Sometimes we need to escape the news to make a discovery.
My discovery was sitting on the shelf.
I can’t remember where I bought the book and since its title is dreadful I don’t know what made me pick it up.
The book’s author Alan Watts was a ‘rascal sage’ (his words to praise a fellow writer / philosopher) and wrote this in the mid 60s. The guys’s a classic philosopher: brilliant ideas, private life all over the place.
Addressing huge topics in plain language, he jolts you and makes you sit up.
I won’t attempt to distil the book here. If you’re interested, read it. I do want to draw a couple of things out of it though and share them with you, as they help make sense of why we bathe.
The hallucination of a separate ego
Watts argues that one of the central mistakes we make as humans, and particularly in Western civilisations, is to assume that we, You or I, are somehow separate from the world.
That we ‘come into it’.
In this way, we view everything else as distinct (and hostile). And because it is hostile, we are suspicious of it and/or seek to control it.
We extend this idea of separation to ourselves.
We tell a story that our mind is separate from our body. It is the mind’s intelligence, we think, that distinguishes us from animals. The mind is there to control the body and its animal urges. Our normal stance therefore is that our ‘self’, our ego, sits inside a bag of skin and blood.
Watts tells us this is hogwash.
“We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.”
This more cyclical view of your human life, placing it in the context of all other things, is a thread of Eastern philosophy (and Avatar of course) - and something we struggle to see.
Bathing helps us figure this out.
You’ll hear contrast bathers describe the sauna, sweat lodge, you name it - something entirely man-made - as ‘natural’. How can that be?
My read is that it’s because bathing reminds us that the mind and body are one.
In the sauna, the heat on our skin brings us back to our body. The steam, the hero of the sauna, goes further. Droplets invisible in the air appear on our skin and in turn sweat appears from within us. This tells us that our body is not a hard border. It is porous. It has a relationship with the outside world.
If you take a moment to dwell on this, it’s pretty radical in how it shapes your outlook.
We are not apart from our environment, or even in it; we are of it. Our body; the other bathers in the sauna; the world (or universe if you like) includes us.
When you feel accepted by the world around you, you accept it back. You think differently about who’s to blame, who’s right or wrong, and how that person could behave in that way. Suddenly, you’re no longer in a crowd, you are the crowd.
That’s a more relaxing place to be.
Radical stuff
I also discovered Aeon this past week, a digital magazine ‘publishing some of the most profound and provocative thinking on the web’.
Here are two Aeon articles and a video from its sister organisation Pysche:
‘Your brain is not a computer’. Completely changed the way I understood memory, and presents more evidence that the mind and body are completely interdependent. Might bring you new perspective on digital and the metaverse.
‘The turbulent brain’. Non-equilibrium sustains life. A case for hot and cold and a challenge to much of a wellness industry focused on balance.
‘Your mountain is waiting’, some visual poetry tying together some of the topics discussed in this post.
A final gift
A passage from Alan Watts:
“Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.”
Told you he was a bit of a rascal.