Chapter 1. Inside Information

Walk-thru of Alan Watts The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

The opening chapter lays the taboo that this the book is about, that we are all God. We habitually think of ourselves as separate entities, like islands in a ocean. We are not encouraged to search for a deeper meaning of existence, because if we did we could realize that we are all parts of a whole.

If we stop to consider ourselves, and decide to shift our attention from our thoughts. we can come to realize that we are separate from each other, yet connected. Like individual waves rolling around on the same ocean. Okay, so we are more than just our thoughts, but how can we find this new meaning that Watts is talking about? One way is through myths, if we treat them as stories to teach meaning by explaining what the meaning is like or similar to, they are decidedly not factual.

Commentary

Those of us living in the tail end of the by now decadent Western civilization, may turn our noses up at a book about Taboo, we like to think our virtue is we accept anything, even gender is fluid as far as we are concerned. We broke all the rules, we are the free and liberated, we had a sexual revolution and do as we please. Look at all our fetishes, what taboo is there that we have not discarded long ago? But still there are other taboos that we can think of, if we take the time to do so. Most religions have taboos about what we can and cannot do. And also the exceptionally modern concept of Cancel culture is a minefield of taboos. There are explicit things that will get you canceled if you transgress(sin).

The taboo Watts want's to get at has to do with knowing ourselves and how, when we stop to contemplate something, it is wondrous that we even happen to exist as we do. That fact that somehow we live in a world where both poetry and giraffes exist is marvelous indeed. The lowdown on the taboo he is talking about is that it changes how we perceive reality, it is a revolution of awareness within ourselves.

The thing about prohibiting things through taboos though, is they are only useful when the conditions that they where made to regulate do not change. It may well have been a good idea mandate rationing of bread as was done in many European states during WW2, but once peace broke out and bread production was up again, the rules where changed. This much is obvious, but if we view the example of imposing a rule as an analogy for life where we find ways to deal with what life brings our way. This may not seem to offer much insight, but bear with it a little longer. For do we not cling to our rules? Most of us certainly went along with draconian Covid restrictions. Watts suggests that we do cling to our rules because they create certainty and meaning in an uncertain world. We agreed to what amounted to house arrests for 2 years to stay safe. We volunteered, no one actually locked us up. The Covid happening is not what we are discussing here however, it could have been right, wrong or something in between. For our purposes the point is we went along with something because most of us thought we should do that, probably because we where uneasy and needed some sense of security. We felt the world was threatening us. Yet if we can accept that we are in fact part of the world, and not isolated things in it then, Watts claims, why would we look for something outside ourselves to protect us? The taboo he wants to explore is precisely this, that we are all part of the universe, as a wave is both something and also the ocean at the same time. Light is both a particle and a wave. Why is this something very few of us experience?

Indeed why do we think of ourselves separate from everything, including each other? As for many things in a society, the why things are so and so, often coincides with who benefits from the existing setup. Without getting to conspiratorial, power can be concentrated by creating an in group and an out group. This is done by making it meaningful to be in the in group, either through violent coercion, hate of the out group, fear of missing out or a whole bunch of other ways, what God you happen to believe being a particularly potent one. The problem with all the divide and conquer tactics, and it is the population that is divided and the individual that is conquered just so we are clear, is that the story we tell ourselves to convince ourselves that our way is the true way, inevitably over time starts to wear thin. That is why the church is loosing power rapidly, we no longer believe it to be the true meaning any more. So the church does what any power seeking entity ultimately must do, it starts to changes it's story, and soon we have gay weddings in the local parish by a female priest. Nothing wrong with that, but only a few years ago that would have got you thrown out (canceled) if you suggested in the weekly Sunday service.

Watts states the purpose of this book very concisely as being to make us realize that we are not ideas alone, we are just as much experience and feeling as well. This sounds so banal that we are almost already starting to read on, but let us take a little time to unpack what he is getting at, for understanding this is a powerful insight. In as few words as can be dared with out doing to much injustice to the message, basically most of us are trapped in our heads, caught up in concepts and definitions, but to truly be alive and part of reality we need to let go of experiencing ourselves only, and expand our awareness to what surrounds us. The taboo then, is that what most of us are aware of, is simply not real. If you want to know what is real, you have to be able to experience yourself, but it has to happen outside your habitual patterns of thought in your head, you have to make room for the experience by willfully focusing your attention away from you incessant thoughts and onto the sensations of being that you experience (senses, feelings).

Fine, but how do we understand ourselves if our thoughts are responsible for keeping us from understanding? One approach is to use myths to teach us. The power of myth lies in its ability to explain something that we do not understand, by relating it to what we do understand. Watts gives a nice example of a children's myths for explaining fundamental metaphysical questions like why are we here. In summary it goes a little like this. Things alternate and repeat, like day is opposite to night, and day becomes night becomes day. In the same way things exist and do not exist. One way to think about God is to think that he is everything, and therefore everything is God. By being creation and creation alternating between opposites (being and not being) and repeating itself God can experience life from all the consciousness that exists.

You can certainly pick apart this myth and claim it is false, and you would be right, but you would also be correct to assume there is truth in it, and so we have myths that resonate and stay with us, not because they are the absolute truth, but because they help us make sense of our lives. The power of myths are that they can give us meaning. As Nietzsche pointed out He who has a "why[meaning]" for which to live can bear with almost any "how". At the core of the myth Watts gives us is the idea that ultimately our innermost being is God. And this is also the taboo, we are all God, and he is everything.

Watts wishes to tell us not how things ought to be, but how they are, and to explain to us how and why we ignore them. In short if we examine ourselves as separate egos, making an earnest attempt, then it will lead to a realization that our ego is an illusion and that we are all part of creation. We are like ocean waves, each separate, yet still part of the same sea. Each wave is experiencing itself and the other waves, playing hide and seek. Once we realize that we become awakened.

Final thoughts

So why is there a taboo about realizing our nature? Is it maybe because if we ponder the question long enough, we will arrive at the same answer, that we are all parts of a whole. In any society that exists by controlling others, this realization is corrosive to the mental prisons most of us live in.