The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

1. Inside Information

• Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
• We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience - a new feeling of what it is to be "I"
• Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or "ground" of our existence and our awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known.
• In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except God. There seem to be other things than God, but only because he is dreaming them up and making them his disguises to play hide-and-seek with himself. The universe of seemingly separate things is therefore real only for a while, not eternally real, for it comes and goes as the Self hides and seeks itself.

2. The Game of Black-and-White

• Consider, first, that all your five senses are differing forms of one basic sense - something like touch. Seeing is highly sensitive touching. The eyes touch, or feel, light waves and so enable us to touch things out of reach of our hands. Similarly, the ears touch sound waves in the air, and the nose tiny particles of dust and gas.
• The physical world is basically vibration. Whether we think of this vibration in terms of waves or of particles, or perhaps wavicles, we never find the crest of a wave without a trough or a particle without an interval, or space, between itself and others. In other words, there is no such thing as a half wave, or a particle all by itself without any space around it. This is no on without off, no up without down.
• While eyes and ears actually register and respond to both the up-beat and the down-beat of these vibrations, the mind, that is to say our conscious attention, notices only the up-beat. The dark, silent, or "off" interval is ignored. It is almost a general principle that consciousness ignores intervals, and yet cannot notice any pulse of energy without them.
• Space is the relationship between bodies, and without it there can be neither energy nor motion.
• Any galaxy, any star, any planet, or any observer can be taken as the central point of reference, so that everything is central in relation to everything else!
• The narrow slit in the fence is much like the way in which we look at life by conscious attention, for when we attend to something we ignore everything else. Attention is narrowed perception. It is a way of looking at life bit by bit, using memory to string the bits together - as when examining a dark room with a flashlight having a very narrow beam.
• We also speak of attention as noticing. To notice is to select, to regard some bits of perception, or some features of the world, as more noteworthy, more significant, than others. To these we attend, and the rest we ignore.
• It seems that we notice through a double process in which the first factor is a choice of what is interesting or important. The second factor, working simultaneously with the first, is that we need a notation for almost anything that can be noticed.
• Symbols enable us to classify our bits of perception. They are the labels on the pigeonholes into which memory sorts them, but it is most difficult to notice any bit for which there is no label.
• What governs what we choose to notice?:
  • Whatever seems advantageous or disadvantageous for our survival, our social status, and the security of our egos.
  • The pattern and the logic of all the notation symbols which we have learned from others, from our society and our culture. It is hard to notice anything for which the languages available to us (whether verbal, mathematical, or musical) have no description.
• There are two ignored factors which constitute the ego illusion:
  • Not realizing that so-called opposites, such as light and darkness, sound and silence, solid and space, on and off, inside and outside, appearing and disappearing, cause and effect, are poles or aspects of the same thing. But we have no word for that thing, save such vague concepts as Existence, Being, God, or the Ultimate Ground of Being. For the most part these remain nebulous ideas without becoming vivid feelings or experiences.
  • We are so absorbed in conscious attention, so convinced that this narrowed kind of perception is not only the real way of seeing the world, but also the very basic sensation of oneself as a conscious being, that we are fully hypnotized by its disjointed vision of the universe.
• In other words, we do not play the Game of Black-and-White. Instead, we play the game of Black-versus-White or, more usually, White-versus-Black. For especially when rates of vibration are slow as with day and night or life and death, we are afraid that Black may win the game. But the game "White must win" is no longer a game. It is a fight - a fight haunted by a sense of chronic frustration, because we are doing something as crazy as trying to keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys.
• By means of scientific prediction and its technical applications, we are trying to gain maximum control over our surroundings and ourselves.
• If the game of order-versus-chance is to continue as a game, order must not win. As prediction and control increase, so, in proportion, the games ceases to be worth the candle. We look for a new game with an uncertain result. In other words, we have to hide again, perhaps in a new way, and then seek in new ways, since the two together make up the dance and the wonder of existence. Contrariwise, chance must not win, and probably cannot...
• The underlying problem of cybernetics, which makes it an endless success/failure, is to control the process of control itself. Power is not necessarily wisdom. I may have virtual omnipotence in the government of my body and my physical environment, but how am I to control myself so as to avoid folly and error in its use?