Alan’s view:

1. “On the other hand, if you see that existence is musical in nature, you will understand my basic metaphysical assumption that life is not serious. ”

• “Now it is my contention and my basic metaphysical axiom that existence—the physical universe—is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It is not going anywhere; that is to say, it does not have some destination at which it ought to arrive. It is best understood by analogy with music because music as an art form is essentially playful. We say, “You play the piano.” You do not work the piano. Why? For instance, music differs from travel because when you travel you are trying to get somewhere and, being a very compulsive and purposive culture, we are busy going everywhere faster and faster in an attempt to eliminate the distance between places. With modern jet travel you can arrive anywhere almost instantaneously, and what happens as a result is that the two ends of your journey become the same place. So you eliminate the distance and you eliminate the journey, and you forget that the fun of the journey is to travel, not to obliterate travel. In music, though, one does not make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who[…]”
• “As a result, we have run into a cultural situation where we have confused the symbol with the physical reality, the money with the wealth, the menu with the dinner, and as a result we are starving from eating menus.”
• “The scientist realizes then that you are something that the whole world is doing, just as when the sea has waves on it the ocean is waving. So each one of us is a “waving” of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is, and with each one of us it is waving and saying, “Yoo-hoo! Here I am!” yet it does it differently each time because variety is the spice of life”
• spotlight vs floodlight consiousness:
  • “Nevertheless, your floodlight consciousness will manage the driving of the car, will notice all the stoplights, the other idiots on the road, and so on, and you will get there safely without even thinking about it.”
  • “People, who by various methods become fully aware of their floodlight consciousness, have what is called “a mystical experience,” or what the Buddhists call bodhi, an awakening”
• “Now then, the idea of li, of natural order, is like the patterns in seafoam, patterns in jade, the shapes of the clouds, the forms of trees and mountains. They are orderly, but we cannot put our finger on the order. ”
• on how the world system is wrong
  • “ Any sensible person would imagine that the main functioning of a university is to teach students and to do research. Therefore the faculty should be the most important thing in the university, but on the contrary, the administration is the most important. These are the people who keep the records, and who make the game rules up. So the faculty are always being obstructed by the administration, forced into irrelevant meetings, and asked to do everything but scholarship”
  • “You may be trying to run a hospital, but you have to spend so much time keeping records and writing things down on paper that you have no time to practice medicine. You may be trying to run a university but the requirements, the recording, and the endless red tape of the registrar’s office is such that the actual work of research and teaching is seriously hampered.”
• “if a mystic is one who is sensibly or even sensuously aware of his inseparability as an individual from the total existing universe, he is simply a person who has become sensible—aware through his senses—of the way ecologists see the world.”
• “Just as a sun or star has many rays, so the whole cosmos expresses itself in you and you and you in all the different variations. It plays games: it plays the John Doe game, the Mary Smith game. It plays the beetle game, the butterfly game, the bird game, the pigeon game, the fish game, the star game. ”
• on prickles and goo
  • “So therefore, if you belong to the prickly type, you hope that the ultimate constituent of matter is particles. If you belong to the gooey type you hope it is waves. If you are prickly you are a classicist; and if you are gooey you are a romanticist.”
• on reductionist approach
  • “ So we “thing” the world, which is to say that in order to measure a curve you have to reduce it to a series of points and apply the calculus. So, in exactly the same way, in order to discuss or talk about the universe you have to reduce it to things.”

Questions to explore:

• what are some of the consequences of our language? “I have body” vs “I am body”

  “The lightning flashes.” Surely the flashing is the same as the lightning. There is not one thing called “lightning” and another called “flashing.” The lightning is the flashing. It is raining. What is this it that is raining? The raining. ”

  “ So it is fascinating to find the hidden assumptions that underlie language and mathematics,”

  “ that question is based on a grammatical illusion that all verbs have to have subjects, and that a verb, or action, or event must be set into motion by a noun, that is to say, a non-event or thing.”

Highlights from the book:

consequences:

• “. Therefore we go on to talk about the conquest of nature, the conquest of space, and view ourselves in a kind of battle array towards the whole world outside us.” | the separation is an illusion

support:

• “you find that as you try to describe its behavior accurately you must also describe the behavior of its environment.” | | to know = to control | knowledge is NOT control learning to letting things happen | | “We regard it as something inside it, and most Western people locate their ego inside their heads.” ”I have body” (not “I am body”) | | | “Western thought is profoundly influenced through and through by the idea that all things—all events, all people, all mountains, all stars, all flowers, all grasshoppers, all worms—are artifacts; they have been made.” | “However, when you watch something grow, it works in an entirely different way. It does not assemble its parts. It expands from within and gradually complicates itself, expanding outwards, like a bud blossoming or a seed turning into a plant.” | | “for us, “to know” really means “to control”; that is, to see how events may be fitted to consistent orders of words and symbols so that we may predict and govern their course.” | “as the Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism arise in cultures far less concerned with controlling the world, and in which the whole notion of the dominance of the universe by man (the conscious ego) seems palpably absurd. For all these philosophies it is a first principle that the seeming separateness of the ego from the world, so that it could be its own controller, is an illusion.” |

About philosophy:

• “where philosophy can include the transformation of the very processes of the mind, and not simply of the words and symbols which the mind employs.”