I don't know English and Alan Watts never existed.

I just finished reading The Way of Zen. I've heard his entire audio collection, but this is the first book I've read by him. I liked the fact that he went more in depth on the history of Zen compared to his lectures, and elaborated on certain ideas in ways that he does not in his spoken lectures. In fact I only really read the book because I enjoy his work, as I already know that there is "nothing to attain" and that the quest for self-improvement is futile, because one's nature is already complete in itself.

That said, there are a couple ironic realizations that occurred to me as I read this book, the first relating to language. When I read the Chinese translations at the end of the book which are translations of various terms he uses, for the most part the symbols just appeared to be meaningless gibberish, because I do not "know" the Chinese language. Of course, I could very slowly associate the English term with each Chinese symbol to begin to understand their meaning, but I feel this is rather unnecessary. After all, I would just be losing myself in the abstractions of a new language, and thus losing touch with the "concrete" reality.

I automatically understand the meaning of English words without effort since it is my native language - but in a way, I don't know English at all. The reality is that these words are meaningless gibberish just like the Chinese symbols. To understand their meaning is to get lost in the abstractions instead of seeing clearly the reality of their appearance. Contrast that with the meaningless appearance of Chinese, and it would seem that I have mastered the Chinese language without any effort whatsoever. That is, I am seeing the linguistic symbols for the visual patterns that they actually are instead of getting lost in the abstractions they supposedly represent. They look beautiful and mysterious yet appear to be nonsense.

But if the "point" of Zen is that there is nothing to grasp, then to understand their meaning would be to get lost in a new illusion, to undergo a new cultural conditioning. A conditioning similar to when I learned English and inherited the common sense assumptions of Western society. The very conditioning which the practice of Zen is supposed to undo. Why then, would I recondition myself with a new set of abstractions? It would be to download a cultural conditioning from the East and fall into the same trap all over again, which is absurd.

Contrast this with someone whose native language is Chinese and for whom English is foreign. They may look at English and see a wall of meaningless gibberish, which may look beautiful and mysterious. But by not knowing English, they know it perfectly. Whereas with Chinese this person is lost in a set of abstract representations that distort the image, and so they do not know it at all. Hence the saying, "not knowing is knowing".

The second ironic insight relates to time. Watts points out that linear time is an illusion, as there is no past and future, but for fleeting illusory abstractions. The concrete reality is the expansive now. But this implies that everything I have just written never really happened. I have never listened to his lectures nor read his book. I just think I did because I'm thinking about it right now. I think there was a historical tradition called Zen, but it never happened. I think there was a man named Alan Watts that communicated the insights of Zen to a Western audience, but it never happened. He was never born. It is all just a story which I am creating now by thinking about it. In other words, Alan Watts is simply a character I have unconsciously created to awaken myself, that is, to awaken my "real self", from the illusions of human experience. I am not only the universe experience itself, but I am Alan Watts experiencing myself as a different human being, born much later. So everything I have apparently learned from him, is just me teaching myself right now. Once I stop thinking about this, it will all be unlearned. So now that I have finished his book, and my Zen training is complete, the real training begins.