The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

by Alan W. Watts

For there is no way of getting rid of the feeling of separateness by a so-called “act of will,” by trying to forget yourself, or by getting absorbed in some other interest. This is why moralistic preaching is such a failure: it breeds only cunning hypocrites—people sermonized into shame, guilt, or fear, who thereupon force themselves to behave as if they actually loved others, so that their “virtues” are often more destructive, and arouse more resentment, than their “vices.”

All winners need losers; all saints need sinners; all sages need fools—that

“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 ego-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. This understanding is at first paralyzing. You are in a trap—in the worst of all double-binds—seeing that any direction you may take will imply, and so evoke, its opposite. Decide to be a Christ, and there will be a Judas to betray you and a mob to crucify you. Decide to be a devil, and men will unite against you in the closest brotherly love.

“spiritual exercises” in meditation or yoga which some consider essential for release from the ego. For when practiced in order to “get” some kind of spiritual illumination or awakening, they strengthen the fallacy that the ego can toss itself away by a tug at its own bootstraps.

For the Logos on high plays, stirring the whole cosmos back and forth, as he wills, into shapes of every kind.

In singing and dancing is the voice of the Law.

for the really dangerous people are those who do not recognize that they are thieves—the unfortunates who play the role of the “good guys” with such blind zeal that they are unconscious of any indebtedness to the “bad guys” who support their status.

“Love your competitors, and pray for those who undercut your prices.” You would be nowhere at all without them.

no one can be more belligerent than a pacifist on the rampage, or more militantly nationalistic than an anti-imperialist.

the real goodness of human nature is its peculiar balance of love and selfishness, reason and passion, spirituality and sensuality, mysticism and materialism, in which the positive pole has always a slight edge over the negative.

To define is to limit, to set boundaries, to compare and to contrast, and for this reason the universe, the all, seems to defy definition.

What guarantee is there that the five senses, taken together, do cover the whole of possible experience?

“All knowledge is a recognition of the mutual relations between sense-experiences and/or things and events.” This comes perilously close to being a meaningful statement about everything. “All things are known by their differences from and likenesses to each other.”

a process which C. G. Jung called “enantiodromia,” the attainment of any extreme position is the point where it begins to turn into its own opposite—a process that can be dreary and repetitious without the realization that opposite extremes are polar, and that poles need each other.

Words are too slow and too clumsy for describing such things, and conscious attention is too narrow for keeping track of all their details.

Thus it will often happen that when you tell a girl how beautiful she is, she will say, “Now isn’t that just like a man! All you men think about is bodies. OK, so I’m beautiful, but I got my body from my parents and it was just luck. I prefer to be admired for myself, not my chassis.” Poor little chauffeur! All she is saying is that she has lost touch with her own astonishing wisdom and ingenuity, and wants to be admired for some trivial tricks that she can perform with her conscious attention. And we are all in the same situation,

“Nothing is left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh!”

True humor is, indeed, laughter at one’s Self—at the Divine Comedy, the fabulous deception, whereby one comes to imagine that a creature in existence is not also of existence, that what man is not also what everything is.