Perhaps the most famous of all of Alan Watts's works, The Book delves into the cause and cure of the illusion that the self is a separate ego, housed in a bag of skin, which "confronts" a universe of physical objects that are alien and stupid. According to Dr. Watts, this illusion underlies the misuse of technology for a violent and hostile subjugation of man's natural environment, leading to its eventual destruction. To find the urgently needed answer to this problem of personal identity, the author modernizes and restates the ancient Hindu philosophy of Vedanta and brings out the full force of its startling and psychologically subversive way of realizing that the self is in fact the root and ground of the universe. With his customary lucidity and wit, Alan Watts presents this "lowdown" on the nature of the self in the form of The Book -- a manual of initiation into the central mystery of existence which any father might slip to his son, or mother to her daughter, upon the threshold of adult life.