Writing in the Cosmic Slipstream

Discovering your muse at the crossroads of creativity and being

Dear Living Dark reader,

Alan Watts ends the first chapter of his classic The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are—which is about seeing through the illusion of being an isolated ego that’s separate from the universe—by beautifully addressing what some might see as a contradiction in his act of writing such a book at all.

On the one hand, he says, the book contains “no sermons, no shoulds and oughts.” This is because

on seeing through the illusion of the ego, it is impossible to think of oneself as better than, or superior to, others for having done so. In every direction there is just the one Self playing its myriad games of hide-and-seek. Birds are not better than the eggs from which they have broken. Indeed, it could be said that a bird is one egg’s way of becoming other eggs. Egg is ego, and bird is the liberated Self....[I]t is not impossible that the play of the Self will be to remain unawakened in most of its human disguises.¹

But on the other hand, he is indeed writing a book about seeing through the illusion of the ego. So why, then, is he even writing on this topic if it’s not in the spirit of an “ought”? Watts addresses this question head-on, and he does so in a way that has wider implications than just the matter of his book, for his words lift the veil on why any of us are doing anything at all.

The motive he describes for his activity of writing and teaching is actually the real motive behind all the respective appearances of motion and activity in these wave formations that we call “our lives” and “ourselves”: