What Alan Watts Can Teach You About the Power of Words
They hold the key to our identity.
“Keep my name out yo’ mouth…” I heard a friend say in response to the mention of his name in a silly joke. I didn’t understand the phrase at the time and gave it little thought.
That was until I read Alan Watts’s “The Wisdom of Insecurity.”
In chapter 3, Watts wrote, “To define has come to mean almost the same thing as to understand… words have enabled man to define himself.”
I have a fascination with words. They open doors to understanding and knowledge. They are symbols we use to describe everything our senses perceive in this world.
According to Watts’s philosophy, we use words to articulate our identity. In essence, we would be hard-pressed to define ourselves without words, or at minimum, some symbol denoting our personality and core beliefs.
If our identities are tied to words and symbols, then they are also linked to how others perceive and use them.
This may strike you as detestable because we tend to think we get to define ourselves. Our dignity seems tied to our ability to tell the world who we are.
But let’s look at the matter further. Watts used the analogy of a dictionary to illustrate this point. “The…
