This book, however, is in the spirit of the Chinese sage Lao-tzu, that master of the law of reversed effort, who declared that those who justify them… - Alan Watts

Lao-tzu, that master of the law of reversed effort, who declared that those who justify themselves do not convince, that to know truth one must get rid of knowledge, and that nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness — from which men shrink.

to know truth one must get rid of knowledge,

We have been accustomed to make this existence worth-while by the belief that there is more than the outward appearance — that we live for a future beyond this life here. For the outward appearance does not seem to make sense. if living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for being who are born to reason, hope, create, and love. man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more that what he see — unless there is an eternal order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death.

[T]he paradox of civilization is that the more one is anxious to survive, the less survival is worth the trouble.

In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before they saw them.1