Christianity, Nonduality, and the Dream of the Separate Self: Notes on Alan Watts's 'Beyond Theology'

Plus brief thoughts on Watts's legacy and influence

Two months ago I was interviewed by Quique Autrey for his podcast Therapy for Guys. The title of the episode was “Beyond Theology: Christianity, Nonduality, and the Play of Existence.”¹ It was the first interview I had ever given where the topic didn’t touch on horror at all. The whole conversation was devoted to spirituality, philosophy, and their real-life implications. It was not, however, the first interview in which I mentioned Alan Watts; in 2017 Watts played a prominent role in an interview that I did for This Is Horror, as indicated by the episode’s title: “Matt Cardin on Horror and Spirituality, Thomas Ligotti, and Alan Watts.”²

From this, one might gather that Alan Watts is important to me. One would be correct: The man numbers among my foundational philosophical influences. As I explained in a 2019 article at The Teeming Brain,³ I read Watts’s classic The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are as a late adolescent in college — at just the right age for a book like that to hit me with the approximate force of a spiritual hydrogen bomb — and from there I went on to devour many more of his works, including The Wisdom of Insecurity, The Supreme Identity, Psychotherapy East and West, The Joyous Cosmology, This Is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, Does It Matter? Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality, Tao: The Watercourse Way, and Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown. I also read his 1972 autobiography, In My Own Way. Today I still revisit his books not infrequently. I also listen to his recorded talks and lectures. He ranks among the half-dozen most important influences on my philosophical maturation and overall outlook, with The Wisdom of Insecurity, Psychotherapy East and West, and The Book being particularly impactful.

By the by, this is why I have been so interested to witness the widespread resurgence of interest in him that has occurred over the past ten to fifteen years. Rather suddenly, it seems, the memory of him has returned to enchant a new generation during the first few decades of the twenty-first century. His general reputation has now become that of a rediscovered modern sage who speaks piercingly relevant wisdom to our current cultural moment. Many of his highly quotable comments have been memefied. Hundreds of his recorded talks are now available, and quite popular, on YouTube and elsewhere. New articles and essays about him have appeared in prominent publications.⁴ New editions of his books have been released, as in the 2013 edition of The Joyous Cosmology from New World Library, which I myself reviewed for New York Journal of Books.⁵ His son, Mark Watts, has created many new titles from transcriptions of his father’s lectures. The name “Alan Watts” now represents a bona fide growth industry.

Despite all this, it wasn’t until three years ago that I read his 1964 book Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship all the way through, even though I had owned a copy for two decades and dipped into it several times. From the few snippets I had read, I basically knew what to expect. But I was unprepared for the force with which the book as a whole would hit me.

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The memory of Alan Watts has returned to enchant a new generation. His reputation has now become that of a rediscovered modern sage who speaks piercingly relevant wisdom to our current cultural moment.

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In Beyond Theology, Watts does something innovative by applying the interpretive frame of the Eastern spiritual outlook, and of Advaita Vedanta in particular, to the theology articulated by Christian mythic symbolism, in order to illuminate the unique contribution of Christianity to certain all-encompassing problems in the modern world. “Only such a uniquely ‘impossible’ religion,” he writes in the preface, “could be the catalyst for the remarkable developments in human consciousness and self-knowledge which distinguish Western culture since 1500. These developments are now swelling into a crisis on every level of human life — a crisis that cannot be handled unless we know, among other things, the role that Christianity has played in bringing it about.”

In describing Christianity as “a uniquely ‘impossible’ religion,” he was referring to its central identity as the only major world religion for whom a contentious exclusivity has been the primary theological and spiritual position. Despite some limited movements in the direction of inclusivity, says Watts, Christianity, both historical and contemporary, has been founded and promulgated on the basis of “an all-or-nothing commitment to Jesus as the one and only incarnation of the Son of God.” Because of this, the Christian religion in its overwhelmingly dominant form is fundamentally “uncompromising, ornery, militant, rigorous, imperious, and invincibly self-righteous.”

Linking this to the conventional, mainstream Christian anthropology that frames humans as fully independent selves who are intrinsically distinct from their creator (a view that is called into question by the Christian mystics, who have always remained a tiny minority), Watts reinterprets and recontextualizes Christianity in light of Vedanta — much as Christianity reinterpreted and recontextualized Judaism — and finds it to be the perfect, in fact the quintessential, expression of the lived experience of lostness and suffering that the individual self experiences as a component of maya, the dream or illusion of space-time and separate identity, which arises out of lila, the playful dance or drama of Brahman, the universal, central self Whose divine dreaming gives rise to all finite selves and the cosmos in which they exist. These selves and their lives are real, but they are real as dreams or illusions, as projections of Brahman. In the words of the great eighth-century Hindu philosopher Sankara, “Brahman is real, the world is false, the individual self is only Brahman, nothing else.”

Watts finds in this ontological-anthropological scheme a warrant for appreciating the cosmic-aesthetic significance of the traditional Christian viewpoint: “If . . . the Christian imagery is set within the context of the Hindu, the razor-edge path between salvation and damnation, with all the magnificent and appalling consequences this illusion has had for mankind, becomes one of the greatest dramatic situations of all time,” because it illustrates and represents just how deeply Brahman can allow Itself to become lost in Its dream, even to the point of forgetting that It is dreaming and therefore possesses the power to wake up. The experience of individuated selfhood thus becomes a “dream that I am not dreaming at all, that I will never wake up, that I have completely lost myself somewhere down the tangled corridors of the mind, and, finally, that I am in such excruciating agony that when I wake up, it will be better than all possible dreams.” In other words, it becomes the dream of the wholly alienated Christian creature-self, lost in a vale of tears and anxiously longing for the inconceivable bliss of Paradise to be known only in the hereafter by those who have been saved through Christ.

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Watts reinterprets and recontextualizes Christianity in light of Vedanta and finds it to be the quintessential expression of the lived experience of lostness and suffering that the individual self experiences as a component of maya, the dream or illusion of space-time and separate identity,

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As I read Watts laying out this argument in his typically (and inimitably) lucid way, I realized Beyond Theology was going to rank as one of my favorites. This past summer, I was still thinking about it when Quique approached me with an interview invitation for his new podcast. He asked me for some topic suggestions. I gave him several, including the idea of using this book as a springboard to broader discussion. And that’s what we ended up doing.

Something else I ended up doing was creating a set of notes about each chapter as I brushed up on the book’s specific content to prepare for the interview. It is these that I thought I would share with you here. The paragraphs above have simply been a set-up for the content below.

What follows is not a book summary as such, like the excellent ones you can find at shortform.com. Instead, it is a record of the specific points, ideas, and phrasings, including many direct quotations, that struck me as particularly interesting or insightful, or that otherwise grabbed my attention with especial force, as I reread Beyond Theology. I figured some of the readers of this newsletter might find them interesting, which is why I’m publishing them here. If they motivate you to read the book itself, or if they perhaps introduce you to Alan Watts for the first time, so much the better.

NOTES ON ALAN WATTS, BEYOND THEOLOGY: THE ART OF GODMANSHIP

Preface

• Christianity’s intractable and unique exclusivism the catalyst for the West’s modern crisis.

  • “There is not a scrap of evidence that the Christian hierarchy was ever aware of itself as one among several lines of transmission for a universal tradition.”

  • “Any attempt to marry the Vedanta to Christianity must take full account of the fact that Christianity is a contentious faith which requires an all-or-nothing commitment to Jesus as the one and only incarnation of the Son of God. . . . My previous discussions did not take proper account of that whole aspect of Christianity which is uncompromising, ornery, militant, rigorous, imperious, and invincibly self-righteous.”

  • “Only such a uniquely ‘impossible’ religion could be the catalyst for the remarkable developments of human consciousness and self-knowledge which distinguish Western culture since 1500.”

Chapter One: The Chinese Box

• The human sense of lostness and alienation.

• Lostness as a game: “To play at being individual, alone, and afraid to die is a strangely fruitful game.” The question to be explored is: How far out can I get? How lost without being utterly lost?”

• “Hebrew and Greek attitudes have combined through Christianity to nurture and exaggerate this particular sensation of personal identity.”

• Tension between ecological worldview and Christian individuality.

• Philosophical theology’s neglect of religion’s mythic aspect.

• Vedanta’s “essentially dramatic view of the cosmos, contrasting sharply with the Hebrew and Christian view of the world as an artifact.”

• “If . . . the Christian imagery is set within the context of the Hindu, the razor-edge path between salvation and damnation, with all the magnificent and appalling consequences that this illusion has had for mankind, becomes one of the greatest dramatic situations of all time.”

• Principles of metatheology:

  1. A religion is not about life but a genuine and authentic way of life.

  2. The Chinese box principle or contextual principle: illuminate one theological system by reading it in the context of another.

  3. Approach this project “almost naively, at its mythic, imagistic, or anthropomorphic level.”

 Chapter Two: Is It Serious?

• The horror of the secularist’s worldview:

  • “[S]uch persons have a view of reality that is grimmer by far than even Jonathan Edwards’ conception of the Angry God. For the secularist imagines the universe beyond and outside man to be essentially dead, mechanical, and stupid . . . . a system of confusion which produced us by mere chance, and therefore must be beaten down and made to submit to man’s will. Now, there is something in this view of the universe which is akin to states of consciousness found in psychosis. . . .

    “Other people aren’t really alive; they’re mocked up mannequins, automatic responders pretending to be alive. Even oneself is a self-frustrating mechanism in which every gain in awareness is balanced by new knowledge of one’s ridiculousness and humiliating limitations.”

• A two-sphere model of reality: core self, surrounded by ego, which doesn’t know it.

  • The experience of sehnsucht (a term not used by Watts) built into such a situation: “Perhaps this is why we something have a strangely pleasant sensation of having forgotten something extremely important from long, long ago . . . . intimations of something to be remembered which is, as it were, a vast dimension of one’s being which has been kept hidden.”

• Negative manifestations of self-consciousness as feedback loops.

• God as guru, means of grace as upaya.

 Chapter Three: Who Is Responsible?

• The power and elevation of words over nature in the West. “The supremacy of the Word is especially evident in the differing modes of transmission for temporal power and for spiritual power.”

• Ascendancy of the Word a relatively recent development in human consciousness, and a Western one. “This entire cosmology seems to represent a particular development of human consciousness that must have taken place during two or three thousand years, or more. It represents a transition from living by instinct and impulse to the attempt to live by thought and reflection.” A consciousness that is both “sharply focused” and “embarrassingly self-conscious.”

• Nature and benefits of this Word-shaped type of consciousness: “the foundation of craft and culture.”

• But rationality brings with it doubt and anxiety and guilt over native organic and non-reflective impulses and intuitions.

• Rise of self-consciousness = loss of primal unreflective perfection of natural, spontaneous impulse and action.

• Alienation of ego from its “better half,” which thus appears as the alien objective universe. God’s hide-and-seek makes the Word the vehicle of salvation.

• Transmission of wisdom by Word, not heredity, and the anxious double-bind this creates.

• God as guru who effects his own liberation via the same means as his bondage.

• God breathed himself into Adam and now looks out from his eyes.

• The Fall, the curse of work, and Jesus’ reversal of it.

• Subversiveness of Jesus’ “lilies and birds” teaching. Inescapability of current predicament, liberation only through more consciousness.

• The drama’s villain: the Devil.

• Implicit unity of opposites. God’s and the Devil’s concealed “Original Agreement.”

• The role of Devil as villain directed by God.

• Vagueness of the original evil, trouble in pinning it down, “the mystery of inquity.”

• Ineffability of Devil’s intentions, sense of human guilt with no definable crime.

• “. . . the utmost blasphemy, that we are each the Lord in hiding. Before we can have the courage to attain that recognition, we must follow the difficult way of consciousness and the discipline of the Word to the point where the ego’s pride in itself is entirely debunked, not masochistically, but in the spirit of cosmic humor.”

Chapter Four: How Must We Have Faith?

• Theological illiteracy of modern educated Western bourgeoisie.

• Unintelligibility of Christianity to modern Western mindset.

• Non-Christian and post-Christian state of Western society.

• Christianity’s potential to become the most colorful, exuberant, liberated religion.

• The Fall = acquisition of technique and self-awareness, leading to infinitely regressive anxiety and guilt.

• Christianity = God’s response to the Fall, presenting itself as history, laid out in the Bible. Story of the Pentateuch and the law, divine election of the Hebrews, etc.

• Impossibility of obeying the law: “what God really demanded was the correction of the inner man, the conversion of the heart. And this is exactly what no one can do . . . a sense of sin amounting almost to despair. This is certainly a revelation in the spirit of upaya or ‘holy cunning,’ to issue commandments, not expecting them at all to be obeyed, but to make men conscious of why they could not obey them.”

• God’s solution: the Incarnation and the Atonement.

• But how do these work? Archaic manner of reasoning unfamiliar to modern Westerners. Greek distinction between nature and person applied to incarnational theology.

• Christianity’s dilemma echoes Judaism: How to truly obey/practice?

• The concept of holiness, including its embodiment. “Close to, but not quite the same as a return to innocence and to the life of spontaneous impulse.”

• The problem of how to have faith.

• “[T]he whole history of Christianity is seen in a new and startling light. It becomes an immense success in persisting in folly! In going, full tilt, in a direction that must lead to a final coming to our senses. In perfecting the isolation and insularity of the human individual to its ultimate absurdity. In nurturing the feeling of personal responsibility and guilt to the point where it paralyzes action.”

• The West’s ghastly folklore of death.

• Christian individualism not to be abandoned but to be intensified until it explodes and leads to something better.

• Christianity as an upaya transforming egocentricity into theocentricity and divine union.

• Christian history a long round of character formation via rigorous discipline.

• Graduating from self-discipline to something better.

• The acme of the Christian egocentric self-disciplinary double-bind: “I must surrender myself, but I cannot possibly do so.”

Chapter Five: Who Is Who?

• Necessity of abandoning/destroying iconic image of Jesus — an idol. “To cling to Jesus is . . . to worship a Christ uncrucified, an idol instead of the living god. . . . [T]he Christ who ‘walks with me and talks with me’ is not the Christ within; he is the crutch, not the backbone.”

• Godmanhood to be discovered here and now, inwardly, not in the letter of scripture. “Every Easter should be celebrated with a solemn and reverent burning of the Holy Scriptures.”

• Mythic, not literal, meaning of miracles is the most significant question. Relative unimportance of historical questions. “To insist on the historicity of the Christian myth is to remove Christ to the sterile distance of an archaeological curiosity.”

• Relative recentness of Christianity’s historical focus and attendant literal-historical beliefs.

• The meaning of the cross and crucifixion:

  • “The God-Man on the Cross sums up in one image the cruelty we inflict by being alive, all the ravages of human selfishness and thoughtlessness. . . . [J]ust in being alive I am unavoidably responsible for untold misery and pain.”

  • “The more conscious of myself I become, the more I realize that I too am hanging on that same cross. . . . Crucifixion is acute consciousness. . . . The meaning is what what I thought was myself was a phantom. My ego was never an effective agent. My supposed controlling of the world and of myself was a Big Act. . . . The ultimate shock of realizing Who is who comes only at the point where my supposed personal self is seen to be nothing.”

• The identity of the personal “I” with the universal “I.”

• Crucifixion and kenosis, “God eternally losing himself, and finding again by losing again.”

• A vision of the all-seeing Eye of God from within.

Chapter Six: This Is My Body

• The primal longing and the “new heaven and earth” seen here and now: “If there is that strange, deep longing in the heart for something that is ‘the answer’ — the gorgeous, golden glory you have always wanted but have never been able to find or define, the thing that is finally for real and for keeps, the eternal home — then anything in the physical or intellectual universe that is asked to be that will collapse. The answer, the eternal home, will never, never be found so long as you are seeking it, for the simple reason that it is yourself. . . . As soon as you realize that you are the Center, you have no further need to see it, to try to make it an object or an experience.”

• The true Parousia (Second Coming) found in the “heaven within.”

• Political vs. organic order in the church.

Chapter Seven: The Sacred Taboo

• The Christian taboo on sex as a pointer toward its inner core, “the mysterium tremendum, the inner and esoteric core of the religion.”

  • “Sex is not to be described for the same reason that the Name of God, YHVH, is not to be uttered,” and the same reason why “graven images” are prohibited.

• Christianity’s esoteric aspect found in its unconscious intent and direction:

  • Summary of book’s argument so far: “. . . the experiment of looking at Christianity within the context of Hinduism . . . the predicament of being a Christian as a very adventurous role being ‘played’ by the Godhead. Insofar as the Godhead is ‘lost’ in his role, the intent in playing it is forgotten and unconscious. . . . [T]he Christian way -– the challenge of Christ — is a double-bind in that it commands the deliberate enactment of spontaneous behavior, such as love and humility. When this commandment is presented to people who believe that they are separate and independent egos, the rigorous attempt to obey it will result in a paralysis which reveals the ego to be a fiction, and lead us on to a new sense of identity.”

• English Christianity’s “mystery” revealed in warnings to adolescent boys about masturbation.

• The truly esoteric is the tacit, that which is known and communicated implicitly – even within oneself.

• “[I]f Christianity really means what it says about the union of the Word and the Flesh, the resolution of the problem [i.e., of Christianity’s inherent double-bind] must be the divinization of sexuality.”

• Human sexuality an instantiation of divine creation that should evoke cosmic wonder.

• “. . . that the core of the Self is held in common between oneself and all others, and that without need for conscious memory to bridge the intervals, our multiform incarnations emerge again and again, like fruits in season, each one, like the sun through a lens, a focus of the One-and-Only. To know this is, in the terms of the hide-and-seek game, to have found ‘home,’ the ‘our eternal home’ of the Christians, and the liberation or moksha of the Hindus.”

Chapter Eight: Is It True?

• Three worldviews: the Hindu, the Christian, and the scientific. The need for caution in asserting objective truth claims.

• The concern of Christian ontology and psychology with the conscious, voluntary ego.

• Hindu and Buddhist experimental research into ontology of selfhood vs. Christian biblicism and patrist monarchical view.

• Religion as game rules.

• Tillich’s reframing of God’s transcendence as depth.

• Plausibility of Indian emanationist ontology vs. Christian creatio ex nihilo.

• Christian problem of evil built into its ontological anthropology. An affront to reason.

• Problem with scientistic mechanist-rationalist-materialist view. Such a view only possible on the ruins of theism.

• Beyond theology to pantheism (or better, panentheism), which is plausible: “the perennial intuition of the mystics everywhere in the world that man has not dropped into being from nowhere, but that his feeling of ‘I’ is a dim and distorted sensation of That which eternally IS.”

• Three ways of describing the mystic’s intuition or vision/experience of the world, three scientific thought trends that resonate with and describe mystical experience by “approaching the world as a unitary and relational system”:

  1. unity/identity of causally related events

  2. field-based understanding of the behavior of things and objects

  3. systems theory

• A return to (a kind of) idealism, to “theories of the self more-or-less akin to the ‘multisolipsism’ of the Hindu atman-is-Brahman doctrine.”

• Beyond theology, and also beyond atheism/nihilism.

• On letting go: “[This is as much] beyond your powers of action as beyond your powers of relaxation. When you give up every last trick and device for getting it, including this ‘giving up’ as something that one might do. . . . That you cannot by any means do it — that IS it! That is the mighty self-abandonment which gives birth to the stars.”

1. “Beyond Theology: Christianity, Nonduality, and the Play of Existence,” Therapy for Guys, July 23, 2022.

2. “Matt Cardin on Horror and Spirituality, Thomas Ligotti, and Alan Watts,” This Is Horror, November 16, 2017.

3. Matt Cardin, “Autumn Longing: Alan Watts,” The Teeming Brain, September 1, 2019.

4. See, for example, Tim Lott, “Off-Beat Zen,” Aeon, September 21, 2012.

5. Matt Cardin, review of Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness, in New York Journal of Books, May 14, 2013.