Watts says: You do not matter because no one does.
Neville says: You do not matter because everyone is God.
Both are elegant. Both are seductive. Both are incomplete.
Because both skip the middle step where someone looks you in the eye and says: You matter because you are here, and this hurts, and it counts.
Watts dissolves the self. That can be freeingβunless you were never allowed to be solid in the first place. If you have spent your life absorbing rooms, moods, expectations, and damage, being told the self is an illusion does not feel like liberation. It feels like confirmation that you were right to disappear.
Neville crowns everyone divine. That can be electrifying. Read the New Testament through that lens, and it is practically a hype speech: you are God, you can do this, it is already done. And still, divinity is strangely impersonal. If everyone is God, the particular ache in your body can become an afterthought. Pain gets waved away as a misunderstanding of power.
In both systems, the specific human quietly vanishes.
One says nothing matters.
The other says everything matters so much that you blur into abstraction.
Neither pauses to acknowledge the obvious: experience is not theoretical.
Bodies feel things.
Nervous systems keep score.
Care is not optional just because reality is strange.
Nonduality does not cancel particularity.
Divinity does not erase specificity.
You are not a peon in a cosmic joke, and you are not required to disappear into Godhood to be worthy of care.
You matter without having to justify it metaphysically.
You matter without being exceptional, enlightened, chosen, or transcendent.
You matter because you are here.
Because something is happening through you.
Because it hurts sometimes.
Because it counts.
Any philosophy that requires you to disappear to work is unfinished.
This is not a rejection of Watts or Neville. It is a refusal to let elegance outrank tenderness. Truth without care is brittle. Power without attunement is cruel.
The missing step is not enlightenment.
It is recognition.
And maybe that is the most practical thing to say: the universe can be vast and playful and absurdβand you can still deserve a chair that does not collapse under you.
