"Hang on to your ego.
Hang on, but I know that you're gonna lose the fight."
Ego
The following quote opens the classic psychedelic
book, The
Joyous Cosmology. This book is thought to have had an influence
on Brian Wilson and SMiLE. The
book attempts, as best it can, to communicate the psychedelic
experience through the written word.
"The Joyous Cosmology
is a brilliant arrangement of words describing experiences
for which our language has no vocabulary. To understand this
wonderful but difficult book it is useful to make the artificial
distinction between the external and the internal. This is, of
course, exactly the distinction which Alan Watts wants us to
transcend. But Mr. Watts is playing the verbal game in a Western
language, and his reader can be excused for following along with
conventional dichotomous models."-Timothy Leary and
Richard Alpert, The Joyous Cosmology, (pg.ix.)
What Leary and Alpert are essentially talking
about is often referred to as "ego." The "distinction"
that Alan Watts wants us to transcend is "ego"; the
ego that feels separate from the body that supports it and separate
from the universe that surrounds it. Often, "ego" will
be expressed by pairs of opposites. "I" and "not-I,"
"self" and "not-self," are a few of the ways
of essentially referring to "ego" without reference
to the illusion itself. There are other ways that ego is referred
to in this early psychedelic book usually by reference to aspects
that lie on either side of the ego (internal/external, mind/body,
controller/controlled, knower/known, self/other).
[Ego is referenced in other pages of this
website as well. Jim McGuinn of the Byrds talks about "arbitrary
barriers" on this page,
the Buddha dismissed the illusion of ego by breaking it down
into the four elements here,
it's claimed that koans break down the ego here,
and the same way of thinking that gives us ego may also produce
the opposites as discussed here.]
Alan Watts explains how the ego arises.
"The dualism of mind
and body arose, perhaps, as a clumsy way of describing the power
of an intelligent organism to control itself. It seemed reasonable
to think of the part controlled as one thing and the part controlling
as another. In this way the conscious will was opposed to the
involuntary appetites and reason to instinct. In due course we
learned to center our identity, our selfhood, in the controlling
part--the mind--and increasingly to disown as a mere vehicle
the part controlled. It thus escaped our attention that the organism
as a whole, largely unconscious, was using consciousness and
reason to inform and control itself. We thought of our conscious
intelligence as descending from a higher realm to take possession
of a physical vehicle. We therefore failed to see it as an operation
of the same formative process as the structure of nerves, muscles,
veins, and bones--a structure so subtly ordered (that is, intelligent)
that conscious thought is as yet far from being able to describe
it."-Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology,
(pgs.4-5.)
"This radical separation
of the part controlling from the part controlled changed man
from a self-controlling to a self-frustrating organism, to the
embodied conflict and self-contradiction that he has been throughout
his known history. Once the split occurred conscious intelligence
began to serve its own ends instead of those of the organism
that produced it. More exactly, it became the intention
of the conscious intelligence to work for its own, dissociated,
purposes."-Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology,
(pg.5.)
"...the illusion is as
real as the hallucinations of hypnosis, and the organism of man
is indeed frustrating itself by patterns of behavior which move
in the most complex vicious circles. The culmination is a culture
which ever more serves the ends of mechanical order as distinct
from those of organic enjoyment, and which is bent on self-destruction
against the instinct of every one of its members."-Alan
Watts, The Joyous Cosmology, (pg.5.)
The ego is seen as quite a troublemaker, but
the book maintains there is a way out of this problem.
"Western science is
now delineating a new concept of man, not as a solitary ego within
a wall of flesh, but as an organism which is what it is by virtue
of its inseparability from the rest of the world. But with the
rarest exceptions even scientists do not feel themselves to exist
in this way. They, and, almost all of us, retain a sense of personality
which is independent, isolated, insular, and estranged from the
cosmos that surrounds it. Somehow this gap must be closed, and
among the varied means whereby the closure may be initiated or
achieved are medicines which science itself has discovered, and
which may prove to be the sacraments of its religion."-Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology,
(pgs.xvii-xviii.)
"My own main interest
in the study of comparative mysticism has been to cut through
these tangles and to identify the essential psychological processes
underlying those alterations of perception which enable us to
see ourselves and the world in their basic unity. I have perhaps
had some small measure of success in trying, Western fashion,
to make this type of experience more accessible. I am therefore
at once gratified and embarrassed by a development in Western
science which could possibly put this unitive vision of the world,
by almost shockingly easy means, within the reach of many who
have thus far sought it in vain by traditional methods."-Alan
Watts, The Joyous Cosmology, (pgs.11-12.)
Watts is speaking about LSD.
"In the type of experience
I am describing, it seems that the superconscious method of thinking
becomes conscious. We see the world as the whole body sees it,
and for this reason there is the greatest difficulty in attempting
to translate this mode of vision into a form of language that
is based on contrast and classification."-Alan Watts, The
Joyous Cosmology, (pg.50.)
Under the influence of LSD Watts sees the
ego for what it's worth.
"There isn't any substantial
ego at all. The ego is a kind of flip, a knowing of knowing,
a fearing of fearing. It's a curlicue, an extra jazz to experience,
a sort of double-take or reverberation, a dithering of consciousness
which is the same as anxiety."-Alan Watts, The
Joyous Cosmology, (pg.72.)
"Of course, to say that
life is just a gesture, an action without agent, recipient,
or purpose, sounds much more empty and futile than joyous. But
to me it seems that an ego, a substantial entity to which experience
happens, is more of a minus than a plus. It is an estrangement
from experience, a lack of participation. And in this moment
I feel absolutely with the world, free of that chronic
resistance to experience which blocks the free flowing of life
and makes us move like muscle-bound dancers. But I don't have
to overcome resistance. I see that resistance, ego, is just an
extra vortex in the stream--part of it--and that in fact there
is no actual resistance at all. There is no point from which
to confront life, or stand against it."-Alan Watts, The
Joyous Cosmology, (pgs.72-73.)
"Every effort to change
what is being felt or seen presupposes and confirms the illusion
of the independent knower or ego, and to try to get rid of what
isn't there is only to prolong confusion. On the whole, it is
better to try to be aware of one's ego than to get rid of it.
We can then discover that the "knower" is no different
from the sensation of the "known," whether the known
be "external" objects or "internal" thoughts
and memories."-Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology,
(pg.85.)
"Our language almost
compels us to express this point in the wrong way—as if
the "we" that must be sensitive to the organism and
respond to it were something apart. Unfortunately our forms of
speech follow the design of the social fiction which separates
the conscious will from the rest of the organism, making it the
independent agent which causes and regulates our actions. It
is thus that we fail to recognize what the ego, the agent, or
the conscious will is. We do not see that it is a social convention,
like the intervals of clock time, as distinct from a biological
or even psychological entity. For the conscious will, working
against the grain of instinct, is the interiorization, the inner
echo, of social demands upon the individual coupled with the
picture of his role or identity which he acquires from parents,
teachers, and early associates. It is an imaginary, socially
fabricated self working against the organism, the self that is
biologically grown. By means of this fiction the child is taught
to control himself and conform himself to the requirements of
social life."-Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology,
(pg.89.)
"The mystical experience,
whether induced by chemicals or other means, enables the individual
to be so particularly open and sensitive to organic reality that
the ego begins to be seen for the transparent abstraction that
it is."-Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology,
(pg.90.)
It is interesting to note that there are "other
means" to access the mystical experience. What are these
other means?
"But what are the
stimuli necessary and sufficient to overthrow the domination
of the conceptual and to open up the "potential forms of
consciousness"? There are many. Indian philosophers have
described hundreds of methods. So have the Japanese Buddhists.
The monastics of our Western religions provide more examples.
Mexican healers and religious leaders from South and North American
Indian groups have for centuries utilized sacred plants to trigger
off the expansion of consciousness. Recently our Western science
has provided, in the form of chemicals, the most direct techniques
for opening new realms of awareness."-Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, The Joyous
Cosmology, (pg.xi.)
"Eventually, the logical
conceptual mind turns on itself, recognizes the foolish inadequacy
of the flimsy systems it imposes on the world, suspends its own
rigid control, and overthrows the domination of cognitive experience."-Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert,
The Joyous Cosmology, (pg.x.)
"Thus appears the
fifth freedom--freedom from the learned, cultural mind. The freedom
to expand one's consciousness beyond artificial cultural knowledge.
The freedom to move from constant preoccupation with the verbal
games--the social games, the game of self--to the joyous unity
of what exists beyond."-Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, The Joyous
Cosmology, (pg.x.)
'"Clearly, nothing can
be done by the mind, by the conscious will, so long as this is
felt to be something apart from the total organism. But if it
were felt otherwise, nothing would need to be done! A very small
number of Eastern gurus, or masters of wisdom, and Western
psychotherapists have found--rather laborious--ways of tricking
or coaxing the organism into integrating itself--mostly by a
kind of judo, or "gentle way," which overthrows
the process of self-frustration by carrying it to logical and
absurd extremes. This is pre-eminently the way of Zen, and occasionally
that of psychoanalysis. When these ways work it is quite obvious
that something more has happened to the student or patient than
a change in his way of thinking; he is also emotionally and physically
different; his whole being is operating in a new way."'-Alan
Watts, The Joyous Cosmology, (pgs.7-8.)
"The practice of Taoism
or Zen in the Far East is therefore an undertaking in which the
Westerner will find himself confronted with many barriers erected
quite deliberately to discourage idle curiosity or to nullify
wrong views by inciting the student to proceed systematically
and consistently upon false assumptions to the reductio ad
absurdum."-Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology,
(pg.11.)
Watts definitely seems to be referring to
something along the lines of Zen's koan, Zen's riddle.
Watts goes on to directly relate this reductio ad absurdum
to the effects of mescaline, LSD, and psilocybin.
Brian Wilson had an LSD flashback in a bookstore.
"Moving slowly into the
aisles, I concentrated on reading the book titles and their authors.
In the philosophy section, I paged through books by Satre, Camus,
Kant. I tried the religion section and picked up the Bible, the
Bhagavad Gita, and the I Ching. I stared at the
pages, tried to read, but the letters all vibrated on the pages
and I couldn't make sense of anything."-Brian Wilson, Wouldn't
It Be Nice, (pg.128.)
Brian's inability to "make sense of anything"
made things worse.
"Suddenly, the inside
of my brain undulated and sent a wave-like shiver through my
body. A tremendous rush of anxiety poured through me. Paranoia.
An attack of some kind. I freaked out that there was too much
knowledge confronting me. I was being overwhelmed by all the
information contained in the books on the shelves. There was
no way I could ever know everything. I panicked."-Brian
Wilson, Wouldn't It Be Nice, (pgs.128-129.)
Brian's panic is rooted in his urgent need
to "know everything." His conscious intelligence (the
knower) cannot know everything; the controller cannot control
everything.
"The room began to spin.
I was in the center of a giant spinning top. Turning, turning,
turning. The moment was completely surreal. Then I saw the books
melting down the shelves, dripping like wax down the side of
a candle. I extended my arms, wanting to run my hands through
the information, wanting to stain my skin with words written
by mankind's greatest minds. But all I felt was air. The knowledge
was eluding me."-Brian Wilson, Wouldn't It Be Nice,
(pg.129.)
"As the buzz subsided
into a manageable burned-out sensation, I remembered Loren once
explaining that hallucinations were comparable to Zen riddles,
mysteries full of meaning. What had mine meant? I had driven
to the bookstore, looking for what? Inspiration? Instead, I'd
seen books melting, unable to grasp the knowledge contained in
them. If that was a riddle, I wanted to know the solution."-Brian
Wilson, Wouldn't It Be Nice, (pg.129.)
The solution to Brian's riddle
was found when he dropped acid for a third, and final, time.
Brian overcame the problem of ego. He no longer needed to know
more information.
"...the transformation
of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the
correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It
is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts
or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong
habits and opinions."-Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology,
(pg.11.)
Brian wished to pass this
positive experience onto the world.
"...I remembered Loren
once explaining that hallucinations were comparable to Zen riddles,
mysteries full of meaning."-Brian Wilson, Wouldn't
It Be Nice, (pg.129.)
SMiLE could be a riddle/hallucination
used to awaken listeners to the ego illusion.
"...the (ego) illusion
is as real as the hallucinations of hypnosis, and the organism
of man is indeed frustrating itself by patterns of behavior which
move in the most complex vicious circles."-Alan Watts, The
Joyous Cosmology, (pg.5.)
"Eventually, the logical
conceptual mind turns on itself, recognizes the foolish inadequacy
of the flimsy systems it imposes on the world, suspends its own
rigid control, and overthrows the domination of cognitive experience."-Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert,
The Joyous Cosmology, (pg.x.)
The solution to Brian's hallucination/riddle
was for Brian to realize the limitations of his conscious intelligence
and find new paths to understanding.
"...transformation of
the self is only through realizing or feeling God."-Alan
Watts, The Joyous Cosmology, (pg.7.)
Through SMiLE Brian would
try to communicate his greater understanding.
