___________________________
- Six weekly small-group sessions
- Read a set passage before the evening talk and discussion
- $180/$90 or less if you become a member
___________________________
BOOKINGS NOW OPEN for Autumn 2025
Starting Wednesday 30 April in Carlton (+Online)
___________________________
Access to the text
We will be reading from The Book on the taboo against knowing who you are. This book was first published in the USA in 1966 and various editions are now available online and in good bookstores.
Courses Outline
Alan Watts (1915-73) was a leader in the Western reception of Eastern mysticism during the 1950s and 1960s. His interests and writings cover Christian mysticism, Zen Buddhism, Taoism and the Vedanta tradition of Hinduism. The text we read for this course provides one of the best summaries of Watts’s own philosophy view, which is found to have deep resonances in Plato and Platonism.
Session 1 | Chapter 1 | Inside Information
Introducing Alan Watts in the context of the Westward transmission of Eastern wisdom during the 20th century. Watt introducing the taboo of knowing who you really are.
Session 2 | Chapter 2 | The Game of Black-and-White
The two sides of being, and how we tend to notice the white figure but not black background.
Session 3 | Chapter 3 | How to be a Genuine Fake
How society trains us from the very beginning into the double-bind of social unity built on the alienation of the ego-self.
Session 4 | Chaper 4 | The World is your Body
Watts’s way towards non-dualism is in the recognition that the universe, as an extension of my body, is inside me as much as I are inside it. I am bodily of the universe, coming out of it and remaining bodily in it, but it is also in me as observer of it. We discuss this reflexive ontology in terms of the contemporaneous claims of the philosophers Watts references, including Douglas E Harding, David Bohm and Evin Schrödinger.
Session 5 | Chapter 5 | So What?
So what does this insight mean for my life? The good life coming not through struggle and resistance but acceptance.
Session 6 | Chapter 6 | IT
“IT” is the word Watt’s uses for the universal “all” experienced beyond the ego-self. In this concluding chapter he discusses how we can even discuss it and more importantly how we can experience it.
___________________________