Alan Watts was profoundly influenced by the East Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Buddhism, and by Taoist thought, which is reflected in Zen poetry and the arts of China and Japan.  After leaving the Church he never became a member of  another organised religion, although he wrote and spoke extensively about Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism. Some American Buddhists criticised him for not sitting regularly in zazen, even though he recorded several guided meditations teaching a variety of mediation techniques. Alan Watts responded simply by saying: “A cat sits until it is done sitting, and then gets up, stretches, and walks away.”

I decided to do some research into the symbols used in the far-east. As the book I've chosen from Alan Watts is about being content with ones self and confronting your emotions, only then would you find inner peace, bringing positively to you and those around you, I found different symbols from Buddhism, taoism and even Chinese symbol. These could somehow be incorporated into my design to represent Alan Watts's influences from the far-east and the contents of the book itself, using a symbol is something the audience would refer too.

"The part of our self that wants to change our self is the very one that needs to be change; but it is as inaccessible as a needle to the prick of its own point." 

                 -     This stood out to me because I thought it was a good concept of us trying to figure out who we are as a person and changing our ways to become that person, but the bigger picture is we are who we are and we cannot change the ways we work. 

                 - Another phrase I took a screenshot from Alan watt's book. I thought this explained briefly about the psychology behind emotions, something I could try visualise for my book cover.

This paragraph stood out to me the most, its about embracing your emotions that you are feeling for a reason. Nor to ignore them which will conflict with another emotion, but to embrace your emotions and find a solution to them and with that you will feel a sense of more self-acceptance. This is a good concept I would like to try and visualise, representing the different parts of emotions from different parts of the body.

Vitruvian Man is perhaps Leonardo da Vinci's most famous illustration.The Vitruvian ideas, presented by Leonardo, formed the basis of Renaissance proportion theories in art and architecture. He noted that a human body can be symmetrically inscribed within both a circle and a square; this idea influenced his architectural practice.

Leonardo's illustration of the theory of Vitruvius is a pen ink drawing of a male figure whose outstretched limbs touch the circumference of a circle and the edges of a square. His navel falls in the exact center of the circle. There is a changing perspective in the work. It is static in structure but dynamic in its presentation of a moving, living man. Hand-written text surrounds the drawing of the figure. I thought this would be a good concept to research into, not only does it represent mankind in its perfect structural form, but represents our existence as not some form of accident, and that we should accept existence as something to embrace.