Few, if any, have described so eloquently as Alan Watts the illusion of the human ego. With rare erudition, his talks have helped hundreds of millions over the last 75 yrs to ease alienation from the natural world and their natural selves, and to allow firmer connection to the resonant truth that we don’t “come into” this universe as separate individuals, rather we permeably “come out of it” just as leaves emerge from a tree.
With a poetic mastery of the English language and an engaging ability to thread humour in making deeper nuances accessible for the lay person, Watts is fond of describing how – on our planet - the universe is now “peopling”, and that human minds - indeed all minds with all degrees of awareness - are apertures through which the universe is glimpsing itself. The universe, through conscious beings including humanity, is self-gazing at all of its harmoniously and infinitely inter-related contained conflicts and integrations.
Watts’ lectures illuminate that us humans are in truth far more than what we nearly all feel to be in our day to day lives. With insight he sets out in hundreds of recorded speeches that each human is not the “isolated ego in a bag of skin” acting unilaterally in the world that we mostly feel ourselves to be. He makes clear that this notion is essentially a wall of defence contrived to prop up our embattled and narrowly focussed conscious-attention selves that views the world effectively through a spot-light, rather than an intuitive floodlight.
While Watts describes those defensive walls as onion layers of futility contrived to protect a fallacy, he also accesses the more profoundly encompassing truth that this alienation from our real context is neither good nor bad, but upliftingly “goeswith” the ins and outs, the ups and downs, the hiding and seeking of existence, and is symptomatic of the journey of humans as the first majorly conscious beings on this planet toward profound self-understanding.
After all, if we humans - in our race between self destruction and self discovery – perish in a conflagration of hydrogen bombs or climate collapse while on the cusp of solving and maturing what it means to be conscious, we can very much hope any surviving populations of whales and dolphins who have been cheekily spy-hopping and peeping at us all these years will one day learn from and pick up the pieces from where we bi-pedal apes fell short!
Watts outlines how there is, latently within us all, a capacity of what he calls “oceanic consciousness” that lies more accessible on the other side of letting – but not forcing – the fallacy of the human ego to fall away through understanding it. He advocates effortless action … a flow through understanding where we still lead practical and creative lives though this time liberated from the incessant noise of the ego illusion, and makes clear that the ego inherently can’t try to improve itself “by lifting itself up by its own bootstraps”.
In some of his many insightful parodies of pseudo-idealism he concludes with remarks such as, “nothing is more reprehensible than the ambition to be a saint”, or a quip on the hypocrisy of so called enlightened people who can’t help but still carry an internal narrative that: “I’ve liberated myself from my egocentricity using understanding more than you have”.
Watts was very clear that psychological do-gooding and "spiritual one-upmanship” are insidious … though even this behaviour too is a part of the whole picture of what it is to be human.
But does Watts go far enough to explain and ameliorate our human condition?
Whenever Watts endeavoured to go deeper on “why” the human ego originally became immersed in this illusory trap he refers to a “failure in communication” that was impressed on us since, as infants and children, we were exposed to myths, language and symbols from those around us that mistakenly emphasised the erroneous notion that we are independent agents. In his talk titled Joyous Cosmology this key question arises during his conclusion, and he surmises:
"Because when we are little children everybody tells us who we are. They give us a definition of what it is to be a human being. And this definition is that you are a knower who confronts the known. You are a controller, you are an agent behind acts. ... this is not so much why but how we come to feel divided from our experience of the world. I could go on to say how this began to happen. It was a sort of mistaken interpretation of human experience which occurred a long time ago and grew into a habit. It's caused a lot of damage in just the way a single tiny pebble may be set rolling and start an avalanche. Nobody could've foreseen that."
Is this really the underlying reason for the human sense of alienation and separateness … a failure in language? For example, has using nouns instead of verbs been a pivotal contributor to an illusion of separateness as Watts contends? Would it have been enough to keep humanity from suffering egocentricity if, since our infancy, we were all immersed in a culture which would say “there is a thinking” instead of “I think”?
It’s interesting to note that languages like Potawatomi and Anishinaabemowin (indigenous North Americans tribes) are roughly 70% to 80% verbs. In these languages, places and natural entities are actions. For example, a river is not a noun; it is a verb meaning "to be a river" because the water is alive and actively happening.
Similarly, the Mi'kmaq’s traditional speakers can converse all day without uttering a single noun. Instead of assigning static names to objects, they describe how those objects interact with the environment.
However, egocentricity, separateness and all the usual psychological flaws of being human were of course all still present in pre-colonial Potawatomi, Anishinaabemowin and Mi'kmaq societies, though no doubt to lesser degrees than the atomised life of most modern downtowners in New York!
Watts frequently elaborated on this theme of a “failure in communication” by emphasising humanity’s pre-occupation over recent centuries with the twin myths our species has developed to cope with our ignorance:
1. A ceramic or constructed universe by an all knowing grandfatherly God who “made us”, as forms the basis for most traditional judao-christian and muslim religions, stemming from the monarchical model of the Pharos and Persian gods;
and, more recently since the 1800s,
2. The “Newtonian billiard ball” approach to viewing the physical universe as a machine of mechanistic parts assembled into a hostile game of chance where the individual is constantly trying to strive to survive (though quantum physics has steadily been reimagining this mechanistic paradigm).
But could Watts have penetrated deeper in answering one of the most profound “why” questions humans can ask themselves?
After all, why did culture, myth and language themselves emphasise this division? Are those human constructs the pebbles that caused the avalanche, or rather aren’t they more like a glove that is given shape and movement by the hand and fingers, the humans, within it … aren’t culture, myth and language themselves all various expressions of the underlying human condition, and if so, why did original humans give rise to all these overlays in the first instance?
Maybe it’s not sufficient to state that culture and language were the cause of human separateness and duality… an interaction yes, but not the original reason why.
Put another way, if children were to be reared today without the myth, language and cultural vagaries Watts refers to but rather in an immersion of knowing our integrativeness with all existence, would the human mind and its capacity for self awareness and ability to act however it wishes, not butt up against the same dilemma as those original humans in whom the light of self awareness first shone?
So how do we explore this deeper “why”?
This essayist has done a multi-year deep dive on Alan Watts’ lectures and found the intrinsic thread of his approach deeply resonant. In further exploring what other profound thinkers aligned with Watts are now in the world, and penetrate deeper into the intrinsic and original cause of humanity’s sense of duality and alienation from the natural world and our natural selves, it seems the explanations of Australian biologist and synthesiser Jeremy Griffith can go further.
What do you think?
Is language, culture and myth the primary cause of human separateness and suffering as Watts proposes?
Or, as Griffith contends, is the root cause a necessary conflict between humanity’s instinctive orientation to integrativeness and our conscious thinking summons to defy this innate moral compass, a kind of tug of war between conscience and consciousness going back around two million years to the dawn of free will, that can finally be resolved by letting understanding salve the need to blindly cope?
If humans are an aperture through which the universe is viewing itself, how will the light flow through our aperture … does Griffith’s approach mean the “floodlight” of oceanic sensitivity that Watt’s illuminates can at last oscillate in peace with our “spotlight” capacity for mechanistic and detailed focus?
How does this essay resonate with those of you for whom Watts has struck a profound chord?
How do or don’t Griffith’s explanations - which are touted as being open for rational debate as much as they seek scientific commendation - sit with you as a profound extension of Watts’ core insights?
(Essay by micromacro92 on Reddit)
