The Book is Alan Watts’ attempt to elucidate Advaita Vedanta for a 20th century, secular audience. While I’m not an expert on this religious tradition, my understanding–from the way that Watts explains it–is that it is fundamentally about non-duality. That one word, non-duality, gets to the core of what it’s all about.

What’s interesting about non-duality is that it’s neither unity nor multiplicity. Instead, the idea here is that our language, the world we believe that we engage with, exists in a sort of bipolarity: there is black and white, male and female, tall and short, good and evil. Yet, rather than see these concepts as opposites, non-dual traditions urge us to see them as two sides of the same coin. The concept of “good” could not exist without “bad” (nor good “bad” exist without “good”). Take black and white for instance: the color black is the total absence of light. Most of what we call “black” merely approximates blackness without being black in its totality. White, on the other hand, is a total saturation of light. The middle ground gives us our diverse array of colors: reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, purples, grays, browns, and everything in between. Without the concept of “white,” there could be no “black”–the concepts only make sense in reference to the other.

This duality of thinking permeates all aspects of our lives: sound and silence, dynamism and stillness, something and nothing. Yet, Alan Watts rightly points out that all of this is part of a unified whole, and that these opposites are simply different manifestations of it, like a wave: the crest could not exist without a trough. In attempting to wipe out evil, might we not also wipe out good? After all, to use an example that Watts relies on himself: could anyone ever vanquish a valley without also leveling the mountains that surround it?

Watts’ play with thought here is fun and insightful, and I think Aldous Huxley’s description of him is spot on: “What a curious man! Half monk and half race-course operator.” Nevertheless, The Book is much more sophisticated than Watts’ playful speeches and anecdote-laden lectures; the man is obviously one in the same, but there’s something a bit more profound about this book.

Now, Huxley’s description of Watts as “race-course operator” is just as significant as his characterization as a monk: Watts pushes us to live an embodied life, recognizing the unity of all things. The Book is not a thought experiment, it offers a pathway to a meaningful, spiritual life in the late 20th and 21st centuries. There is little space here for ritual, yet the wonder of existence remains. It also attempts to unify spiritual traditions with current advances in physics, especially quantum mechanics. It’s a strange thing that the idea of a quantum realm has done a great deal to validate non-dual traditions in the same way that classical mechanics gave weight to Abrahamic faiths.

I suspect that non-dual traditions gained increasing popularity at the end of the 20th century precisely because of advances in the physical sciences: these traditions granted people the right to live a spiritual life while remaining true to logical analysis of the nature of things. Still, non-dual traditions are hardly the only reapidly growing traditions: earth-based traditions–especially modern variants on Paganism and Shamanism–as well as charismatic faiths like Pentecostalism seem to be growing even more rapidly than non-dual. I suspect that earth-based traditions can attribute their growth to ecological awareness and a need for embodiment at a time that we engage with increasing levels of abstraction, especially via media simulations, internet communities, and general simulacra like Disney World. As for charismatic beliefs, I still haven’t untangled the driver for their growth, but I’m sure it will be something illuminating.

I digress. Watts’ book is a great introduction to non-dual traditions, and he pulls on Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism to really get at the core of his message. It’s certainly relevant to the present, and I think any potential reader going through deeper depression or a good old-fashioned spiritual crisis might learn a lot from it.