The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (18 page)

Actually, we know this already. After people die, babies are born—

and, unless they are automata, every one of them is, just as we ourselves were, the "I" experience coming again into being. The conditions of heredity and environment change, but each of those babies incarnates the same experience of being central to a world that is "other." Each infant dawns into life as I did, without any memory of a past. Thus when I am gone there can be no experience, no living through, of the state of being a perpetual "has-been." Nature "abhors the vacuum" and the I-feeling appears again as it did before, and it matters not whether the interval be ten seconds or billions of years. In unconsciousness all times are the same brief instant.

This is so obvious, but our block against seeing it is the ingrained and compelling myth that the "I" comes into this world, or is thrown out from it, in such a way as to have no essential connection with it. Thus we do not trust the universe to repeat what it has already done—to "I"

itself again and again. We see it as an eternal arena in which the individual is no more than a temporary stranger—a visitor who hardly belongs—for the thin ray of consciousness does not shine upon its own source. In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself—through our eyes and IT's.

Now you know—even if it takes you some time to do a double-take and get the full impact. It may not be easy to recover from the many generations through which the fathers have knocked down the children, like dominoes, saying "Don't you dare think that thought! You're just a little upstart, just a creature, and you had better learn your place." On the contrary, you're IT. But perhaps the fathers were unwittingly trying to tell the children that IT plays IT cool. You don't come on (that is, on stage) like IT because you really are IT, and the point of the stage is to show on, not to show off. 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.

(1) Idris Parry, "Kafka, Rilke, and Rumpelstiltskin."
The Listener.
British Broadcasting Corporation, December 2, 1965. p. 895.

(2) For which the reader is directed to such works in the Bibliography as Bucke's
Cosmic Consciousness,
James's
Varieties of Religious Experience,
and Johnson's
Watcher on the Hills.

(3) Academic philosophy missed its golden opportunity in 1921, when Ludwig Wittgenstein first published his
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
which ended with the following passage: "The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said,
i.e.
the propositions of natural science,
i.e.
something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." This was the critical moment for all academic philosophers to maintain total silence and to advance the discipline to the level of pure contemplation along the lines of the meditation practices of the Zen Buddhists. But even Wittgenstein had to go on talking and writing, for how else can a philosopher, show that he is working and not just goofing off? (The above passage is from the English translation of the
Tractatus,
published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929. Sections 6.53, 6.54, and 7, pp. 187-89).

(4) From
The Bard and the Harper,
recorded by James Broughton and Joel Andrews. LP-1013, produced by Musical Engineering Associates, Sausalito, California, 1965.

THE BOOKS

These are books which, from many differing points of view, bear upon and expand the themes of
The Book.

Reginald H. Blyth,
Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics
.

Luzac, 1942.

Norman O. Brown,
Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning
of History.
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959.

Richard M. Bucke,
Cosmic Consciousness.
Rev. ed. Dutton, New York, 1959.

Trigant Burrow,
Science and Man's Behavior.
Philosophical Library, New York, 1953.

Wing-tsit Chan,
The Platform Scripture of the Sixth Patriarch.
St.

John's University Press, New York, n.d.

S.P.R. Charter,
Man on Earth: A Preliminary Evaluation of the Ecology
of Man.
Contact Editions, The Tides, Sausalito, Cal., 1962.

Alexandra David-Neel,
The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan
Buddhist Sects.
Maha-Bodhi Society, Calcutta, n.d.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
The Phenomenon of Man.
Collins, 1961.

John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley,
Knowing and the Known.
Beacon Press, Boston, 1960.

Georg Groddeck,
The Book of the It.
Vision Press, 1961.

René Guénon,
Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines.
Luzac, 1945.

Aldous Huxley,
Island.
Chatto & Windus, 1962.

William James.
The Varieties of Religious Experience
. Collins, 1960.

Raynor Carey Johnson,
Watcher on the Hills
. Hodder & Stoughton, 1959.

Carl G. Jung,
Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Recorded and edited by Aniel Jaffe. Routledge and Collins, 1963.

J. Krishnamurti.
Commentaries on Living.
3 vols. Harper & Row, New York, 1956-60.

Lin Yutang,
The Wisdom of Loa-tse.
Michael Joseph, 1958.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, trans.,
The Bhagavad-Gita.
Allen & Unwin, 1948.

—, trans.,
The Principal Upanishads.
Allen & Unwin, 1953.

D.T. Suzuki,
Zen Buddhism.
Ed. William Barrett. Doubleday, New York, 1956.

Alan Watts,
Nature, Man, and Woman.
Thames & Hudson, 1958.

Raymond H. Wheeler,
The Laws of Human Nature.
Nisbet, London, 1931.

Lancelot Law Whyte,
The Next Development in Man.
Cresset Press, 1944.

Richard Wilhelm and Carl G. Jung,
The Secret of the Golden Flower.

Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1962.

Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, and Humanities Press, New York, 1961.

John Z. Young,
Doubt and Certainty in Science.
Oxford University Press, 1951.

• CONTENTS