Good point though in general about how you can read and “comprehend” something without ever really “getting” it. I tend to think this happens more often than not!

… still I will maintain a zen-like unflapability …

But what has happened? Never at any time were you able to separate yourself from your present thought, or your present experience. The first present experience was reading. When you tried to think about yourself reading, the experience changed, and the next present experience was the thought, “I am reading.” You could not separate yourself from this experience without passing on to another. It was “ring around the rosy.” When you were thinking, “I am reading this sentence, you were not reading it. In other words, in each present experience you were only aware of that experience. You were never aware of being aware. You were never able to separate the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known. All you ever found was a new thought, a new experience.

To be aware, then, is to be aware of thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires and all other forms of experience. Never at any time are you aware of anything which is not experience, not a thought or feeling, but instead an experiencer, thinker or feeler. If this is so, what makes us think any such thing exists.

In your defense of not having read any Watts in a couple years, I can testify that you do read an awful lot and have every excuse for not specifically remembering.

he talks about how the technocracy pulls things apart and labels the ever increasinly small parts as if they were seperate things……..and then we wonder how to put things back together when necessary.

there is a lecture he gave to a group of technologists in the early 60`s and it exempifies his wit and insight into things. he just speaks in plain english about how pulling things apart and complexifying things will lead to disaster for society. the red tape that bureaucrat produces take up so much of the resources of a community that the hospital can`t get built………….

things haven`t changed.

i mean i guess it makes sense on some level, but i havent read watts in a few years and never that book. have been hitting the whole 1970’s trip though lately, which i think may help account for that almost word for word sync up

We teach children that they have a “self” an “identity” so that we can fool them into believing that they are separate from and different from everyone else. We then use culture and its web of double binds to simultaneously pump up their isolation and criticize them for feeling that way.

Of course, since I’m in the midst of reading Watts at the moment, the parallels jump out at me. Here is a similar thought in his words (italics mine) from Chapter 3, entitled How to be a Genuine Fake:

Our society - that is, we ourselves, all of us - is defining the individual with a double-bind, commanding him to be free and seperate from the world, which he is not, for otherwise the command would not work. Under th ecircumstances, it works only in the sense of implanting an illusion of seperateness, just as the commands of a hypnotist can creat illusions. (pages 79-80, The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)

Great minds must think alike. Granted, however, if one accepts that the self is illusion, then Misters Boucher & Watts are one and the same. As is the walrus…

This might be incorrect threading etiquette or something, but happy birthday Tim! Prime numbers are something special. So is your blog.