2022-03-01 - On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan ============================================================= Watts ===== I did not find this book very satisfying. I have to agree with another online reviewer who wrote "And with the sudden tinkling of the unseen bell I put the book down and did not pick it up again. Just so much smug western white male self love from this ivory tower icon. There is, to be fair, a good deal of insight in his collective writings, but there is far more cumbersome rubbish one must slog through to find it." Below are a few quotes from the book that i found interesting. Thus bamboozled, the individual--instead of fulfilling his unique function in the world--is exhausted and frustrated in efforts to accomplish, self-contradictory goals. Because he is now so largely defined as a separate person caught up in a mindless and alien universe, his principal task is to get one-up on the universe and to conquer nature. This is palpably absurd, and since the task is never achieved, the individual is taught to live and work for some future in which the impossible will at last happen, if not for him, then at least for his children. We are thus breeding a type of human being incapable of living in the present--that is, of really living. For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now. In other words, you have been hypnotized or conditioned by an educational processing-system arranged in grades or steps, supposedly leading to some ultimate Success. First nursery school or kindergarten, then the grades or forms of elementary school, preparing you for the great moment of secondary school! But then more steps, up and up to the coveted goal of the university. Here, if you are clever, you can stay on indefinitely by getting into graduate school and becoming a permanent student. Otherwise, you are headed step by step for the great Outside World of family-raising, business, and profession. Yet graduation day is a very temporary fulfillment, for with your first sales- promotion meeting you are back in the same old system, being urged to make that quota (and if you do, they'll give you a higher quota) and so progress up the ladder to sales manager, vice-president, and, at last, president of your own show (about forty to forty-five years old). In the meantime, the insurance and investment people have been interesting you in plans for Retirement--that really ultimate goal of being able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of all your labors. But when that day comes, your anxieties and exertions will have left you with a weak heart, false teeth, prostate trouble, sexual impotence, fuzzy eyesight, and a vile digestion. All this might have been wonderful if, at every stage, you had been able to play it as a game, finding your work as fascinating as poker, chess, or fishing. But for most of us the day is divided into work-time and play-time, the work consisting largely of tasks which others pay us to do because they are abysmally uninteresting. We therefore work, not for the work's sake, but for money--and money is supposed to get us what we really want in our hours of leisure and play. In the United States even poor people have lots of money compared with [other parts of the world], while our middle and upper classes (or should we say "income groups") are as prosperous as princes. Yet, by and large, they have but slight taste for pleasure. Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy. ... But there is another possibility. Instead of checking out, let us ask what the trap means. What is implied in finding yourself paralyzed, unable to escape from a game in which all the rules are double-binds and all moves self-defeating? Surely this is a deep and intense experience of the same double-bind that was placed upon you in infancy, when the community told you that you must be free, responsible, and loving, and when you were helplessly defined as an independent agent. The sense of paralysis is therefore the dawning realization that this is nonsense and that your independent ego is a fiction. It simply isn't there, either to do anything or to be pushed around by external forces, to change things or to submit to change. ... 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. author: Watts, Alan, 1915-1973 detail: LOC: BD450 .W3 tags: book,non-fiction,philosophy title: The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are Tags ==== book non-fiction philosophy