1.) What is the basic difference between a game and a contest? Why is Watts's adaptation of the traditional Indian view put in terms of the one instead of the other?
2.) In chapter one (but it is also found in chapter three), what does Watts suggest has become the "opposite" but equally devastating viewpoint of that which takes God to be the benevolent overseer of our lives? (In some ways, he hints, this viewpoint is just the inevitable flip-side to the belief in a benevolent Father who is a discrete and separate power from us.)
a. That God is a malevolent overseer who has deliberately put us in a lifeless and lonely cosmos.
b. That the wrath of a hot God has died away to give us the cold chill of a blind, fragmented, lonely world.
c. That the world is more alive than we are.
d. That the universe is an illusion.
3.) Briefly describe-without using Watts's words or examples-Watts's account as to how cause and effect is more a way we are trained to perceive things than it is the way things occur.
4.) Give two of Watts's examples of the ironic consequences in turning black-and-white into black-vs.white.
5.) Explain the nature of the double bind or self-contradictory command Watts discusses in chapter three.
6.) Why is it, according to Watts, that it is still too much to say that the ants' behavior is conditioned by or is a result of their greater context/environment?
7.) Briefly give the basic argument Watts makes in chapter four for considering intelligence to be a cosmic rather than merely human quality.
8.) How does Watts argue, near the end of chapter four, that we produce the universe just as much as it produces us? (Hint: look at end of the part dealing with rainbows and rocks.)
9.) In chapter five, Watts goes through a series of steps wherein the self seems more and more to become zombie-like until at last it breaks. Can you recount this series of steps (without simply borrowing Watts's words)?
10.) What is Watts's point in chapter five about contemplation and action?
11.) Watts makes a point about practices such as meditation, regression therapy, etc. that may seem rather surprising. What is it he says about these and why does he say he regards them in this way?
12.) At the end of chapter four, right after talking about rainbows and rocks, Watts shyly alludes to a notion of time (and one, it might be mentioned, that has been considered by a couple of quantum physicists as well) that he quickly draws back from so as not to startle the reader too much. What is this notion of time?