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Friday, November 21, 2008
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
**One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man [person] who has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. **The sphere of the Bodhisattva is thus what Gerald Heard call "meta-comedy", a jargonesque and up-to-date equivalent of the Divine Comedy, the viewpoint from which the tragedy of life is seen as comedy because the protagonists are really players. So, too, the lower outcaste, whether criminal or lunatic who cannot be trusted, is always the mirror image of the upper outcaste, the impartial one who takes no sides and cannot be pinned down. But the former retreats from the tragedy of the double-bind because it appears to him to be an insoluble problem. The latter laughs at it because he knows it to be nonsense. When society cannot distinguish between these two outcastes, it treats both alike.
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This "knowing where to stop" is more generally called wu-wei, a term whose literal meaning is nonaction or noninterference, but which must more correctly be understood as not acting in conflict with the Tao, the Way or Course of nature. [How could one act in conflict with Tao?] It is therefore against the Tao to try exhaustively, to pin its unceasing transformations to names, because this will make it appear that the structure of nature is the same as the structure of language: that it is a multitude of distinct things instead of a multitude of changing relations. Because it is the latter, there is actually no way of standing outside nature as to interfere with it. The organism of man does not confront the world but is in the world.
Language seems to be a system of fixed terms standing over against the physical events to which they refer. That it is not so, appears in the impossibility of keeping a living language stable. [This may no longer be true. Are computer languages living?] Thinking and knowing seem to be confronting the world as an ego in the same way that words seem to stand over against events; the two illusions stand or fall together. Speaking and thinking are events in and of the physical world, but they are carried on as if they were outside it, as if they were an independent and fixed measure with which life could be compared**
Alan watts
One of the blessings of easy communication between the great cultures of the world is that partisanship in religion and philosophy is ceasing to be intellectually respectable. Pure religions are as rare as pure cultures, and it is mentally crippling to suppose that there must be a number of fixed bodies of doctrine among which one must choose, where choice means accepting the system entirely or not at all. Highly organized religions always try to force such a choice because they need devoted members for their continuance. Those who rove freely through the various traditions, accepting what they can use and rejecting what they cannot, are condemned as undisciplined syncretists. But the use of one's reason is not a lack of discipline, not is there any important religion which is not itself a syncretism, a "growing up together" of ideas and practices of diverse origin.
**Yet if the main function of a way of liberation is to release the individual from his "hypnosis" by certain social institutions, what is needed in California will not be quite the same as what is needed in Bengal, for the institutions differ. Like different diseases, they require different medicines.
Alan watts
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