## Highlights God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear. "Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hpg5had69vvnyreq8wn7b9fx)) - 💭 the reason why this higher power doesn't choose to just be the traditional higher power, because he needs the cyclical yin and yang contrast to be who he is Vedanta is the teaching of the *Upanishads,* a collection of dialogues, stories, and poems, some of which go back to at least 800 B.C. Sophisticated Hindus do not think of God as a special and separate superperson who *rules* the world from above, like a monarch. Their God is "underneath" rather than "above" ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hpg5shtajbfzytdt8vnbq9bp)) ### New highlights added February 23, 2024 at 10:56 AM The cat wasn't born as a head which, sometime later, caused a tail; it was born all of a piece, a head-tailed cat. Our observer's trouble was that he was watching it through a narrow slit, and couldn't see the whole cat at once. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hqbfyskn1peyea519w2fh1pe)) - 💭 sometimes cause an effect is just part of a larger entity but we do not notice because we are not zoomed out enough But there are two ignored factors which can very well come into our awareness, and our ignorance of them is the mainstay of the ego-illusion and of the failure to know that we are each the one Self in disguise. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hqbgbqs0p5az82rrq76v1w0x)) - 💭 not zooming out and duality For our own gynecologists have recently discovered that many women can be conditioned psychologically for natural and painless childbirth. The pains of labor are renamed "tensions", and the mother-to-be is given preparatory exercises in relaxing to tension and cooperating with it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hqbgpj7xvfyf4qdw5014ct5q)) death as such is not a sickness at all. It is the natural and necessary end of human life—as natural as leaves falling in the autumn. (Perpetual leaves are, as we know, made of plastic, and there may come a time when surgeons will be able to replace all our organs with plastic substitutes, so that you will achieve immortality by becoming a plastic model of yourself.) Physicians should therefore explore the possibility of treating death and its pangs as they have treated labor and its "pains." ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hqbgp1qvxjn7rhaa52htr1sj)) ### New highlights added April 9, 2024 at 12:07 AM The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected—and by physical relations of fascinating complexity. The death of the individual is not disconnection but simply withdrawal. The corpse is like a footprint or an echo—the dissolving trace of something which the Self has ceased to do. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv0pa5xay7ssjs19c90gtdzh)) Thus bamboozled, the individual—instead of fulfilling his unique function in the world—is exhausted and frustrated in efforts to accomplish, self-contradictory goals. Because he is now so largely defined as a separate person caught up in a mindless and alien universe, his principal task is to get one-up on the universe and to conquer nature. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv0phvpr8vcsfgf341tf61rg)) - 💭 a form of self deception There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv0pjfy4r1gzqkvddh736vdn)) - 💭 why doing comes after the being In other words, you have been hypnotized or conditioned by an educational processing-system arranged in grades or steps, supposedly leading to some ultimate Success. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv0pnkadt2vyznregvteyhcq)) - 💭 bookmark complete progression of constant temporary milestones engrained in human life All this might have been wonderful if, at every stage, you had been able to play it as a game, finding your work as fascinating as poker, chess, or fishing. But for most of us the day is divided into work-time and play-time, the work consisting largely of tasks which others pay us to do because they are abysmally uninteresting. We therefore work, not for the work's sake, but for money—and money is supposed to get us what we really want in our hours of leisure and play. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv0pr62mkvw3xw169hr3hk3n)) The explanation is simple: most of our products are being made by people who do not enjoy making them, whether as owners or workers. Their aim in the enterprise is not the product but money, and therefore every trick is used to cut the cost of production and hoodwink the buyer, by coloring and packaging chicanery, into the belief that the product is well and truly made. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv0px48jdm6c4v3x5pp5ernc)) - 💭 this is also the key for content. this is the basis of passion and enthusiasm. this is why there was life in Obsidian Flight School. But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship on the hypothesis of a *future* reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts—based on the realization that the only real "I" is the whole endless process. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv0q27mcnx1w92j8t07dqk02)) - 💭 withdrawal sounds like neet or online degen culture stewardship sounds like hustle the middle is just to be present? ### New highlights added April 11, 2024 at 2:47 PM To sum up: just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own. Furthermore, every organism is a process: thus the organism is not other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does. More precisely, the organism, including its behavior, is a process which is to be understood only in relation to the larger and longer process of its environment. For what we mean by "understanding" or "comprehension" is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don't *compose* the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which *has* no separate parts. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv7f3hz0zsbs3yb4mpv8xtyq)) The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights, international peace, population control, conservation of natural resources, and assistance to the starving of the earth—urgent as they are—will destroy rather than help if made in the present spirit. For, as things stand, we have nothing to give. If our own riches and our own way of life are not enjoyed here, they will not be enjoyed anywhere else. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv7ftg4epnae32k7v70aj5q0)) when you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually *feel* yourself *as* the whole process and pattern of life. Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv7gcd6ftts4cpw7bwcq4qnz)) A Chinese philosophical work called *The Secret of the Golden* *Flower* says that "when purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped." For a society surviving to no purpose is one that makes no provision for purposeless behavior— that is, for actions not directly aimed at survival, which fulfill themselves in being done in the present and do not necessarily imply some future reward. But indirectly and unintentionally, such behavior is useful for survival because it gives a point to surviving—not, however, when pursued for that reason. To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv7gnqgbhx80h5bskp7tehm1)) It must be lived in the spirit of play rather than work, and the conflicts which it involves must be carried on in the realization that no species, or party to a game, can survive without its natural antagonists, its beloved enemies, its indispensable opponents. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv7h578e0smdp8w650ktceyq)) Whatever may be true for the Chinese and the Hindus, it is timely for *us* to recognize that the future is an ever-retreating mirage, and to switch our immense energy and technical skill to contemplation instead of action. However much we may now disagree with Aristotle's logic and his metaphors, he must still be respected for reminding us that the goal of action is always contemplation—knowing and being rather than seeking and becoming. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv7h8k8tn7r80p8jk3t02pbx)) As it is, we are merely bolting our lives—gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in—because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv7hap11n1xnvh6309rmhsrx)) unless you read Saint Thomas Aquinas or Martin Buber or Paul Tillich, and realize that you can be a devout Jew or Christian without having to believe, literally, in the Cosmic Male Parent. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv7j1m745bq2eh7ez7e2crcz)) - 💭 further reading? ### New highlights added April 11, 2024 at 3:44 PM In knowing the world we humanize it, and if, as we discover it, we are astonished at its dimensions and its complexity, we should be just as astonished that we have the brains to perceive it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv7j74k0vh8tnaeffb1ckwpt)) - 💭 reflecting awe of the universe back at yourself In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself—through our eyes and IT's. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv7jnpxn2vtg0cn097m0ygmc)) - 💭 similar to the egg THE BOOKS These are books which, from many differing points of view, bear upon and expand the themes of *The Book.* ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv7jjd13a7epj5cyhv68yeh9))