The Book, On the Taboo Against Knowing Who you Are

What governs what we choose to notice?
The first consideration is that we notice whatever is needed for the survival of our body, ego, and social status.
The second is whatever conforms to the logic and patterns we have learned while growing up.

In a famous study in the 1960s by Hubel and Wiesel cats were raised in two different environments. In one the cats could only see vertical lines, in the other only horizontal lines.

We are constantly bombarded by an infinite amount of stimulus and vibrations to which we could not possibly respond without being overwhelmed. But we can come to realize that opposites are merely different poles of the same thing and that we have been immersed in the faulty belief that all objects are indeed separate entities with no relation to each other.

And so we enter into the world of life and death thinking they are separate events and that life must win at all costs.

 

Okay, I'm back.

Took a little trip to the shore, then the brakes acted up on the way back so I had to check out the van.
Turns out I wasn't watching how low the front pads were and they wore through to the rotor on the right so I had to replace both rotors yesterday. Luckily I had a new set of pads on the shelf.
Got it all together and took it for a test drive, got back and the front brakes were literally smoking. Seems the calipers were sticking which is probably why the pads wore down ahead of schedule. So then I had to replace the calipers which meant redoing everything I already did.

Next I mowed the lawn twice, once to cut the grass and once to cut up all the lumps left after the first cutting. It seems I'm mowing twice a week anymore and the grass is rarely dry!

So now I have some time. Must be philosophical message in all that somewhere!

 

We were talking about what governs what we choose to notice? At least I was.

...and death becomes the ultimate bad trip as in the West it leads to the last judgement and who wants to be judged? Or worse death leads to nothingness.

Even if we believe in heaven who wants to be in a heaven where all you do is praise God and attend church everyday as portrayed to children?
In our society death is not seen as a necessary ending to birth and living but as something to be avoided at all costs instead of an opportunity to be free of the ego.

 

So we need to come to the realization that death takes us all, there is no getting out of it.

This means we need to stop playing the game of black verses white. We can't have white without black and life without death. We need to discover or real-ize that all we are doing is playing the game of white verses black, and it's just a game.
But we continue to play the game of white must win over black in increasing ways and complexity. Watts illustrates this fact by citing examples such as the proliferation of new advances aimed at winning various types of games. Order must win over chance.

Increasingly we devise ways to eliminate chance and control our environment and ourselves. I used to drive the original Volkswagen Beetle. No power steering, no power for that matter, no ABS, no seat belts, airbags, collision avoidance system, or air conditioning. And the heaters never worked. But they were fun to drive, going somewhere was an adventure. Now the cars drive themselves and everywhere is the same.

Complex electronic devices may result in us becoming part of the internet with our nervous system existing as part of a global network, no longer individuals with seperate identities and thoughts.
But, looking at this from another angle, isn't that what we are now?

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose​

 

CHAPTER THREE
HOW TO BE A GENUINE FAKE
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The secret taboo is that you are not just a bag of skin separate from the universe, you are the universe!
The rest of the book is an attempt to make you feel that fact as a fact.

We start with the word "I".
"I" remain even if my arms and legs are removed.
I walk, talk, and think, but I don't grow my bones or circulate my blood.
Internal functions of the body seem to happen to me, or "I", the same as external things.
"I" seems to point to an area inside the body where a little man sees, hears, and experiences. But different cultures local him in different places. In the West he is located somewhere in the head, but in ancient China he was located in the chest.

There was a young man who said,
"Though It seems that I know that I know,
What I would like to see Is the 'I' that knows 'me'
When I know that I know that I know."​

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Memory plays an important part in the establishment of the "I" experience.

But memories are not static data, they ebb, flow and are subject to change. In addition memories are only formed by that which we pay attention to, so that memories are not a complete record of all of our experiences. In addition memories are stored in neurons, and as such are not exclusive to the interior world of the mind, as neurons are physical and as such are part of the physical world at large. So even though memories allow us to form an idea of being a separate individual from the rest of the world, they only really allow us to maintain a fiction of being separate.

We have formed a notion that "I" exist as a bag of skin and outside of that bag lies the world, separate from me.

 

When considering the world it appears to be nothing more than a set of wiggles. Memory, clouds, bodies, events, coastlines, all wiggle, nothing is orderly or static. When viewing the stars at night we see nothing more than random arrangements of matter.

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However as humans we have learned that random patterns such as the placement of stars can be caught in a net or grid of implied order.

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We can now impose order on chaos, and control the wiggles including wiggly thought. Each wiggle can be defined as so much to the left, right, up, or down.
We have come to believe that by imposing a set of limits, divisions, and order we can control and understand the universe. But looking closely we find that no matter how small the grid, how much order we impose, how closely we define...the wiggles always slip through the holes and we must keep refining the net by making the holes and definitions, smaller and smaller, ad infinitum.