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Friday, October 2, 2015

Alan Watts, Nature,Man and Woman: the laughter of the universe (Dante on the song of the angels in heaven)

"Furthermore, it is always possible to argue not that we are conditioned by the past,
but that we use the past to condition ourselves in the present,
and for reasons that are not historical but deeply inward and unknown.

For example,a physiologist does not ned to call upon the whole history of
living creatures to explain why a person is hungry. He explains it from the present state of the organism."


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Strictly speaking, it is not quite true that one must wait for something to happen spontaneously.
For the heart is beating, the breath is moving, and all the senses are perceiving. A whole world of
experience is coming to the organism of itself, without the slightest forcing.
This spontaneous arrival of experience is not actually passive;
it is already spontaneous action.
When it is watched and felt to be action in this sense, it flows naturally into further action.
But blocking takes place if this action is ignored and its apparent passivity interpreted as
"nothing happening."
It is true that it may not be what was expected to happen, but then the expected is
always liable to be forced rather than the spontaneous. The constant action of
spontaneous experiencing which, considered as an act, is the organism's creation of
the world and the world's creation of the organism,
is the basis and style of action from which love and expressions arise.
In this open and ungrasping mode of awareness the beloved, the other,
is not possessed but is rather received into oneself
with all the richness and splendour of the unpremeditated surprise.

In almost every culture love is an intimacy between two particular people
in which conventions that govern other relationships are set aside.
In this respect it already suggests, even if only symbolically, the sacred
rather than the profane, and the lover's removal of clothes in another's presence
is already a sign of taking off the personal mask and stepping out of role.
Only a society which is seriously ignorant of he sacred could regard the taboo,
the secrecy of love, as a cloak hiding an unfortunate but necessary reversion to animality."

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etc....

remark:
i feel sad that i should want to read this book though i couldn't agree more.
it is not reading books what i would like to experience at all.
but to be basic and simple and spontaneous alone is not the same 
as finding it for two to be like that together.
though exactly this spontaneous experience was how it all started
and which gave me hope and longing for more of it.
and i have never seen all this any different way at all.
there are so many ways of being blocked and to block each other 
from this for two persons that it can be near to impossible 
to feel well together.
i don't want to read. I don't want to write.



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