In 1950, an Episcopal priest left the priesthood.
His name was Alan Watts. He'd been born in Chislehurst, in Kent, in 1915, and ordained in 1945. Whatever his private reasons, and those were his own, he set down a role he'd taken on only five years before, and the collar with it.
What followed took years. He wrote and spoke about Eastern thought for Western audiences, and became known for something rare in a serious thinker: he laughed a lot, and he invited everyone else to laugh too. In 1966 he published a book with an unusual title, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.
At the centre of his work was a three-word phrase he made famous. The skin-encapsulated ego.
What did Alan Watts mean by the illusion of the separate self?
Alan Watts described the ordinary feeling of being a separate someone, living inside a bag of skin and looking out at a foreign world, as a case of mistaken identity. He called it the skin-encapsulated ego. As I read him, seeing through that feeling wasn't grim or mystical. It was a relief, and often a funny one.
I'm careful with Watts, because he's one of the most misquoted people on the internet. So I'll stay with his own phrase and the documented shape of his life, and speak for myself about the rest.
What is the skin-encapsulated ego?
It's the feeling most of us have without ever questioning it: that "I" am a small, separate thing, located somewhere behind the eyes, wrapped in skin, facing a world that is other than me.
That feeling is so familiar it seems like simple fact. But look at what it produces. If I'm a small, separate thing facing a big, other world, then I have to defend myself. I have to prove myself, protect myself, compete, keep score. The world becomes a place of threats and rewards. And much of the anxiety, loneliness and striving people bring into my rooms rests on exactly that picture.
Watts's point was that the picture is a construction. It's learned. It's reinforced by language, culture and upbringing, and it's so thoroughly taught that questioning it feels almost forbidden. Hence his title: a taboo against knowing who you are.
Why did he treat it so lightly?
Because the heaviness was part of the illusion.
A separate self that has to hold everything together is a very serious thing. It can't afford to laugh at itself, because it thinks it's all there is. When that sense of separation loosens, even a little, something lightens. You don't stop caring. You stop carrying the whole weight of being you as if everything depended on it.
That's the permission I find in Watts, and it's why I include him in this series of lives. Not because his life was tidy. But because he kept pointing at the same thing from a direction almost nobody else took: with a smile.
I glimpsed this myself once, very clearly, long before I had words for it.
The first transformation I ever witnessed was my own. Long before I had a method or a name for any of it, alone in a quiet room, I realised, almost casually, that the person I had been performing was not the person I was.
I didn't know Watts's phrase then. But when I came across it later, I recognised the moment. The performed self, the separate someone who had to manage everything, was the thing I'd been taking myself to be. And the one who noticed it wasn't that. Everything I've done since, over twenty years of work, has been a refinement of that one quiet moment.
Doesn't losing the separate self mean losing yourself?
No. It means losing a mistaken picture of yourself.
People often worry that if they see through the ego, there'll be nobody left, no personality, no preferences, no one to love or be loved. What actually happens is closer to the opposite. The performed self loosens, and the person underneath comes forward: more relaxed, more present, more genuinely warm, because they're no longer spending every moment defending a small territory.
It's the same thing I write about in how to let go of your ego: the difference between the self you perform and the one who watches it. And it's the question at the heart of who am I.
How can I loosen the sense of being a separate self?
This practice is best done outside, and it takes about five minutes. A garden, a park, a balcony, anywhere with sky.
Stand or sit still, and listen. Don't label the sounds. Just hear them: traffic, birds, wind, voices. Notice that you aren't doing the hearing with effort. Sounds simply arrive.
Now ask: where does the hearing happen? Out there, where the sounds are? In here, behind the ears? Try to find the line between the sound and the one hearing it.
Most people find they can't. The sound and the hearing seem to happen in the same place, with no clear border. For a moment, the sense of a small someone inside a bag of skin, listening to an outside world, gets blurry.
Don't make anything of it. Just notice it, and if something in you relaxes or even wants to laugh a little, let it. That's the lightness Watts kept pointing to.
Try it again at a different time of day, in a different place. The effect isn't a trick of one garden or one afternoon. It's a glimpse of something that's true everywhere, usually hidden under the busy feeling of being someone in particular.
Why is the separate self so convincing?
Because it's been practised every day of your life.
From the moment a child learns its name, it starts to learn a story about being a separate someone. This is my body. These are my things. That's you over there, and this is me in here. The story is useful. It helps us function, take care of ourselves, and live among other people. The trouble is that we stop noticing it's a story at all.
Then everything in life seems to confirm it. Other people treat us as separate. Our roles depend on it. Our worries are organised around it: my future, my reputation, my safety. After decades of this, the feeling of being a small, separate thing behind the eyes seems as solid as the floor.
But feelings that have been practised aren't the same as facts. What was learned can be seen through, and sometimes the seeing takes a moment rather than a lifetime. As I read him, Watts's gift was to make that moment feel less like a spiritual achievement and more like getting a joke you'd missed for years.
What's left when the separate self relaxes?
Life, without the weight of having to hold it all together.
Not a blank. Not an absence of personality. Just the ordinary, awake presence that was always here, now without the constant effort of being someone. Who were you before the world told you who to be? My answer is an invitation to look.
If you'd like a guided place to start looking, it's what Who Am I? is for.
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.