You know, you can always bug people in a beautiful way – in a very helpful way – by just saying to them, ‘What did you forget ?’

They say, ‘Well, I don’t know. Was I supposed to remember?’ ‘I’m really not trying to put you on. I mean, it’s not difficult; this is something completely obvious that you forgot.

‘You’ll easily remember it because it’s so obvious.’ Well, that’s the hardest thing in the world to think of. What’s the most obvious thing I forgot? Huh, what’s that? Well, who do you think you are?

Well, how do you answer that question, ‘Who are you?’ Well, you give a name. You say, ‘I’m Joe Dokes, I’m Alan Watts.’ That’s not true.

That’s what people told you you were. They put that name on you and they taught you to identify with it and to behave as it was expected to behave.

But that’s not who you are. You know very well. Go back in your memory, go back into your infancy before they started telling you all this stuff.

Who are you? And if you get with that you know very well who you are.

What you are basically, deep deep down, far far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

Only there’s a conspiracy that you mustn’t let on about that because everybody is. And if one person realizes it, the other is a little bit offended and will say, ‘Well, how come you’re so great?’

So everybody, therefore, who gets an intimation of who they really are and ever comes out with it – in Christian civilization – people say,

‘Who the hell do you think you are? You’re Jesus Christ?’ Well, you say, ‘Jesus Christ said he was Jesus Christ and everybody put him down for it, and that’s what you’re doing to me.’

There is, as it were, a recess of the soul – of the psyche – where everybody knows perfectly well that you are not just this irresponsible little mouse that’s been chucked down into this world, but that you are really doing this work. You’re running it.

Only you can’t admit it just in the same way as you can’t admit that you’re responsible for the way your own heart beats.

You say, ‘Oh that’s not my doing. I’ve no control over my heart.’ Do you have any control over being conscious? Do you know how you will?