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.

5. So What?

The separate person is without content, in both senses of the word. He lives perpetually on hope, on looking forward to tomorrow, having been brought up this way from childhood, when his uncomprehending rage at double-binds was propitiated with toys.
We have scrubbed the world clean of magic. We have lost even the vision of paradise, so that our artists and craftsmen can no longer discern its forms. This is the price that must be paid for attempting to control the world from the standpoint of an "I" for whom everything that can be experienced is a foreign object and a nothing-but.
Children are in touch with paradise to the extent that they have not fully learned the ego-trick, and the same is true of cultures which, by our standards, are more "primitive" and - by analogy - childlike.
But the way is not back. Just as science overcame its purely atomistic and mechanical view of the world through more science, the ego-trick must be overcome through intensified self-consciousness.
All winners need losers; all saints need sinners; all sages need fools.
It seems almost as if to be is to quarrel, or at least to differ, to be in contrast with something else. If so, whoever does not put up a fight has no identity; whoever is not self-ish has no self. Nothing unites a community so much as common cause against an external enemy, yet in the same moment, that enemy becomes the essential support of social unity.
When you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life. Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing. Each organism experiences that from a different standpoint and in a different way, for each organism is the universe experiencing itself in endless variety.
You will see that the ego is exactly what it pretends it isn't. Far from being the free center of personality, it is an automatic mechanism implanted since childhood by social authority, with - perhaps - a touch of heredity thrown in.
There is no fate unless there is someone or something to be fated. There is no trap without someone to be caught.
Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own.
In a society surviving to no purpose... the tasks are being done for their own sake, whereupon farms begin to look like gardens, sensible living-boxes sprout interesting roofs and mysterious ornaments, arms are engraved with curious patterns, carpenters take time to "finish" their work, and cooks become gourmets.
The Secret of the Golden Flower: "When purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped."
To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.
To be released from the "You must survive" double-bind is to see that life is at root playing.
When I make the sound "water" you know what I mean. But what does this whole situation mean - I making the sound and your understanding it? What is the meaning of a pelican, a sunflower, a sea urchin, a mottled stone, or a galaxy? Or of a+b=b+a? They are all patterns, dancing patterns of light and sound, water and fire, rhythm and vibration, electricity and spacetime.
Sir Arthur Eddington: "Something unknown is doing we don't know what - that is what our theory amounts to."
The world is a spell, an enchantment, an amazement, an arabesque of such stunning rhythm and a plot so intriguing that we are drawn by its web into a state of involvement where we forget that it is a game. We become fascinated to the point where the cheering and the booing are transformed into intense love and hate, or delight and terror, ecstatic orgasm or screaming meemies. All made out of on-and-off or black-and-white, pused, stuttered, diagrammed, mosaiced, syncopated, shaded, jolted, tangoed, and lilted through all possible measures and dimensions. It is simultaneously the purest nonsense and the utmost artistry.
For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.
No one can be moral - that is, no one can harmonize contained conflicts - without coming to a working arrangement between the angel in himself and the devil in himself, between his rose above and his manure below. The two forces or tendencies are mutually interdependent, and the game is a working game just so long as the angel is winning, but does not win, and the devil is losing, but is never lost. (The game doesn't work in reverse, just as the ocean doesn't work with wave-crests down and troughs up.
Does it really take any considerable time or effort just to understand that you depend on enemies and outsiders to define yourself, and that without some opposition you would be lost? To see this is to acquire, almost instantly, the virtue of humor, and humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive.
The real goodness of human nature is its peculiar balance of love and selfishness, reason and passion, spirituality and sensuality, mysticism and materialism, in which the positive pole has always a slight edge over the negative. (Were it otherwise, and the two were equally balanced, life would come to a total stalemate and standstill.)
To be viable, livable, or merely practical, life must be lived as a game - and the "must" here expresses a condition, not a commandment. It must b"e lived in the spirit of play rather than work, and the conflicts which it involves must be carried on in the realization that no species, or party to a game, can survive without its natural antagonists, its beloved enemies, its indispensable opponents.
Whatever may be true for the Chines and the Hindus, it is timely for us to recognize that the future is an ever-retreating mirage, and to switch our immense energy and technical skill to contemplation instead of action. However much we may now disagree with Aristotle's logic and his metaphors, he must still be respected for reminding us that the goal of action is always contemplation - knowing and being rather than seeking and becoming.
As it is, we are merely bolting our lives - gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in - because awareness of our existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being.
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god.

6. It

Nothing so eludes conscious inspection as consciousness itself. This is why the root of consciousness has been called, paradoxically, the unconscious.
The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.
Chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy are special fascinations with the details of our environment, but metaphysics is fascination with the whole thing.
There are gaps between the fingers; there are gaps between the sense. In these gaps is the darkness which hides the connection between things... This darkness is the source of our vague fears and anxieties, but also the home of the gods.The dualistic terms "non-duality" is taken to represent the "dimension" in which explicit differences have implicit unity
Is it conceivable, then, that I am basically an eternal existence momentarily and perhaps needlessly terrified by one half of itself because it has identified all of itself with the other half?
If, on the other hand, self and other, subject and object, organism and environment are the poles of a single process, THAT is my true existence.
There is no way to stand outside IT, and in fact, no need to do so. For so long as I am trying to grasp IT, I am implying that IT is not really myself. If it were possible, I am losing the sense of it by attempting to find it. This is why those who really know that they are IT invariably say they do not understand it, for IT understands understanding - not the other way about. One cannot, and need not, go deeper than deep.
In fact we know how to grow brains and eyes, ears and fingers, hearts and bones, in just the same way that we know how to walk and breathe, talk and think - only we can't put it into words. Words are too slow and too clumsy for describing such things, and conscious attention is too narrow for keeping track of all their details.
We then behold the Self wherever we look, and its image is the universe in its light and in its darkness, in its bodies and in its spaces.
I presume then that with my own death I shall forget who I was, just as my conscious attention is unable to recall, if it ever knew, how to form the cells of the brain and the pattern of the veins. Conscious memory plays little part in our biological existence. Thus as y sensation of "I-ness", of being alive, once came into being without conscious memory or intent, so it will arise again and again, as the central Self - the IT - appears as the self/other situation in its myriads of pulsating forms - always the same and always new, a here in the midst of a there, a now in the midst of then, and a one in the midst of many. And if I gorget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born.
In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself - through our eyes and IT's.
To come on like IT - to play at being God - is to play the Self as a role, which is just what it isn't. When IT plays, it plays at being everything else.