Alan Watts

The main problem for modern man in the Western civilized world is his feeling of being separate. Whatsoever he tries to do, whatsoever or whomsoever he tries to contact with, he always finds himself cut off, alone and rejected in a world that is not his own. According to Alan Watts in his the Book, on the taboo of knowing who you are, this problem lies at the root of our civilization. It is the modern problem par excellence. It is as much a cultural problem as it is an individual problem. It has to do with the way our thinking is conditioned by centuries of religious thought, that described God as a far away father figure and man as his disobedient son, who was dispelled from Paradise to wander forever in an alien and hostile world. After his rejection from Paradise man is not part of this world anymore; he is born in it, but not of it. He somehow has to get one-up on the world, either by conquering it or by renouncing it.

So he feels at loss. He feels himself a separate entity, disconnected from everything he meets. He doesn't have a warm and loving relationship with the world, for how to be loving towards something that's alien, that's not like you? It only gives you fear. So the world -that strange other- has to be subjected, controlled, laid down in circumscribed patterns in order to be manageable. We are afraid of the wild in nature, of the unpredictable. It's better to cultivate the world. It's better to turn nature into culture. For everything cultural can be controlled. But in cultivating the world, in driving nature -that hostile stranger- out of it, we are destroying its inner balance. Out of our need to conquer and adapt it to our needs, we are not acting out of responsibility towards the world we are living in. We exploit it. So the whole world falls victim to our feeling of separateness.

But is there really no safe place? Is there nowhere to turn to for comfort and consolation? Is everything that strange to us? What about the family we live in? What about the religion we adhere to and the nation we're a part of? No, nothing can console us in our modern predicament. Most of the time even our little in-group is alien and hostile to us. If we are brought up with the notion that we are a separate entity in a dangerous and hostile world, who has to fight for his life and who is constantly attacked by others, how can we be safe with anybody? Maybe our wife is the wolf inside the stable. Maybe our son is planning to take over. For being cut off from everything means what it says: there is nothing en rapport with us. Everybody has his own interest to defend and is not concerned about others. Sometimes they will unite with us but that's only seemingly. In the end they'll desert us if better opportunities open up. We know it. We feel it in the silence of our meetings.

This is not a very comforting picture Watts is drawing us, but he wants to draw a clear one in order to see it sharp. The problem is huge. For ourselves and for the world we are living in. We are lonely. We are afraid. We don't belong. Everything is hostile to us. We are are a small and fragile organism fighting and struggling against the whole world. But in this struggle we are also destroying the very world we are living in. We aren't that responsible in our stewardship. We are messing up the environment. We are turning the world and the whole universe into a garbage disposer.

Now the next question to be asked is: where does the problem originates from? What is the cultural bias in our minds that makes us feel and behave this way? Is it something natural or is it a product of our upbringing? Watts is very definite about this: we are hoaxed by the conditioning of our upbringing and the society we live in, into believing that we are a separate ego. The feeling of being separate is not natural: a child playing on the beach doesn't feel himself to be cut off from existence. He is connected. He is en rapport. But then his parents (who also fell victim to the ego hoax played upon them by their parents and their society) start talking to him. 'Always strive to be better than others. Don't let yourself be fooled . Don't be a looser. Trust no one. The world is a rat race.' etc. They are projecting their own fear and feeling of worthlessness upon their child. Most of the time the child is some sort of a second try for lost opportunities. Everyone knows the picture of the yelling father on the football field, exhorting his little son to become the worlds top player. This wouldn't be the ground cause for the above mentioned problems if the father would turn this whole game of yelling into lighthearted sport, but for most parents this game isn't a game anymore. It is dread seriousness.

So slowly and slowly the idea creeps up in the mind of the child that he is a unique and solitary person, who only lives once in the billions of years gone by and to come and who doesn't have any worth or value of his own, but who has to give his life meaning by achieving something which is considered worthwhile by the people surrounding him. Though this is the underlying adhortation given to him, he is confusingly fettered by all sorts of double binds like 'you must be a free agent in everything you do' and 'always follow your own course', although all sorts of social authorities strive to make the child into an automatic mechanism. Admonitions as these only strengthen his idea of being a separate ego.

The solution to the problem is a very natural one. In fact it is no solution at all. For a solution means doing something. It means that you have to put in something that isn't there. But the solution to this problem of separateness is not something that you have to alter, that you have to put in. The solution has been there all along. In fact it is the natural state of your being. We only have to see through the layers of our conditioning, through the illusion with which we've been brought up, and reach our natural state. Then we get the experience that we are not a separate ego, but that the inner core of our being is shared by everything around us. All we have to do is relax into that what we have been all along, into that what's been given.

Watts states it like this:

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination. What we really are is, first of all, the whole of our body. And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment. Obviously a body requires air, and the air must within a certain temperature range. The body also requires certain kinds of nutrition. So in order to occur the body must be on a mild and nutritive planet with just enough oxygen in the atmosphere spinning regularly around in a harmonious and rhythmical way near a certain kind of warm star.

That arrangement is just as essential to the existence of my body as my heart, my lungs,and my brain. So to describe myself in a scientific way, I must also describe my surroundings, which is a clumsy way getting around to the realization that you are the entire universe. However we do not normally feel that way because we have constructed in thought an abstract idea of our self.

"Well," you ask."How do I get rid of it?" And my answer to that is: That's the wrong question. How does one get rid of what? You can't get rid of your hallucination of being an ego by an activity of the ego. Sorry, but it can't be done. If you try to get rid of your ego with your ego you will just end up in a vicious circle. You'd be like somebody who worries because they worry because they worry.

 

Instead of a separate ego 'in a bag of skin' we are the soul of everything in the universe and it would be just as accurate to say 'I rain' or 'I sunshine' as it is to say 'I breath' for the 'I' in these sentences means nothing else than 'the whole is breathing through me' or 'I am breathing through the whole', which is just as true or just as nonsensical according to the meaning of I you adhere to. Watts wants us to change our common notion of 'I' and 'ego' to the ancient Vedantic concept of 'Self'. For his view on the ego is nothing new. It was the common religious world view in the East since Vedic times. But this notion is very alien to our Western world and somehow seems to elude us all of the time.

Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I. And the more you become aware of the unknown self -- if you become aware of it -- the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is. You are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. You look and look, and one day you are going to wake up and say, "Why, that's me!" And in knowing that, you know that you never die. You are the eternal thing that comes and goes, that appears -- now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown -- and so it goes, forever and ever and ever.

 

These thoughts belong to the vast tradition of mysticism and can be encountered in all sorts of mystical writings both in the East and the West. They have been shared throughout history by all sorts of men and women who had the technique or the natural ability to relax into their natural being. All these men and women reported the same and concluded the same. Surely Watts is not claiming any originality in his books. In fact that's part of the strong case he is making: in the inner core of every religion you'll find these ideas about the soul of man and the soul of the world. The great contribution Watts made was the fact that he translated these old Eastern concepts into for Westerners clearly understandable language. He polished up the pearls again, so to speak, and showed their beauty to the world. He also made clear -more than any writer before- the great importance of the matter. Changing our view of ourselves and changing our view of the place we have in the universe is really a matter of life and death, not only for ourselves but also for the whole planet earth. The political solution to earths problems is fundamentally a religious one.

To gain the happiness we already have -one of Watts paradoxes- we have to alter not only our notion of ego but also our notion of God. For in fact these two concepts are closely related. The authentic self of man is none other than this God. In most religions such a statement would be sheer blasphemy, but nevertheless it is the true religious experience of every true religious person. Watts replaces the old concept of a personalized God with the more abstract concept of IT, the religious force that works in everything 'death' and alive. This IT is full of consciousness and indeed the life force of the universe.

All this is mysticism all right. But the question must be asked whether Watts was a mystic or not. Not that it would be something grave if he wasn't, but it's perhaps something worthwhile to discuss what the basic difference is between a mystic and a philosopher of mysticism. For in my view Watts was the latter, not the former. The basic ideas of Watts are mystical - creative consciousness underlying everything, the equation of God and the Self, Being as the ultimate ground of the world etc.- but there is one aspect missing in the writings of Watts, that is somehow the touchstone of true mysticism. For if we take the ancient Vedantic qualification of the Absolute, Satsitanda, and dissect this concept into its meaningful parts, than we can conclude that Sat = Being, Truth is being discussed by Watts and also Sit = Consciousness, but that there is relatively less attention for Ananda = Blissfulness.

Watts is a very sharp and clear thinker, trained and schooled in the Western philosophic tradition. His writings offer a deep intellectual penetration into the religious and philosophical problems of mankind. But somehow all his writings remain on the intellectual side of the brain, which surely isn't a crime, but with the 'true' mystic there is something more going on than just mere intellectualism. In mysticism the thoughts of Watts become an experience, a deeply felt reality that generates bursts of bliss in the experiencer. Watts writes again and again that a mere intellectual understanding of his thoughts won't do, but that it somehow must become an experienced reality in the person who sees the validity of it. But the question "Well," you ask."How do I get rid of it?" when speaking of our conditioned ego problem, is to the point and keeps haunting us after reading the book. For Watts answer that 'it's the wrong question' is not a very satisfying one. No question is wrong. Certainly not this one.

Watts discusses in his book a number of means -like meditation, yoga, bio-energetic training etc.- how to alter our conditioned experience of our self and the world, but he seems to dismiss them right away by stating -not irrelevantly though- that all these means can intensify the problem even more by entangling us into the web of yet another in-group who magnifies our ego by confronting us with the enemy of the villainous out-group. 'I'm better than you because I'm doing yoga and you don't.' Trying to be spiritual and living a Eastern life style -Buddhist or whatever- is very trendy nowadays and can give you a good presentation at parties. Again it can be just another ego-trip, although you'll deny it till you see red and purple.

But then this question of the means is never discussed again by Watts. There is a saying in Dutch: 'throwing away the baby with the washing water', which means losing something worthwhile of the whole by dismissing a part of it considered irrelevant. Because the techniques of reaching through the deeper layers of your ego to the Self of the universe are relevant. They form an integrated aspect of the mystical training of all religious persons both in the East and the West. They are the way to do it, though it is 'walking on the razors edge' because there's the danger that you'll cling to your method and to the goal that you are setting yourself and that you'll end up all tensed and frustrated because you want to see some immediate results.

But the experience of the Self can grow to ecstatic heights by these techniques, if properly practised with the help and the instruction of a master. Then something happens that's an integral part of the quality of the Self. Then the Ananda, the blissfulness of the Self, opens up in our hearts. This aspect of religion and mysticism is not presented in its fullest impact in the writings of Watts. And that's a pity, because it could have been used as a valid argument for the truth of his philosophy. Once the Self is realized and a connection is (re)established between our soul and the soul of everything surrounding us, then a great jubilation rises up in our hearts underlining the truth of all Watts has written: 'yes, that's it!' our heart then seems to shout (or not to suppress the obvious pun: 'yes, that's IT!'). For truth is not something that's confirmed by the mind alone, but truth is experience of wholeness and is therefore confirmed by the heart also.

But the works of Watts show that you can arrive at the truth also by way of reasoning. Truth is very logical. Truth is also the basis of our mind. Mystics get confirmation by their ecstasy, by their laughter and their emotion. But the truth of the Absolute can also be reached by the beautiful workings of our mind, as numerous philosophers have shown. Truth is always very complex. Truth is most of the time very paradoxical. But that doesn't mean that nothing valuable can't be said. The books of Alan Watts show that religion can be rational, once it is stripped of its superfluous mythology and once its symbolism is explained. That's the valuable contribution Watts has made: he has made religion and mysticism understandable.

 

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