Are we spiritual, or just hiding behind the idea of it?
People turn to religious identities, beliefs and rituals to avoid confronting their own reality, and that avoidance quietly becomes the anxiety they were trying to escape.
Alan Watts defined Buddhism as the "religion of no-religion," and his book has a lot of textual quotes that got stuck in my mind.
The identification happens when religion becomes imitation, and it is always falling apart and promoting lip service and imitation. Humans always make religion a cliché through therapy, self-help, stoicism, productivity, and mindfulness.
The problem of becoming a cliché is that they are repeating the wisdom instead of living it.
Instead of experiencing reality, we imitate what we think a spiritual person looks like, and this can turn into a defense mechanism.
Then a person who considers himself an atheist gets the label of "I am not religious," and it becomes another identity. But freedom isn't about just replacing one identity with another; it is about becoming impossible to categorize. As he says here:
"The theist is caught by God… but the atheist is equally caught."
He does not mean that the atheist secretly believes in God, but that their life is about rejecting God, so God is still the center of their psychological universe.
The insight in this book, and in The Wisdom of Insecurity, is that religion isn't the problem. The problem is using religion as psychological security, because we spend our time seeking certainty through beliefs, we seek identity through labels, we seek safety through rituals, and we seek permanence through ideology, and all of them are tracks left by our ego.
He said:
"The true bodhisattva does not leave a track of any kind, either by being overtly religious or by being overtly nonreligious."
Watts suggests that identity itself may be the trap. We often define ourselves by what we believe, reject, or aspire to become, but even those identities can quietly imprison us.
We live real life when we observe and learn from what is around us without any target or trying to adopt different identities. It is about flowing with life. I understood that every single change I make for myself is to make the life I am living at that exact present moment work.
The spiritually advanced leave no sign.
He said:
"There is no sign about the spiritually advanced to indicate that they are self-consciously religious."
When we go on social media, everyone is always performing: mindfulness, minimalism, meditation, cold showers, breathwork. But when this becomes a performance, it replaces the real practice. If everyone knows we are enlightened, we are just advertising it.
I've selected some ideas from Alan Watts that made me more aware and helped me build my own identity. I share reflections like these in my essays: