Who Are You Beneath the Person You Learned to Be?

Ali
Aug 11
9 min read

What Alan Watts' The Book Can Teach Us About the Ego, the Higher Self, and Remembering Who We Are

There is a question beneath almost every question we ask about our lives.

Why am I here?

Why does this keep happening to me?

What am I supposed to do next?

Why can't I let go?

What is my purpose?

But beneath all of them may be a much stranger question:

Who is the "I" asking?

Not your name.

Not your profession.

Not your relationship status.

Not the story of what happened to you.

Not even the personality you've spent a lifetime calling "me."

Who are you underneath all of that?

More than half a century ago, philosopher Alan Watts built an entire book around essentially this question.

In The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts argues that one of our deepest assumptions about ourselves may also be one of our greatest illusions: the feeling that we are completely separate individuals, enclosed within our bodies, looking out at a universe that exists "over there."

Watts describes this ordinary identity as the experience of being a separate ego bounded by the body. His alternative is not that individuality disappears, but that the individual can be understood as an expression of something vastly larger.

And whether or not you agree with his philosophy, it raises a remarkable question:

What might change if the person you've always believed yourself to be isn't the whole of who you are?

1. The Identity You Call "Me" Was Partly Given to You

Imagine yourself as a newborn.

You didn't know your name.

You didn't know your nationality.

You didn't know whether you were successful or unsuccessful, attractive or unattractive, spiritual or unspiritual.

You didn't know what career you were supposed to have.

You didn't even have the autobiographical story you now call my life.

Then the world began telling you who you were.

"This is your name."

"This is your family."

"This is what good people do."

"This is what success looks like."

"People like us don't do that."

"You've always been the shy one."

"You need to be realistic."

Some messages were explicit.

Others were absorbed almost invisibly.

Watts argues that our social environment acts like a mirror through which we learn to see ourselves. Even our language and many of the categories through which we understand experience were inherited rather than invented by us.

Eventually the descriptions become so familiar that we stop recognizing them as descriptions.

We call them me.

A question worth sitting with

How much of what you believe about yourself did you consciously choose?

And how much did you inherit?

2. You Have a Name. But Are You Your Name?

Watts makes a deceptively simple observation.

Names are useful.

Without labels, ordinary life would become extraordinarily difficult.

But there is a difference between naming something and knowing what it is.

Your name allows other people to refer to you.

It doesn't contain you.

Neither does your résumé.

Neither does your age.

Neither does your past.

Neither does the worst thing you've ever done.

Neither does the best thing you've ever accomplished.

Watts warns that we can become "fooled" by names, mistaking a separate label for proof of a fundamentally separate existence.

Think about how powerful that idea becomes psychologically.

Someone says:

"I am a failure."

But failure describes an interpretation of events.

Someone says:

"I'm an anxious person."

Perhaps anxiety is something they experience rather than the entirety of what they are.

Someone says:

"This is just who I am."

Maybe.

But perhaps it is simply who they have repeatedly learned to be.

There is an enormous difference between:

I am this

and

I have experienced this.

That tiny space can become the beginning of freedom.

3. The Wave Is Not Separate From the Ocean

One of Watts' most beautiful ideas is also one of his simplest.

We commonly speak as though we arrived from somewhere else:

"I came into this world."

Watts turns that assumption around.

His point is that we emerge from the world. He compares human beings to leaves emerging from a tree and waves arising from an ocean.

A wave has a recognizable form.

You can point to it.

You can distinguish one wave from another.

Yet you could never remove the wave from the ocean and still have a wave.

Its individuality is real.

Its separateness is questionable.

Watts makes essentially the same distinction about human beings:

Differentiation is not separation.

You can be unmistakably you without being isolated from everything else.

This is where Watts becomes particularly interesting when viewed alongside the language many people use around consciousness and the Higher Self.

4. What If the World Doesn't End at Your Skin?

We normally imagine:

Me → skin → everything else.

Inside is "me."

Outside is "the world."

Watts challenges that boundary.

Your lungs make little sense without an atmosphere.

Your body depends upon sunlight, plants, microorganisms, water, food and an immense ecological system.

Your mind developed through relationships, language and culture.

Remove the environment entirely and the organism cannot remain what it is.

Watts therefore describes the person and environment as fundamentally interdependent, arguing that the individual is separate from the larger environment primarily "in name."

That produces a fascinating reversal.

Instead of asking:

"How do I fit into the universe?"

perhaps we could ask:

"Could I ever have existed apart from it?"

5. The Ego Isn't the Enemy

This distinction matters.

It is easy to turn spiritual philosophy into another war:

I must destroy my ego.

But then who is trying to destroy it?

The ego.

Watts' argument is subtler.

The problem isn't having an identity.

You need one.

The problem begins when the identity is mistaken for the totality of what you are.

Your personality can be useful without becoming your prison.

Your biography can matter without becoming your boundary.

Your roles can be meaningful without becoming your essence.

Watts describes each person as a unique manifestation of a larger whole, much as an individual branch remains connected to the tree from which it grows.

You don't have to erase Ali, Sarah, Michael or Jennifer.

You simply begin asking:

Is this the entirety of me?

That is a very different spiritual practice from trying to become nobody.

6. Why We Spend So Much of Life Trying to "Arrive"

I'll be happy when...

I lose the weight.

I make enough money.

I meet someone.

I get the house.

I heal this.

I become successful.

I finally figure out my purpose.

Then you reach one milestone.

For a moment, there is relief.

And almost immediately:

What's next?

Watts saw something almost comical about this pattern.

He describes a culture that trains people through successive stages toward an imagined future arrival: school leads to more school, which leads to career advancement, which leads toward retirement, while the present keeps being treated as preparation for something else.

The destination keeps moving because wherever you finally arrive...

you are still here.

And it is still now.

Perhaps the deeper question isn't:

"How do I finally get where I'm supposed to be?"

Perhaps it is:

"What am I missing about the life already happening?"

7. Why Opposites May Need Each Other

Watts calls one of his central ideas the Game of Black-and-White.

We divide reality into opposites:

Light / dark.

Success / failure.

Pleasure / pain.

Beginning / ending.

Life / death.

Good / bad.

We naturally want one side and resist the other.

But Watts asks us to notice something strange.

Can you imagine a mountain without a valley?

A wave with a crest but no trough?

Sound without silence between sounds?

Inside without outside?

Watts argues that many apparent opposites are not independent enemies but mutually defining aspects of a larger process.

We spend enormous energy demanding:

White must defeat Black.

But if one side disappeared entirely, the game itself would disappear.

This doesn't mean suffering should be romanticized.

It means contrast may have a deeper place in experience than we ordinarily recognize.

Try this with your own life

Think of something difficult that happened five or ten years ago.

Then ask:

What exists in my life today that could not have existed in quite the same way without that experience?

Not:

"Was the suffering good?"

But:

"What grew around it?"

Those are very different questions.

8. The Higher Self: A Fascinating Parallel

This is where I find Watts particularly interesting as a QHHT practitioner.

Alan Watts was not writing about QHHT.

He was interpreting philosophical traditions, especially Vedanta, decades before QHHT existed in its current form. His book explicitly describes itself as a modern Western presentation drawing on Vedanta alongside Western thought.

So I wouldn't claim that Watts was secretly describing the Higher Self as understood in QHHT.

But the parallel is worth exploring.

In QHHT, clients are often invited to move beyond the everyday analytical mind and explore a deeper level of awareness that Dolores Cannon came to call the Subconscious, later commonly described in this work as the Higher Self.

And one of the fascinating themes that can emerge is the possibility that the everyday personality is only one layer of identity.

Watts approaches a related philosophical territory from another direction.

He describes an "inmost Self" beyond the everyday personality and presents the Vedantic idea that beneath apparent separateness lies a deeper identity with the whole.

Different frameworks.

Different methods.

But they can provoke a remarkably similar question:

Who are you when you move beneath the story of who you think you are?

9. Maybe Awakening Isn't Becoming Someone New

There is another trap hiding inside personal development.

We discover that we don't like ourselves.

So we construct an improved future self.

More spiritual.

More disciplined.

More healed.

More successful.

More enlightened.

Then we spend years chasing that person.

But what if awakening isn't primarily about adding something?

What if part of it is seeing through what was added?

The labels.

The expectations.

The inherited fears.

The roles.

The endless need to prove that you are enough.

Watts' book repeatedly returns to experience rather than merely adopting another doctrine. He argues that what is needed is not simply another belief system, but a changed experience of what it means to be "I."

That distinction matters.

You can intellectually believe:

"We are all connected."

And still feel completely alone.

You can say:

"Everything happens for a reason."

while privately feeling abandoned by life.

You can repeat:

"I am enough."

while another part of you whispers:

No, you're not.

Ideas can point toward something.

But an idea about water cannot make you wet.

At some point, philosophy has to become experience.

10. Five Questions to Take Into Your Own Inner Work

Instead of simply finishing this article and agreeing or disagreeing with Alan Watts, try something more interesting.

Sit somewhere quiet.

Put your phone away.

Take a journal.

And answer these slowly:

Who would I be if I temporarily removed my name, career, relationships, achievements and failures?
Which beliefs about myself did I actually choose, and which were handed to me?
What am I constantly postponing until some future version of my life?
What part of myself am I fighting that might need understanding instead?
If there is a deeper intelligence within me, what would I most want to ask it?

Don't force profound answers.

Notice what happens in the silence after the question.

The Question Beneath All the Questions

Perhaps the most powerful thing about The Book is that Watts doesn't merely ask us to adopt another definition of ourselves.

He asks us to question the definition we already accepted.

Maybe you are not simply a frightened little consciousness dropped into an enormous universe.

Maybe your relationship with life is more intimate than that.

Maybe the boundary between "you" and "everything else" isn't quite where you thought it was.

Maybe your personality is real without being the whole story.

Maybe some of what you've spent years trying to become is covering something that was already there.

Watts describes the individual not as an expendable fragment, but as a unique focal point through which the larger universe expresses itself.

And that leaves us with a question far more interesting than:

What should I become?

It is:

Who was I before the world told me who I was supposed to be?

And perhaps even deeper:

Who is the one who is aware of all of it?

Continue Your Journey

Whether you're exploring Quantum Healing Hypnosis (QHHT) for the first time, researching Beyond Quantum Healing (BQH), or you're already a practitioner deepening your understanding of consciousness, the goal remains the same: greater self-awareness, healing, and meaningful integration.

Explore more expert resources: