The Book, On the Taboo Against Knowing Who you Are

Discussion in 'Philosophy and Religion' started by MeAgain, Aug 18, 2021.

  1. hotwater

    hotwater Senior Member Lifetime Supporter

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    Oh, I think I know who we are, or at least who we think we are.

    [​IMG]
     
  2. MeAgain

    MeAgain Dazed & Confused Lifetime Supporter Super Moderator

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    When we reach the point where we realize that nothing needs to be done, as the universe flows on no matter what we do, then everything can be done without regard for success or failure. Instead of striving to conquer nature, cure the Earth, avoid death or save our fellow man; we can just enjoy life as it is. We can play.
    And when we just play, then we find life is worth living, for who wants to work all day long? Playing is what leads to good music, fine food, great art, and just solutions to the world's problems.
    In singing and dancing is the voice of the Law ~ Hakuin
    In Vedanta the universe is seen as Lila and Maya, play and illusion. The illusion of the universe is playing or play. It has no message, goal, or reason, it doesn't signify anything or lead to some future salvation, it just is.
    It is nothing more than

    Thrummular, thrummular thrilp,
    Hum lipsible, lipsible lilp;
    Dim thricken mithrummy,
    Lumgumptulous hummy,
    Stormgurgle umbumdular bilp
     
  3. wooleeheron

    wooleeheron Brain Damaged Lifetime Supporter

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    Actually, you can measure a temperature below absolute zero, which is infinite, but it doesn't share our space-time, and you can use that as the benchmark for how cold you can go.
     
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  4. MeAgain

    MeAgain Dazed & Confused Lifetime Supporter Super Moderator

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    Watts continues:
    If you claim you understand any of this, you have again fallen into a trap. The trap of a separate being who believes he or she understands the separate goings on and relationships between that which was never separate to begin with and brags about it.
    Being human you will die, and you will depend on the laws of nature for your existence. But at the same time you will realize that it's all a game and those who appear different from you, are in fact just different aspects of your own true nature. Good guys need bad guys and the truely good know in their hearts that they also contain a grain of evil within. Nothing is worse than the individual who believes he or she is always right, just, and knows the true.
     
  5. wooleeheron

    wooleeheron Brain Damaged Lifetime Supporter

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    "True Nature" is where Watts misses his chance to leverage contextual vagueness, and begins to ramble. Its interesting linguistically, in that he's very Zen and being able to follow his logic errors makes more sense out of anything he writes.
     
  6. MeAgain

    MeAgain Dazed & Confused Lifetime Supporter Super Moderator

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    Life exists as a conflict between two extremes and can not survive if one extreme is totally eliminated, for to eliminate the "other" is to eliminate yourself. Life must be approached as a "play" in which the protagonist must have an antagonist or the play loses all meaning. But the goal is never to eliminate ether one, it must be to limit each to a contributing role in the play.
    When considering the self, or ego, if we continue to regard it as a separate entity, alone agaisnt the world it becomes impossible to avoid conflict.
    Watts believes, or believed, that all attempts to win at the game, invest in the future, bow to the goal of progress, etc. robs us of living in the present and living in the present is the best way to improve ourselves, and our environment, all without chasing a future ideal which never arrives.
     
  7. wooleeheron

    wooleeheron Brain Damaged Lifetime Supporter

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    Without a past and future, the present is just a blur, and enlightenment can be achieved in 30 seconds flat.
     
  8. MeAgain

    MeAgain Dazed & Confused Lifetime Supporter Super Moderator

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    CHAPTER SIX
    IT
    Human beings are endowed with the capacity to wonder about their own and others' existence. But knowledge of oneself is hard to acquire as that knowledge must be attained by the very object that wishes to attain it.
    Wondering about the implications of the existence of oneself and others, while worth contemplating, must also take place with a sense of wonder about the entire environment that surrounds and supports those individuals it contains. And while that environment includes chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy; it also includes the metaphysical realm.
    What is IT? How can IT be defined? IT can't be placed in any category such as animal, mineral, or vegetable. IT can't be defined as solid, liquid, or gas. And IT can't be called running, sitting, or jumping as it includes and transcends all of these.
    What can be said about everything? Anytime we attempt to describe anything we must define, contrast, and limit. How can we define, contrast or limit everything?
    But the urge to know remains!
     
  9. wooleeheron

    wooleeheron Brain Damaged Lifetime Supporter

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    This is where Watts proves to everyone's satisfaction, that he wrote an entire book discussing how he doesn't comprehend the English language. His argument about descriptions always requiring definition, contrast, and limits is merely his cultural and academic bias towards two thousand year old logic and metaphysics. The English language has two grammars, one vague and one explicit, while academics have been denying and puzzling over the second grammar for thousands of years, because the second grammar contradicts classic logic, and implies that humor can make more sense out of logic, than vice versa. Like I said, it was his first popular book, and he got better at incorporating more contextual vagueness to compensate for his sad sense of humor, but this is an example of how money corrupts everything, including the English language, with lawyers and judges still insisting that, if they say it isn't funny, its not funny.
     
  10. MeAgain

    MeAgain Dazed & Confused Lifetime Supporter Super Moderator

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    Sorry I don't follow you. As an example could you illustrate by describing something without resorting to comparisons, contrasts, limitations, or exceptions. A tree for example. Please tell me what a tree is without resorting to comparing it to other things, contrasting it with other things, defining its limitations, or citing exceptions to its "treeness". It can be a specific tree or an ideal concept of a tree. Metaphors, similes, antonyms, discrepancies, and analogies can't be used.
     
  11. wooleeheron

    wooleeheron Brain Damaged Lifetime Supporter

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    Sorry, the dictionary only has so many definitions for words, and they all use comparisons, contrasts, limitations, and exceptions. Saying the color blue is blue, is meaningless.
     
  12. MeAgain

    MeAgain Dazed & Confused Lifetime Supporter Super Moderator

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    As is saying the dictionary only has so many definitions for words, and they all use comparisons, contrasts, limitations, and exceptions.
     
  13. wooleeheron

    wooleeheron Brain Damaged Lifetime Supporter

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    Go ahead, try defining any one of those words, and see what the dictionary tells you. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Mental Masterbation.
     
  14. MeAgain

    MeAgain Dazed & Confused Lifetime Supporter Super Moderator

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    Mankind intuitively recognizes these gaps and realizes that that the world resides on the nervous system of the individual, it is all he or she can know. But there are numerous nervous systems, not one alone, and what do these nervous systems reside on but each other?
    This system of interlocking nervous systems accessing each other and the world has many names including God, Nature, the Void, the Absolute, Energy, and other mystical terms. All depending on the location of the one who names, the understanding of the concept, the intellectual and social development and so on, but universal across the world.
    Some try to deny the reality of this naming and or mystical experience as everything can not be known. The gaps can never be filled as our senses can not access them. Thus any "mystical" experience of these gaps is a pure hallucination. To say everything is God, or energy, or the Absolute is to say nothing as nothing can be known of those gaps.
    Everything is energy says nothing, a form of circular reasoning.
    But energy can only be known by contrasting it with inanition or inertness.
    Thus energy as everything must include non energy, inanition, or inertness.
    Therefore energy is everything.
     
  15. MeAgain

    MeAgain Dazed & Confused Lifetime Supporter Super Moderator

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    Watts likens philosophy into a battle between two groups, the "Prickles" and the "Goos"
    The prickly people like hard facts, differences, particles, and divisions. The Goos like generalizations, unity, and waves.
    Prickly people consider Gooey people to be:
    Gooey people consider Prickly people to be:
    But each group needs the other to define itself, without the other what would each argue about or for?
    Currently the Prickly people have the upper hand.
    We may be at the extreme point of "enantiodromia," where things turn into their opposite, a natural point where hopefully philosophy realizes that both extremes are in reality part of the same thing. That is not to say that there are no hard facts, differences, particles, and divisions; but to acknowledge that all those exist with generalizations, unity, and waves. The Prickles do not dissolve into the Goo but are part of the Goo and vise versa.
    [​IMG]
     
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  16. wooleeheron

    wooleeheron Brain Damaged Lifetime Supporter

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    This is Watts merely carrying on again, demonstrating how easy it is to play with dualistic logic, when you know nothing about linguistic analysis and fuzzy logic. He couldn't know that energy and information would progressively turn out to be interchangeable, or that Information theory has a blatant contradiction in the categories they use. The Zen are not like you and me, they know things without knowing them.
     
  17. MeAgain

    MeAgain Dazed & Confused Lifetime Supporter Super Moderator

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    For ordinary people there is nothing in between extremes, you are either good or bad, right or wrong, liberal or conservative, but as wooleeheron points out with his "fuzzy logic", good and bad, right and wrong, liberal and conservative, etc. consist of a range of variables:
    All poles are extremes of a single process, in the middle it gets "fuzzy".
    The ego, or my self, is one extreme of the all encompassing universe, with my birth as an independent thinking being at one end and my death and dissolution into the rest of the universe at the other; with all that fuzziness in between.
    Is Watts caught in dualistic logic or is he pointing beyond it? He talks about how we divide the world by finding differences, measuring, analyzing, and computing thus treating the world as if it was something other than ourselves which needs to be understood and conquered as if it was separate from us. Yet the very acts of finding differences, measuring, analyzing, and computing are done by the human mind...which is a part of that very universe being analyzed.
    And if the subject and object are opposite poles of the same process, with all that "fuzziness" in between:
     
  18. ~Zen~

    ~Zen~ Ancient Mariner Administrator

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    Shit flows in and you know what's going to flow out... these days people are a reflection of the media which completely absorbs their lives.
     
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  19. wooleeheron

    wooleeheron Brain Damaged Lifetime Supporter

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    The mass media is a reflection of academia, which promotes whatever makes money, including common sense and conventional wisdom, which nobody has ever proven exist. Comprehend the lies of academia, and you comprehend the mass media.
     
  20. wooleeheron

    wooleeheron Brain Damaged Lifetime Supporter

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    Watts is definitely caught in dualistic logic, and describes exactly how he has no awareness the English language even has a second grammar, and no awareness of fuzzy logic, which wasn't formulated at the time. Fuzzy logic merely asserts that some things are partially true, or partially false, and Fractal Geometry and Chaos theory apply to almost everything observable. In other words, his use of language doesn't reflect reality.
     

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