The Book
February 11, 2021
Ethan Maurice
By: Alan Watts Intro:
If you, like me, have lived your life with a largely unquestioned concept of “the soul” — the separate, eternal spirit inherent in each human being — The Book will shake at the very foundations of your reality. Whether The Book will shift the very foundations of your reality, I do not know, but I finished it a month ago and grow increasingly confident it did mine.
The subtitle, “On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are,” refers to the “sensation of the self” and our unwillingness to examine it. In his typical flowery yet tight, brilliant yet simple word and metaphor, Alan Watts explores the implications of this tiny yet titanic shift in the idea of “self” — a true linchpin to our understanding of the world in which change radiates out in the most profound and jarring of ways throughout all aspects of life.
Whether you feel this blasphemous or righteous, frightening or riveting, I encourage you to give The Book and the “self” some examination. At minimum, it is fascinating. And trippy. But more important: the more schools of thought you lose yourself in exploration of and feel you have found the answer and then lose that feeling again, the deeper connection you sow to the insurmountable mystery of existence. Whether or not you jive with the “universal perspective” is less important than the willingness to entertain other perspectives, to get beyond the dogma of perspectives, and live in recognition of the inherent mystery of being that all perspectives attempt to explain.
We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience—a new feeling of what it is to be “I.” The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing—with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.
The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.
Why not sit back and let things take their course? Simply because it is part of "things taking their course" that I write. As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers are lilies and some roses.
It is a fight -- a fight haunted by a sense of chronic frustration, because we are doing something as crazy as trying to keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys.
However, there is a third possibility. The individual may be understood neither as an isolated person nor as an expendable humanoid working machine. He may be seen, instead, as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself -- as an incarnation of the Self, of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call IT. This view retains and, indeed amplifies our apprehension that the individual is in some way sacred. At the same time it dissolves the paradox of the personal ego, which is to have attained the "precious state" of being a unique person at the price of perpetual anxiety for one's survival.
Thus bamboozled, the individual -- instead of fulfilling his unique function in the world -- is exhausted and frustrated in efforts to accomplish self-contradictory goals. Because he is now so largely defined as a separate person caught up in a mindless an alien universe, his principle task is to get a one-up on the universe and conquer nature. This is palpably absurd, and since the task is never achieved, the individual is taught to live and work for some future in which the impossible will at last happen, if not for him, then at least for his children. We are thus breeding a type of being incapable of living in the present -- that is, of really living."
For if you know what you want, an will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell you how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment. I am not saying that American and European corporations are run by greedy villains who live off the fat of the land at everyone else's expense. The point becomes clear only as one realizes, with compassion and sorrow, that many of our most powerful and wealthy men are miserable dupes and captives in a treadmill, who -- with the rarest of exceptions -- have not the ghost of a notion how to spend and enjoy money.
If, then, after understanding, at least in theory, that the ego trick is a hoax and that, beneath everything, "I" and "universe" are one, you ask, "So what? What is the next step of practical application" -- I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give -- to the cause of peace or racial integration, to starving Hindus and Chinese, or even your closest friends. Without this, all social concern will be muddlesome meddling, and all work for the future will be planned disaster.
"When this new sensation of self arises, it is at once exhilarating and a little disconcerting. It is like the moment when you first got the knack of swimming or riding a bicycle. There is the feeling that you are not doing it yourself, but that it is somehow happening on its own, and you wonder whether you will lose it -- as indeed you may if you try forcibly to hold on to it. In immediate contrast to the old feeling, there is indeed a certain passivity to the sensation, as if you were a leaf blown along by the wind, until you realize that you are both the leaf and the wind. The world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside: they move together inseparably, and at first you feel a little out of control because the world outside is so much vaster than the world inside. Yet you soon discover that you are able to go ahead with ordinary activities -- to work and make decisions as ever, though somehow this is less of a drag. Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own. Eyes see and ears hear as wind blows and water flows. All space becomes your mind. Time carries you along like a river, but never flows out of the present: the more it goes, the more it stays, and you no longer have to fight or kill it."
As it is, we are merely bolting our lives — gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in — because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, “It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what’s happening now.” How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment — from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies — how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?
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