Vertical Consciousness in a Parallel World
In My Own Way by Alan Watts, I came away with the same message as the first time: spirituality keeps trying to escape the very place where it has to show up.
Watts never argued against awakening, insight, or expanded consciousness. What he quietly and relentlessly questioned was our obsession with going up; up and out of the body, away from the mess, toward some rarified spiritual altitude where gravity no longer applies.
We learn how to cultivate vertical consciousness with remarkable sophistication, how to witness, observe, detach, transcend, and reflect. We learn how to stand back from experience and call that freedom. And in doing so, we built a parallel world, one where consciousness floats above life, commenting on it rather than inhabiting it.
This is where the phrase “double cross” stops being clever wordplay and starts to describe something painfully real.
Spirituality promised wholeness, then it crossed the body out of the equation. First, by treating it as an obstacle, and then by offering practices that subtly bypass it while claiming embodiment as a virtue. The betrayal was philosophical. The body was framed as something to manage, purify, discipline, or transcend, but rarely as something to trust.
The esoteric double cross captures this tension with unsettling clarity.
The long vertical line speaks to consciousness: awareness, reflection, knowing. The upper horizontal bar is meaning: ideas, insights, teachings, cosmologies. This is where spirituality became eloquent, where language flourished.
Then there is the lower bar. Shorter, denser, quieter. The body: sensation, limitation, time, vulnerability, consequence.
Watts understood this instinctively. He mocked the idea that enlightenment could hover above ordinary life without ever expressing itself through it. Consciousness, he insisted, is not meant to escape form any more than a dancer is meant to escape the dance. The universe is not trying to get rid of bodies; it’s experimenting with them.
From this view, the body is not the problem spirituality must solve; it’s the place where spirituality either becomes real or reveals itself as fantasy.
Alchemy grasped this long before modern spirituality tried to tidy things up. Transformation required heat, pressure, decay, and repetition. Insight alone did nothing. Gold was not imagined into existence; it was cooked, reduced, condensed, and lived. The philosopher’s stone was never large or luminous. It was small, ordinary, and irreversible, just like real change.
The tragedy is not that spirituality aimed too high; it’s that it stopped too soon. It lingered at the level of understanding and mistook that for integration. One could speak fluently about nonduality while remaining profoundly divided. Awake in theory, unavailable in practice.
This is what vertical consciousness without descent creates: a life lived slightly above itself.
The body becomes something one has, not something one is. Relationships become classrooms, pain becomes a lesson, and experience becomes material for insight rather than something to be fully entered.
The double cross quietly refuses this arrangement. It suggests that realization is not completed by rising above life, but by descending far enough into it that there is nowhere left to stand apart. Consciousness does not lose itself there; it fulfills itself.
Watts, Religion, and the Double Cross of Meaning
Reading In My Own Way, what becomes increasingly clear is that Watts was never interested in tearing religion down; he was interested in pointing out where it forgot what it was pointing to.
Religion didn’t go wrong because it talked about God; it went wrong because it started talking instead of listening. What began as direct, lived encounter slowly congealed into belief, explanation, and moral management. Experience hardened into doctrine, mstery became a syllabus.
And once that happened, separation crept back in through the side door.
God became up there; humanity became down here. The believer stood in between, trying to relate correctly rather than participate fully. The body, messy, instinctual, pleasurable, vulnerable, became suspect. Something to supervise, outgrow, and keep on a short leash.
This is where religion didn’t just forget the body; it quietly double-crossed it.
The irony Watts kept circling, often with a grin, was that religion set out to reunite us with the whole and ended up reinforcing the very split it claimed to heal. The universe was turned into a moral courtroom. Life became a test, and existence was something to get right rather than something to enter.
From there, spirituality drifted upward. Belief replaced presence; virtue replaced aliveness; and transcendence replaced intimacy. One could speak beautifully about love while being oddly estranged from sensation, desire, grief, and joy. The upper bar flourished, the lower bar remained short.
Watts had little patience for this kind of holiness because he refused to let it float above life. He kept reminding us, sometimes gently, sometimes mischievously, that the universe isn’t trying to escape itself; it’s trying to experience itself.
Religion, in his view, only works when it remembers that it is a finger pointing, not the moon itself. The moment we start worshipping the finger, beliefs, doctrines, moral systems, we lose the sky entirely.
this is where the double cross returns, not as an accusation but as a diagnosis.
Insight was never meant to hover; meaning was never meant to replace living; and consciousness was meant to descend far enough into form that it could no longer pretend to be separate from it. When religion stopped short of that descent, it didn’t become false; it became unfinished.
Watts wasn’t offering better beliefs; he was inviting a different orientation altogether, one where life is trusted enough to be lived, the body is trusted enough to be inhabited, and mystery is allowed to remain mysterious.
Or, to say it in his own way, and perhaps in mine as well: the universe is not asking for your belief; it’s asking for your participation.
If spirituality has double-crossed the body, the remedy is not to abandon insight, but to let it fall, fall into breath, habit, relationship, aging, work, grief, pleasure, and limitation as lived intelligence.
In the end, Watts wasn’t pointing upward or downward; he was pointing here and reminding us, with a grin, that enlightenment which cannot pay rent, feel loss, or love imperfectly hasn’t finished the journey it claims to have begun.