The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Summary

This book is a philosophical exploration of identity, self-awareness, and the nature of reality. Watts challenges conventional notions of the self and argues that the sense of separation between the individual and the universe is an illusion that we are taught by society from an early age on. An illusion that ultimately keeps us from being truly happy and free and at an inner peace with our actions and lives.

The idea that because we view ourselves as separate from the world is so pervasive to our culture that we seek to conquer our surroundings and destroy them. Nature is in the 6th mass extinction as a direct consequence of our actions on Earth. The ideas in this book are heavily inspired by Zen Buddhism, something that Alan Watts has covered extensively in his other works as well.

The true self is not confined to the ego or the body but is part of a greater, interconnected whole. Some Chinese philosophers would call this greater connected whole the Tao. Our distinctions of things into dual categories are like thinking that the two sides of the coin are something different entirely. Sure they are different, but you can't have only one side of a coin and they are still part of the same object, there is only one coin. It is the same with other illusions such as "self" and "other", "subject" and "object," or "mind" and "body".

Humans are an expression of the universe. Just as waves are expressions of the ocean, human beings are expressions of the cosmic process, because in the end we are quantum wave functions, particle physics wandering through the universe, looking back at it. In the words of Michael Stevens: the universe "peoples".

The problem with realizing this is that if everybody were to realize that this is the case, society would stop functioning because people would stop performing their roles within society because they would start to see them as somewhat pointless. Therefore there is a huge taboo, especially in Western societies, around these spiritual ideas and truly learning about this interconnectedness. Instead we cling to our perceived notion of the self as separate, because that's what everybody, always tells us is reality. Self-inquiry challenges existing power structures. Our whole language is built in such a way as to maintain existing power structures. Interestingly enough, the concepts of self, are different from culture to culture with one of the main differences being that Western cultures are more focused on the individual and it's rights where more Eastern cultures are more focused on the society and the role of the individual as they pertain to their social surroundings.

Life, according to Watts, is a form of cosmic play. It is God, split into all the entities that make up the universe, that are now playing hide and seek with themselves in all of Gods forms, ultimately coallescing back into unity and then getting bored and starting the cycle anew.

Key Ideas

• you are not separate from the rest of the universe
• life is play, spontaneity and expression are important
• fear is rooted in illusion, dissolving the illusion dissolves the fears
• questioning cultural narratives leads to mental freedom and internal peace
• direct, immediate experience is more important than concepts, and words, and often can't be expressed with language at all, there is no way to describe a conscious state exactly how we felt it

Preface

We misunderstand ourselves, wrongly slicing the self into a different thing than the surroundings and consequently seek to conquer and control the surroundings, leading to their ultimate destruction, followed by our own, because we are fundamentally connected to them. The book is about how that divide can be solved and how this view is inspired by a mix of Hinduism and Modern Science.

Chapter 1 - Inside Information

What is the taboo in our society that nobody is told? It's not sex anymore. Instead it's wondering how weird it is that we are here and the stuff that we do.

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.

Book Recommendation: Galaxies, Nuclei, and Quasars – Fred Hoyle

Technological power is in the hand of the most propagandist people, because they get elected into power. This is bad. Religions might fix this, but they too are stuck with faith in things that might not be true in light of new evidence. And they too need to convince others that what they are saying is true. Because if enough people believe it, it has to be true.

Just as money is not real consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

Knowing who you really are, not your ego, but the thing underneath that, is taboo in our society. We play the role of the ego, without ever being told that it's a role.

God is the universe, everything within it, and it has forgotten to be God, the universe with it's different forms is playing hide and seek with itself, sometimes remembering that it is God. Everybody is part of this, everybody is God, but had forgotten thoroughly. Also, because everything is part of the same excitations in the same physical fields, there is no "I" that ends when dying. That same field just goes on and creates new forms, I am the same as you, the same fields, over and over again, God.

God is "underneath" rather than "above" everything, and he or (it) plays the world from inside.

Book Recommendation: The Gospel According to Thomas – A. Guillaumount

You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed.

Altruism is an expression of virtue signaling, i.e. a heavily disguised form of egoism.

Chapter 2 - The Game of Black and White

We slice reality into narrow consciousness slices of time and space, as well as defined concepts for which we have words or other symbols to express them. We don't experience most of the rest of this world, even though we might "see" it we don't experience it unless we put attention to it while seeing it.

We get caught up in a battle that doesn't exist, trying to make "the light" win over "the dark". But this can't be won, similarly to how one can't get rid of valleys without also losing the mountains.

Book Recommendation: All and Everything – G.I. Gurdjieff

Death is inevitable, but it's not bad, because the ego, the illusion that doesn't exist, is the only thing that dies. The universe and it's patterns of energy, our "true" self continue. We were never born, it was just the universe playing hide and seek with itself. Now in a different form, without this particular ego.

Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way if discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.

But this sort of traveling becomes harder and harder to do, because of legislations, rules and other people being everywhere, severely limiting the freedom to do the wandering.

Brains merge closer and closer due to technology until it all might be one giant whole, predicting itself into the future, for many years ahead, without any room for surprise because everybody controls everybody else because all are 'one' through technological means.

Thought: How is this different from his conception of God finding himself? Also, why does a vast computationally complex system like this become more predictable? I.e. just like a body's cells cooperating gets new "dimensions" to play with, so would this proposed hyper organism do unpredictable things, that the humans within it wouldn't understand. Just like cells don't get why we use cellphones.

Patterns persist while the thing that makes up those patterns come and go and change over time. Cells get replaced, yet the human stays. Faculty members, and buildings change, yet the university stays.

If you could produce any sort of human character you wanted, how would you know what sorts of characters were needed?

Chapter 3 - How to Be a Genuine Fake

Where is the I located? What even do we mean by it? It's confusing, since I am as much what is going on inside the brain, as I am the result of some of that going on, namely the conscious experiences, memories etc.

People think of the world as made out of distinct parts, made out of "clay". Matter vs. Form, i.e. everything is clay (or subatomic particles) then organized into a specific form. But this forming needs an intelligent being to create it - God enters the picture. God is the intelligence bringing the right forms into being. It's image is tainted by the culture it was developed in, which abused this idea, to justify their power hierarchies. There is an all intelligent "benevolent" person like God up top, the fundamental hierarchy of the universe is just like our social hierarchy: just.

Later the model of God got superseded by the idea that the universe creates form by evolution on its own. God became unnecessary, but everything is now either completely determined or random and meaningless. People think that the survival of the fittest means that they have to face the gravest circumstances so they make the universe cruel and heartless, something to be fought and won over and the dualistic struggle emerges in it's full modern western form. An us vs. them dynamic, the universe as something separate from ourselves, to be overcome and dominated.

Things change their behavior tremendously, depending on their environment. To understand humans you can't look at them (or their parts) in isolation. Just like words change their meaning depending on context do all things change their behavior depending on their surroundings.

There is a vast difference between the bark of a tree and the bark of a dog.

Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves.

Society tricks people into believing they need to act naturally, spontaneously, in their own mind, yet have to "spontaneously" follow societal rules and whims. This leaves people confused for it's an impossible thing to fulfill. Be yourself, yet be part of the society. Be free from it, yet be indoctrinated by it to be that way.

The world contains fights, but none of those fights is terminal. The birds aren't trying to eliminate worms for good because that would mean that they too would die. Men is different in that regard.

The most sacred value of our culture is the right of every individual to justice, health, and wealth, or "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." To suggest that the personal ego is a hallucination seems to be an attack on this most sacred value, without which civilized people would fall back to the level of cookies or ants to become an organized mass where the particular person is expendable.

Humans are connected to the Universe like branches are connected to the tree. They are all part of the same Self.

The corpse is like a footprint or an echo—the dissolving trace of something which the Self has ceased to do.

Society is commanding man to be free yet bound to society, else how would he obey the command of being free? This is a paradox. Given this paradox, humans try to break free from the world by abolishing their connections from nature through technology. Forgetting how to live in the now, focused on a point in the future where human problems are solved due to the advances in tech.

Thought: All of this ideas are fine and well, unless people really do solve all problems and become "godlike" through the use of technology. Including the solving of the problem of wisdom, i.e. not only having all the power but also knowing what to do with it. If people succeed with this, then the whole argument of it being a hoax falls down and becomes indeed a utopian reality. That's a big IF, but it's still a possibility.

People focused on the future as such go up and up the ladder, school, good grades, university, company worker, vice president, president, retirement, death. Not enjoying their time during the whole affair, because they are always busy running after the next target, the next goal. Being abysmally unhappy in the whole pursuit, because they've lost the present in that constant search.

Thought: People truly working for a better future don't fit that description, because they do enjoy their work tremendously. Real scientists and engineers, excited about the possibility of solving great mysteries of the universe.

Our pleasures are not material pleasures but symbols of pleasure—attractively packaged but inferior in content.

Thought: In Essence Maya Millennial, food that Instagrams good but tastes premium mediocre. It reminds me too of the idea of Quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Knowing Quality and treasuring it, further, creating it, masterpieces in their own right because you love the work and the objects created with that work, then you truly live in the present. It's about knowing what is good, not because others want it or because the advertisement says it's good but because it's to your taste and done expertly. It's the Rearden Metal Bracelet of Dagny Taggarty.

Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythmless, undancing, mummified.

Chapter 4 - The World is Your Body

Every description of something doing something, when looked at in enough detail, would have to include the entire world going with it, because that thing is only reacting to the sum of all those influences on it. It's not "doing" anything of its own, but is entirely acted out by it's surroundings. This is only confusing while one thinks of the thing as separate from the rest of it's environment. But they are both part of the same thing. The universe being itself.

The universe is peopling. It is doing the act of acting as people.

Humans are not intelligent on their own. They need a society to be so. Language, books, conversation etc. but really they need even more than that, they need food and shelter and an entire world to support their intelligence, so that drawing the boundary around a single human and saying that they are intelligent makes no sense.

The same argument applied to the Earth as a whole, and so on to the Galaxy and the entire universe. Matter of Energy have intelligence built in.

Thought: This reminds me of the ideas of Thomas Nagel in his Mind and Cosmos book. Everything in the universe is conscious to a certain degree because it's a fundamental building block of nature, just as energy is. It could even be measured how much part of each particle is conscious etc.

But, the organism and the environment are parts of the same coin. The environment shapes the organism as much as the organism shapes the environment. They are the head and tail of a cat, the same thing. Not cause and effect of one another.

Apart from your brain, or some brain, the world is devoid of light, heat, weight, solidity, motion, space, time or any other imaginable feature.

Thought: David Eagleman gives much more detail to this argument in his book The Brain.

Book Recommendation: Saving the Appearances - Owen Barfield

A universe without observers would be different in that it would lack the carved up reality that observers impose on it to make sense out of it. I.e. conscious entities bunch of features of the universe into distinct concepts and entities: things that can be dealt with.

The universe might not have existed until the first conscious observer appeared. If there is nobody in the forest to hear the tree fall, there was no tree there. Ever.

Just as current will not begin to flow from the positive end of a wire until the negative terminal is secure.

Thought: This is factually just wrong. Current does flow, and once it hits the end of the wire, an electrical wave comes back, exactly negating the flow of current that caused it, leading the wire to a settled non flow state without electrons moving. For more details watch some of Alpha Phoenix videos on electricity.

Book Recommendation: Quantum Theory – David Bohm

Book Recommendation: My View of the World – Erwin Schrödinger

Chapter 5 - So What?