The Book_ On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are - Alan Watts [44]
But as I pursue these games—as I become more conscious of being conscious, more aware that I am unable to define myself as being up without you (or something other than myself) being down—I see vividly that I depend on your being down for my being up. I would never be able to know that I belong to the in-group of "nice" or "saved" people without the assistance of an out-group of "nasty" or "damned" people.
How can any in-group maintain its collective ego without relishing dinnertable discussions about the ghastly conduct of outsiders? The very identity of racist Southerners depends upon contrasting themselves with those dirty black "nigras." But, conversely, the out-groups feel that they are really and truly "in," and nourish their collective ego with relishingly indignant conversation about squares, Ofays, Wasps, Philistines, and the blasted bourgeoisie. Even Saint Thomas Aquinas let it out that part of the blessedness of the saints in Heaven was that they could look over the battlements and enjoy the "proper justice" of the sinners squirming in Hell. All winners need losers; all saints need sinners; all sages need fools—that is, so long as the major kick in life is to "amount to something" or to "be someone" as a particular and separate godlet.
But I define myself in terms of you; I know myself only in terms of what is "other," no matter whether I see the "other" as below me or above me in any ladder of values. If above, I enjoy the kick of self-pity; if below, I enjoy the kick of pride. I being I goes with you being you.
Thus, as a great Hassidic rabbi put it, "If I am I because you are you, and if you are you because I am I, then I am not I, and you are not you."
Instead we are both something in common between what Martin Buber has called I-and-Thou and I-and-It—the magnet itself which lies between the poles, between I myself and everything sensed as other.
There it is, a theoretically undeniable fact. But the question is how to get over the sensation of being locked out from everything "other," of being only oneself—an organism flung into unavoidable competition and conflict with almost every "object" in its experience. There are innumerable recipes for this project, almost all of which have something to recommend them. There are the practices of yoga meditation, dervish dancing, psychotherapy, Zen Buddhism, Ignatian, Salesian, and Hesychast methods of "prayer," the use of consciousness-changing chemicals such as LSD and mescaline, psychodrama, group dynamics, sensory-awareness techniques, Quakerism, Gurdjieff exercises, relaxation therapies,the Alexander method, autogenic training, and self-hypnosis. The difficulty with every one of these disciplines is that the moment you are seriously involved, you find yourself boxed in some special in-group which defines itself, often with the most elegant subtlety, by the exclusion of an out-group. In this way, every religion or cult is self-defeating, and this is equally true of projects which define themselves as non-religions or universally inclusive religions, playing the game of "I am less exclusive than you."
It is thus that religions and non-religions—all established in the name of brotherhood and universal love—are invariably divisive and quarrelsome. What, for example, is more quarrelsome—in practical politics—than the project for a truly classless and democratic society?
Yet the historical origin