Alan Watts (1915 to 1973), the English-born writer and speaker who was among the best-known interpreters and popularisers of Zen, Taoism and Vedanta for Western readers, held in The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) that the search for security is itself what makes us anxious, because it rests on the idea of a separate, lasting ‘I’ that must be protected, an ‘I’ he held does not exist. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his view that the everyday ego is made of stories and his respect for the wisdom of the body, but holds that the middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer is real at its own level, and roots it in the Soul instead of dissolving it.
Who was Alan Watts? #
He was born in 1915 in Chislehurst, Kent. He was ordained an Episcopalian priest in 1945 and left the priesthood in 1950. From 1951 he taught at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, and the weekly talks he gave on Berkeley radio from 1953, with his books and lectures, made him one of the best-known voices of Eastern philosophy in the West. His many books include The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), The Way of Zen (1957) and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966). He died in California in 1973.1
What did Watts teach about insecurity? #
That the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are “the same thing”.2 The Wisdom of Insecurity begins with what it calls the age of anxiety. As traditional religious belief gave way under honest doubt, people turned to new political and economic myths, and to the mind’s endless planning and remembering, for the security it had promised. But life is a flowing stream; you cannot, in his image, walk off with a river in a bucket. Trying to make it hold still only produces more fear. He called the way through the law of reversed effort, sometimes known as the backwards law. The harder we grasp at security, the less secure we feel, just as holding our breath only loses it. What he offered was not a new belief but a different way of standing in life, giving full attention to the present, not living in memory and anticipation. He drew a sharp line between belief, which clings to what we wish were true, and faith, which opens to whatever is. “Belief clings, but faith lets go.”3
What did Watts teach about the ego? #
That the separate ‘I’ we try to make secure is largely an illusion of memory. We imagine a permanent core inside us, the thinker of our thoughts and feeler of our feelings, and spend our lives trying to protect it. In his words, “We do not actually understand that there is no security until we realize that this ‘I’ does not exist.”4 In The Book (1966) he gave the idea its most famous phrase, the ‘skin-encapsulated ego’, his name for the feeling that each of us is a separate self shut up inside our skin, a feeling he called a myth.5
He also saw the split inside us as a split between head and body. In his account civilised people have been taught “to neglect, despise, and violate our bodies, and to put all faith in our brains”, so that brain and body pull against each other, and the body’s own wisdom is left to wither.6
How does Watts’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most closely in seeing the everyday self as something constructed. The ego, the middle-world self, is made of stories we tell ourselves and stories society tells us, and the more tightly they are held, the more real they feel. Watching the stories, not being caught up in them, the capacity of the Aware SelfAware Self. The Witness: not a part of the self but a capacity for awareness, cultivated by hollowing-out, that can watch the flow of thoughts without being caught in them. More about this, is the beginning of realising that we are not the stories.7 See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
His wisdom of the body finds an echo too. In shamanism the physical body is not a vehicle for the soul, nor a thing we happen to inhabit. It has its own consciousness, intelligence, wisdom, needs and drives, and needs to be listened to and respected as much as any other part of us.8 See What can somatic and body-centred therapies offer shamanic work?
And his line between belief and faith meets the plain statement that shamanism asks for no belief and no leap of faith; it is a path of direct, personal experience, there to be tried. His separate, skin-bound ego also resonates with the deep sense of loneliness, isolation and separation that, as modern humans, we all carry, and that simply being in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer begins to heal.9 See Is animism the same as ‘all is one’?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On whether the ‘I’ exists. Watts’s flattest statement is that it does not. Therapeutic Shamanism holds two truths at once. On one level everything is one, part of Great SpiritGreat Mystery (Great Spirit). The unknowable from which everything comes. Better rendered ‘the Great Mystery’: animism has no interventionist creator-god, and the truly infinite cannot be prayed to, bargained with or journeyed to. More about this; on another, separation is real, and the ego, though made of stories, is very much a real thing in the everyday middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer. Denying it does not make it go away; it only drives it into the Shadow, out of conscious control.10 And beneath the ego there is something that is not a story at all, the Lower-World Soul, our true Self-identity, which acts as an anchor that stops us drifting and getting lost in the stories of the human-made world.11 See What is ego death?
On transcendence. Watts did not teach ignoring the ego; he asked for full awareness of experience as it is. The caution here is about how teaching that the self is an illusion can be used, as permission to rise above the middle-world. Trying to ignore and transcend the middle-world ego contributes to the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, and on a personal level it simply does not work.12 The middle-world self is to be reined in, not abolished, and that is done not only by rising towards Spirit but by descending to the Soul, to rise, but rise rooted.13 See What is spiritual bypassing and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
Did Watts understand Zen correctly? #
Some Zen teachers thought not. The Zen teacher Philip Kapleau faulted him for dismissing seated meditation, and D. T. Suzuki, whose books Watts had popularised, is reported to have said that Watts did not understand a particular Zen story. Others defended him, among them the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, who called him a “great bodhisattva”.14 Watts, for his part, described himself as a philosophical entertainer.
