The Book_ On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are - Alan Watts [54]
This mysterious something has been called God, the Absolute, Nature, Substance, Energy, Space, Ether, Mind, Being, the Void, the Infinite—names and ideas which shift in popularity and respectability with the winds of intellectual fashion, of considering the universe intelligent or stupid, superhuman or subhuman, specific or vague. All of them might be dismissed as nonsense-noises if the notion of an underlying Ground of Being were no more than a product of intellectual speculation. But these names are often used to designate the content of a vivid and almost sensorily concrete experience—the "unitive"
experience of the mystic, which, with secondary variations, is found in almost all cultures at all times. This experience is the transformed sense of self which I was discussing in the previous chapter, though in
"naturalistic" terms, purified of all hocus-pocus about mind, soul, spirit, and other intellectually gaseous words.
Despite the universality of this experience and the impressive regularity with which it is described in the same general way,(2) tough-minded types regard it as a commonly recurring hallucination with characteristic symptoms, like paranoia, which adds nothing to our information about the physical universe. Just as we cannot say anything about everything, so, they argue, one cannot feel or experience anything about everything. For all our senses are selective. We experience by contrast just as we think by contrast. To experience something underlying all experiences would thus be like seeing sight itself, as something common to everything seen. In terms of what color, what shape—other than all mutually contrasting colors and shapes—could we see sight itself?
Yet metaphysics, like philosophy as a whole, is not something which can simply be cured or abandoned, as if it were an intellectual disease.
The most antimetaphysical philosophers have, in fact, a tacit metaphysics of their own, which lurks behind the assertion that all experience and all knowledge must be of classes, and of contrasts and comparisons between them. To put it in the simplest way, they will allow that I can know and speak sensibly about something white, since I know white by contrast with black, and by comparison with red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. They will allow meaningful statements about dogs and cats, because they are organic as distinct from inorganic, mammals as distinct from marsupials, and, though frisky, have clearly defined boundaries which demark them from the whole world of non-dogs and non-cats.
But the underlying assumption, that all knowledge is in terms of constrasts, is as metaphysical as an assumption can be. Put it in another way. "All knowledge is a recognition of the mutual relations between sense-experiences and/or things and events." This comes perilously close to being a meaningful statement about everything. "All things are known by their differences from and likenesses to each other." Backed up into this position, the antimetaphysician can be carried, albeit with screams of protest, to an even deeper metaphysical level.
Grant that the statement "Everything is energy" conveys no more information than "Everything is everything." To describe energy, I must differentiate it from non-energy, or from mass, and thus if "everything"
is to include non-energy—mass, space, or whatever—it will not only be uninformative but also nonsense to say that everything is energy. If, then, we are going to insist that energy can be known and described only by contrast with non-energy, this is virtually the same as saying that energy