The Book, On the Taboo Against Knowing Who you Are

CHAPTER ONE
INSIDE INFORMATION
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Watts starts by informing us that there is always some taboo in every culture. Here, in the West, sex is no longer taboo, neither is religion, although it is bad form to argue over different types and beliefs.
Sex is well understood and exposed and religions are complicated and increasingly suspect.

So, this book is intended to look into many religious concerns and the fact that many people today question the meaning of existence without the book being religious itself.

As he puts it, this book will look into the fact that people seem to be nothing more than tubes that input things at one end, process them, and then expel them out the other all just to create new tubes which then go on to put things in one end and expel them out the other. In order to hide this basic fact people develop all sorts of games such as developing eyes, ears, and brains to better find things to input, and wiggling around in new and ever greater and more complicated patterns, huffing and puffing, and gathering in groups and fighting amongst themselves in an effort to be the top tube. Eventually they no longer look like simple tubes, which seems an enormous waste of time and effort; and when you think about it seems incredibly odd.

I paraphrased all that, but what a great insight!

 

What is taboo in today's society? It is a subversive taboo in that it turns common sense upside down and has never been widely known in any society, rather it has been limited to a few select human beings as it has been seen as too dangerous to expose to the general public. It is the fact that we think of ourselves as separate human beings.

Science contradicts this feeling as we don't realize that we are a part of the universe and it is not outside of us. We are not born into the universe, we come out of it.
As a result of this feeling of being a separate individual we are constantly at war with the rest of creation. We must conquer nature, space, disease, and insects. We fail to see that we are a part of everything so there is nothing separate from us that needs to be conquered.

Secondly as separate individuals we have no common ground, no common "sense" of being common. Not being connected to each other our opinions are just that, opinions, with no common sense or ground. As no agreement can be found as there is no connection between us, we end up with the most aggressive amongst us being the ones who win the day.

Religions can't help:.

Therefore this book will not be about dogma or religion it will be an attempt to induce a new experience, not only ideas but feelings. It will attempt to cure us of the notion of being separate human beings.

 

The problem is this taboo can not be explained in a conceptual manner. It must be looked at through the tools of myth, stories, metaphors, analogies, and images which point to what we wish to explain rather than trying to explain it directly as we don't have the words or direct concepts that we need. Watts uses the following story when explaining to children where we come from, why the world was created, etc.:

 

Now the secret taboo is not that the world "goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins", or that "there is nothing outside God", and "he has no one but himself to play with".
The taboo is the recognition that you're It.
Now in our society anyone that believes they are God is obviously insane, a megalomaniac, and may be extremely dangerous!
This is because our concept of God is rooted in the idea that God is the "King of the Universe" who controls all that is, the ultimate authoritarian.
But this is not the type of God presented in the previous story. In fact the story is really taken from the Indian Upanishads, which go back to around 800 B.C.E. In Vedanta, the central teaching of the Upanishads, God is beneath the world, not above it. God is not only me, God is you and me, and everyone and everything else. Knowing this no megalomania is possible. God is not a being, god is the experience of being.

Therefore this book does not purport to define right and wrong, proselytize, or convert anyone to the ideas presented in this book. As all is one, nothing needs to be done, no one needs saved, there is nothing to learn and no one to teach it. Everything presented in this book is merely presented because Watts claims he felt like presenting it. Nothing more. .

 

CHAPTER TWO
THE GAME OF BLACK-AND-WHITE
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All five of our senses report their input to our brain in the form of on or off neuron units. That's it. On or off, this is similar to all phenomenon in that everything physical is vibration. Now, the senses respond to these vibrations registering both the up and down vibration of a wave or the on/off state of a particle. But the mind, or conscious attention normally responds only to the up or down portion of the wave or the on state of the particle. The silent or off portion is ignored.

When listening to music we hear the notes being played, but usually ignore the pauses between, artists and architects talk about space as well as images and buildings, and physicists talk about curved and expanding space. Thus we discover the on states of music, images, buildings, and matter can not exist without the off states.

Consider a lone ball or sphere existing without space around it. How would we define its size, its inside, outside, surface, or mass? How would we define it at all?
Even if we could imagine a lone ball existing without space, it would be a static entity. It couldn't move. How could it move with no other object or space to compare its movement to? Movement implies motion/stillness.
So we add another sphere or ball. Now we can have movement as one ball can come nearer to the other, one can accelerate or decelerate. But which ball is moving, which is changing velocity? The first ball, the second, or both?
Let's bring in a third ball. Ball one and two remain at the same distance from each other and the third approaches them both. Or does it? Perhaps the third is stationary and one and two move toward it, perhaps all three balls move at once. We can say that balls one and two are a majority therefore they decide who is moving. But if ball three joins one and two can we say that the balls move at all?

So far we have been restricted to two dimensions, as two balls can only move in one dimension, a straight line and three balls can move in two dimensions, side to side and front to back.
Let's add a fourth ball. Now movement in three dimensions becomes possible. The fourth ball allows us to stand off and watch the other three and determine what they are doing. But which one is the fourth ball? Which one gets to stand off and observe the others?

The principle remains the same no matter how many balls we add. Which ball the first, second, third, or billionth is the impartial observer?

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"The problem is this taboo can not be explained in a conceptual manner".

 

Good questions.
Conceptualize was my choice of words. Maybe I can explain it better. The taboo Watts is talking about is that you and I are not separate and you and I are in fact ALL in total. Now if we are in fact all, we are also God as we would have to include God in the word "all". Without getting into the many definitions of the word God, Watts is telling us that there is no separation, no creator, no independent god, which in the west would be considered the creator of the universe. We are It, we are all there is.
This is taboo in the sense that it would be a heresy to the religions of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Methodism, Islam, Judaism, and probably many others.

So we may be able to conceptualize such a thing in the abstract, but we can't think about it or talk about it, or explain how that would work or how it can be as to try to explain it means there must be someone to explain it, someone to understand it, and something to explain. It can only be experienced. Words don't work as the more words we use the more we divide up the experience of being one. The more we think about it, hunt for it, or analyze it, the further we get from the truth.

So in this book, Watts is trying to express this idea, or concept, knowing that he can't use words in the ordinary way. He is going to try and sneak up on what he wants us to experience, which he tells us is taboo; the idea that god and ourselves are not separate.

Now this also implies that he can never succeed because if he does succeed to convince you that there is no separate you, and you actually experience this fact, then there is no you to convince. That's the paradox.

 

Now in our discussion of the balls and which ones were moving and which were not, we missed one possibility. Supposed none of the balls were moving at all, it was the space between them that moved! This is the problem of the expanding universe. Are the stars moving away from each other, or like a balloon being inflated, the space between them is increasing? Do the stars move or the space? One answer is that the stars and space are not separate entities, they are stars/space, or solid/space.
When we look at the question this way the problem disappears. It only occurred becasue we think of solids and space as two different objects or things when in fact one cannot exist without the other.
Solids and space are the same thing.

In a similar manner we think of cause and effect as two different things. If something happens it must have been caused by something else. Two separate things, one thing causes the other. Thing A caused thing B.
But if thing A and thing B are separate things how do they meet? How can one thing that is different from another cause it to arise? And if A is alike enough as B to cause B to arise aren't A and B just different aspects of the same thing?
Further, if we allow that A can cause B, what caused A? And what caused what caused A? And so on all the way down to infinity; which leads us to the prime cause. But what caused the prime cause?

Looking through a narrow slit in the fence the observer becomes confused about the nature of a cat. Similarly viewing the world through our narrow band of attention we become confused as to the nature of reality. We look at the world by noticing various aspects or details that interest us, ignoring the others. In the process we chop up the world, we place great value on some things and little on others. The more we value one thing the more we ignore another. The more we value the more we ignore, the more we ignore the more our ignorance grows.

But what governs what we value and what we ignore?