The Antibody Network ·The Clearing
Reading 3 of 5 Who Is Asking

The bag of skin

Alan Watts, in a letter to his children, names the hallucination and the taboo that protects it.

The reading — Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)

The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

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.

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. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man’s natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction.

Perennial 1966 CE Open this teaching on the Map →
The framing

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.

Watts wrote The Book as a friendly letter to his children, an attempt to say plainly what every mystical tradition had been pointing at and what the modern world had built a specific taboo against seeing. The taboo is against knowing who you are. Not what you are worth, or what you should do, but what you are, underneath the sensation of being a small someone looking out through the eyes at a world that is not you.

He is not saying you do not exist. He is saying the border is drawn in the wrong place. The skin is a surface the world happens on both sides of, the way a wave’s edge is not where the ocean stops. Read this one twice. The first time it sounds like a claim. The second time it sounds like a description of something you have felt on a good day and not had a word for.

Carry with you
Where did the border between you and the world feel thinnest today, and what were you doing?