The Book on the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are
Do you sometimes get the feeling that at that place is an unwritten taboo written all beyond the faces of the faceless oversupply around you? That they're all walking on EGGSHELLS? If you've ever idea that, says Alan Watts, you're right! I certainly thought that as a child. Society wouldn't let me be who I was. I was zany and irrepressible, and they would allow me have NONE of that! It's the taboo confronting knowing who you Actually are. It's the "unbearable lightness of being." The impossibility of getting any existent answers. The immense difficulty in getting to the 'bottom' of yourself. Or even finding a secure foundation for an endless stream of very random thoughts. Watts progresses, after this book, with the concept of groundlessness in The Wisdom of Insecurity, and that's an audiobook I'm now listening to. Simply that one, unfortunately, rather obviates any underlying reason for our life by negating God'south existence at the outset. If you want to find Guild in Chaos, why would you block your emergency exits? Only now you know almost groundlessness. Only guess what - you're not lonely. Nosotros ALL have that problem. So what in the world do we exercise? Simple, says Watts - nosotros need to see the Big Picture and our place within it. Then we can start to detect Ourselves. Okay... but will that actually SATISFY us? Be forewarned. The offset part - seeing the big motion-picture show - is easy. It's the 2nd part that's excruciatingly difficult - considering we're still weightless, as he says. Groundless. And lost in space. That first part is what the eminent Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain called, "the intuition of Being," and information technology happens to nearly all of the states. It happened to me when I was 20 - a feeling of the utter Vastness of the universe, swiftly followed past a vision of my own littleness and vulnerability! So is THAT the taboo? Nope, Watts says - merely you're getting the idea. The taboo is the one against amalgam an accurate YOU - and this is the 2nd part... An Authentic You that is acutely, and with a sense of perfect pitch in tune - not ONLY with the Fun of Life (for that'south easy nowadays) - only in tune Sympathetically with the great Tragedies of Life, and SEEING THE REASONS for their existence. An Authentic You that is in perfect tune with ANY place in existence that Fate happens to put y'all! An Authentic You that finally feels the solid ground below its feet again - on the day it sees its familiar and cozy world is in fact BRUTALLY DISHONEST. An Authentically Human Y'all. Information technology's tough to find information technology. They all want to turn yous outwards. Society frankly discourages inwardness. Information technology's a world of fast food, fast fulfillments - and avoiding Pain (fifty-fifty though pain and disappointment are two of the greatest teachers)! Think of fads, peer pressure, incessantly distracting breaking news releases, keeping up with the Joneses, inane pop-upwardly ads, family unit demands... the list is endless! And you know, there's gonna be all heck to pay if you lot're Unlike. Tunnel vision is the Proper name of the Game. And Attention. But at that place are ever gonna be ones who think they're above you in their rather earthy pursuit of questionable possessions & peccadilloes! But this delightful and very readable book is a good identify to start being Different from that. But Only that - a showtime. Finding yourself is the toughest thing you can ever practise. If you start, and don't terminate the chore, it will always bounce back on you, because more powerful people than you WANT to leave your questions unanswered. If you lot don't end information technology, it can terminate YOU. But knowing you lot DO have a real cocky tin can e'er get you on your feet once again. All it takes is that SUDDEN GLIMPSE, of a buried, Real YOU. And that's called Grace. It's who we truly are. It's Jung's mystical Cocky. Information technology's our very ain Holy Grail. But - don't try to go about finding information technology just similar Watts, or exist dissimilar for the sake of being unlike and trying to be proud of that. It just won't work. Guaranteed. Merely Be YOURSELF (and proficient luck to yous)! And - and then you're off and running - on the most Ancient Quest of them all. 'Till the current of air shakes a thousand whispers from the Yew....' Pun intended! For you volition be shaken, there's no doubt - But the Real Y'all is also the Gateway to the Peace of Completion - and Unassailable Self Knowledge.
What a powerful little book. Watts has a souvenir for explaining Eastern thought and metaphysics to a western audience. Some of the statements in this book will change the way you look at the world in an instant. The day I finished reading this I spent two hours wandering around Seattle staring at trees and buildings and everything else nether the sunday. Things felt new and interesting for a little while. This book also has lots of interesting (and sometimes very humorous) commentary on western society and the concept of the ego. Truly some food for thought.
Having read this and several other works by Watts while still in loftier schoolhouse, I am unsure of a proper rating. At the time he was very influential, but then I knew so picayune and was so very unhappy. Mother introduced me to Watts and, thus, Eastern philosophies. Actually, they were covered a bit in Freshman Civilization course taught by Kelly Play a trick on and that was intriguing, but Watts was the commencement actual believer I may have read. Later, not much later, Mike Miley was to introduce me to the real stuff, Sri Aurobindo and the lot, but Mom and Alan Watts got me going. She was probably pretty unhappy too though I didn't know it until word got to me in college that she'd left Dad. Mom and Dad. I oft draw Dad every bit a modern Voltaire, a skeptic, and Mom as one who took literally Paul's injunction to "believe all things." She was Norwegian, a member of the Lutheran Church of Norway, but when her friend the priest would visit we'd accept a Catholic Mass sans Dad. When my friends got into talking almost Vedanta or Zen or Taoism, she'd eat information technology upwardly, just as she came to eat up, to my daze, orange double domes. I respected Dad. I idea Mom a chip of a chip. Yet anybody liked Mom, only a select few got close to Dad. Her heart was an expansive one. Watts describes his book as an attack confronting the notion that we are individual egos in bodies. I have come up to accept this position for various reasons. Amongst them are: Still, despite this considered confidence, I too oft autumn back into the miserable sense of being precisely that which Watts decries--"a divide ego enclosed in a bag of skin"--especially when things aren't going smoothly. Thus, when people ask, usually thoughtlessly, "How are you?", I, brought by them to cocky-consciousness, often respond "Depraved". This, my fallenness, is quite ho-hum.
-I have memories of beingness all sorts of creatures. The Erik body and modest variations on that theme are virtually common, just I wake up every 24-hour interval with the memories of variant Eriks and many others. Some of these others come up time and again in dreams. To these types of memories may be added those of 24-hour interval-dreaming or of other altered states of consciousness. In one case, for possibly one-half an hour, I was a night-haired Amerindian girl. Since the experience began in the shower, that is a particularly brilliant and cherished memory.
-Despite these bodily-associated memories, I really spend most times unaware of the Erik trunk or of anything associated with it. For instance, when reading, if it's a good book, I'one thousand right at that place in it. Being enlightened of the Erik trunk is often not a good thing. It often means something is wrong.
-Other than inferred references to the Erik body and its sense organs and point of reference, my bodily experiences are about common things, exist they material or ideational. I have no secrets, no private life which isn't predefined by common, public objects. I remember, I imagine in terms which either are the lingua franca of everyone or which might easily become and then.
-I certainly don't take an individual ego. That, upon assay, is a vanishing point on the horizon, a heurism, a convenience of reference to this Erik torso and its habits of behavior. This body certainly isn't individual, but composite, a supercommunity of communities of cells, constantly changing.
-The notion of individuality and the weight given it is both culturally and historically contingent. This seems confirmed once again and once again by my occasional studies in history, anthropology and psychology. The agents in the bible, peculiarly the Hebrew Bible, are often families, clans and nations, non particular human being bodies.
Wow, what do I say about this book.
I read this based on the numerous, quite intelligent, quotes that can be found on the Cyberspace attributed to Mr. Watts. Reading this book was a very different experience though.
To exist certain, there are some grains of wisdom, merely they are to be establish among tons of chaff. With the flowing and unfocused nature of this volume I could only movie a stoned hippy unloading a stream of consciousness while reading information technology. In the terminate Watts takes a total volume to state the obvious; opposites can't be without each other and everything in the universe is connected. He pulls from this understanding that an individual doesn't actually exist and that yous are connected to everything around you. He ignores a few key aspects though, such as 'self preservation'. If a dog is biting my shin, I'm immediately enlightened of my individuality and my need to protect information technology lest I stop to exist.
While he starts the book by stating that he volition pass this bit of wisdom, what he gives you is "neither for living better nor for reasoning more than fitly [Cicero]". If an author makes the merits that their writing tin can meliorate my life in some way, they must give me something that I tin apply in every day life. This is not the example here.
My recommendation is to stick to the inspiration derived from quotes you tin detect from Watts and avoid the useless context of the books they are found in. Y'all will take time left over to read some truly useful works.
Watts says humans are continued to everything around united states so that we and the universe are one. The goal of Eastern idea is to tap into that oceanic feeling and honey and harmony volition result. This perspective he contrasts with Western thought, which is atomistic and ego-based, leading to contest, domination and conflict. Watts has an interesting writing style. Points and themes fade in and out, like a smoothen power betoken, and he takes the reader along for an virtually mesmerizing ride until one thinks almost what is existence said. Watts uses the biological cell equally an anology for our openess to the earth, only doesn't say that that openess is selective (information technology's non "oceanic"), it is strife-ridden (in service of survival), and it is defensive confronting harm. Elsewhere, he acknowledges the obvious. Conflicts are in that location subsequently all, but he writes that they are "within premises" for those who are enlightened because our interdependence is recognized. Watts refers to quantum physics and relativity as if these back up his viewpoint. Just as mass is energy, he says that "this relativity, or interpendence, of the two is as close to a metaphysical unity underlying differences as anyone could wish." Yes, and we might suppose that the cosmos is absent of tension betwixt matter and free energy and that exploding stars and galaxies are not trigger-happy. For those who inquire hard questions about his perspective, Watts says that truth is beyond agreement. Questions are off limits, and "no 1 should utilize speaking and thinking to find out what cannot be spoken or thought." To bolster that perspective, Watts states that "Equally Wittgenstein suggested, people who ask such questions may have a disorder of the intellect...." That strikes me as taking some liberties with (the early) Wittgenstein'due south view of "nonsense." Watts is asserting a truth that Wittgenstein could or would not assert. Watts of course knows that we dice and is careful to not suggest nosotros live physically in a heaven. Yet, he brings eternity back by maxim that "I return in every baby born." Well, nosotros know that our children live on with pieces of u.s., just Watts is non talking near genes. He is referring to our selves as an "It" that "will rise again and again, as the 'cardinal' Cocky," so there is hope after all. The separate ego has no place in Watts' theory. The ego is to be equated with domination of others. That is not accurate. As biological beings, we are egoistic, wanting to survive and enjoy well-being. But a good role of human kind also identifies with the broader community and that identity includes compassion, dearest, empathy and all of that, as the practiced of the whole is good for the cocky. An statement could be made that it is Watts' perspective that is egocentric. While world is filled with existent suffering that demands active appointment, Watts wants us to retreat into a quiet corner so we can detect ourselves.
Alan Watts does a fine task of breaking through the narcissistic wall that many of us build around ourselves, as if we take a superior, godlike ability to admission a vantage point that sees a earth around us, apart from us, rather than the states of information technology, fully immersed inside the Whole Everything of All Things. Sure, it is totally the book you love as a freshman higher student, trying to disavow your WASPy upbringing past incorporating Easternized Western Thought rather than skilful ol' fashioned Westernized Western Idea. And sure, it is the book to read before a weekend camping Trip with friends so that you tin can have that Highly enjoyable campfire discussion nigh Nothing and Identity and Patriarchy and Existence and Issue... You know what I am talking about: "Information technology's like, homo, y'all know, we are all simply totally sort of similar the various colors of Fruity Pebbles in a bowl -- sure we are individual, only nosotros are all One, in that catholic Milk, bound by Bowl, crunchy, then soft, and then edible, then digested..." The volume doesn't read similar that, it is more than similar: "The political and personal morality of the Due west, especially in the U.s.a., is –for lack of this sense– utterly schizophrenic. It is a monstrous combination of uncompromising idealism and unscrupulous gangsterism, and thus devoid of the humour and humaneness which enables confessed rascals to sit down together and work out reasonable deals." It's a book from which you can gain what yous'll let yourself to gain. If you want to read information technology ironically, to merely option information technology autonomously in try to peachy your granola-munching homies, then information technology is for y'all. If y'all find yourself unable to escape that mirror, that Cocky and then wholly consuming, so this book tin be a good companion in your quest to rid yourself of Yourself. If you want to notice ways for you to be more fully awake in your twenty-four hour period-to-twenty-four hour period beingness, this is your book. It is The Book, after all.
This is i of those books that goes deep into the essence of the PERSONAL EGO. The way we look at the world and why nosotros look at it with squinting eyes. This volume literally opened up my mind to some new thoughts and at solidified some of my own ideas that I had been dwelling on for years. Its funny at times. But, Read it with no distractions around. Its only enjoyable if y'all tin can literally digest what the man is saying. Youll never look at the world the same one time youve read this book, and I mean that in a proficient mode. EXTREMELY POSITIVE!
I certainly don't concur with him on everything, just this book is life irresolute. I mostly took off a southward tar considering he tends to be hypocritical at times - he criticizes superiority complexes but conspicuously has i, and talks about politics in ways he criticizes people for doing so.
I read this book while on a kayaking trip with my older brother on Kachemak Bay, Alaska and I have never, literally, been exactly the same. Information technology pulls the veil back, as it were. You can read information technology over and over, but I think the best 1 is the first fourth dimension through. It made my listen race with the possibilities that it opened upwards, created some serious dialogue with my brother, and it made the perfect Christmas present, that yr, to my parents who absolutely Need to read it (though I know they never have, and they probably never will...)
I seem to have this problem where I keep reading books where I pretty much agree with what the author is saying, except that somehow I find it irritating the fashion they say it. I'm turned off by the parts where Watts turns to the aforementioned old complaints about how the world is deteriorating compared to our previous or natural mode of being. The wide stereotyped pictures painted are quite deadening, even though I know he's trying to illustrate the general way of things to brand his point and non necessarily pinning anyone down as being just similar that. And his style of word utilize I observe much more irritating than poetic or whatever it'southward supposed to exist. Still, for the near part, he's right.
Displaying one - 10 of i,069 reviews
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60551.The_Book
0 Response to "The Book on the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are"
Post a Comment