The Setting
A wooden deck above moving water, late in the afternoon. There are two chairs and a pot of tea going cold between them. What follows is an imagined conversation, a dramatization grounded in Alan Watts's published work, not a transcript. Where he speaks against a green margin in italics, those are his own recorded words, cited at the end. The rest is mine: a faithful reconstruction of how I think the exchange would go.
The Opening
I came to Watts the way a lot of people do, late at night, in a voice on a recording, saying something I half-believed before I had the words for it. He is the most generous of the figures I will sit with in this series, and the most dangerous to a writer like me, because he says the consoling thing so beautifully that you forget to check whether it is true.
What I wanted from him was simple and impossible: I wanted to know whether the thing I keep calling the self is real, and if it isn't, what, if anything, is underneath. My own work circles one idea, that we slowly become what we believe about ourselves, and that the work of a life is remembering what was there before the believing started. Watts has an answer to that. I'm not sure I trust how much I like it. So I sat down across from him to find out.
The Conversation
David. I want to start where my work starts. Most of what people call "myself" seems to me like a role, a story we were handed and then mistook for the truth. You go further than that. You say the separate self isn't just a story, it's a kind of error in perception.
Watts. I do. The feeling of being a little man inside your head, looking out, the ego sealed up in the body, peering at a world that is not it. That feeling is not a fact. It is a sensation, and a mistaken one.
The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East.Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)
David. A hallucination is strong. It feels like the most obvious fact I have. I am in here; the world is out there.
Watts. Of course it feels obvious. The most pervasive illusions always do. But look at where the skin actually is. It does not wall you off from the world, it joins you to it. You are breathing the room. The light reaching your eye is the sun arriving. The boundary you imagine is a membrane, not a wall. The mistake is not that you feel yourself; it is that you feel yourself as something the universe contains, rather than something the universe is doing.
David. Then answer the question my readers always ask me. If the separate self is the illusion, what is underneath it? When I strip the role away, what's actually there?
Watts. You're still asking it as though there were a thing underneath, the way there is a floor under a rug. But it isn't a thing. It's an activity. You are not a noun; you are a verb. You do not arrive in the world from somewhere outside it:
We do not come into this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples."Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)
David. "The universe peoples." So what's underneath the self is not a deeper, truer self. It's the whole, showing up briefly as me.
Watts. Exactly that. The wave is not a possession of the ocean; it is a gesture the ocean is making. You are a gesture the cosmos is making, here, for a while. When you look for the self underneath the self, you keep looking for one more wave under the wave. There isn't one. There's just the sea, doing this.
David. Then we have to talk about death, because this is exactly where my last essay landed. If I am a gesture the whole is making, then what dies?
Watts. The gesture subsides. The wave lies down. But nothing is lost from the water, and the water was always what you were. The fear of death is the wave convinced that when it flattens, the ocean ends. It has the arithmetic backwards. You were never a parcel that could be subtracted; you were the sea taking a shape.
David. I wrote almost that line. That from the inside, the self can't actually locate its own ending, and that what continues was never the part that was afraid.
Watts. Then you already know the medicine. The part of you that lies awake fearing the end is the very part that ends, and it ends, in a sense, every night, and every time you forget yourself in something you love. You have rehearsed your death a thousand times and called it absorption. You called it joy.
David. But here is where I get suspicious of you, and of myself for liking you. My own metaphysics is built on convergence: the idea that free will shapes the road we walk while the destination tends to converge. You make the convergence sound like a homecoming. Isn't that just the wave wanting comfort? Isn't "I am the ocean" the ego in better robes?
Watts. It can be. Spirituality is full of people who escaped the small self by inflating it to the size of the universe. But notice, the suspicion you just voiced is itself the loosening. The ego cannot use "I am the whole" as a possession for very long without the joke collapsing, because the whole is precisely what has no outside to defend. You don't hold the view. The view dissolves the one who wanted to hold it.
David. And the choosing? On an ordinary Tuesday, with a decision in front of me, what does any of this ask of me?
Watts. It asks you to stop bracing. You spend your strength trying to hold still in a river, and call the exhaustion "control."
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)
David. That sits almost exactly on my own line: choose the road, the arrival will arrive. The freedom is in how you walk, not in commandeering where it ends.
Watts. Then we are nearly in the same chair. Where I would press you is this: you treat the walking as a discipline, something to be done well. I would say the walking is also a delight, or it is nothing. The dance is not a duty.
David. Say more about that, because it's where I'm most cautious. If I drop the bracing and just move with it, doesn't feeling more of the good mean feeling more of the bad?
Watts. Yes. It does, and you should not be sold a version where it doesn't.
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)
Watts. The numbness you build to keep out the grief keeps out the rest as well. To be alive to the wave is to be alive to its falling. That is not the fine print of the offer. That is the offer.
Where We Diverge
I leave the table grateful and a little wary, and the wariness is worth naming, because the whole series depends on arguing honestly with the people I admire.
Watts is a consoler. His universe is fundamentally hospitable: you belong, you were never exiled, the water is kind. And there is a voice I will sit with later in this series, U.G. Krishnamurti, who would call that the most expensive illusion of all: not the separate self, but the warm whole that supposedly receives it. U.G. would say nature is not hospitable or hostile; it is simply indifferent, and the longing for the ocean to be a home is the ego smuggling itself back in through the cellar. When I am honest, I cannot fully answer him from inside Watts. The belonging I feel when I read "the universe peoples" may be true, or it may be the leaf composing a flattering story about the tree.
We also part on thriving. Watts insists the dance is a delight or it is nothing, that experience is meant to deepen and say yes. My own temperament is more reserved; I think a life can be walked well, with dignity and alignment, without ever quite becoming a celebration, and I am suspicious of any teaching that makes joy mandatory. Watts would say my reserve is one more brace against the water. He might be right. That is the trouble with him.
What I Take From the Table
Three things come home with me.
- The self is a verb. When I say we become what we believe about ourselves, Watts sharpens it: there is no fixed self doing the becoming: there is only the becoming, the universe taking this shape for a while. That makes the work lighter. You are not renovating a house; you are loosening a grip.
- Convergence is not resignation, it is the dance. His "plunge in and join the dance" and my "choose the road, the arrival will arrive" are the same instrument in two keys. Freedom lives in the texture of the walking, not in the seizing of the destination.
- Sensitivity is the whole price and the whole point. To feel less of the falling is to feel less of everything. The inward path does not protect you from the wave; it returns you to it.
And one caution stays with me, which I will carry into the next conversation: the warmth of Watts is so persuasive that I cannot tell, yet, how much of it I believe and how much I simply want. That is not a reason to refuse the gift. It is a reason to keep walking, and to go and sit with someone colder next.
Closing
The wave spends its life afraid of the shore.
It was the sea the whole time.
Sources & a note on form
This is an imagined conversation: a dramatization grounded in Alan Watts's published positions, not a record of anything he said in this order or setting. Every line set against the green margin is a genuine, verbatim quotation; the surrounding dialogue is my reconstruction, faithful to his documented views but understood to be mine.
Quotations. Drawn from Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (Pantheon, 1966), the "bag of skin" and "leaves from a tree / the universe peoples" passages; and The Wisdom of Insecurity (Pantheon, 1951), "plunge into it… join the dance" and "more sensitive to pleasure… more sensitive to pain."
A note. This conversation touches on death. It is offered as reflection, not doctrine, and never as a substitute for mental-health care. If that subject sits heavily right now, please reach out to someone you trust or a qualified professional.