THE BOOK ON THE TABOO AGAINST KNOWING WHO YOU ARE.
“For chivalry is the debonair spirit
of the knight who ‘plays with his life’ in the knowledge that even mortal
combat is a game.”
, Watts states the cure and cause of
separateness that keeps us from embracing the richness of life.
He argues that the whole universe
consists of a cosmic self-playing hide and seek (Lila), hiding from itself
(Maya) by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe,
forgetting what it really is; the upshot being that we are all IT in disguise.
Wonder is not a disease.
If one ever wonders at a moment in
life which book would slip to their children, Watts eloquently advocates for a
book of experience and feeling.
“The book that I would like to slip
to my children would itself be slippery. It would slip them into a new domain,
not of ideas alone, but of experience and feeling. It would be a temporary
medicine, not a diet; a point of departure, not a perpetual point of reference.
They would read it and be done with
it, for it were well and clearly written they would not have to go back to it
again and again for hidden meanings or for clarification of obscure doctrines.
We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience—a new
feeling of what it is to be ‘I’.
Where did the world come from? Why did God make the world? Where was I
before I was born? Where do people go when they die?
, explains it with a simple and very
ancient story.
“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.
But just as the hour-hand of the
watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night,
waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can’t have any
one of these without the other, because you wouldn’t be able to know what black
is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side
with black. (…)”
What
our consciousness ignores.
“If you put your hand on an
attractive girl’s knee and just leave it there, she may cease to notice it. But
if you keep patting her knee, she will know you are very much there and
interested.
But she notices and, you hope, values
the on more than the off. Nevertheless, the very things that we believe to
exist are always on/offs. Ons alone and offs alone do not exist.”
It is a general principle that
consciousness ignores intervals, so you wonder what governs what we choose to
notice, and Alan Watts talks about two elements that work simultaneously.
“The first is whatever seems
advantageous or disadvantageous for our survival, our social status, and the
security of our egos. The second is the pattern and the logic of all the
notation symbols which we have learned from others, from our society and our culture.
Imagination cannot grasp simple
nothingness and must therefore fill the void with fantasies, as in experiments
with sensory deprivation where subjects are suspended weightlessly in sound-and
light-proof rooms.”
Humans are genuine fakes. The hallucination of separateness prevents one
from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery.
“We cannot chop off a person’s
head or remove his heart without killing him. But we can kill him just as
effectively by separating him from his proper environment. This implies that
the only true atom is the universe—that total system of interdependent
‘thing-events’ which can be separated from each other only in name.
For the human individual is not build as a car is built. He does not
come into being by assembling parts, by screwing a head on to a neck, by wiring
a brain to a set of lungs, or by welding veins to a heart. Head, neck, heart,
lungs, brain, veins, muscles, and glands are separate names but not separate
events, and these events grow into being simultaneously and interdependently.
In precisely the same way, the individual is separate from his universal
environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by
your name.”
So what? Who am I?
“But peace can be made only by those
who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. No work of love
will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid
plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
Once you have seen this you can
return to the world of practical affairs with a new spirit. You have seen that
the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there
is no separate ‘you’ to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be
robbed.
The only real ‘you’ is the one that
comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every
conscious being. For ‘you’ is the universe looking at himself from billions of
points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.”
Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of
oneself.
, explains the complexity of it.
“Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and
wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more
than people, even if only one’s own person. Every intelligent individual wants
to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the
fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.
For the human organism is,
apparently, the most complex of all organisms, and while one has the advantage
of knowing one’s own organism so intimately—from the inside—there is also the
disadvantage of being so close to it that one can never quite get at it.
Nothing so eludes conscious inspection as consciousness itself. This is why the
root of consciousness has been called, paradoxically, the unconscious.”
*****
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