Episode #253 ... The Philosophy of Alan Watts - What Am I?

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  Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This, patreon.com/philosophizethis if you value the show as an educational resource. By the way, sure, many of you have already heard about this already, but Apple's changed their policies in a way that forces a lot of podcasts like this one to go to a monthly subscription model on Patreon rather than a per-episode one. I have no say in this. It's been going on for years, and it feels like I kind of just need to go along with what the big people tell me is gonna happen. Good news, I guess, is that this won't change much of anything for most of you. From what I understand, the contribution's just gonna be more predictable for people as one amount moving forward. Anyway, all of you that make this possible, I can't thank you enough for continuing to support the podcast, getting philosophy out there for everyone. This is the first in a series we're doing on the philosophy of Alan Watts.

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  I hope you love the show today. So, in 1965, in a lecture called Myth of Myself, Alan Watts asked the audience a question that I think is an important starting point if you wanted to understand essentially everything else he ever says throughout the rest of his work. He asked the people listening to him, "What do you mean? What do you feel when you say the word 'I'? I, myself," he says. And to start considering this question and what he's getting at here, imagine yourself going to dinner at a restaurant with some friends one night. You guys order food, waiter brings a basket of bread, you start having a conversation. Now, in that environment, when it comes to the word "I," well, there's a you, there's the person that's physically at the dinner, eating food, talking with your friends. But then for most people, there's also a version of you that seems to be perched up

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  inside your head, behind your eyes somewhere, where this you is somehow stepping back from that dinner, and the whole time is interrogating this other you in what seems like an attempt to control the entire situation, asking stuff like, "Did I sound smart there when I just said that thing? Do these people really like me? Are they really my friends? Am I talking too much or too little here? Should I even be speaking at all?" Well, to understand the work of Alan Watts, we have to understand the details of why he thought this kind of self-monitoring and internal talk goes on so habitually, especially in people born into the modern Western world. Why do I feel that this interrogator that's up in my head is the real me, over and above anything else I might be? More than that, why do we often think that to be a good person just means to be able

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  to interrogate ourselves like this and control every piece of what we are as much as possible? Why is it so much about controlling things all the time? Alan Watts spent a lifetime doing something very specific in his work, but he did it very well. His goal was always to try to find a way to translate Eastern religious concepts and make them understandable to Westerners. He wanted to show how these ideas, that may initially seem kind of out there and difficult to grasp when you grow up with a traditional Western education, when you actually take the premises of Western thought seriously, and you follow them all the way up to the highest levels of physics, psychology, understanding the sciences at this level will often lead to problems that seem almost impossible to solve within the same logic, borderline paradoxes, he thought at times, where sometimes the premises that we're educated on begin to undermine

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  themselves in ways where Eastern spiritual practice starts to feel a lot more satisfying. It's a way to describe our kind of existence and our own experience of it. This series we're doing on Alan Watts right now will, of course, give many examples of this move that goes on in his work, and I'll tie them into all the brilliant, memorable, sometimes funny examples of these points that Alan Watts gave across his 26 books and over 180 recorded lectures that many of you have no doubt heard clips from over the years on the Youtubes. You know, with someone like Alan Watts, someone can have listened to this guy casually for years sometimes, always feeling kind of mildly confused as they do it, but swearing to themselves that there's something deeper here that he's getting at that's obviously profound, that they'd love to understand if they could. Well, by the end of this, I can promise you, you'll understand the full case Alan Watts

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  thought was worth making throughout the course of his life, as well as all the Eastern and Western thought that he grounds his entire case in, outside of the really fun YouTube lectures. And if next episode is gonna explain why he thinks reality is not quite what you think it is, and if that episode will set up the next one where we talk about how your purpose here is not quite what you think it is, then this episode, again, will form an important base that he needs to establish first, which is best described as starting with the fact that you and your whole identity is not quite what you think it is. And again, it starts by considering something simple like going to dinner with your friends on a random Tuesday. Why is it so tempting to think that this analyzing, self-critical voice up in my head just is me?

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  That that's the real me, and it's somehow doing an examination of myself? Well, instantly, Alan Watts might want to ask someone here, "Who is the self that's doing the questioning there? And who is the self that's being questioned?" Actually, what he might want to start with even before that is to give an explanation for why this is so tempting for us to do in the first place. "We think of ourselves this way in the West," he says, "quite simply because this is the way we're taught to think of ourselves from the moment we're born by everyone else." He develops this argument in his book called, uh, The Book, of all things, subtitle, "The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are," written in 1966. He says, "As children, we're essentially powerless to resist the identities that our parents and teachers force on us to be able to understand ourselves."

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  He cites the work of an anthropologist and systems thinker named Gregory Bateson here, who has a famous concept in his work called "The Double Bind." To explain it in the book, Alan Watts says, "Think about what we're typically told as children. On one hand, you're told that you're a free, autonomous individual, where you shouldn't go around imitating what other people do, like your friends at school, for example. No, that's not you. That's you trying to be like them. You should just be you. And for you to ever be truly free, well, that means that whatever you're doing has to be something that's emerging spontaneously out of you, is something that's truly sincere." The assumption is that if something isn't spontaneous enough, then it's not really fully you, is it? It's some kind of calculation you must be making, we're told. But he says, "Think about the contradiction that this forces kids to start their lives

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  from when trying to form some sense of their own identity. For me to believe that I am a free, autonomous individual requires me to just obey that definition of me you just gave me, that I'm a free, autonomous individual. In other words, I'm supposed to abdicate my freedom and spontaneity in order to establish my freedom and spontaneity." He gives the example of a parent telling a kid that they should love their mom, but the parent also tells them, "You shouldn't love your mom simply because I'm telling you to love her. No, you should love your mom just because you genuinely love your mom. In other words, follow my commands about who you should be, but, uh, look, you better really mean it when you say it, all right? I'm not hearing enough sincerity going on up in that bedroom." And he thinks, when you're a kid and you're confronted with this spot, the main feeling

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  you're gonna have at the time is just confusion. But as you grow into an adult, and you internalize this contradiction you have to live in every day, as the society around you tells you more and more about what a quote-unquote "good person" is, what you're supposed to be, and then it tells you to exercise your supposed freedom within those narrow parameters they give you, what that whole setup produces is this internal supervisor we're talking about, where now that you don't have a parent that's lording over you, doing all this stuff for you, you start to do it to yourself. You're left to constantly analyze, make judgments about whether the feelings you have are truly genuine, whether you're feeling the right thing right now that a good person should be feeling, or whether you're just a psycho. And the irony is, he thinks, we create this whole ego, again, this little controlling

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  boss up in our head, where on one hand, it's the thing that many people experience as their most independent, authentic self, but on the other hand, it's something that's mostly made up of other people's ideas about who we ought to have been in the first place. The further irony of this to him is that if you really wanted genuine feelings to emerge out of someone as the purest expression of how they felt, constantly supervising and controlling those responses is maybe one of the worst things you could ever do. That said, someone could say back to him here, "Okay, maybe this is just my ego talking, this voice in my head, as you say, and maybe this is something I've learned to do from very early on in life. Still, though, I do identify with this voice that's going on. It does seem to be driven by all my preferences, and it does feel like it's a huge part of me."

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  Alan Watts might respond back to this person and say, "Okay, look, I'm not trying to tell you to ignore this voice or to get rid of it entirely, but if you don't mind, can we do some measurements on it real quick? How big of a piece of you is this supervisor we're talking about? Because it's certainly not all of you, right? There's tons of things about what you are that have nothing to do with this activity that's going on. So is it most of what you are, would you say? Is most of your life spent as a kind of narrator and judge, thinking about what's going on with all the rest of what you are?" He once gave a lecture on this exact subject called "The Inevitable Ecstasy," where he starts to formulate a theory of what he thinks this voice is that so many of us strongly identify with. And he asks, "What if the reason we identify with this supervisor in our head so much is simply because it's an activity that we're already familiar with?

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  He calls it a kind of muscular strain that we've become used to over the years. Imagine going to the gym every single day and doing the exact same exercise over and over again for hours. Well, eventually, doing that movement would start to feel natural to you. At a certain point, it would start to feel second nature. You might even start to feel so comfortable that doing that movement feels like it was something your body was designed to do from the start." Watts thinks this activity of the ego, again, this muscular strain of controlling and judging up in the mind, is something that many people do so often that they start to mistake a really familiar activity with all of what they are. The way he describes it is interesting, because he thinks it's really a combination of two things that are going on. It's, one, a psychological image of ourselves that we've been conditioned to believe in,

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  and, two, a habitual pattern of physical tension that gives this supervisor, that to him really exists in our imagination, the feeling of being something that's actually real. It's what he calls, quote, "the physical referent for the psychological image of ourselves," end quote. What he means is, at the same time we're trying to control everything with this dialogue mentally, we at the same time usually have bodily reactions we get used to as well that make the whole thing feel more real to us. For example, you might tighten up your jaw when you think about what you want next. You might, uh, focus your eyes as you concentrate. You'll find your body randomly tensing up without even noticing it. And he says, "The combination of both, the mental and physical activities here going

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  on in unison, progressively reinforce themselves and eventually turn into a really strong habit that, to most of us, doesn't even feel like a habit anymore. It starts to just feel like this 'I' that we find ourselves identifying with so strongly." Or what he calls in another book, quote, "an illusion that's married to a futility," end quote. But I want to be very clear about what Alan Watts is not saying here. He's not saying that this "I" is a total illusion, like it's not really going on. No, it is going on. And he's not renouncing this habit of the ego entirely. He's not even saying to get rid of it. You know, he's not saying, uh, "Put a blanket over your head and just rock back and forth until the voices start to go away." No, what he's really trying to get us to question here is this additional layer that we often place on that voice, where we're not thinking about it as a habit, really.

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  The problem's when we start to think that what we are as beings fundamentally is somebody that's up inside our heads doing all this deliberating. To lightly paraphrase the way that he put it in another point in his work, what we take to be the thinker is itself just one of the thoughts. And what we take to be the feeler is itself just one of the feelings. You start to mistake the feeling of trying to control yourself, that repeated exercise we do, for evidence that there's a separate self doing all the controlling up there. But it's worth asking to him, you know, are you any more defined by this activity of trying to control the world around you than you are by when you're not doing it and you're totally relaxed? Like, does that single mental state fully define you? How about when you're locked in and doing a puzzle or something? Does that single activity define you?

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  Of course it doesn't. And if we can just get to this point in his argument about the self, and this can bring a lot of context to Alan Watts and clips you may have heard over the years that otherwise may seem kind of random. He's trying to get us to see, when it comes to the kind of beings we are, just how small a piece of that, this controlling and willing ourselves to do things every day, really is. He'll do this using metaphors that come from a number of different angles, citing work that ranges from Vedanta, Freud, and Carl Jung, all the way to Schrodinger of all people. It's going to be a fiesta of philosophy today to understand Alan Watts. So as your philosophical sherpa, go ahead, hop on for a piggyback ride, as I take you through some of the examples that are the most special to him when it comes to loosening this grip that the ego typically has on people.

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  And to get started here, one direction he approaches us from, that is a classic Alan Watts metaphor, is to start by talking about the nature of conscious attention. Whenever we focus our attention, he says, we fix it on a single thing. We're doing something kind of like shining a spotlight onto a single part of a much larger room. You focus on a single thing, and he says, look, you can certainly see whatever it is you're looking at in a lot of detail. It's cool. But it's important to recognize that there's always an enormous amount of other stuff going on outside of what you're consciously focusing on. He also says, notice about our attention, that it doesn't just move around randomly from thing to thing throughout the day. He says it's especially drawn to all the things that change around us. Many things that might be dangerous to us, things that might be useful, things that

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  might require us to do something pressing if it were to happen in a moment. So in a famous metaphor that he gives about this, Alan Watts compares our attention to a radar system on a ship. Think of one of those Doppler radar things that every methed-out weatherman has used since the beginning of time. What does it do? Well, the line spins in a circle, it scans a terrain, and it points out disruptions or anomalies that are going on in the terrain that it's always scanning. Well, he thinks we do something similar, as we otherwise go throughout our day and consciously focus our attention on the things that might be threats or opportunities to us. Consider, he would say, just how easy it is to mistake the stuff we're always consciously focusing on with the entirety of the person that we are.

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  But also notice, no matter how easy that may be for someone to do, with very little effort, you can show someone that what you consciously focus on is only a very small part of your entire being. For example, when you're focusing on what kind of fruit is on sale at the grocery store. Well, your heart is still beating in that moment, right? That's a part of you. Your food is still digesting. In fact, for that matter, there's tons of subconscious psychological calculations being made by you at a level that you're never going to be aware of, that are nonetheless a huge part of what you are. Another example, when you get home from work and you think back to all the radar blips that went on throughout your day. Maybe you think of the person that almost hit you on the road that morning in your car, that snide comment that Sally made at the office today.

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  Again, he'd say it's easy to start to equate these negative blips on the radar with what our whole life is, when with just a slightly wider perspective, if you look at the terrain that the radar was scanning, you notice there were actually so many things about what your life was that day that operated beautifully, and that these things were just as much a part of what your life was on that day as all the bad things that you focused your attention on. He'd say, notice how you were already participating in life before you ever started trying to explain it to yourself and control it. He expands on this point with an example that everybody can relate to. He says, look, it is, it's obviously possible for people to consciously control their breathing, right? You can deliberately breathe in and out, you can stop deliberately breathing in and out.

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  And when you go on with your day and you start to focus on other things, well, your breathing somehow is still something that's going on that's a part of you, it's just going on automatically in the background now. Again, there is so much of what you are that lies outside of whatever you're narrowly deciding to focus on right now. Now, this is a surprisingly important point in the argument that he wants to continue to build here. He thinks we're left to acknowledge the fact that what we are as a being is something that seems to extend at times beyond certain narrow parameters of awareness that we have. And if it goes beyond certain limits of awareness that seem like common sense to us, next question that might be interesting to ask for him is, does what you are ever go beyond certain physical limits you have that also seem like common sense to us?

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  Like, common sense would tell you that what you are is a physical creature that ends about where your fingertips and toes end. Anything that goes on outside your skin, in other words, is not really something that's a part of you anymore. That's either a part of someone else, or it's a part of this separate box of the universe that you're living your life in every day. But Alan Watts is going to challenge this assumption about what you are as well.

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  Maybe a good place to start is just to give a few examples about how our ability to live in this kind of allusion to him is only made possible by the narrow limits of our senses. Like, normally, if you're sitting in a room having a conversation with someone, it can feel like you're your own distinct thing there, completely separate from everything else that's in that room. But imagine for a second, imagine if you were able to see the air that's around you in that room, to be able to see this gas of oxygen, nitrogen, that you're constantly inhaling as it fills your lungs up, sustains your whole existence, only for you to then breathe it out and shoot clouds in all directions, pushing all the other gas in the room everywhere. Well, if you could see this stuff going on all the time, the idea that there's a constant

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  tether between you and the immediate space around you beyond your skin might start to seem a bit more plausible. More than that, imagine when you're talking to this other person in conversation, imagine being able to see the sound waves of your voices, where as you speak, they bounce all around the room, off the walls, going inside the ears of the person you're talking to, with their sound waves hitting your ears, affecting everything that you decide to do next. You see, to Alan Watts, the problem with the common sense Western view that the skin is where the self ends, is that the skin also happens to be the exact location where we have contact with anything and everything else. Or as he says about the skin, quote, "It is as much a bridge as it is a barrier," end quote.

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  And he's going to extend this poetic point that he makes about the skin with solid arguments in his books, from the philosopher John Dewey, as well as arguments from the field of biology that reinforce why the physical boundaries of the self become far more complicated than we typically assume. One memorable example he gives to start with here is that if we wanted to try to understand ourselves better as living organisms, well, look for a second at another kind of living organism in the honeybee, he says. Honeybees and flowers are things that look very different from each other physically. And yet, in terms of the biological activities that certain bees and flowers engage in, it is impossible to understand what the bee is doing without understanding what the flower is doing. In fact, most of the time, it's impossible for the flower and bee to even exist without each other.

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  His point is that to understand what either of these things are would require you to understand an interconnected living system, not two totally separate beings that can each be understood on their own. No, you have to gain an understanding of a kind of living organism process that's going on. But he'd say this doesn't just go on at the level of ecology or biology. This goes on at practically every scale that we study hard enough in the sciences. And this is where he'd want to bring in the philosopher John Dewey, who had a concept in his work called The Transaction, that'll be helpful here. Of all the places he could possibly start, Dewey's going to start by talking about something as simple as the relationship between buying and selling. Simply put, he says, buying and selling seem on the surface like they're two separate activities.

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  But really, if you were to take a step back and look at them together, he says, buying and selling are better described as two different sides of a single event that's going on. He says he can't have a buyer without a seller, and he can't have a seller without a buyer. Alan Watts says that John Dewey thought we needed to understand living organisms through the same kind of logic, with us as humans being an important example of a living organism in terms of the relationship we have to the environments that we're in. In other words, most human behaviors that make up practically everything you are are things only done in relationship to your environment. The classic example he gives here to illustrate this is walking. The activity of walking, he says, requires an environment.

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  It requires there to be a ground that's underneath you that you're walking on. If someone were to just be moving their legs like they were walking, but for some reason they were just suspended in empty space with no ground, they'd be doing something, but it wouldn't be doing what we call walking. And so too with so many other things that constitute our lives. Watts's point here is to further disrupt this assumption we make, that the self is something that just ends where our skin happens to end. See, if so much of what makes you you involves these relationships with the world around you, why are we so convinced that the boundaries of your skin tell us the whole story about what you are? In fact, to Watts, it starts to seem like to understand you is less to understand a

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  single being and more to understand a process that is going on. More specifically, a process that's going on within many different processes that are also simultaneously going on. And for any of you that have listened to the show for a while, and you're sitting there thinking Alan Watts is starting to sound like a process philosopher here. Well, two points to Ravenclaw. Nice work. It's as far from the worst description you could have of Alan Watts, I think. There's certainly plenty of evidence to back this up. I mean, first of all, he directly cites and gives high praise to Alfred North Whitehead's work as maybe one of the greatest philosophers in the West at understanding reality. Second, a bit of foreshadowing here, but this process-driven ontology will be a trend that we see continue

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  into the next couple of episodes as we talk about his views on reality and purpose. Three, while there's obviously a big difference in approach between Watts and someone like a Burson, or Whitehead, or Deleuze, you know, these classic process philosophers we've heard of, for whatever it's worth, if I was in a conversation with someone and they described Alan Watts as a process philosopher, I would never criticize that take personally. I actually think it's a really useful way to bring continuity to his work, and I don't get the sense that he'd reject the title. Anyway, that said, Alan Watts has no problem giving you plenty more examples here to make the case that you are a process. He actually even uses similar language to other process philosophers we've seen over the years. If you remember from the episodes we did on Burson, we used a sand dune to describe his view of reality. Well, Watts is going to use a whirlpool in his work. That's the

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  thing he thinks gives the best image of the true kinds of beings we are. In his lecture, "We as Organism," he says, quote, "The only thing constant about us at all is the doing rather than the being," end quote. What he means is that to be you is never to just be a static thing, sitting on a shelf, waiting to be studied by a scientist and perfectly understood. No, just like a whirlpool, he says, you're something that is always moving and always changing. But what's interesting about a whirlpool in particular is that even though the water that's making it up is constantly flowing through it, the whirlpool itself keeps a distinct enough shape to make it recognizable to us. You can point to a whirlpool, say, "Look, there's a whirlpool," and people know what it is you're talking

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  about. Kind of like the same way you can point to me and say, "Look, there's a Steven," and people know what you mean. But its bigger point here is to ask yourself, what exactly is that whirlpool that we're pointing at? I mean, there's no fixed thing sitting underneath all that moving water. We start to realize that the whirlpool just is the activity that's going on where we're pointing. And again, Alan Watts thinks this is the way that we should start to understand ourselves as well. Now, notice one important thing about this whole whirlpool analogy he's giving here. None of it requires us to dissolve the concept of individual identity. In other words, individuality is something that can still exist as a process to Alan Watts. It's just what we call our individuality is not some fixed little controller

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  sitting behind our eyes. Watts says it's best understood as a recognizable pattern that's going on within a larger process that we're a part of. To further move in this direction and build his case beyond just the fields of psychology and biology we've already talked about, the next move's going to be to talk about how we see this show up in the world of physics, specifically through the work of a famous quantum physicist by the name of David Bohm. As usual, he starts with the typical picture we have in the West of the way that something works. He talks about Newtonian mechanics, the way that we have to assume the universe must be when we try to view it only through Newtonian mechanics. He says the classical Newtonian picture imagines the universe as essentially like a game of pool that's going on. There's a bunch of billiard balls, they're all clanging into

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  each other. The laws of physics essentially have their way on a bunch of separate, discreet physical things. Separate entities that just have various kinds of interactions within this otherwise neutral warehouse that we call the universe, what Alan Watts calls the fully automatic model of the universe. But Bohm says that quantum mechanics, the deeper you go into it, complicates that picture of things drastically. He says, "Consider the example of an electron." Look, scientists run experiments on electrons all day long. And he says, "In one experimental arrangement," say one that's designed to detect where an electron's going to arrive, scientists can get a reading in that case that's clearly a kind of localized detection, meaning the measurement of an electron shows it to be something that's behaving like a particle in that case. But he says, "Change the experimental

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  setup just a bit," and scientists report that even though individual electrons are being detected at specific locations, when you look at the pattern formed by these detections, it shows a kind of interference that normally is only possible if an electron was functioning like a wave. In other words, depending on how the electron is interacting with whatever quantum system it's being measured in, Bohm says that will determine something important about what the electron even is in a given moment. So if you wanted to be a good scientist, can we say that this electron is simply like a billiard ball, or something that always has the same qualities no matter the conditions it's in? Bohm says no, and says these properties generated at this quantum level have to be understood in relation to the larger physical arrangement that the thing is in. Now, to get back to the case Watts wants to continue

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  to make with all this, he says Bohm's work gives us a great example of how traditional, classical ways of describing what our reality is, sometimes, depending on which reality we're trying to describe, cease to be the best description we have. He'd say, "Here's yet another example of how there's a thing that supposedly has its whole own independent existence going on, but properties about what it is become inseparable from the larger system that it's a part of." And more than that, the question becomes, is the universe really just this neutral container that we're all sitting in all day? And all of this will lead Watts to an even more radical question that comes from the work of the theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger. To put it simply, Schrödinger's going to take this whole conversation about whether physical things are really as separate as we commonly think of them,

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  and he's going to apply this same line of thinking to our explanations about consciousness. Schrödinger was fascinated by something he called the "arithmetical paradox." Let me explain it real quick. The basic idea is that, you know, for us to be able to do science at all, we need to assume that we all live in a single, shared, objective world that can be reliably understood. But for science to even get off the ground in the first place, we always have to understand this reality from potentially billions of different points of consciousness. Everybody experiences this reality from their own private perspective, and this creates a problem for Schrödinger. How can we ever reconcile all these apparently separate centers of experience, especially when the science we're doing leaves the experiencing subject out of the descriptions that we're using? Schrödinger

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  starts to wonder, what if the mistake we've been making is that we're assuming because there are billions of different perspectives on reality, that there must be billions of separate consciousnesses that are behind them? He gives the example of a crystal in his work. Imagine a big crystal with all these different facets that are going through it. He says, "Imagine holding this crystal up to your eye like a kaleidoscope, and trying to look at a single object through it. And imagine seeing what appear to be hundreds of different images of that object reflected through all the different facets of the crystal." Well, just because you're seeing hundreds of different images there, that doesn't mean that the object has somehow become hundreds of different things. Schrödinger wonders whether the same might be true of consciousness. What if what we experience day to day as

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  countless separate conscious selves that are all living out their own lives are actually just a bunch of different expressions of one single underlying reality? And this is where Watts wants to bring in Eastern spiritual tradition to give us a better language to imagine this as a possibility. Specifically, the relationship and the practice of Vedanta between what it calls Atman and Brahman. Real quick definition of terms here. Vedanta is a type of Hindu philosophy rooted in the Apinashads, or their sacred texts. And Alan Watts is especially interested in a school of this called Advaita Vedanta, which, among other things, has a particular focus on a non-dual understanding of reality. Atman is what this kind of Vedanta calls your deepest self, meaning Atman is what you fundamentally

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  are beyond localized things like your personality, your memories, how we normally think of our identity when we're out to dinner with friends on a random Tuesday. Finally, Brahman is what Vedanta calls ultimate reality. I mean, what this is talking about is the fundamental reality that underlies everything that exists. Now, the big point here that Alan Watts wants to make accessible to people outside this tradition is that Vedanta gives you an entirely different way of seeing your own identity. And it begins with considering the possibility that Atman, your deepest self, and Brahman, ultimate reality, are actually the exact same thing. And a great metaphor that Alan Watts uses at many points throughout his work to express this idea, he says you are a lot like an apple that's

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  being produced by an apple tree. "Where though it's possible, in theory, to step back and distinguish you as a piece of that tree individually, you are not really separate from that tree. No, more accurately, you're something that the tree is doing right now, something that grows out of the tree as a natural expression of the larger process that's going on." Meaning, you didn't arrive in a neutral universe from somewhere else somehow, like some stranger who suddenly showed up here and now has to figure out a way to live. No, you grew out of here. You're something that reality itself is doing. So as you can imagine, under this new framing of your most fundamental self, things like human feelings or human actions, these are just as much an expression of Brahman as

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  a, you know, a supernova is, or the Grand Canyon is. I mean, to Alan Watts, in the sense that your most fundamental self is identical to ultimate reality, he finds a provocative way to put it when he says that what we are ultimately is God. See, ultimate reality, as understood in Vedanta, is divine. And so anything that exists, including you, is at its deepest level an expression of that same divine reality. Now, Watts was very aware of the reactions many Westerners were going to have to this, you know, when he so casually changes what's meant by the word "God." But all of this was part of his plan, it should be clear. In fact, he thought it's in large part due to the narrow ways that Western religions typically think about God, that leads to this picture we began

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  the episode with, where we think of ourselves as this controlling, internal supervisor that lives up in our heads somewhere. He'd say, "Think about the similarities between the ego supposedly controlling our worlds and the way the average person experiences God in something like Christianity." Not many people ever become deep scholars of Christian theology, so the most influential images of God that people inherit in this world are essentially that of a supreme ruler. You know, there's a man in the sky that knows you by name and has a plan for you, and the point of your time here on this earth is to try to live by the word of God better, or put a different way, to control your own behavior in each moment as much as you can. It's an image of a creator god that gave rise to the universe like some grand engineer, and then he laid down some laws and restrictions

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  that are supposed to govern the behavior of all the things he put inside of this big container he created. Now, considering this image for a second, is there any mystery as to where many people get programmed to think about their identity and the universe and the narrow ways we spent this episode questioning? His point is also that, you know, on the off chance you were a Christian, and you ever felt something that made you have this insight that Vedanta put so clearly. In other words, if you would ever feel like you were God, a single expression of some underlying divine unity, he says, "In normal Western spiritual language, the second you say 'I am God' to someone, one of two things is going to happen to you. You're either going to be called blasphemous, somebody that needs to be corrected harshly, usually by spiritual gatekeepers of some sort, or you're going to be called mentally ill, crazy,

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  somebody that needs to be committed, put on some strong medication at the very least." To Alan Watts, "Living in the West, whether you believe in God as a supreme ruler, or whether you're an atheist that sees the universe as some disinterested impersonal mechanism, either way, you're not thinking of yourself as something that is part of the universe at all. You're just temporarily occupying it. You're some kind of an alien or a stranger, navigating a world that you didn't ask to be born into in the first place, and now need to find some way, anyway, to continue to live in it meaningfully." You're far from the apple that's growing on an apple tree, is what he's saying. But again, to Alan Watts, "When you use Vedantic spiritual language to deepen your understanding of your most fundamental self, you start to feel more like what you are, is what he describes as

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  'the universe playing hide and seek with itself.'" We'll talk much more about that one on episode three of this series. That said, Watts would want to warn people about a common trap you can fall into here. See, if from the beginning of the episode, we've been moving further away from seeing ourselves, it's this ego in our heads trying to control everything, then if you practice Vedanta, and say you feel heavily swayed by the idea that you're something the universe is doing, well, this becomes a really tempting place, he thinks, for the ego to kind of slip back in unnoticed, where you start thinking of yourself as superior to all the people around you, you know, smarter than everyone else, who hasn't yet realized the truth of all this stuff yet, like you have. He has a great metaphor for this, where he talks about the ego as kind of like a bunch of burglars

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  that are robbing a building. And when the cops raid the building on the bottom floor, the burglars run away up to the second floor to get away from them. Then as the cops raid the second floor, they run up to the third floor, and so on and so forth with the ego, where it's still always in the building somewhere, it just escapes by identifying with some supposedly higher version of itself on a higher floor. He'd say, "Be careful of this becoming something that deepens the habit of the ego, rather than loosens it." The last thing he might say, that's a good place to end today, that'll set us up for next time, is probably to say, "Just notice for a moment how when you don't see yourself as a stranger living in this reality, but instead as something identical to it, notice how responsibility for all that goes on in this life no longer becomes something

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  that you have to come up with good reasons for doing anymore. Notice how when you stop seeing the universe as something totally separate from yourself, caring for the world around you starts to look like caring for the larger process that makes your own existence possible." Anyway, apologies if this went on too long today. As always, tell me if you want more of this. Patreon, I can't thank you enough for all that you do to make this show possible. I'll be back very soon, much sooner than last time, by the way, sorry for the delay. I, uh, I went on a road trip with my dad. I just find myself very aware of the fact that the guy's getting older. It's not going to be here forever. Don't want to wake up one morning and, uh, wish that I had done something like that sooner.

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  So just thanks for your patience, as always. Most of all, though, thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.