Alan Watts was an iconoclast through and through. He took a huge step in bringing Zen and other eastern philosophical ideas to the west before and during a time when the United States was undergoing a huge cultural shift in the 60s and 70s. We explore one of his pivotal books here, aptly named "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are."
Copyright 2023 by Letters to the Sky
Alan Watts was an iconoclast through and through. He took a huge step in bringing Zen and other eastern philosophical ideas to the west before and during a time when the United States was undergoing a huge cultural shift in the 60s and 70s. We explore one of his pivotal books here, aptly named "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are."
Copyright 2023 by Letters to the Sky
Stephan Downes:
Hi. I'm Stephan Downes.
Adam Rizvi:
And I'm Adam Rizvi.
Stephan Downes:
This is Letters to the Sky, a podcast about the metaphysical iconoclasts, philosophical visionaries, and religious leaders of the world.
Adam Rizvi:
Whether you consider yourself religious, spiritual, neither, or something in between, we invite you to take a deep dive with us down metaphysical rabbit holes and learn to see your life from a new perspective.
Stephan Downes:
Hello Adam.
Adam Rizvi:
What's up, Stephan?
Stephan Downes:
Not much. How's your bedroom?
Adam Rizvi:
I knew that was going to-
Stephan Downes:
Is that where you live?
Adam Rizvi:
I knew that was going to be a question.
Stephan Downes:
That's not the real question.
Adam Rizvi:
Oh that wasn't a question? Okay.
Stephan Downes:
No, that wasn't. I was just asking.
Adam Rizvi:
My bedroom's great. Yeah. I've got some nice recording equipment in here and it's nice and cool, chill. All right. Lay it on me.
Stephan Downes:
Cool. Would you might telling me real quick, is enlightenment possible and what does it have to do with being better than everyone else?
Adam Rizvi:
Okay. Yeah, way to start.
Stephan Downes:
Serious responses only, please.
Adam Rizvi:
Okay. Serious response only. All right.
Stephan Downes:
Not that serious.
Adam Rizvi:
What do you want from me? All right. I'm not going to unpackage this. Enlightenment is not possible and when you're enlightened you're way better than other people, way, way better than other people.
Stephan Downes:
I'm glad we're on the same page about this.
Adam Rizvi:
Oh yeah, you agree?
Stephan Downes:
Absolutely. Oh my God.
Adam Rizvi:
Interesting. Okay. Well, for everyone who's listening, that at some point I'm sure will be unpackaged as you get to know Stephan and I a little bit more. So today, we chose a book. It's called The Book and it's by Alan Watts. As we are want to do, every episode we pick a book that we love. We read it. We underline it. And then we talk about it. In order to understand this book, let me just paint a little picture here of who Alan Watts is for those of you who've never heard of him. Alan Watts, in my mind, is a social revolutionary. He was a guide in the emerging hippie movement and a teacher of Asian religions, including Buddhism, and both Chinese and Japanese culture. The interesting thing though is he was raised in an orthodox Christian tradition. He became an Episcopal priest, I believe, but eventually left that to dive fully into Zen Buddhism. You've probably heard of the book, The Way of Zen. That is his book and a spiritual classic. He's also a really multifaceted person. He smoked way too much. He drank way too much. I think he had liver disease towards the end, which got him. He married three times. He had seven kids and ultimately died at the age of 58. Just go on YouTube and type Alan Watts and you'll see. He's got a wonderful British voice that really lends a lot of gravitas to everything he says. Any thoughts on him, Stephan, before I share a little bit about The Book itself?
Stephan Downes:
Yeah. I mean Alan Watts is someone who has definitely been a big part of my "spiritual upbringing." He's super big, like you were saying, on YouTube. There's a lot of people talking about him on YouTube. But he's just someone who seems to transcend boundaries of religious and not religious in a way that makes him extremely relatable to anyone looking to find out more about wisdom. One of my favorite stories about Alan Watts and the way that I relate to him is a story from a student of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, who is a Buddhist Zen teacher who came to America from Japan. One of his American students had said, "Oh we thought Alan Watts was amazing until we found the real thing." Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was basically he said, "You completely missed the point about Alan Watts. You should notice what he has done. He's a great bodhisattva." This, I think, encapsulates Alan Watts. He's someone who emerged from, he was interested in Buddhism from a very young age. He kind of was one of the leading voices on Eastern thought from a Western perspective in America certainly and in the West more broadly, actually, one of the first ones that actually gained popularity on a very wide scale. So he was involved with the Beats. He was also a precursor to the hippie movement as well, as you said. The way he talks about things, if you read the book you'll get that sense or really any of his books though. Whereas the understandings he talks about from how we understand these traditions, like let's say Zen or Chan or Vedanta or any type of Eastern tradition are kind of this blend of authentic information and Alan Watts-isms, you know? But it's very wise you know? There's a ton of wisdom to it. It's not something that if you want to be a serious practitioner of a specific tradition that he's not offering that information right? That information tends to come from the teacher in the lineage. But his information is so useful and has been so useful to so many people that to simply write him off as mistaken or wrong is an unbelievably disappointing oversimplification of who Alan Watts is and what he offered and you know, at the end of the day, he wrote a ton of books. He talked to a ton of people. He influenced so many people. We can't have the conversations that we have today without Alan Watts at all, especially when we talk about Zen in America and Buddhism, our understanding of Buddhism in general.
Adam Rizvi:
Yeah. I think Alan Watts is very near and dear to our hearts, both Stephan and I, because in many ways the genesis of these episodes came from us listening to Alan Watts' lectures on YouTube and talking about them between each other. So this is probably not going to be the last time that we talk about an Alan Watts book. This book, in particular, it's called The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. That is a fantastic title. It was published in 1966 when Alan Watts was 51, seven years before his death. So in many ways, this book, I think it seems to encapsulate his teachings and what he offers. I'll briefly give a synopsis here from online. The Book provides us with a much-needed answer to the problem of personal identity, distilling and adapting the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta. At the root of human conflict is our fundamental understanding of who we are. The illusion that we are isolated beings unconnected to the rest of the universe has led us to view the outside world with hostility and has fueled our misuse of technology and our violent and hostile subjugation of the natural world. Really, this book is in a certain way about Vedanta, but if you knew Alan Watts, you knew that he was way more than any one particular tradition. In fact, if anything, he'd be more related to Zen Buddhism. So I find it interesting that in the latter part of his life he ends up talking about Vedanta. But enough of the overview, let's tackle some of these ideas.
Stephan Downes:
All right. Well, I think, Adam, when you and I were talking about how we should structure this episode because I think if we can say anything about this book, it's one of those books where so many topics are covered in such a short period of time. It's not the shortest book ever, but it's not long by any stretch of the imagination. I mean it's probably around 150 pages maybe. Yeah. It's right around 150 pages. It's not a long book, but he covers so many different topics that I know that you and I had a hard time coming up with what to talk about, because I have this feeling and I shared it with some other people that I could talk about this book for six episodes, no problem. But we decided to break it down into like three questions that we feel were kind of the, I don't want to say the outlying because that's not going to be the right word, but three questions that we feel like Alan Watts asked and Alan Watts answered in this book. Those three were what is the self, the ego? and is there a taboo? What should be done with the ego? What happens when the ego's undone? What's next? Through those three questions, we were able to kind of come up with the main points we wanted to talk about. So I think without further ado, we should jump in. We should ask Adam what is the self and the ego and in relation to this book, is there a taboo?
Adam Rizvi:
First of all, the fact that Alan is suggesting this concept of not looking at our identity, ego, as a taboo is fantastic. I think it applies to today just as much as back in the '60s. Taboo meaning something that is unspoken, something that is right underneath conscious awareness or at least what we verbalize to each other. It's so good. It's also something, you know it implies something that you don't want to touch, something that's maybe a little dirty right? It's true, except we don't realize that we're treating it that way and that's what he's bringing to our awareness. So right from the preface, Alan outlines what his thesis is. This is not a doctoral dissertation, but he uses that word. He says, "Briefly, the thesis is that the prevalent sensation of oneself has a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy and religions of the East." That is so compelling and that's the second sentence in his whole book in the preface. He says that this, "Sensation of being separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin." I just love that, first of all, because it really captures what we're feeling. He says it's not true. Not only is it not true according to Western science, it's not true according to the religious philosophies of the East. That's really compelling.
Stephan Downes:
Yeah, absolutely. Another great piece that he has in kind of the same vein of what exactly we are and aren't, he says, "We are not a noun. We are a verb." I love this as well because it's so poetic right? That we are not these things. We are this thing that's happening. We are a happening, you know, in the language of Alan Watts. I got to say, so Adam, we agreed that there's a taboo. But like why is there a taboo? Why? Why is it such a problem for us? Why is this such a problem to accept?
Adam Rizvi:
That's a really interesting question. I would say in my experience, when you approach something internally that's hard to face psychologically, there's a resistance that comes up. It's like someone who might have faced some trauma in their childhood or had a bad experience, a really bad experience and then you go to talk about it. There's a natural feeling of resistance like, "I don't want to talk about this." You know? There's a tension that arises in the room and we don't want to go there right? For people who have members of their family or maybe you yourself have something that has happened in the past, anyone that brings it up creates a change in environment where you don't want to go further in that conversation and I think that's what happens on a subconscious level when we start to really ask ourselves, "Well, who am I really? What do I think I am?" We start to unravel the fabric of our own reality and that is super scary. Anyone who's actually taken the step, whether it's through meditation or through various forms of psychotherapy to go down there, it's a dark cave.
Stephan Downes:
Yes, it is.
Adam Rizvi:
It's a place that most people don't want to go there. Why bother? I could just have my life and be happy and do my thing. Why would I bother going down that dark hole?
Stephan Downes:
Yeah. I feel like this would be true, although I haven't done a wide survey of all spiritual practitioners. But I feel like if you really asked why do people do this? Why do people go through this? Why do people go through the process of unraveling themselves? Because as you described it, it's not a comfortable process. I feel like it's because you just can't do anything else. There's something that hasn't been fulfilled there. It's weird to say because as we're going to get into it, it's a double bind right? In the famous words of Alan Watts, he uses this word, double bind, all the time. The striving for it is at some point the barrier to it and there's no way around it right? There's no way around that. It's so uncomfortable, but you can't stop. There's something in me that just continuously cares about this and I have been through many painful experiences in discovering parts of myself. But at the same time, those lead to realizations and peacefulness and awakenings that are ... It's not even like I'm doing it for that.
Adam Rizvi:
There's a reason why this concept of know thyself is so critical in many philosophical traditions. It was famously written above the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi, "Know thyself." If you look in Western as well as Eastern philosophical traditions, it's always about going deeper into who I am. The other side of that is understanding what the world is and what society is. I want to read something here that I think is a really interesting idea. Alan says, "In Japan, it was once customary to give young people about to be married a pillow book. This was a small volume of woodblock prints often colored, showing all the details of sexual intercourse. It wasn't just that, as the Chinese would say, one picture is worth 10,000 words. It was also that it spared parents the embarrassment of having to explain these intimate matters face-to-face.He goes on to say, "Well, what if we had a pillow book for growing up and knowing yourself? What would that look like if we can really distill in a book, in a set of woodblock prints, the steps and the experiences one would have if they bothered to venture into the discovery of who they are?" The rest of his book is an attempt at answering that. I think in some ways Alan Watts, he doesn't say this but I think he's trying to write that book. This book is the pillow book that he would give to his children.
Stephan Downes:
Yeah. I hadn't thought about that but, now that you say that, I can absolutely see it. I absolutely agree. I think some people are naturally interested in spiritual topics, whether it be philosophy or some sort of like self-knowledge of learning about themselves. But motivation really has to come from within. It's why I like the idea of a pillow book because it's not something that like can occur until it's ready to occur. A lot of this information and these things that we learn about ourselves, we can't realize them until we're ready to realize them. I feel like that's, in one instance, how it works by definition. Like of course, you can't because that's just the way things work. That's a huge process in the path of awakening is moments of looking at one thing and it's suddenly completely different than it was before you know, looking at the world a different way. It's just these moments of spontaneous awakening. I do feel like that's what Alan is talking about in these books is, okay, you're asking the right questions. Here are the answers now that you're asking them. You know, I'm not going to give you the answers until you've asked them.
Adam Rizvi:
Yeah. One of the things-
Stephan Downes:
Asked the right questions.
Adam Rizvi:
One of the things that I like about Alan is he makes it clear from the outset that we don't need a new religion. We need a new experience. He reiterates that over and over again that what he's talking about is an experience. What experience can we have that will actually open us up? It does seem, if you look at it, all major transformations, personal and psychological transformations happen because of experiences, not because of something we've read necessarily or watched, but only insofar as the reading and the watching will create an experience in us. And then the experience leads to the transformation.
Stephan Downes:
Yeah, absolutely. So he talks about in this same vein part of this book is about humanity's relationship to nature and the environment as well as humanity's relationship to society at large and how our current ... He goes on to paint the Western civilization in a particularly bad light. I think the points he makes are extremely fair, but I also when I personally read it, I feel like a lot of those points also exist in other cultures, just maybe not to the same extremes or they haven't manifested in the same ways. So when I read it, it's more a criticism of like human culture at large. But that being said, in the vein of talking about nature and environment and society, he really talks about how our fundamental understanding, because we have a hallucination of ourselves as egos, as egos inside a bag of skin as he says, the fundamental way we approach not only our outer environment, so to speak, which he goes on to talk about how that's not true, but also society at large and what we choose to focus on. Those things could never be anything other than what they currently are. They could never be anything other than dysfunctional. If you come to the problem, your baseline assumption is that you are something separate, apart from something else, and along with that come all the hangups and fears.You know, if we want to talk like scientifically, you hear a lot of the reptilian brain right, the four Fs. If you come at life from that perspective and have never learned how to tame that part of yourself, how to like move beyond the initial feelings of fear or trepidation-
Adam Rizvi:
Stephan, what are the four Fs?
Stephan Downes:
The four Fs are feeding, fleeing, fighting, and fucking.
Adam Rizvi:
Got it.
Stephan Downes:
Although in school we would learn those as and fornicating.
Adam Rizvi:
Fornicating.
Stephan Downes:
There we go. Sorry, guys. I said the wrong word. If that's what you are and that's what you inherently feel yourself to be without analysis and without some sort of attempt to be other than that, then the only thing you can create is a reaction to those feelings right, which those structures that are created in society and with society and how we treat the natural world are inherently like more and more rigid and more and more incapable of accepting anything other than the status quo, which is why, to come back to it, is why there's a taboo right. Because we have built these structures in society and these structures in our relationship with the environment that inherently rely on more and more people only agreeing with this is the right way to do it. So that's why there's a taboo because you can't have someone walking around like blowing the whole thing up, not physically, not literally, but blowing the whole thing up philosophically, like pointing out how crazy it all is. You can't have that.
Adam Rizvi:
Yeah. When I hear you say that, I think of the concept of echo chambers right, people who have particular ideologies. I guess you could call it ideological echo chambers where just the same idea gets reflected and bounced back over and over and over again. Now, in that particular system, you actually have no movement. There's no growth in the ideology except, I guess, only one particular direction is more and more extreme. That particular ideology when reflected on itself only gets more and more refined. You need someone willing to question the very fabric of that ideology, the very ground on which it stands for it to really go anywhere meaningful. That, I think, is what we're talking about. If you can look at the taboo of questioning your reality, questioning who you are, then something will break and you will be able to create something new. In many ways, society is a reflection of who we are individually, collectively. So if one of us is able to break through that ground of the status quo and then we bring forward what we find to society at large, that is how society moves forward. And that happens, I think, technologically. It happens philosophically. It happens on a societal level with education. Someone needs to question the way things are in order for it to break forward.
Stephan Downes:
Yeah, absolutely. In this case, we're talking about I mean Alan does talk about society and the environment, but he always talks about them in the context of this individual awareness of who and what we are, which kind of leads us into the next question which is, okay, we've accepted this as the premise or at least we can try it on, so to speak. We can take it at its face value right now in the spirit of this conversation and of learning. But like what do we do? What do we do? We've accepted it. I feel like I'm an ego wrapped inside a bag of skin and that's not correct. That has created all the problems in the world, so to speak right. So what do we do?
Adam Rizvi:
Actually, to set up that question, let me read a relatively long portion of Alan Watts' book here. This is going to encapsulate the question of what is the self and what is the ego? What it'll do is also help us realize the impact of thinking in this particular way on society. And then I think that's going to really compel us to ask, well, what do we do with it now? So Alan Watts says, "We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that I myself is a separate center of feeling and action living inside and bounded by the physical body, a center which confronts an external world of people and things making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. I came into this world. You must face reality, the conquest of nature. The feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in this universe is in flat contradiction to everything we know about man in the sciences. We do not come into this world. We come out of it as leaves from a tree, as the ocean waves, the universe peoples." I just love that quote so much, "As the ocean 'waves.'" The ocean is doing the thing called waving. The universe is doing the thing called peopling. That's what the expression of the universe is, the verb of peopling. That's what's happening here. The final result or not, I should say what Alan says, "The first result of this illusion of being separate individuals is that our attitude to the world outside us is largely hostile. We are forever conquering nature, space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious order." That, for me, is just the fundamental crux of why Alan Watts is bringing up this concept of being willing to go into the ego. Because we see ourselves as separate, the natural consequence of that is we are hostile to the world outside of us.
Stephan Downes:
Yeah. Yeah. You know, when I was a kid, this conversation's kind of reminding me of this. Like okay, so two things, I never understood why there was this distinction between nature and man. People would say, "Are the things that ..." Take like skyscrapers. Take things that are the ways that humans create that are not organic, right. Like when we think of organic structures, we tend to think of trees, the shapes that are found in nature. And then we would make this distinction of, well, what mankind does isn't that. But I've literally always been confused by that statement because along the same lines of we're not different. We're not this thing that comes into the world. We come out of it. Stephan came from somewhere and it's not a question of do I have the right answer to who created Stephen or yadda, yadda, yadda. It's just my identity literally emerged from something, right? And that something was what was there before. So there's no separation. The separation of me and other is completely fabricated, like 100% completely fabricated. It's an illusion. It is a trick of the mind. We could get into both of us have scientific educations. We could very easily go down the route of what is the purpose of that evolutionarily? Right? It's a well-known phenomenon and there's a well-known reason for it, but we don't even have to, just the fact that our identities came from what was there before, right? It's just all this continuation. At some point, Stephan, the identity called Stephan won't be here anymore. There'll be some other identities after Stephan, right? All of it has never made any sense, not to the same level of profundity that I sort of enjoy thinking about this today. But I've always, even before I was under any sort of spiritual practice or anything, I just never really understood why people made such a big deal out of the difference between like man and nature. It just never really made sense to me.
Adam Rizvi:
I was recently having a conversation with a friend of mine about the sense of self. She's a neuroscientist and she shared with me that the Iroquois people, Native Americans, actually had this concept of the long body. It encompassed two ideas, one that your body actually is not just what's physically present in the present moment, but incorporates everything that it was in the past and everything that it will be in the future. The other thing is that it incorporated all the members of the tribe. So your sense of self, your body, the body of who you are wasn't just the body you were carrying around, but it was all the bodies of every member of your tribe. There are these reports of members of the tribe getting injured or hurt and other members of the tribe actually feeling their pain. Now, whether this is psychological or not is immaterial. But I think what it's indicating is we can have a shared sense of self that is beyond this physical body and imagine what that did to the tribe to really have a sense of oneness, a larger sense of me. That speaks to, well, what should we do with the ego? That's the second question. Now we know that we have a sense of the impact of thinking in a small way about who I am and what it does to my relationship with society and nature. So Alan is suggesting that we unravel or we undo the ego. Wouldn't you agree?
Stephan Downes:
Let's do it. Yeah, absolutely. I'm ready. I'm ready to unravel it. Unravel me like a string, Adam. Wait, no, no, no. Unravel me like a ball of string. There we go.
Adam Rizvi:
Yeah.
Stephan Downes:
No, I take that back. You can unravel a string too because a string is really just more smaller strings.
Adam Rizvi:
Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Okay. If you had to pick a vegetable that would encompass the idea of the ego, what one would you pick for Alan Watts' description?
Stephan Downes:
Oh my God. Well, you can't see me, dear listeners, but I'm rolling my eyes at Adam right now because it's an onion. The answer is an onion.
Adam Rizvi:
That's correct.
Stephan Downes:
Okay, okay. Onion, so why an onion? The onion is a metaphor that you'll find all over like spiritual traditions and spiritual lineages because the onion is like concentric circles of something that ends up with nothing, right? There's no really like core of an onion. Even if you look at the smallest piece of an onion, it's just like another layer of onion that's a little differently shaped. It's not quite a full layer yet, right?So when you're talking about onions, you're removing these layers upon layers upon layers. And then at the end, this again gets into what do you do about it? At the end, what do you find? What do you find when you're done with it? Adam, what's the answer?
Adam Rizvi:
Well, you find nothing.
Stephan Downes:
What?
Adam Rizvi:
In the process of cutting through and removing all these layers, you cry a lot.
Stephan Downes:
Oh man. The metaphor just keeps giving. Okay. Onioning, so we're onioning. We're all always onioning. But Alan talks about the difference between like methods of undoing, of peeling the onion, so to speak. We'll just roll with this metaphor because it's a good one. The idea of how we go about becoming a smaller onion, I guess, like how we go about finding out that there's nothing really there, a lot of people tend to go the route of attacking it, right? We say, "The ego is bad and that part of me is bad." There's no realization and there's no self-awareness that the ego saying it is bad is a confirmation of the ego's existence, right? There's a famous story that Watts tells about Lao Tzu meeting Confucius. He asked for Confucius' philosophy. Confucius, one of the things he says is a forgoing of the self, a giving up of the ego. Lao Tzu says, "That's stuff of nonsense. The idea that you can get rid of your ego is a positive manifestation of your ego." So that leaves us in the space, I just want you to listen to that. You can't fight your way out of it. You can't fight your way out of your ego. Just sit with that for a minute. What's left? If nothing you can do is going to get rid of it, what do you do about it?
Adam Rizvi:
Well, when I hear you I just feel like giving up, throwing the paper in the air and just saying, "Well, to hell with it. I don't know what to do."
Stephan Downes:
Well, that sounds like the ego talking. Again, Alan Watts talks about this book in the spirit of Vedanta. But as you said in the beginning, to be sure, these ideas that he's talking would be much more familiar in a Buddhist setting. One of the key things, and I'll just talk about it for a moment, one of the key things that will help us understand this conversation is that Buddhism tends to reject extremes. Buddhism rejects eternalism which is that things are always permanent, that there's the permanent self, that there's a permanent anything. It rejects the opposite, which is that there's nothing. So when we say nothing, when we say, "Oh what's there at the end?" It's not nothing. It's just that there's no onion, right? There's no core of the onion. So if you know if take that question of, okay, if everything you're doing is not it, is a positive manifestation of it, so what do you do? And then you sit with it and then you feel like, "Well, then I'm going to do nothing, throwing the towel. Eff it." That's the opposite, right? That's the nihilism. That's the attitude that nothing matters, that it doesn't matter and both of those are the extremes, right? So we're swinging from one extreme to the other. The only option left is to just surrender. Surrender doesn't mean give up. Surrender means release, relax, to let it happen. That is the essence of the spiritual path in all sorts of traditions. All sorts of traditions have different words for it. I was speaking with a friend last night. In Catholic theology, this is called sacrifice, the idea of taking communion, very tied into this, this idea of surrender and we surrender the part of ourselves that thinks we know what's going on, right? We surrender the part of ourselves that feels it's right about things, that feels it has the answer to everything.
Adam Rizvi:
Alan has this great description of the onion. He says, "You will feel like an onion. Skin after skin, subterfuge after subterfuge is pulled off to find no kernel at the center, which is the whole point, to find out that the ego is indeed a fake, a wall of defense around a wall of defense around nothing. You can't even want to get rid of it, nor yet want to want to." So I think this is what you're talking about, Stephan and the reason why I wanted to read that quote is because of the word, defense, the use of the word, defense. For me, one of the more primal access points to undoing the ego, to pulling those onion layers off is to look at my tendency to defend against something. For me, it's any way that I'm resisting what is. In any moment, like right now if I'm feeling a sense of regret or if I'm feeling a sense of anxiety about something in the future, anything that is a pushing back against what is, if I'm upset about a particular situation, for me, that is defense. That's the ego propping itself up, the sense of I. In order to really have anxiety there needs to be someone who feels the anxiety, right?
Stephan Downes:
Absolutely.
Adam Rizvi:
There's so many ways that the ego maintains its sense of self. If I look at that defense and be like, "Okay, well, what am I really defending myself against here? What am I really worried about?" That's when I can, through introspection, start to peel away those layers.
Stephan Downes:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I love what he says about ... It's kind of diverging from just talking about onions all episode long. He says, "I see vividly that I depend on your being down for my being up. I would never be able to know that I belong to the in group of nice or saved people without the assistance of an out group of nasty or damned people. But conversely, the out group feels that they are really and truly in and nourish their collective ego with relishingly indignant conversation about squares, au faits, WASPs, Philistines, and the blasted bourgeoisie. "Even St. Thomas Aquinas let it out that the part of the blessedness of the saints in heaven was that they could look over the battlements and enjoy the proper justice of the sinners squirming in hell. All winners need losers. All saints need sinners. All sages need fools. That is so long as the major kick in life is to amount to something or to become someone as a particular separate godlet."
Adam Rizvi:
That's so good.
Stephan Downes:
So we have this path. We have this path of-
Adam Rizvi:
Watching the sinners squirm?
Stephan Downes:
YeaH, trying to be better. We have this path of trying to be better, of working towards something on you know the spiritual path, at least, called enlightenment, this path of movement, right? But then we have to understand that all of that movement depends on a reference point, right? So this is how we get over the ego. This is how we peel the onion is we finally realize that all of those things are it. All of those things are the ego. We're just left in the space of nothing.
Adam Rizvi:
That's a great place to go to what happens next.
Stephan Downes:
Yeah, let's do it.
Adam Rizvi:
In many ways, we do things because we want a particular outcome. We undertake a particular challenge because what propels us forward is the end goal. So why would we bother going through the challenge of excavating the caverns of our mind, of our psyche, and undoing a sense of self that creates antagonism? Why would we want to do that? If we do, well, what's next? What would life look like with that?
Stephan Downes:
Yeah. I just want to say one thing, jump into this. But I do want to say one thing which is the question ... This happens a lot. This is a question I get a lot and i'm sure it's a question you get a lot which is, okay, so if it's all just the ego, then why do anything at all? Right? Which you just asked. I think this is the difference between intellectually understanding what we're talking about and the experience of what we're talking about. If you have the experience of what we're talking about, that question doesn't come up. The question of why do anything at all doesn't make any sense anymore because that's still being spoken from the perspective of someone who identifies, and not even identifies but doesn't even have access to something else. It's a distinction that you see. Like sure, there's nothing to do about it, right? On some sort of ultimate level, there's nothing to do about it. But at the practical level, there very much is. That's the difference between people who understand this intellectually and people who understand it in their experience itself.
Adam Rizvi:
This is a hell of a way to close out our episode, but this idea of what's next has been talked about so much. Really, it does take an exploration into the words of many, many teachers and masters who've had glimpses of what life is like when that sense of self dissolves. There's this great book, I think, by Jack Kerouac, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. A great Zen saying which is, "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." It speaks to something, which is something massive happens, you see the fundamental nature of who you are in reality. But on the level of form and behavior, nothing changes.
Stephan Downes:
Yeah. Yeah. There's this idea that something different is happening now. To get more specific, and something Alan Watts talks about a lot because Alan Watts was influenced a lot by Jungian philosophy, is he talks about ego and conflation. This is this concept of once we have an awakening to this truth, that the ego actually is so clever that it latches onto it and starts identifying with that truth. What you end up seeing is people who become ... They become psychotic, who think that they are literally God, who think that they are literally all-powerful because the ego has said, "Oh this is the truth and I have it." It's a subconscious thing. There's no conscious awareness that this has happened, but it's such a slippery like delicate situation that one finds oneself in that this is a risk and unfortunately, we see it. I feel like we see this a lot in Western psychiatric problems. I would just go way out there on a limb here, but I would be surprised, if you started looking at things in this perspective, if you didn't find a lot of the people who we think are "crazy" have had some sort of awakening experience and have had no way to process it. So the ego latches onto it immediately because there is no training. There's no training in what to do when this happens. Traditionally, if you talk about Eastern traditions and Eastern lineages of wisdom, even Western ones, this is where the role of a teacher comes in. This is totally a topic for a different episode, but this is just a suspicion that I have that if you really looked at it, there'd probably be a surprising number of people who've had some sort of experience and then had no way to process it and they ended up going crazy.
Adam Rizvi:
I think that's why in some of the more detailed and structured spiritual traditions, you'll find a lot of psychological training.
Stephan Downes:
A ton of it.
Adam Rizvi:
A ton of it. I mean definitely in the Buddhist tradition, I can think in several mystical traditions. In particular, St. Teresa of Avila actually has this great book, The Interior Castle. I highly recommend it for anyone with a Christian bent, where she talks about these stages that the psyche undergoes as it approaches the divine in her concept. To me, that's psychological training. That's a form of developing your psyche where when things do fall apart, psychologically speaking, when you start to have your sense of self dismantled and realize you're not who you think you are, you need that training to hold things together until the transformation completes itself.
Stephan Downes:
Absolutely. Yeah. I just wanted to read another quote here. I write notes all over my book and sorry to those of you who don't believe in writing in books, because I wrote in this book a whole lot.
Adam Rizvi:
That's the only way to do it.
Stephan Downes:
Don't tell them that. They'll judge us. Okay. It says this, "And do not suppose that this understanding will transform you all at once into a model of virtue. I have never yet met a saint or sage who did not have some human frailties. For so long as you manifest yourself in human or animal form, you must eat at the expense of other life and accept the limitations of your particular organism which fire will still burn and where in danger will still secrete adrenaline. The morality that goes with this understanding is above all, the frank recognition of your dependence upon enemies, underlings, out groups, and, indeed, upon all other forms of life whatsoever. "Involved as you may be in the conflicts and competitive games of practical life, you will never again be able to indulge in the illusion that the offensive other is all in the wrong and could or should be wiped out." So when we're talking about what to do, right? So what happens when it's undone? It's, like you said, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. There's a wholeness of understanding and this experience is that everything's changed and nothing's changed and that one can simply be at peace with what is.
Adam Rizvi:
What I like about that quote that you just read was, to me, it speaks to the tendency in the human mind to make saviors of our teachers, of our authority figures, of our guides. We put them on pedestals. And then inevitably what happens is when our concept of the virtuous teacher, the virtuous guide gets destroyed, for lack of a better word, we're-
Stephan Downes:
No, that's a good word.
Adam Rizvi:
We're disillusioned and all hell breaks loose. And then the natural tendency is to then attack. I mean you just look at what happened with Jesus as a very obvious example. We glorify and then we attack. I think we still do that. So if we then can recognize, hey, if you become enlightened, if you realize something deeply spiritual, if you've made growth and progress, you're still a human. What that does, to me, is it levels the playing field in a way that helps me to relax because then I can choose to treat everyone as me, as expressions of that one grand self. To relate back to the Iroquois concept of a larger sense of self, if it's all me, then I can just sit back and relax. I can breathe.
Stephan Downes:
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a great place to end this. But before we go, I want you to ask me the question I asked you at the very beginning of this episode. Do you remember what it was?
Adam Rizvi:
I think you asked me can someone become enlightened?
Stephan Downes:
No. All right. That's all we have time for today. All right. I think we'll wrap it up there.
Adam Rizvi:
Yeah, that sounds good. We have an amazing series of books lined up ahead. So we're very excited to dive into some really interesting material. I think our next book is going to be Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman.
Stephan Downes:
That'll be a good one to stir the pot with.
Adam Rizvi:
Yeah. We haven't yet begun to stir the pot and we absolutely want to do a lot of stirring.
Stephan Downes:
All right. Well, until next time, Adam, you be well and I will talk to you soon.
Adam Rizvi:
Take it easy, Stephan.