Book Review - The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Although I'd first heard of Alan Watts' The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are several years ago, it wasn't until I watched Dakota Wint's YouTube video Top 5 Books Every New Spiritual Seeker Needs that I was motivated enough to actually check it out. First things first—I know that I will benefit a lot from re-reading this book several times. It's extremely dense and packed with a lot of valuable information, a lot of which I likely didn't absorb during my first reading of the book.

The basic premise of the book is that we have been told that we are isolated beings, "unconnected to the rest of the universe", which has led to our viewing the "outside" world with hostility and "has fueled our misuse of technology and our violent and hostile subjugation of the natural world". However, Watts asserts that this belief is mistaken and that we are in fact directly connected to everything else there is. In the beginning of the book, Watts discusses the concept of cultural taboos—things like making direct eye contact with another person or performing an act that is against one's religion. This leads him to make the following point:

"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."

The concept of "I" is extremely powerful and commonplace in most societies on Earth, and it is so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, as well as our laws and social institutions. Watts spends many words of this book arguing against the concept of personal selfhood in favor of a more universal concept of identity—one that includes the rest of reality in addition to the components that we would normally judge as "ourselves".

One of the other things I found interesting was Watts' definition of "attention" as "narrowed perception"—because when we attend to one thing, we ignore everything else. In Watts' own words: "conscious attention is at the same time ignore-ance (i.e., ignorance) despite the fact that it gives us a vividly clear picture of whatever we choose to notice."

These are just some of the concepts that Watts describes in The Book. If either of these ideas sound interesting to you, I would definitely give this a read. I wish that this review was able to more fully show how wonderful this book is, but since this is only my first read-through, I feel like I was only able to skim the surface of its ideas and therefore will likely have more to say about it upon successive readings. I definitely give this one two thumbs up though!

5/5 stars. 178 pages.

Book Review - kindfulness

I first heard of Ajahn Brahm and his book kindfulness at my local Buddhist center, the Kadampa Center, during one of the Buddhist classes that I was taking last year. I wrote down the name of the book because it was given a very strong recommendation by a few people, and decided to give it a read this week.

Ajahn Brahm is a British Buddhist monk in the Theravada tradition who serves as the Abbot of the Bodhinyana Monastery in Australia. He also holds many other positions in various places around the world and has accomplished many hard-earned achievements. He is quite qualified to write a book on the topic of kindfulness, which seems to be a term that he created which focuses on generating relaxation in order to bring ease to the body, mind, and world and facilitate healing.

The first half of the book focuses on five simple stages to begin or deepen one's meditation practice. The first stage focuses on giving up the baggage of the past and future by showing no interest in your past or future experiences at all.

"Some people think that if they contemplate the past, they can somehow learn from it and solve their problems. But when we gaze at the past we invariably look through a distorted lens. Whatever we think it was like, in truth it was not quite like that at all! This is why people argue about what happened even a few moments ago."

"As for the future – the anticipations, fears, plans, and expectations – let that go too. The Buddha once said, 'Whatever you think the future will be, it will always be something different.' This future is known by the wise as uncertain, unknown, and unpredictable. It is often useless to anticipate the future, and in meditation it is always a great waste of time. You cannot know the future. It can be so strange, so weird, so completely beyond what you would expect."

The second stage involves developing present-moment awareness, which requires an ability to conjure silent awareness in the present moment. Brahm suggests that instead of being silently aware of every thought or feeling that arises, we should choose silent present-moment awareness of just one thing. He, along with many other teachers I have studied, advises starting with a silent present-moment awareness of the breath.

"When you are noting or making a comment about an experience that has just passed, you are not paying attention to the experience that has just arrived. You are dealing with old visitors and neglecting the new arrivals."

The above concept is contrary to meditation instructions that I have received from the Headspace meditation app, which advises practicing a technique called "noting" each thought and emotion that arises before letting it fade away. (As a side note, I actually no longer use Headspace—I found silent meditation [with a focus on silent present-moment awareness, of course!] to be much more productive for me than the guided meditation style. However, I would advise brand-new meditators to give Headspace a try, since it is more geared toward absolute beginners than intermediate and advanced meditators.)

The third stage of this meditation practice is a sustained attention on the breath. One common problem that comes up at this stage is a tendency for one to control the breathing, which makes the breathing uncomfortable. Brahm suggests taking a step back and imagine that the practitioner is just a passenger in a car looking through the window at their breath—they are not the driver, nor a backseat driver.

The fourth stage occurs when the practitioner's attention expands to take in every single moment of the breath. This degree of stillness can only emerge when one lets go of everything in the entire universe except for the experience of breathing silently.

The fifth stage is called "full sustained attention on the beautiful breath", and it often flows naturally and seamlessly from the previous stage. It is simply a matter of the mind recognizing the beautiful breath and rejoicing in it. This facilitates a deepening of contentment.

The second half of the book describes practices to develop kindful loving and letting be and working with obstacles to kindfulness. The first set of practices involves a type of compassion meditation that is sparked by generating kindfulness for a helpless, suffering being—Brahm uses the example of a struggling kitten—and then expanding that feeling to other beings until it is extended to all sentient beings. The passage on working with obstacles covers topics like restlessness, being kind to oneself, anger, and negative mind states. The following quote helped me understand my own proclivity to attach to anger in certain situations:

"There is an addictive and powerful pleasure associated with the expression of anger. And we don't want to let go of what we enjoy. However, there is also a danger in anger, a consequence that outweighs any pleasure. If we would keep in mind the danger, then we would be willing to let anger go."

The book closes with a summary of the previous chapters' advice and encouragement to continue practicing kindfulness for the benefit oneself and of all sentient beings.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I wasn't sure what to expect before reading it, but I found it to be one of the better dharma books that I have read in the past few years. The advice is easy to understand because of Brahm's clear, concise writing style. I would definitely recommend this book to others, regardless of their previous experience with meditation or the concept of mindfulness.

4/5 stars. 184 pages.

Book Review - Virtually Human

The times they are a-changin'. Advances in technology have brought us the Internet, smartphones, the sharing economy, cryptocurrencies, and automation. Every day, people all around the world are uploading their thoughts, memories, preferences, beliefs, and history to social media websites, essentially creating "mindfiles" of themselves. Software engineers across the globe are working to create "mindware" that will combine this mindfile data with humanlike consciousnesses in computer software to create "cyberconsciousness". Within the next few decades, the combination of mindfiles and mindware will result in something called "mindclones", which will essentially be an extension of our own human consciousnesses. That is the premise of Virtually Human: The Promise—and the Peril—of Digital Immortality, and Martine Rothblatt goes into great detail about the societal implications of this technological innovation.

This is the sort of book that needs to be read multiple times to fully comprehend. I would definitely recommend it to others, but would caution them that it can be a bit slow to get into. For the first third of the book, I just wasn't hooked. But things definitely picked up and I became really interested in the discussion. It seems like Rothblatt has a deep understanding of where things are headed in the future, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence. Her arguments are well thought-out and thoroughly-researched, and definitely worth considering. If you have any interest in the concept of extending our consciousness past physical bodies and into the realm of computers, this is a must read.

4/5 stars. 350 pages.

Book Review - Bhagavadgita

The Bhagavad Gita is a traditional Hindu scripture that is part of the epic Mahabharata. It is essentially a dialogue between a prince named Arjuna and his guide, Lord Krishna. It takes place right before a battle in a war between families that Arjuna is expected to fight. The text introduces many concepts in Hinduism, including dharma, yoga, bhakti, karma, and more.

I really wanted to like this book. Having purchased it over ten years ago, going into reading it with the knowledge that it is one of the most important Hindu texts, and listening to people like Duncan Trussell quote it and explain it in his podcast built it up in my mind, but ultimately, this was a tough read for me and I didn't get much out of it. That's likely due to the fact that I didn't understand most of it.

I'm going to go ahead and blame my experience with this text on the edition that I read, rather than on the text itself. Fear not, I plan to read a few alternative versions of the Bhagavad Gita over the next several years. I already have several in mind, but if you have any that you would recommend, please let me know!

2/5 stars. 97 pages.