## Metadata - Author: [[Martine Batchelor, Stephen Batchelor]] - Full Title: What Is This? - Category: #books ## Highlights - I don’t think it’s just a western problem that we spend so much time living in our heads. It seems to be a feature of being human. Otherwise, back in seventh century China teachers would not have placed so much emphasis on embodiment. There would have been no need to do this if people didn’t feel themselves to be in some way disembodied. So we’re not just engaging in a practice that might serve as a valuable corrective to our cerebral modern culture. We’re coming to terms with a far broader human tendency to be disembodied, which has probably been the case at all periods in history. Even in fifth century BCE India Gotama says, ‘Go to a forest, sit at the root of a tree, pay attention to your breathing’. He presumably gave this instruction because even then people felt cut off from nature, trees, and their breath. Otherwise, why would he have said it? ([Location 675](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07SBK7XQG&location=675)) - Heidegger too placed great emphasis on this kind of questioning. For him, such questioning was not just an intellectual activity that went on in the head. At the very end of his essay on technology he says: ‘Questioning is the piety of thinking’ – die Frömmigkeit des Denkens.16 Yes, piety – there’s something almost religious (in the best sense of the word) about this questioning. There’s a humility. There’s a kind of awe, wonder. A sense of uncanniness. A sort of reverence. ([Location 685](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07SBK7XQG&location=685)) - Simply because we’re human there are certain things that we just aren’t going to know. It’s not because we are stupid. It’s simply the way we are built. This, to me, suggests the need for humility. To acknowledge and cultivate unknowing and questioning is very much about being open to the fact that the world is profoundly mysterious and strange. But that’s something that our ego resists and ignores. I suspect this habit must have conferred survival advantages in our ancestral past. After all, it’s not much help in the struggle for survival on the African savannah to sit cross-legged on the ground and declare to one’s fellow tribe members, ‘Shit, this is weird – I haven’t got a clue who I am or what’s happening’. ([Location 1322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07SBK7XQG&location=1322)) - such convictions can function as anaesthetics. I’m taking that word very literally: ‘an-aesthetic’. Rather than enhancing our aesthetic appreciation of the world, our knowledge and certainties function as anaesthetics. They dull us, they numb us. They might, of course, give us advantages in our work and career, but – as a side effect – they are an-aesthetic. They render the rest of the world flat, opaque, uninteresting, boring. ([Location 1342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07SBK7XQG&location=1342)) - We find ourselves in a still, clear, open space of awareness. This stopping of reactivity allows us to glimpse what it’s like not to be caught up in those familiar patterns at all. These moments of stillness, of deep peace, are glimpses of nirvana itself: a state of presence that is not conditioned by the habits of reactivity. They may not last very long, but I think it’s very important to consciously affirm and valorise them. And not just by making a mental note, but by exploring what it feels like in your body not to be reactive. Try and taste and enjoy the very flavour of this way of being. ([Location 1802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07SBK7XQG&location=1802))