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# 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: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Alan_Watts
LOC: BD450 .W3
tags: book,non-fiction,philosophy
title: The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
# Tags
book
non-fiction
philosophy
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