Lesson 1: The Story You Tell About Yourself Isn't You — Alan Watts, Myth of Myself

Lesson 1 of 25 — The Myth of Myself

Most of us walk around with a sensation Watts called “the skin-encapsulated ego” — the feeling that you are a little captain sitting behind your eyes, piloting a body through a world that is fundamentally not you. This lecture is his frontal assault on that feeling.

Watts’s argument isn’t that you should think better of yourself. It’s stranger and more liberating: the separate self you’re defending, improving, and worrying about is a social convention — real the way Tuesday is real, not the way gravity is real. You learned it the way you learned your name. And what you actually are, underneath the convention, is not a stranger who arrived into the world but something that grew out of it — as native to the universe as a wave is to the ocean.

Listen for the moment he asks what you mean when you say “I came into this world.” You didn’t. You came out of it.

This is the authentic recording from the Official Alan Watts Org, the archive preserved by the Watts family. The complete remastered collections are at alanwatts.com.

Sit with this: What in your life are you defending that is a story rather than a self?

Next: Lesson 3 — The ego is a social convention · All 25 lessons · Alan Watts profile