The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are – Alan Watts
Alan Watts condenses eastern philosophy and spiritual teachings, providing insights into the language that the west understands.
No matter how much we divide, count, sort, or classify the wiggle into particular things, this is nothing more than a method for thinking about the world; Nothing Is Actually Ever Divided.
Change And Materialism
The more things changes, the more they are the same. Change is in some ways an illusion, for we are always at a point of uncertainty where any future can occur.
America’s reputation for materialism is unfounded. Pleasures are not material but symbols for pleasure—attractively packaged, but inferior in content.
The World Is One
The individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is — rather literally — to be spellbound.
The Duality Of Life
Life is a system of geological and biological cooperation. But man continues to separate himself, as though he is the only subject among a world of objects—such dualist thinking is a neurosis.
Not realizing that so-called opposites are poles of the same thing. Things like light and darkness, sound and silence, and solid and space cannot be without one another.
We are absorbed in conscious attention, convinced that this narrowed perception is the only real way of seeing the world.
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
ALAN WATTS
The most powerful taboo in society is the one against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.
What Eastern Thought Is
The self or ego that we create and identify as a separate being does not really exist. A mind-altering experience on every page, the illusion of separateness we attach to is identified as the problem, and a solution to our ego trip is offered.
Memories
Memories over time convince you that “I” is real—they are actually one of the key parts of the ego sensation. It gives an impression of a self, the executive, as something that remains constant as life changes—as if our conscious selves were a static mirror reflecting a fixed perception
Embracing The Self
Since forcibly ignoring the self only strengthens its influence, we must embrace it, and learn so much about it that our newfound self-consciousness makes its influence blatant—we gain control with awareness.
Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror through which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment.
The Real Self
The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination that accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East.
To define is to limit. The words we use in language are limited to the magnificence that is our presymbolic. The boundaries we set on the boundless make it impossible to properly define things like the universe.
Wiggly Universe: An Undivided Entity
The universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game… There is never anything to be gained; the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.
Everything is a big wiggle. They wiggle so much and in so many different ways that one can really make out where one wiggle begins and another ends, whether it be in space or time.
We Are Not Categorically Separate
By accepting our condition—craving for categorization—we can begin to monitor how we create these imitation realities and modify our conscious experience to embrace our relationship with the universe.
Our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing — with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized.
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.
Out Attention
Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. Attention is a narrowed perception. Like a scanning mechanism, it is a flashlight in the darkroom that narrows our perception. While a narrowed perception is great for being sharp, it can only focus on one area at a time.
Just as true humour is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.