The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Alan Watts
(page numbers based on pdf version)
I: Inside Information
9. For there is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one’s eye because a direct look is too unsettling.
10. The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are—as now practiced—like exhausted mines: very hard to dig. With some exceptions not too easy found, their ideas about man and the world, their imagery, their rites, and their notions of the good life don’t seem to fit in with the universe as we now know it, or with a human world that is changing so rapidly that much of what one learns in school is already obsolete on graduation day.
11. #tubes All of this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd.
It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd—uncanny and highly improbable… This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things.
14. Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness—an act of trust in the unknown.
An ardent Jehovah’s Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
15. Freud, as we shall see, was under the influence of a nineteenth-century fashion called “reductionism,” a curious need to put down human culture and intelligence by calling it a fluky by-product of blind and irrational forces.
16. At one extreme of meaning, “myth” is fable, falsehood, or superstition. But at another, “myth” is a useful and fruitful image by which we make sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air… in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road.
16. “There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.” #biking
16. “So because it doesn’t get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears… It’s also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it’s always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn’t always hide in the same place.” #change
18. But to most children, and many adults, the myth is at once intelligible, simple, and fascinating.
21. Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.
21. Indeed, it could be said that a bird is one egg’s way of becoming other eggs.
22. it is part of “things taking their course” that I write… I realize, too, that the less I preach, the more likely I am to be heard.
II: The Game of Black-and-White
24. Yet the general habit of conscious attention is, in various ways, to ignore intervals.
24. Space is the relationship between bodies, and without it there can be neither energy nor motion.
26. We believe that every thing and every event must have a cause, that is, some other thing(s) or event(s), and that it will in its turn be the cause of other effects… Our observer’s trouble was that he was watching it through a narrow slit, and couldn’t see the whole cat at once. #acausal
28. You saw, but did not really look.
28. It seems that we notice through a double process in which the first factor is a choice of what is interesting or important. The second factor, working simultaneously with the first, is that we need a notation for almost anything that can be noticed. Notation is a system of symbols—words, numbers, signs, simple images (like squares and triangles), music notes, letters, ideographs (as in Chinese), and scales for dividing and distinguishing variations of color or of tones. Such symbols enable us to classify our bits of perception. They are labels on the pigeonholes into which memory sorts them, but it is most difficult to notice any bit for which there is no label.
28. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us (whether verbal, mathematical, or musical) have no description.
30. Imagination cannot grasp simple nothingness and must therefore fill the void with fantasies, as in experiments with sensory deprivation
32. Death is, after all, a great event… when the time comes where clinging is no longer of the least avail, the circumstances are ideal for letting go of oneself completely… an occasion for great rejoicing. #happinessindeath #conoroberst
33. Indeed, you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it’s no help to cling to the rocks falling with you.
***STOPPED PAGE 33 ON SECOND READING OF EBOOK, BELOW ARE PAGE #S FROM PAPER BOOK
Miles of what used to be free-and-easy beaches are now state parks which close at 6pm, so that one can no longer camp there for a moonlight feast. Nor can one swim outside a hundred-yard span watched by a guard, nor venture more than a few hundred feet into the water. All in the cause of “safety first” and foolproof living. (43)
Orderly travel now means going at the maximum speed for safety from point to point, but most reachable points are increasingly cluttered with people and parked cars, and so less worth going to see, and for similar reasons it is ever more inconvenient to do business in the centers of our great cities. Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home. As already suggested, fast intercommunication between points is making all points the same point. (44)
Futhermore, our bodily cells, and their smallest components, appear and disappear much as light-waves vibrate and as people go from birth to death. A human body is like a whirlpool; there seems to be a constant form, called the whirlpool, but it functions for the very reason that no water stays in it. The very molecules and atoms of the water are also “whirlpools”—patterns of motion containing no constant and irreducible “stuff.” Every person is the form taken by a stream—a marvelous torrent of milk, water, bread, beefsteak, fruit, vegetables, air, light, radiation—all of which are streams in their own turn. So with out institutions. There is a “constant” called the University of California in which nothing stays put: students, faculty, administrators, and even buildings come and go, leaving the university itself only as a continuing process, a pattern of behavior. (47)
But technical progress becomes a way of stalling faster and faster because of the basic illusion that man and nature, the organism and environment, the controller and the controlled are quite different things. (51)
The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its inseparable shadow, and the more it disowns its shadow, the more it becomes it. (51)
Apart from such human artifacts as buildings and roads, our universe, including ourselves, is thoroughly wiggly. Its features are wiggly in both shape and conduct. Clouds, mountains, plants, rivers, animals, coastlines—all wiggle. They wiggle so much and in so many different ways that no one can really make out where one wiggle begins and another ends, whether in space or in time. (58)