Book summary “In my own way”: summary

Introduction

You often feel like a lonely ego trapped inside a bag of skin, alienated from an external and indifferent universe. Western culture reinforces this painful split through linear thinking, guilt-ridden religious dogmas, and rigid educational systems that treat you as a machine.

Alan Watts spent his life showing you how to dissolve this illusion in "In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915–1965". He traces his journey from the gloomy constraints of Victorian England to the vibrant Californian counterculture. You discover that you are not a separate visitor in the world, but an inseparable expression of the cosmic game.

How can you escape the trap of the isolated ego? What happens when you drop the need to control reality through compulsive thinking? Can you learn to treat existence as a spontaneous play rather than a grim struggle?

1. Childhood Landscapes and Early Awakening

Your earliest sensory interactions with nature and peculiar places shape an inner compass that rejects compulsive Euclidian tidiness. You discover an affinity for environments that resist rigid human control.

Special places leave an indelible mark on your psychological orientation.

Alan Watts applies the term topophilia to describe a special love for peculiar places. Chislehurst, featuring a stony wood abounding in round grey stones and wild commons, served as the foundational landscape of his childhood.

Humanity harbors a compulsive need to flatten, rectangularize, and uniformize nature into Euclidian patterns. This strips the world of imagination and exuberance. Letting land go its own way fosters a much happier and more alive natural ecosystem. His father let the back part of their garden go fallow, creating a miniature herbaceous forest where Watts could get lost among tall grasses and butterflies.

Topophilia and Wild Gardens

An individual's early aesthetic and spiritual foundation can be deeply shaped by a mother's connection to gardening, color, and art. His mother introduced him to color, flowers, and intricate designs through her gardening, cooking, and Oriental art gifts from missionaries. He grew up surrounded by sweet peas, scarlet-runner beans, rose trees, crisp apples, speckled thrushes, blackbirds, blue tits, robins, and the natural landscape of Kent and Sussex.

Western upbringing relies heavily on regimenting biological functions like eating and excreting. This creates a vicious cycle of anxiety and institutional brainwashing. Nurses used a medical escalation moving from California Syrup of Figs to senna tea, cascara sagrada, calomel, and finally castor oil.

Observing and befriending living creatures through gentle interaction is far more rewarding than hunting and killing specimens. Samuel Blyth used a one-foot strip of molasses mixed with essence of pear to paint trees for trapping moths at night. Watts later abandoned killing in favor of talking gently to moths to inspect them alive.

The First Satori

The contemplation of jewels and flowers serves as a direct way for the mind to understand itself. His mother showed him a morning glory flower, asking if it made him feel jazzy inside. You can use this method directly:

• Fix your mind upon jewels or flowers and meditate on how their colors and forms have no independent nature of their own, realizing the mind alone is the radiant jewel.

True spiritual liberation arises when you completely abandon conceptual theories about the self and spiritual states. In the autumn of 1932, while meditating alone in an Elizabethan room at Canterbury, Watts shouted mentally at all his conceptual dogmas to go away. He composed a haiku capturing the moment: All forgotten and set aside—Wind scattering leaves Over the fields.

You can apply specific practices to dissolve tension and foster spontaneity:

• Annihilate and reject every theory and concept of what should be a properly spiritual state of mind or what is meant by the self.
• Talk gently to moths and call to them to get them to alight on your hand.
• Inspect moths alive and at leisure.
• Photograph specimens in color instead of killing them.
• Do not try to force an action or performance; instead, focus on the inner pattern and let it execute itself naturally.
• Stand up with your hands on your hips.
• Roar with laughter for ten minutes every morning.

2. Critique of Western Religion and Education

Traditional British schools and exoteric religions impose a half-miseducation built on guilt, corporal punishment, and linear verbal dogmas.

Western cultures have suffered for more than a thousand years under official exoteric religion. This tradition initiated crusades, inquisitions, wars, and cultural destruction while repressing genuine joy. Historical examples of religious zeal include the Crusades, the Holy Inquisition, the Puritan Revolution, and the Thirty Years War.

Severe warnings regarding sexual development and rigid dogmatic confirmations caused Watts to reject the framework of an oppressive God the Father. He formally declared himself a Buddhist at the age of fifteen while supported as a scholar at Canterbury Cathedral. He joined the Buddhist Lodge of London, where his own father eventually became treasurer.

The Brutality of British Schools

Traditional upper-class British schools relied heavily on institutionalized corporal punishment and sports culture. Flogging and physical brutality were accepted rituals justified by the administration. Watts utilized strategy and guile to avoid physical punishments, recognizing that individuals who use intellect against brute force are often labeled as coward by the brawny establishment.

The standard curriculum forces students to memorize disconnected facts, dates, and artificial grammar rules while screening out poetry, interconnections, and real comprehension. Watts was taught French through artificial paradigms like memorizing nonsense about umbrellas and aunts. He learned Latin history through boring recitations of Livy rather than appreciating language as a living art.

Escaping Religious Dogma

Conventional Western religious education presents God as a humorless authoritarian figure devoid of natural wonder. After publishing Behold the Spirit and experiencing internal conflict, Watts formally resigned from the Christian ministry in the 1950 year of his ordination ending. He recognized that institutional religion clung to security, authority, and obsolete dogmas.

You can reshape your understanding of learning by following an ideal curriculum that prioritizes practical skills and self-knowledge:

• Learn survival techniques for natural and urban wildernesses.
• Study self-hypnosis, aikido, elementary medicine, and sexual hygiene.
• Practice vegetable gardening, astronomy, navigation, sailing, cookery, and clothesmaking.
• Train in metalwork, carpentry, drawing, painting, printing, and typography.
• Explore botany, biology, optics, acoustics, semantics, psychology, mysticism, and yoga.
• Engage in electronics, mathematical fantasy, drama, dancing, singing, and playing by ear.
• Master wandering, advanced daydreaming, prestidigitation, techniques of escape, and disguise.

3. San Francisco Renaissance and Alternative Education

Literate and inquisitive individuals do not need traditional college unless required for professional certification or specialized scientific equipment. You can design higher education through mentors, specialized bookshops, and direct study of philosophy rather than academic institutions. Nigel Watkins ran a magical bookshop in Cecil Court, serving as a bibliographer and discriminator of occult literature without trying to convert anyone to a system. Watkins guided Watts on what to read from Hindu philosophy and introduced him to key figures in the London occult scene.

Independent specialized bookshops and knowledgeable booksellers can provide a superior metaphysical education compared to academic professors. Nigel Watkins is valued as worth at least twenty academically accredited professors.

True education happens through self-directed exploration, metaphysical bookshops, and participatory Asian philosophy rather than academic conformity.

The Academy of Asian Studies

The American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco aimed to bridge Eastern philosophy and Western practicality, though it struggled between functioning as an information service and a center for transforming human consciousness. Co-founded with Frederic Spiegelberg, the Academy brought together scholars from diverse traditions to study Asian cultures. While initial financial backers viewed it as a graduate-level information bureau for professionals, the faculty and core thinkers were primarily concerned with the practical transformation of human consciousness.

Watts managed the American Academy of Asian Studies on Broadway Street in Pacific Heights from 1952 to 1956. The Academy brought together a diverse faculty and students who explored Asian philosophies through a participatory approach rather than detached academic objectivity.

The Academy faculty included Haridas Chaudhuri, Sir C. P. Ramaswamy Aiyar, Judith Tyberg, Tokwan Tada, and Rom Landau, who engaged in weekly colloquiums on the nature of consciousness. Students and affiliates included Crist Lovdjieff, Claude Dahlenberg, William Swartley, Michael Murphy, Richard Price, and Richard Hittleman.

Metaphysical Mentorship

Sabro Hasegawa introduced students to the actual practice of Japanese arts and the concept of the controlled accident, embodying the fusion of bohemian and traditional Zen-Taoist life. Hasegawa taught sumi-e painting, calligraphy, tea ceremony, and the appreciation of natural objects like driftwood, demonstrating how to flow with one's own nature.

Hasegawa converted a room into a burlap-walled space with an enshrined driftwood Buddha and conducted tea ceremonies. Methodical spiritual disciplines and striving for self-improvement are merely sophisticated ways of reinforcing the ego. Jiddu Krishnamurti taught that true meditation happens spontaneously when an individual completely abandons all ambition to transform or improve the illusory abstract ego.

When Watts asked Krishnamurti about practicing yoga, Krishnamurti explained that realizing the impossibility of self-improvement clears the way for true meditation. You can apply this realization directly in your own life:

• Understand that there is nothing you can do to improve or transform yourself.
• Completely abandon personal ambition to enter a state of true meditation.

4. Philosophy of the Self and the Cosmic Field

Traditional thinking treats the ego as a real entity inside your body. Alan Watts argues that the isolated ego is not a biological or psychological reality, but an obsolete social institution akin to the calendar or the metric system. Helped by his student Leo Johnson, Watts realized that this conceptual framework has become inappropriate for contemporary ecological realities.

The isolated ego is not a biological reality but an obsolete social institution and a chronic muscular tension.

Leo Johnson lived simply in Berkeley as an auditor of courses, providing profound insights into the social nature of the ego.

Trying to overcome the ego through muscular tension and willpower is futile because an erroneous concept cannot be dissolved by sheer effort. Spiritual exercises requiring intense straining or concentration only reinforce the illusion of the ego. Watts compares the futile effort to use brawn in the brain to trying to lift an airplane off the runway by straining at your seat belt.

Just as an alcoholic's imaginary snakes cannot be driven away by an imaginary mongoose through brute force, the illusion of an isolated subject confronting an object dissolves instantly through clear intelligence once the error is seen.

The Ego as a Social Fiction

The human ego is maintained through an illusion married to chronic physical tension rather than acting as a true central organizing principle. Watts calls this a cramp in consciousness and sankocha. You learn this physical futility as a child when trying to force spontaneous actions like loving, sleeping, or controlling bodily functions.

People strain their eyes, clench jaws, and tighten muscles to control feelings, and this physical tension becomes the foundation of the Christian ego.

Things that are fundamentally interconnected should be understood as an inseparable relationship rather than isolated entities. Watts invents the term goeswith to describe the inherent link between different aspects of the same process, such as front and back or bees and flowers. Elsa Gidlow invariably goes with a garden, illustrating how her life and dwelling are harmoniously integrated with nature.

The Universe as an Energy Field

Drawing on the Aristotelian idea that the soul is the form of the body, Watts argues that the human soul should be understood as a repeating pattern rather than a fixed substance. Forms can repeat themselves in space and time without any substantial linkage, much like successive waves in a single field of water that do not push or cause each other. Watts calls these repeating patterns wavicles.

Separate things are merely conceptual abstractions, while the universe operates as an integrated field of energy where humans and nature form a single organism-environment field. Just as a flower cannot exist without its environmental field, individual things are merely wiggles in a continuous flow. The word God serves as an exclamation expressing astonishment and love for this reality, pointing directly beyond the egocentric predicament toward satori.

5. Sensory Awareness and the Art of Living

You can dissolve mental chatter and experience eternal reality directly through sensory awareness, spontaneous music, and playful nonattachment.

Sensory Awareness Practice

True sensory awareness requires getting the ego out of the way to experience the nonverbal physical world directly. Practitioners learn to listen to sounds without naming them, feeling what goes on with every nerve-end and letting the response happen naturally.

David Hunter taught drama and sensory awareness classes at Pacific High School, asking students to lie on the floor for half an hour and listen to sounds without questioning their meaning.

• Lie on the floor, close your eyes, and listen.
• Become aware of all ongoing sounds without trying to think what they are or naming them.
• Listen to sounds in the same way you would listen to music without asking what it means.
• Find out if your ears are willing and happy in listening to these sounds and whether the sounds themselves want to be heard.
• If there is resistance, find out where that resistance is and how it feels.

Industrially civilized people lack the gift for spontaneous music, relying instead on over-calculated rhythms that suppress natural expression. Chanting, humming, flute or drum playing, and dancing in demilitarized patterns act as natural forms of yoga-meditation that silence the chattering of thought and connect one to the basic energy of the universe.

Watts encouraged seminar attendees to breathe effortlessly and allow their voices to hum along a line of least resistance.

• Breathe effortlessly and allow the voice to hum along a line of least resistance like water.
• Use liquid and unpremeditated rhythms when dancing instead of counting strict steps.

Playing Life by Ear

Because no general philosophical principles can provide adequate rules for action without infinite exceptions, life must be played by ear. Just as a rich language departs from strict grammar and must be learned by ear, human beings must trust their natures and brains rather than symbolic rules and linear principles. The universe makes no mistakes, and even death is simply a way of dying at the right moment.

Engaging in tactile activities like grinding black ink on a stone and writing characters absorbs consciousness entirely in immediate sensory textures, leaving no room for wandering thoughts.

Watts describes buying slabs of black ink and a fine brush at Kyukyodo on Teramachi, then spending 15 minutes or more grinding ink and listening to the rain before writing ten Chinese characters.

• Boil water and whisk powdered green tea into a froth.
• Grind black ink on a stone with water for 15 minutes until it develops an oily texture.
• Observe the sensory experience with wide-awake clarity and write characters on a scroll.

Psychedelic substances can confer polar vision, revealing basic opposites as poles of a single circuit and dissolving the illusion of separation. During his experiments with LSD, Watts experienced an aesthetic and mystical state.

Watts and Edwin Halsey took 100 micrograms of d-lysergic acid diethylamide-25 at Keith Ditman's office in Beverly Hills during an eight-hour exploration, experiencing time slowing down and the surrounding world as a multidimensional maze.

Conclusion

You are not a separate ego confronting an external universe, but an inseparable expression of the cosmic field playing its own existence.

The themes of early sensory wonder, institutional critique, and philosophical awakening fit together to dissolve the illusion of human isolation. When you abandon linear urgency and compulsive control, you realize that the world is an organism rather than a mechanism. You can apply these insights directly to daily life through several practical disciplines.

1. Listen to ambient noises without naming or judging them, letting acoustic vibrations wash over you as raw sound.
2. Approach your daily tasks with sincere playfulness rather than solemn anxiety, treating existence as music rather than a race to a finish line.
3. Drop the muscular tension of holding yourself together as an ego, and allow your body to relax into its natural environment.
4. Let music flow through you without forcing rhythms or anticipating notes, experiencing the present moment without mental commentary.

10 Key Ideas

1. Special places leave an indelible mark on your psychological orientation, fostering a much happier and more alive natural ecosystem when left to go their own way.
2. Traditional British schools and exoteric religions impose a half-miseducation built on guilt, corporal punishment, and linear verbal dogmas.
3. True education happens through self-directed exploration, metaphysical bookshops, and participatory Asian philosophy rather than academic conformity.
4. The isolated ego is not a biological reality but an obsolete social institution and a chronic muscular tension.
5. Separate things are merely conceptual abstractions, while the universe operates as an integrated field of energy where humans and nature form a single organism-environment field.
6. You can dissolve mental chatter and experience eternal reality directly through sensory awareness, spontaneous music, and playful nonattachment.
7. Because no general philosophical principles can provide adequate rules for action without infinite exceptions, life must be played by ear.
8. True spiritual liberation arises when you completely abandon conceptual theories about the self and spiritual states.
9. Psychedelic substances can confer polar vision, revealing basic opposites as poles of a single circuit and dissolving the illusion of separation.
10. You are not a separate ego confronting an external universe, but an inseparable expression of the cosmic field playing its own existence.