(This is the working draft of my first book, which is currently half-finished. I will be releasing a certain amount of it here on Steemit for you all to read, critique, and hopefully enjoy. If these posts become successful enough, I just may be able to buy the latitude to finish it.)
This Won't Hurt a Bit
How Modern Myths Have Anaesthetized Us to Our Own Destruction
by Seven
Dedication
This book is for those who are intelligent enough to marvel at the stupid things they say and do. This book is for those who want to live a better life. This book is for those who are dissatisfied with the wide disparity between the world as it is and the world as it could be. This book is for those who want to leave the world a better place than they found it. This book is for those who don’t want their children to inherit a world that is an unhealthy and unhappy place in which to live. This book is for those who realize that there is no longer any excuse whatsoever for any member of the human race to live in poverty and misery. This book is for those who realize that there is no longer any excuse whatsoever for one human being to coerce another into submission by violent means. This book is for those who realize that the human race has some serious growing-up to do, and very little time left in which to do it.
Ultimately, this book is for you, because, as Jiddu Krishnamurti pointed out:
“You must understand it, go into it, examine it, and give your heart and your mind, with everything that you have, to find out a way of living differently. That depends on you, and not on someone else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything.”
And so I can only say to you:
Namasté!
FOOTNOTES?
I have no patience for footnotes or bibliographical references; in fact, I hold them in contempt. As explanation I offer you the words of Alan Watts:
“Notice this! That to be an authority today in the academic world depends on documentation. It is not enough to say, ‘For I say unto you...’; you must put in your footnotes. And the more the footnotes, the more the authority, obviously. So our dissertations tend to be books about books about books about books, and our libraries multiply by mitosis.
So when somebody speaks ‘as an authority’, that means speaks as the author; that’s all it means. It’s a statement of which you are the author and therefore for which you assume responsibility. That is to speak with authority. And to be ‘original’, likewise, is not to be freaky, but to speak from the origin.”
Surely you have not picked up this book just to hear a regurgitation of the same ideas and the same information that has already been written by other people. Presumably you are reading this book because you’re curious as to whether I have anything new and interesting to say.
I feel that I do. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have bothered to write it.
Now, I want to make it clear that I’m well aware of the impossibility of being truly original, in the purest sense, on a planet of nearly seven billion people, with a written history that extends five thousand years or more into the past. As proof, I’ll admit that for the meaning of this very paragraph I can readily summon to mind three relevant quotations:
“There are more things in heaven and earth... than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (William Shakespeare)
“There is no new thing under the Sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” (Isaac Newton)
It would be disingenuous of me either to claim absolute uniqueness or to disclaim the influence of others’ ideas. Still, as far as is possible, I intend to speak with authority, as the author of this book. Its origin is in me; it is an original work.
INTRODUCTION
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT LIES, and the truth that is lied about, and why the difference between the two is important to all of us. It is not for the weak of mind nor the faint of heart.
This book is meant to challenge you, to encourage you to re-think what you think you know. It is not meant to leave you with the feeling of having learned something new; instead I hope to inspire in you a deep doubt about what you have already learned.
Doubt and uncertainty are not popular feelings in our modern world. We tend to think of ourselves as the ever-evolving product of continual forward progress, especially in the pursuit of knowledge, and our ego discourages us from questioning this idea. It is both comforting and empowering to think that we know all that can be known, or at least all that can be known for now -- until Science announces the next Conclusively Proven Fact. We admire the resolute and determined, the “man of action” who has no doubts and moves with confidence and surety. And we are so discomfited by what we don’t know that we often refuse to admit any lack of knowledge even to ourselves. If you doubt that, think for a moment about the difference between knowing and believing. You can believe anything, no matter how absurd, but you can’t be said to know something unless it is true. Our instinctive fear of the unknown prompts us to paper over the holes in our reality map with beliefs, so we can pretend that there aren’t any.
But not-knowing is a reality; it is an inescapable part of life and to achieve true maturity we must come to terms with it. We must accept the alternative to easy reliance on dogma and routine, which assume complete certainty. That alternative is constant awareness -- including awareness of the real limits of our knowledge. Constant awareness requires constant effort, a continuous expenditure of energy, and that is one of the reasons we avoid it. But I think we will suffer less from that expenditure than we are suffering now for our mental laziness.
All of the wise men and mystics throughout history have told us that attaining wisdom is not a process of learning, but of unlearning. If only we can rid ourselves of all the false ideas that we hold, clear perception of reality -- truth -- will come as naturally as breathing. Even if we never reach perfection in this practice, even if we never manage to recognize and remove all false ideas from our minds, we will still benefit from the pursuit of that goal. You only have to look at the world around you to observe the consequences of lies and misinformation. We can do better. And, considering the crises we face, I think we must do better. It is time to stop accepting lies, even from ourselves, and to live according to the truth left in their absence.