The Book, On the Taboo Against Knowing Who you Are

As whose emotions change? You say my? When I change emotional states, do I become non=me? When we freeze a glass of water, does it cease to be H2O?

Again, classic reductionism. We are "nothing but" this or that. My wife is nothing but a bunch of waves and particles, but I can pick her out in a crowd and relate to her in ways I don't with other bunches of waves and particles. An interesting thing about QM is that despite all the chaos going on at the subatomic level, things are remarkably stable and predictable statistically up here.

 

Yes, the butterfly effect, six million degrees of separation, and all that. And I might be related to you through Genghis Khan, too. I understand he was pretty active back in the day. But such influences and connections seem relatively remote, by comparison with the immediate realities of my consciousness and the people I interact with on a daily basis. I happen to agree with some of the basic concepts of Buddhism. I think upādāna (attachments) and taṇhā (grasping) are the roots of human suffering, which I think was the point of the Adam and Eve story in Genesis. And anityaya (anica) (impermanence) and dukkha (suffering) are also part of the human condition." No self" can be useful as a corrective to the "me, me, me" of American culture. But the doctrinal absolutism that I detect in Watts' presentation of it is bothersome.

I find all the elaborate rationcinations about the nature of physical reality in the context of Buddhism puzzling. What about the parable of the poisoned arrow? Cūḷamālukya Sutta. Speculation about metaphysical absolutes is a distraction from the immediate practicalities of dealing with dukkha. It is said that the Buddha was a practical man, not concerned with metaphysical matters, but focused instead on the problem of what to do about suffering. What the Buddha Did NOT Teach | Wanderings Of course, the Buddha thought that suffering was the result of attachments which were a result of ego, so its important to get the ego under control, which is no easy task. Denying it is one approach. Some Buddhists (admittedly a minority) don't go to the extreme of denying "self" as completely as Watts seems to do.

"No self" is a translation of the Pali term Anatta, which in Sanskrit is Anatman--"not Atman". What anatta was originally rejecting was the Atman, a Hindu concept denoting an unchanging, permanent "true self", free of ego and defiling kieshas (impurities) and serving as the "observing" or "witness" consciousness to the Brahman, with which it will ultimately discover it is one. A little different from what we westerners have in mind by "self". At the time the Buddha began his ministry, the Vedantic tradition was under attack from Charvaka the radical materialist/hedonist school which taught there was no atman, no samasara, no reincarnation, and no karma. So the Buddha, in his characteristic way, struck a middle path between the two by accepting all except atman. Materialism of the Charvaka and rationalism of the Buddha This doesn't mean he explicitly rejected atman either. In fact, the Cula-Malinkovada sutta indicates that he may not have. When he was asked point-blank if there is or isn’t a self, he declined to answer (Samyutta Nikaya 44.10). His treatment of the topic in the Anattalakkhana Sutta is simply to challenge the five skanhas. which are commonly thought to be attributes of self.

Some scholars think "no self" was absent or muted in the earliest Buddhist writings and that hardening of the doctrine was a later "talmudic' development.
https://www.amazon.com/Non-Self-Early-Buddhism-Joaquin-Pérez-Remon/dp/9027979871
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335229447_The_Doctrine_of_Not-self_anatta_in_Early_Buddhism Collins tells us that while the monks are staunch believers in "no self", not so much the Buddhist laity. Selfless Persons In the Mahayana, Tibetan and Zen traditions, the Tathagatagarbha Sutras teach that all beings have the core of Buddha Nature or "true self" (satya-atman) within them. The Tathagatagarbha Sutra - The Buddha on Buddha Nature The Buddha Within: Tathagatagarbha Doctrine according to the Shentong Interpretation of the Ratnagotravibhaga - Buddha-Nature Likewise, the Theravada Dhammakaya/Forest traditions of southeast Asia are particularly vocal in challenging the non-self concept in favor of "true self". This seems to get us very close to the Atman.
Atman in Buddhism
Nirvana in Buddhism

Others think that the concept is best understood as a strategy for attacking attachments, rather than fundamental truth to be taken literally. "When the Buddha taught not-self (anatta) — as opposed to no self — he was recommending... a way of cutting through the mind’s tendency to cling to things by claiming them as “me” or “mine.” 7 Things the Buddha Never Said That I can accept. "Let me be clear that this idea isn’t saying we don’t exist. If we walked into a wall, our bodies would bump against it and we’d feel pain. Yes we exist! Instead, what it’s really saying is that we’re constantly changing beings, always in flux. We’re not permanent, fixed entities. We’re more like rivers. If you stood on a bank and watched a river, the water molecules passing by now would be different from what passed by a moment ago. So then how can we say it’s the same river?" If there is no self, then who’s sitting here? - Wildmind. Heraclitus said much the same thing in the 6th century B.C.E. Is the Nile the same river Cleopatra pissed in, and is the Mississippi the same waterway Mark Twain made a career of writing about? Much more polluted I'd imagine, but the location and channels are pretty much the same. Sometimes rivers change course, but there is continuity in the way they do it. I say it is the same river (and person) because there are continuity and similarities, as well as differences--in the case of humans, the most important of which is an integrated organism controlled by a brain with continuous memories. Have I changed much since I was a kid? You bet. I've changed profoundly. As a Christian, I feel "born again" after a conversion experience. And my outlook and priorities are certainly different after college, marriage, parenthood, and steady employment than before. That's undeniable, and if that's all that "no self" means, who could argue? But literal acceptance of "no self" gets into conceptual problems of apparent logical contradiction with other Buddhist doctrines like reincarnation and karma. If there is no self, what is being reborn, and what is the sense of attributing its condition to karma. I know that Buddhist apologists can provide answers to these, but they remind me ever so much of the mental hijinks of Christian apologetics websites. I wonder if the "no self" concept isn't another one of those ideals that people claim to believe but really don't show it in their everyday practice--like "turning the other cheek" and the "lilies of the field" for Christians.

 

Certainly, Buddhism has been no exception--witness the external dispute with Hinduism and the internal disputes leading to the Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana divisions. .So how to get over the feeling of being a lone, independent, separate ego?

Another approach might be to accept this as the human condition, get over yourself, and get on with your life. (I'm using "your" generically--nothing personal). After three marriages, an adulterous mistress, alcoholism, and a bad smoking habit, Watts didn't seem to have been close to nirvana. Should we rely on him to get us there?

 

Harmony never acts nor reasons, and whenever harmony is lost, balance will be restored. Beauty and ugliness define one another, because harmony is impossible without a sense of humor, which academics like Watts lack.

 

He was Zen, which is what Asians call a "rootless religion" that isn't even popular in its country of origin, China. The Japanese adapted Chuang Taoism to their own rather melodramatic culture, and academics ate it up. Buddhism is much the same, a rootless religion, that adapts to whatever culture it encounters, just like academics. To comprehend the mysterious ways of the rootless comedian, requires examining the Big Picture, sharing your words, and playing nice.

 

You forgot to tell him, "There is no spoon..."

 

This part is a good example of his struggle with systems logic, and to avoid contextual vagueness. He's leaning heavily on the principle of identity and the fact that English is still taught as having only one grammar. The saving grace is his efforts are transparent, so you can follow what he's attempting to say more easily.

 

What Watts struggles to communicate, is that the issue is the lowest possible energy state of the complete system, because he has no clue what systems logics are, which is what Asian philosophy is all about. He spent his career attempting to learn it and, eventually, converted to Taoism as "less dramatic". Everything in the environment tends to work towards occupying the lowest possible energy state, with a car engine idling being an example. When you stomp on the gas, the engine roars to life and can occupy any higher energy state faster, but the engine takes longer to wind down when you pull your foot off the gas. This expresses particle-wave duality, and how energy and information exchange identities.

His logic sucks, but it was his first popular book. Hippies like to say, "Whenever harmony is lost, balance will be restored" and the systems approach is to maintain harmony whenever possible, and to impose balance whenever necessary, in order to promote harmony. The more you can promote harmony in yourself, the more you can promote in the environment, and vice versa. Harmony is in occupying the lowest possible energy state whenever possible.

 

Absolute zero is impossible, and the lowest possible energy state of the system is a car idling, not rusting. No energy, no lowest possible energy state.

 

The Bose–Einstein condensate is about as close as you're going to get to absolute zero