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?

3. How to Be a Genuine Fake

• Most people think of themselves as separate from their thoughts and experiences.
• Memory is an enduring pattern of motion, like the whirlpool, rather than an enduring substance, like a mirror, a wax tablet, or a sheet of paper. If memories are stored in neurons, there is no standing aside from the stream of events, for neurons flow along in the same stream as events outside the skull. After all, your neurons are part of my external world, and mine of yours! All our insides are outside, there in the physical world. But conversely, the outside world has no color, shape, weight, heat, or motion without "inside" brains. It has these qualities only in relation to brains, which are, in turn, members of itself.
• The skin informs us just a much as it outforms; it is as much a bridge as a barrier.
• It is largely by talking that a hypnotist produces illusions and strange behavioral changes in his subjects - talking coupled with relaxed fixation of the subject's conscious attention. The stage magician, too, performs most of his illusions by patter and misdirection of attention.
• If there is any biological foundation for the hoax of egocentricity, it lies only in the brain's capacity for narrowed, attentive consciousness hand-in-hand with its power of recognition - of knowing about knowing and thinking about thinking with the use of images and languages.
• The world is neither form nor matter, for these are two clumsy terms for the same process.
• It is doubtful whether Western science and technology would have been possible unless we had tried to understand nature in terms of mechanical models.
• When the astrologer draws a picture of a person's character or soul, he draws a horoscope - that is, a very rough and incomplete picture of the whole universe as it stood at the moment of that person's birth. But this is at the same time a vivid way of saying that your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and processes which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing. A scientific astrology, if it could ever be worked out, would have to be a thorough description of the individual's total environment - social, biological, botanical, meteorological, and astronomical - throughout every moment of his life.
• Other people teach us who we are.
• Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment. We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation.
• Society is our extended mind and body.
• The child is told that he must be free. An irresistible pressure is being put on him to make him believe that no such pressure exists. The community of which he is necessarily a dependent member defines him as an independent member.
• Essentially the social double-bind game is a demand for spontaneous behavior of certain kinds. Living, loving, being natural or sincere - all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen of themselves like digesting food or growing hair.
• The web catches the spider.
• We should fight to check the enemy, not to eliminate him. We must learn to include ourselves in the round of cooperations and conflicts, of symbiosis and preying, which constitutes the balance of nature, for a permanently victorious species destroys not only itself but all other life in its environment.
• The individual may be understood neither as an isolated person nor as an expendable, humanoid working machine. He may be seen, instead, as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself - as an incarnation of the Self, of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call IT.
• Differentiation is not separation.
• Not withdrawal, not stewardship on the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts - based on the realization that the only real "I" is the whole endless process. This realization is already in us in the sense that our bodies know it, our bones and nerves and sense-organs. We do not know it only in the sense that the thin ray of conscious attention has been taught to ignore it, and taught so thoroughly that we are very genuine fakes indeed.

4. The World is Your Body

• The basic realities of nature are social fictions:
  • The notion that the world is made up or composed of separate bits or things
  • That things are differing forms of some basic stuff.
  • That individual organisms are such things, and that they are inhabited and partially controlled by independent egos.
  • That the opposite poles of relationships, such as light/darkness and solid/space are in actual conflict which may result in the permanent victory of one of the poles.
  • That death is evil and that life must be a constant war against it.
  • That man, individually and collectively, should aspire to be top species and put himself in control of nature.
• The nub of the problem is the self-contradictory definition of man himself as a separate and independent being in the world, as distinct from a special action of the world.
• What we call "things" are no more than glimpses of a unified process.
• The gestalt theory or figure/ground relationship - No figure is ever perceived except in relation to a background. Our attention is almost automatically won by any moving shape (in contrast with the stationary background) or by any enclosed or tightly complex feature (in contrast with the simpler, featureless background)
• The illusion that organisms move entirely on their own is immensely persuasive until we settle down, as scientists do, to describe their behavior carefully.
• Everything labeled with a noun is demonstrably a process or action, but language is full of spooks, like the "it" in "It was raining" which are the supposed causes of action.
• The organism is sometimes a running process, sometimes a standing process, sometimes a sleeping process, and so on, and in each instance the "cause" of the behavior is the situation as a whole, the organism/environment. Indeed, it would be best to drop the idea of causality and use instead the idea of relativity.
• Total situations are patterns in time as much as patterns in space.
• We can never, never describe all features of the total situation, not only because every situation is infinitely complex, but also because the total situation is the universe.
• Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.
• The balance of nature, the harmony of contained conflicts, in which man thrives is a network of mutually interdependent organisms of the most astounding subtlety and complexity.
• Surely all forms of life, including man, must be understood as "symptoms" of the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy - in which case we cannot escape the conclusion that the galaxy is intelligent.
• Knowing is a translation of external events into bodily processes, and especially into states of the nervous system and the brain: we know the world in terms of the body, and in accordance with its structure.
• A living organism is a point of arrival apart from which there can never be the currents or phenomena of light, heat, weight, hardness, and so forth. One might almost say that the magic of the brain is to evoke these marvels from the universe, as a harpist evokes melody from the silent strings.
• The difficulty of understanding the organism/environment polarity is psychological.
• In the act of putting everything at a distance so as to describe and control it, we have orphaned ourselves both from the surrounding world and from our own bodies - leaving "I" as a discontented and alienated spook, anxious, guilty, unrelated, and alone.