Alan Watts Said Your WORST Quality Is Actually Your Greatest Gift

Alan Watts said the thing you hate most about yourself — the quality you’re most ashamed of — is actually the most powerful thing about you.
In this short, we explore one of Alan Watts’ most radical and rarely discussed teachings: that your darkness isn’t a flaw to be fixed. It’s unintegrated power waiting to be reclaimed.
Watts spent decades studying the work of Carl Jung, and he took Jung’s concept of the shadow further than most people realize. Jung had written that neurotic egoism — the selfish, driven part of you that spiritual culture tells you to destroy — is actually what he called “a true will of God.” Not a mistake. A sacred force developing something essential in you.
But Watts didn’t stop there. He connected Jung’s Western psychology to ancient Hindu philosophy, specifically Vedanta, which teaches that the “I” in every person is not a broken, separate ego — it’s Brahman, universal consciousness, expressing itself through you.
The result? A teaching that challenges almost everything mainstream spirituality tells you about your “dark side.”
Watts argued that human history has been a “magnificently futile conflict” built on one refusal: the refusal to admit that black goes with white. That you cannot have light without shadow. And the more you disown your darkness, the more it controls you.
This isn’t about acting on your worst impulses. It’s about stopping the war with yourself so you can finally become whole.
Sources and references:
— Alan Watts’ tribute lecture to Carl Jung (1961), where he explored Jung’s shadow psychology through the lens of Eastern philosophy
— Carl Jung’s writings on the shadow, individuation, and “sacred egoism” from his collected works
— Alan Watts, “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” (1966)
— Vedantic philosophy on the nature of Brahman and the illusion of the separate self
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