On the Book

The Book is Alan Watts’s attempt to explain Advaita Vedanta to a secular twentieth-century audience. I’m no expert on the tradition, but from the way Watts presents it, it’s fundamentally about non-duality — and that one word gets to the core of the whole thing. What’s interesting about non-duality is that it’s neither unity nor multiplicity. Our language, and the world we think we engage with, runs on a kind of bipolarity: black and white, male and female, tall and short, good and evil. Rather than treat these as opposites, the non-dual traditions ask us to see them as two sides of one coin. “Good” couldn’t exist without “bad,” nor “bad” without “good.” Take black and white: black is the total absence of light, and most of what we call black only approximates it without being wholly black; white is the total saturation of light; and the middle gives us our whole array of colors. Without the concept of white there could be no black — the two make sense only in reference to each other. That duality runs through everything: sound and silence, motion and stillness, something and nothing. Yet, as Watts rightly notes, it’s all part of a unified whole, the opposites simply different manifestations of it, like a wave whose crest can’t exist without its trough. In trying to wipe out evil, might we not wipe out good as well? Could anyone, to use his own example, do away with a valley without leveling the mountains around it?

Watts’s play of 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.” But The Book is far more sophisticated than Watts’s playful, anecdote-laden lectures; it’s obviously the same man, and yet there’s something more profound here. Huxley’s “race-course operator” is as significant as the “monk,” because Watts presses us to live an embodied life that recognizes the unity of all things. The Book isn’t a thought experiment; it offers a path to a meaningful spiritual life in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries — there’s little room for ritual in it, and yet the wonder of existence remains. It also tries to reconcile the spiritual traditions with advances in physics, quantum mechanics especially, and it’s a strange thing that the idea of a quantum realm has done so much to validate the non-dual traditions, much as classical mechanics once lent weight to the Abrahamic faiths.

I suspect the non-dual traditions gained their popularity at the end of the twentieth century precisely because of those scientific advances: they granted people permission to live a spiritual life while staying true to a logical analysis of things. Still, they’re hardly the only rapidly growing traditions — earth-based ones, especially modern variants of Paganism and Shamanism, and charismatic faiths like Pentecostalism, seem to be growing even faster. The earth-based traditions I’d attribute to ecological awareness and a hunger for embodiment at a time of ever-increasing abstraction, of media simulations, internet communities, and simulacra like Disney World; the charismatic ones I haven’t yet figured out, though I’m sure the answer will be illuminating. I digress. Watts’s book is a fine introduction to the non-dual traditions, drawing on Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism to reach the heart of his message. It’s very relevant to the present, and I think any reader going through a deep depression, or a plain old spiritual crisis, could learn a great deal from it.