Which is Really You, the Finger or the Thumb?

Observe the stages of this differentiation, the levels of abstraction: First, the organism from its environment, and with this knowledge of the environment. Second, the distinction of knowing knowledge from knowledge itself. But in concrete fact all this, like the fingerthumb opposition, is a difference which does not divide. The thumb is not floating in the air alongside the rest of the hand. At their roots both fingers and thumb are joined. And at our roots we are joined to the whole subjec...

 The Stream

What happens with your stream of experience if you realize that no one is in control of it? If you see that it is just going along of itself, unpushed and unpulled? (This is what the Chinese writing on this page means: The Tao, the course of nature, flows of itself.) You can get the feel of it by breathing without doing anything to help your breath along. Let the breath out, and then let it come back by itself, when it feels like it. And then out again when it wants to go out. Keep this up un...

 Every Brain Plays Its Own World

All knowledge, all experience could be said to be a neural situation inside the skull, and the brain is not merely a receiver and recorder of input through the senses: it also has output because the way in which it structures its senses and nerve patterns shapes the input in the same way that a harpist, by selective plucking, brings formal melody out of a row of uniformly scaled and otherwise silent strings. Thus the brain evokes the sensible world by sounding the strings of all those vibrati...

 Rigidness is a Symptom of Death

As Lao-tzu put it two thousand years ago: Man at his birth is supple and tender, but in death he is rigid and hard. Plants when young are sinuous and moist, but when old are brittle and dry. Thus suppleness and tenderness are signs of life, While rigidity and hardness are signs of death.

 Heaven Into the Head, Or Head Into the Heavens

G. K. Chesterton once said that whereas the philosopher tries to get the heavens into his head, the poet asks only to get his head into the heavens. So when one asks, in today’s lingo, “Where’s your head at?” it would be ideal to answer that it’s in heaven. The problem is that most of us now live in cities where the view of heaven is blocked by ceilings and smog. People don’t even realize that every home can be a home with a view—the view of the sky—since we are living on the ...

 Why Are Religious Services Unintelligible?

(4) The Church will expect you to attend at least one of its services regularly, every Sunday, and with very, very few exceptions these are universally abominable. In the first place they consist almost exclusively of talk. We tell God what to do and what not to do, and give him information about things which, if he is omniscient, he already knows. We attempt to celebrate his glory with doggerels and religious nursery rhymes called hymns, mostly set to military or sentimental tunes. And then ...