The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)

This book has a 60’s hippie feel to it (someone once told my brother that it was a book to “blow a joint through”), and yet the teachings springs from Eastern philosophy thousands of years old. Watts is of course was one of a wave of thinkers who turned to the East during the 60’s; it’s a little impressive to me that he was older, having been born in 1915. Perhaps that maturity made him more of the “real deal” in expressing himself, whereas others sometimes fell into the trap of pretentiousness.

The central premise is that while we feel ourselves to be separate beings with separate egos, we are in reality all a part of a larger whole, and ignoring this fact is what leads to suffering in both ourselves and everything around us. It’s taken a little bit to an extreme and I’m not in agreement with everything Watts says, but he is profound and reading The Book led me to read several of his other books.

This book also contains one of my favorite quotes, a description of ‘yugen’, the sense of the mysterious depth in everything that makes up nature, the sense of mystic calm in all things, and/or the sense of a strong communion with nature:

“To watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest without thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands, to contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds. All these are yugen, but have they in common?”

Other quotes, all of which relate to oneness:
On death:
“Death is, after all, a great event. So long as it is not imminent, we cling to ourselves and our lives in chronic anxiety, however pushed into the back of the mind. But when the time comes where clinging is no longer of the least avail, the circumstances are ideal for letting go of oneself completely. When this happens, the individual is released from his ego-prison. In the normal course of events this is the golden opportunity for awakening into the knowledge that one’s actual self is the Self which plays the universe – an occasion for great rejoicing.”

On the ego:
“In the same way, the more resolutely you plumb the question ‘Who or what am I?’ – the more unavoidable is the realization that you are nothing at all apart from everything else. Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery – in morals, in art, or in spirituality – the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old eog-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else’s depth or failure.”

On parts and the whole:
“For what we mean by ‘understanding’ or ‘comprehension’ is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don’t compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts. Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.”

On the self:
“But I define myself in terms of you; I know myself on in terms of what is ‘other’, no matter whether I see the ‘other’ as below me or above me in any ladder of values. If above, I enjoy the kick of self-pity; if below, I enjoy the kick of pride. I being I goeswith you being you. Thus, as a great Hassidic rabbi put it, ‘If I am I because you are you, and if you are you because I am I, then I am not I, and you are not you.’” ( )

I haven't begun reading this yet, but I used to listen to Watts's audio files on KPFK Los Angeles when I lived in Southern California. His insights always amazed me. Now I've begun to practice Vipassana or insight/mindful meditation, and finding this book in a free box was like a message to me: Keep going, beginner, keep going.

Alan Watts has convinced me that one can cultivate a rational mysticism, an optional way of viewing the cosmos that is paradoxically at once unnecessary and unavoidable. In "The Book" he continues in the tradition of Eastern thinkers who prefer to view the self as an indivisible part of the whole universe instead of the common Western perspective of the self being separate and apart from its environment. Like a Necker cube, no one perspective is the truly definitive way of viewing things, the Eastern view is not 'right' and the Western view is not 'wrong', what is wrong is denying the existence of one or the other. The taboo in question is the dominant Western denial of the alternative Eastern perspective of what a self, and thus what the cosmos, really is. ( )

This is a book that everyone should read in their teenage years. It could head off some regrettable life decisions or lead to some fulfilling ones. ( )

From the back of the book:

This book explores an unrecognised but might taboo - our tacit conspiracy to ignore who or what we really are. The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords with neither Western science nor with experimental philosophy-religions of the East. Drawing on the insights of Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, Alan Watts formulates his own solution to the urgent problem of personal identity and proposes a method of self-examination that shatters 'the big lie and hallucination' of alienation.

Alan Wilson Watts (January 6, 1915 – November 16, 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience.

He wrote more than 25 books and numerous articles on subjects such as personal identity, the true nature of reality, higher consciousness, meaning of life, concepts and images of God and the non-material pursuit of happiness. In his books he relates his experience to scientific knowledge and to the teachings of Eastern and Western religion and philosophy.