The Book Essays

Please post The Book by Alan Watts essays here.

Br. John+

Here is the start of my THE BOOK essay, I sincerly hope that this is the correct place to submit it. I am going off the title so I assume I am correct. Well enough said read on and enjoy .

Chapter 1

What did I make of this book? Well first off I found that Alan Watts states clearly that people are split into two. And to find and understand everything around us we must first understand ourselves. For both parts form a symbiotic relationship with each other -you cannot have one part without the other-.

He tells us that the human race is self centred and we concentrate on our egos and separate ourselves into different groups. Instead he says that we should understand ourselves, and know that we are a part of everything.

In a way the God he talks about is the Force. That energy that is in us connects us to everyone else and first we must be able to know ourselves and our Force before we can understand other people.


May The Force Be With You Always

(Conclusion in final analysis of final chapter in THE BOOK)

Chapter 2

In chapter 2 -The Game of Black and White, Watts talks about how there cannot be one thing without another. There is no peak to a wave if there is no trough to compare it to. For example Watts talks about how everything can be said to be moving or stationary, if there is nothing to compare that thing to. Therefore anything can be a central point in determining what is moving.

Watts then talks about how people are confused on Cause and Effect. And how that we think sometimes that something is caused by an event before it, but in fact sometimes this is not so (as with the cat reference) and in fact there is no cause and effect both things were created together it just happens that we as observers see one thing before another.

Watts talks about how people have been affected by different events, and experience events differently because of the way they have been taught to. For example Watts talks about in the game of Black and White, White must win, because Black would is the bad side of life, and White the good. Watts says that people become disillusioned about what we should do in life, and that we are constantly trying to get White to win. But instead we should accept the ‘Black’ side of things, and just deal with them. For example he says that women in Western Countries have pain while in labour, but in other countries women just give birth then go on about their duties. This is because people have been taught to think that you are meant to have pain during childbirth because of women’s ‘original sin’, but other women haven’t been taught so. Ergo giving birth is a normal part of life and not much of a big deal is made of it. Those women accept the ‘Black’ side of things, and nothing bad comes about it.

He then discusses the effects of communication and how this is affecting the way we think. Watts talks about how eventually we become so in touch with one another that we form a super being with an infinitely large ability to know everything. Eventually this super being will become one entire whole where all information is passed through (internet), and everything can be relayed with little effort. And how everyone can be at a single point on the earth but everywhere else at the same time. The more we change as a society and the more our technology changes the more we become the same thing.

Does technology get us anywhere? That was a question that could be asked in several of the later paragraphs, because by getting more advanced technology to solve current problems, we create new problems that have to be solved with newer and more advanced technology etc… and that new technology is easily taken for granted so then we need newer and newer technology, because only then can we impress others with what we have.

May The Force Be With You Always

(Conclusion in final analysis of final chapter in THE BOOK)
(More THE BOOK analysis going to be posted promptly, will start once in finish my Latin Revision

Here is the latest part of my THE BOOK essay, only chapter 3 is here because of the length of the chapter. Enjoy!

Chapter 3

To begin with Watts talks about how we as humans seem to use the term ‘I’ for things that are conscious or partially conscious to us. For example “I speak” “My clothes”, and “I was sick” or “I dreamed”. However we never use ‘I’ for things in our sub conscious, this implies that we do not think and examine ourselves thoroughly enough. We only consider half of ourselves.

Watts then talks about memory. He talks about our conscious playing tricks, and creating illusions that can disorientate us. And how some external influences seem to alter our perception of events. Watts then talks about how our universe and environment is ‘wiggly’. And we as humans try to impose order from the wiggly chaos. But this order never actually occurs, we just find another, easier, way of looking at the same thing. Watts then talks about us having the ‘material’ world, but material is just a definition of something that can be measured with images that make things easier too look at.

He then talks about the different ways people consider God. Most are the same, for example the Christians, Jewish and Muslim beliefs that God is a being of ultimate power, God knows everything and has planned an everlasting life after your mortal life has ended. And that you must do what you are told or this ending will not happen, and instead you will spend eternity in agony.

Watts then discusses how some people began too question the theory of God, and instead replaced that absence with the Automatic Model, in which everything happened because in a infinite amount of time that configuration of events would happen. Everything is done by chance. And that the only way too survive for a long amount of time is too try and beat the inevitable randomness of nature. But Watts then talks about how our view of everything being mechanical lead us to logical scientific laws of how things work, as opposed to people who did not think of nature as a mechanism, and instead of a series of events that arose mutually.

Watts talks about how we are misguided in thinking that there is a body, but that instead there is only a system of atoms arranged in a certain way. But even then he says that we should not just think of the body as atoms, because the sum is greater than the parts that make it up. In other words we should look at what the parts are, but also what the parts are doing. Watts then mentions that too understand what things are doing we need to know what in the environment around them is making them do that, so the line between body and the rest of our universe slowly gets broken down, we essentially are one with everything. ‘The should is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and processes which make up your environment’ That I believe is an important quote that pretty much sums up all that has been said in the few paragraphs beforehand. If the previous quote was important, then this part goes even further beyond that. Watts says that as people are one with their environment, then we can remove a head or vital organ to kill a person, but we can kill that person just as easily by removing their environment. Because we are only separated from everything else by name. But each individual is just one manifestation of the entire whole. Everything can be different, but connected (each part does one specific thing, but is connected to everything else regardless).
This means that when someone dies they are not removed, just withdrawn from the state with which we associate them.

We are influenced greatly by our surroundings is the next part of THE BOOK. We are taught to speak and learn languages and see images that we did not invent, therefore our thoughts are controlled by others, in addition we copy and learn that things are meant to be disgusting and painful, because that is what other people think. And we fear death because of the way in which other people view the loss of someone. ‘Society is our extended mind and body’. But we by the society that determines what we are that we are separate and independent.

After Watts talks about how we are a society which depends on contradiction too exist. We play ‘a double blind game’ which means that we are told not to do things that are forced on us anyway, and how we must be ourselves but not all the time, and too control ourselves but be natural at the same time. We have to do things how we would do them, but we have to do them in a specific way. Very contradictory.

May The Force Be With You Always

(Conclusion in final analysis of final chapter in THE BOOK)

Here is my analysis of Chapter 4 of THE BOOK by Alan Watts.

Chapter 4

Watts begins chapter 4 summing up all the previous points, and reinforcing the point that we are everything and that there are no single events, but parts of the whole event. And this is why people need to stop viewing themselves as different, individual, things and more of an entire whole.

Watts goes into a very detailed description of how events in a certain area rely on the information of the surrounding area. This is a much more descriptive and explanative form of the three balls analogy in the second chapter. That too understand what an ‘individual’ is doing, you must understand why that individual is doing something, and the why is in the environment that they are in, so very rapidly you extend the range of just that individual point on an area (say a park) to everywhere else because you must understand why that point is doing what it is doing. ‘As soon as one sees that separate things are fictitious, it becomes obvious that nonexistent things cannot “perform” actions.’

Watts then talks about how because there is no individual, we therefore do not need any nouns, as these show individuality which is not there. Instead verbs can be used, too describe what the entire universe event is doing at one time. In addition to this Watts says that one thing would imply another, ‘the birth of an organism implies its death. Wouldn’t it be as farfetched to call birth the cause of death as to call the cat’s head the cause of the tail?’. The point Watts is making is that everything is a pattern that carries on afterwards, and so patterns in time are the same as patterns in space. Watts sums up the points made, by saying that an organism is because it does. (I feel this is a more interesting saying than the ‘I think therefore I am’ because Watts’ quote applies to everything.)

Watts introduces an interesting point about our senses. Our senses were first introduced in Chapter 1, but these points are much more complex and dynamic. Watts says that nothing exists unless there is a point of origin for it too exist from. This implies that there was no Universe before anything organic could determine the surroundings in which it was in. (As in Quantum Mechanics (study of the very small, a physics subject)).

May The Force Be With You Always

(Conclusion in final analysis of final chapter in THE BOOK)

Here is my chapter 5 THE BOOK analysis. Chapter 6 should be done either later today or by the end of tomorrow.

Chapter 5

At the beginning of the chapter watts talks about materialism and how many people have a dependence for ‘things’, and how those people think that other people must also have a dependence for ‘things‘. Watts explains this point with a story: a businessman who once pitied his workers lives decided too pay them double for their work. But instead of them coming too work more often, and enjoying what they were doing, they came into work half as often. Several people who employed others were asked on what they should do to try and get them to come into work more often, and all of them said to increase their salary, or gives them gifts. But instead Watts says that the business men or women did not understand that the ‘workers valued goofing off more than money’

Watts says that one of the best Christmas present he got was a cheap gold ring with a glass diamond in it, because this caught the light in such a way that the entire spectrum of colour could be seen. He preferred this presents to this others, because it made him feel happy inside, unlike other presents, this present gave him a feeling of happiness and peacefulness.

Watts says after, that people can’t help but be egotistic. We say that we have little ego, but in a group any discussion about outsiders, and how their ways are wrong is being egotistic. Watts says that religion who say that they are more in touch, and they have a better philosophy, are all trying to bring everyone together; are in fact self contradictory, because of their belief that they are better than other religions and ways of life. That destroys the unity and fundamental core of the religion. “We believe everyone is equal, but that we are better than everyone else” essentially that is what is being said. Watts says that it is in our nature too quarrel. Because the more we say that we are a more open thing than everything else, we are already quarrelling with that other thing, and so destroying the former point.

It would appear that in the game of life humans are trapped. If we try and say that we are good, then that must mean that someone else is bad, and therefore meaning that we are not good, because we create evil. Vice versa. If however we do remove our egos, then we will end up with things just happening. That would be quite harmonious, although we would not recognise it.

Watts talks about how having a purpose to do something purposeless then you are creating a purpose, survive. This behaviour makes us survive, because it gives a reason too survive or not. But too escape the “You must survive” double-blind, we must consider that as “playing”. But playing has two meanings, that would confuse, so instead we must use the words “toying” and “sincere”. Serious should not be used, as you would hope too have some fun in your life. Watts says that all life is a dance, and that we are fascinated by the way everything dances.

After those points, there is a paragraph 3 pages long. This paragraph states almost everything that has been discussed so far. The paragraph starts by saying that you, we are the universe, and our sense of sight, smell, touch, and hear are just different ways of noticing our higher self (the universe). Also that if we do good, we cause bad things to counter how good we are. And how conflicts are tried to be resolved, but fail because they do not view themselves as the same thing but instead as individual events. That then goes into how people get confused by thinking that they are individuals. The paragraph finishes by saying how we should consider ourselves as God. This is because we are everything from atoms to galaxies we govern ourselves, and everything else.

May The Force Be With You Always

(Conclusion in final analysis of final chapter in THE BOOK)

Here is the final chapter analysis of THE BOOK. Conclusion and notes are included at the end of the post.

Chapter 6

In the final chapter, Chapter 6, Watts begins by saying how we are interested in things, but are more interested in our conscious self. As we try to pursue the routes of our conscious self, we find that it becomes harder and harder to pursue. So we can view our conscious as our subconscious.

Watts briefly mentions the definition of philosophy. He says that philosophy is ‘to hold such assumptions, consciously or unconsciously’. Watts then says that someone who ignores and doesn’t acknowledge philosophy is a very bad pragmatist or a positivist, because they have not thought about their position. But another description of philosophy is to think in such a way that you can distinguish between what is real and what is nonsense.

Watts’ next point is that there may be gaps in our senses. These gaps stop us from seeing the true extent of things, they limit our perception. In between these gaps could be God, or alternatively our fears and anxieties. We do not know that our senses sense everything there is too sense. And we sense something by contrasting that thing too something other than it.

Watts then says that we will never be able to understand “IT”, because IT understands understanding, and not the other way round, so we will be forever futile in our efforts too fully know IT. But IT is us, this is why we never fully know ourselves. But what of death? That is asked in one of the very last chapters, and Watts says that when we ‘die’ we are just reborn into another baby, to re-see the entire world again as another perception.

Conclusion

What did I draw from this book? Well for one thing a new perception about things around me. But more than that, I found a way of actively describing God or The Force. For what is said in this book, is that we as individuals, are not actually individuals. But we have been convinced by our consciousness that we are individuals but instead we are everything, we are The Force.

Watts view is not discovering something that is new, but more that he has uncovered something that has always existed but never really ‘found’.

Here are a few notes about the above work. First of all, I have said that Watts said this, purely because the book was published under his name, so I assume the work in there is his. But this might not be true, I accept that.

Also if I discover something new about THE BOOK, or have any more comments to post about THE BOOK. Then I will post them, but only if I have enough to constitute a good forum post (I will post several points at a time. Not 1 after the other).

People may now be wondering what this means to me personally. Well as a perception of seeing myself, I have decided that I will keep this philosophy with me until I die. As I now consider this an almost new way of life. I pledge from this day forward too follow what I have learnt here and to spread the teachings in this Book.

I finished this on the 3rd February 2008, and the day I truly became a Jedi.

I have noticed on looking back at the posts that there are odd looking symbols between words, and I realise that these don't make sense. This is becasue i did my THE BOOK analysis on microft word, and copied that onto a post. That is why there are some weird symbols, because data was altered during the transfer from my computer to the website.