The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The Teaching
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.
Commentary
Watts wrote The Book in the mid-1960s as what he called a friendly letter to his children: an attempt to say, in plain English, what every mystical tradition had been pointing at and what the modern West had been raised inside a specific cultural taboo against seeing. The book is short, conversational, and devastating in what it names.
The taboo, in Watts's analysis, is not religious or social in the usual sense. It is structural. Western culture has trained its members from infancy to experience themselves as separate egos enclosed in bags of skin, looking out at a world of objects. This is not a philosophical position. It is a pre-reflective sensation, installed so early and so thoroughly that most people never notice it could be otherwise. And it is precisely this sensation that the mystical traditions all describe as the central illusion to be seen through.
The civilizational consequences Watts identifies follow with terrible logic. A society of selves convinced they are separate from each other will compete rather than cooperate beyond what survival requires. A society of selves convinced they are separate from nature will exploit it as object rather than recognize it as kin. The body politic raised inside this taboo cannot help producing the specific kinds of sickness that late modernity exhibits. The traditions on this map all point past the taboo. Watts's contribution was to name the taboo as a taboo, in language ordinary readers could follow, in a moment when an entire generation was looking for exactly that.