## Metadata - Author: [[Philip Shepherd]] - Full Title: New Self, New World - Category: #books ## Highlights - A sensibility that is not whole cannot detect wholeness—and so has no reason even to believe wholeness exists in any meaningful way. ([Location 309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=309)) - Our culture likes to take a superior stance when it comes to myth. In fact, when we call something a myth, we are calling it a lie; a mythomaniac is not someone who has a mania for myths, but a chronic liar. We depict myths as harmless cartoons or view them as superstitious carryovers from our distant past—naive explanations of natural phenomena. ([Location 322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=322)) - The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed. Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I’m willing to let them change me, something happens between us that’s more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues. Like so much of what I learned in the theater, this turned out to be how life works, too. ([Location 520](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=520)) - You cannot find presence, freedom or creativity inside a world arrested by description—which is also to say you cannot find wholeness there—because any such world is a mere duplicate that has severed ties with the world it purports to represent. ([Location 525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=525)) - But we should also be aware that to designate the significance of the world’s phenomena is to flatten them into signs—and although the origin of those three words is uncertain, the great linguist and etymologist Ernest Klein suggests that they, and their ally assign, are all related to the Latin word secare, “to cut.” And indeed, when we assign meaning, we create a kind of sign for ourselves that is independent, cut away from the flux of the present. In the way a theater flat might be painted to represent a forest, our knowledge of the world flattens it into a duplicate. ([Location 543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=543)) - As the title of a book by Lawrence Weschler puts it, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. Like real listening, ‘seeing’ the present requires a willingness to be changed by it, and static knowledge forestalls the need for real seeing ([Location 550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=550)) - Labels, static knowledge, foregone meaning—they are all means of convenience that effectively sidestep Being. They dismiss it. And as long as the male element remains independent of the female, its primary relationship will be with its own knowledge rather than with Being. Indeed, willful doing invariably expresses such knowledge: it expresses our known relationship to the world, our assessment of its available resources, our formulation for making those resources conform to our wishes—and it expresses, above all, how we want to be known by ourselves and the world. Willful doing is created by knowledge. ([Location 558](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=558)) - It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings” … The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. ([Location 570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=570)) - To interpret a phenomenon or assign meaning to it is in a sense to solve it and thereby conquer it. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, though, reminded us that life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be experienced. ([Location 573](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=573)) - To solve the ‘problem of the self’ is to arrive at a static idea of the self—a duplicate that we use to define and identify ourselves. To the extent that we identify with that duplicate, our identity is mistaken. And in that our mistaken identity takes us out of relationship with the world, it leaves us incapable of coming into harmony with it. ([Location 591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=591)) - The source of that confusion—our mistaken identity—will maintain its hold on us, supported by our culture’s story in countless directives every day, until we can hold it to account. As a first step, we might haul it into the light and name it. If we were to call it the ‘known self’, we would remind ourselves that it is based on the presumptions of static knowledge: our duplicates. ([Location 595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=595)) - In order to be present you have to appreciate that the present is an unknown—it has never been here before, and neither have you. ([Location 610](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=610)) - If the self is to be present—fully responsive to and participant in the here and now—then it too must remain untethered by objective knowledge. ([Location 612](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=612)) - It’s one thing to admit that the present is an unknown—but to allow that the self is an unknown is a bit of a kicker. We depend on our solution of the self to solve the problems of our living—and so we carry that solution around with us, like a framed picture. ([Location 615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=615)) - You cannot breathe twice into the same body, but you can breathe twice into the same ‘known self’. The more you protect the idea of ‘who you know yourself to be’, the more it ossifies; and you accept that ossification because it seems to offer a sort of reliability. ([Location 622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=622)) - When we become defensive in social situations, that’s exactly what is happening—we are defending ‘who we know ourselves to be’ from the implications of a present event. When our self-definition is under attack, we feel we are under attack. We confuse the two. And because they become confused, we feel that when we protect the definition, we are protecting the self. ([Location 624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=624)) - For an analogy we might look to skiing or snowboarding: when you stand as a beginner on the hill, feet clamped onto a slick board or two slippery sticks that threaten to speed down the slope, carrying you with them, the natural instinct is to try to assert control by leaning back into the hill. In fact, and contrary to intuition, you learn that only by leaning forward can you achieve stability—and only stability provides choice. ([Location 653](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=653)) - Only by leaning down the hill can you ride it freely. In the same way, and it is equally counterintuitive, stability and choice in life can only be learned by giving yourself over to the world as it is, unknown and on the move, and finding your ease within its flux. ([Location 659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=659)) - And, certainly, to stray from the ‘known self’ is as counterintuitive as leaning towards the trees you wish to avoid on your runaway snowboard. As it turns out, it is also as necessary. Just as the snowboard won’t otherwise move into a turn, so too you cannot otherwise move into the world. And to move into the world is also to move into your true self—as opposed to the duplicate self that your culture instructs you to secure. ([Location 664](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=664)) - self-knowing is a moment-by-moment revelation of the harmonizing energies of the world to which you belong. ([Location 676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=676)) - you can either be ‘who you know yourself to be’, or you can be present. One or the other. Not both. ([Location 677](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=677)) - the hero within each of us is nurtured by our willingness to step beyond definition (“away with all duplicates”) and into the surrender of a direct, unmediated encounter with Being. Furthermore, the ‘known self’ is a tool of the male element of doing: it is a construct of ideas and instructions that is intended to guide what we do and how we do it in our everyday lives; and in that it is deliberately a duplicate, it is deliberately disconnected from the living guidance of ‘what is’. That state of disconnection is also, tellingly, the primary characteristic of the mythological tyrant. ([Location 679](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=679)) - The tyrannical independence made possible by wealth has as its prime goal the avoidance of transformation, the maintenance of the status quo of our mistaken identity. ([Location 736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=736)) - Egregious wealth, let us be clear, is a measure of one thing and one thing only: your ability to ride roughshod over the world, oblivious of the inevitable damage your actions leave in their wake. In other words, wealth measures your ability to live irresponsibly. ([Location 738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=738)) - personal wealth can be used to help the world; but experience cautions that even the determination to help out, in the hands of the wealthy, can initiate actions that are callously insensitive to their own consequences. To use the resources of wealth otherwise requires a humility and attentiveness to the world that continuously provoke transformation in us. Either way, though, wealth cannot be seen as a measure of your ability to do good. The true measure of your ability to do good is found only in the openness of your heart and in your soul’s ability to transform—qualities to which personal wealth often makes us feel we should be immune. In the meantime there are people armed with no more than compassion, a sense of justice and an unswerving commitment to ease suffering who have done immeasurable good in conditions of fragile poverty. ([Location 740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=740)) - When we look at atom and individual we find that though their roots come from different languages—Greek and Latin—they mean exactly the same thing, “indivisible.” There is more to this than mere coincidence: we describe the world according to how we experience ourselves. The self and the atom are both classically understood to be ‘stand-alone’ units that interact with other ‘stand-alone’ units. That understanding provides the foundation for the story by which we live—and that makes it all the more difficult for us to recognize that it is entirely a cultural fabrication sustained by mutual agreement. In other societies the idea that each person enjoys a sort of independent existence is quite alien. ([Location 803](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=803)) - Once we appreciate that we have placed the head in hierarchical supremacy over the body, we can begin to appreciate that relationship as the prototype for all other hierarchies we create. ([Location 1076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=1076)) - The idea that we are part of and sustained by an all-aware, dynamic whole has existed in many forms; it is often referred to as the Perennial Philosophy. Traditionally, that whole is understood to be hidden at all times, yet manifest in all things. The ancient Greeks called that whole the Logos; Lao-tzu famously referred to it as the Tao. Indigenous North American nations knew it as the Great Spirit, and Australian Aborigines as the Divine Oneness. It has also been called the Great Mother, Christ Consciousness, Buddha Consciousness, the One Mind, or God. As architect Christopher Alexander observed, God, described by one word or another, is a way of understanding that we are part of an unbroken whole. ([Location 1111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=1111)) - When we think, for example, we can do it more effectively if we shut out the world, and sometimes if we can’t shut out the world, it impairs our thinking—all of which seems to confirm that our thinking is independent from the world around us. ([Location 1121](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=1121)) - Heraclitus put his finger on the difference between those opposites when he observed that when we are awake, we all share the same world; in sleep, each of us withdraws to a world of our own: a dreamscape that only we inhabit. To be spiritually awake is to join the rocks, the trees, the butterflies, the bees, the birds, the animals, all beings. ([Location 1171](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=1171)) - In effect, we have created a catch-22 for ourselves: until we can experience the body’s intelligence, we won’t be able to identify with the body; but until we can identify with the body, we won’t be able to feel its intelligence. ([Location 1697](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=1697)) - Abandoning all expectations and simply paying attention to the body can be a revelation: so many currents and incipient forms and impulses of energy blossom within it and move and fade—like particles in a cloud chamber—and each minute stirring is part of the felt self; it belongs to our wholeness and reveals it. ([Location 1737](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=1737)) - The rupture between thinking and Being is the primary wound of our culture: it segregates the poles of our consciousness and marries us to the male aspect; it foments division and conflict and hierarchies in our lives and businesses and governments; it impairs our relationship to our own community; it skews how we see our natural environment and what we expect from it; and it makes palatable certain forms of entertainment we would otherwise find woefully inadequate. In short, that rupture causes us to organize, partition and supervise the embodied corridor, rather than live its receptivity to ‘what is’. If we wish to heal that wound in ourselves and in our culture, we literally have to embark on the hero’s journey, which overthrows the tyrant, discovers the embodied axis mundi within, journeys to the pole of female being and grounds us in it. ([Location 1770](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=1770)) - If we can broadly understand patriarchy to be “rule by the male element,” then such a reality-obscuring allegiance to ideas is the essence and the defining trait of patriarchy everywhere, and on every level—from the patriarchy that lives in the self to one that possesses whole societies. The more passionately we feel our ideas, the more deeply patriarchy runs within us and the less access we have—or permit ourselves—to the guidance of the living present. ([Location 1953](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=1953)) - any emotional attachment to idea that eclipses the present will institute an inner patriarchy. ([Location 1958](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004ZZN01W&location=1958))