Alan Watts

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Publisher: kindle import (0)

I believe,' said Tertullian of Christianity, 'because it is absurd.' People who think for themselves do not accept ideas on this kind of authority. They don't feel commanded to believe in miracles or strange doctrines as Abraham felt commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. As T. George Harris put it: The social hierarchies of the past, where some boss above you always punished any error, conditioned men to feel a chain of harsh authority reaching all the way 'up there.' We don't feel this bond in today's egalitarian freedom. We don't even have, since Dr. Spock, many Jehovah-like fathers in the human family. So the average unconscious no longer learns to seek forgiveness from a wrathful God above. But, he continues— Our generation knows a cold hell, solitary confinement in this life, without a God to damn or save it. Until man figures out the trap and hunts... 'the Ultimate Ground of Being,' he has no reason at all for his existence. Empty, finite, he knows only that he will soon die. Since this life has no meaning, and he sees no future life, he is not really a person but a victim of self-extinction. (2) 'The Ultimate Ground of Being' is Paul Tillich's decontaminated term for 'God' and would also do for 'the Self of the world' as I put it in my story for children. But the secret which my story slips over to the child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or 'pretending' to be, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it's always the inspector. This, then, is the taboo of taboos: you're IT! Yet in our culture this is the touchstone of insanity, the blackest of blasphemies, and the wildest of delusions. This, we believe, is the ultimate in megalomania—an inflation of the ego to complete absurdity.