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It's a pen name, the author was living in Ireland when all those books were written.
Wei Wu Wei is an exponent of Advaita Vedanta...Advaita is a sanskrit word meaning 'There are not two', and most advaita texts would hope to inform you that all prescriptions to relieve the drama of separation actually serve only to reinforce it.
Advaita teachings suggest that thought is, by its nature, reflective and seperative, roughly meaning that with every thought that occurs within consciousness, a symbiotic, reflective thought also arises, and almost perfectly disguises itself as a 'thinker'...this process can continue infinitely...try it out, now....
As you think, wonder who is doing the thinking - ah!but who is wondering?...the problem now is you are two...the thought, and the thought about the thought, which almost immediately leads to the same question again 'who is this thinking', and again, who's asking, and so on, iterative seperation, thoughts dividing like yeast...The important thing to grasp is that the continuity you feel exists between these thoughts which are attached to other thoughts and disguised as a thinker, is illusory. But it is this illusion of coninuity which gives rise to your feeling of being a time-bound individual, when all there is is consciousness, playing a game of hide and seek with itself, for there is only it, one thing arising always and already - and you are that YOU ARE, just as I am that I AM.
That is, there never was, or ever will be, a 'thinker'...there is only thought, and thought about thought, arising on the 'screen' of consciousness, and dying...which spins the whole notion of 'reincarnation' in an interesting light, because it literally means that 'you' are born and die with every thought arising and passing...
The thought structure is, usefully (for avoiding sabre tooth tigers, hunting mammoths and collecting shoots and tubers at least), adamant that it retains control at all costs and so weaves the *almost* impenetrable illusion of continuity and permanence, and infects every thought with a desire for exactly that - permanence...pleasure eternal, wihtout a moment of pain...the problem being that the body cannot withstand anything of too much duration, pleasure in such degree would destroy it, and so we eventually arrive at the modern condition where the organism has drifted so far from its innate intelligence inn servitude to a degenerate and false/illusory thinking mechanism which was conjured as its servant but has taken over the house.
It's a flip/reverse on traditional vanilla religious wisdom which maintains somehow that our intelligence is the indication of our 'soul' and that we grew a body to house that wonderful gift from God, or whatever/whoever. In contrast Advaita wisdom maintains that the body is pure perfection, and bastly intelligent, but that it developed an intellect which eventually usurped the body and hence the natural functioning of the senses...
Loads of info about Advaita webwide if you're interested...I actually find Wei Wu Wei slightly irritating, to be honest. There are far more direct descriptions of the wisdom available, including the Book of Chuang Tzu (traditional taoist text), and, which I seem to be endlessly plugging here at Barbelith, the recorded dialogues of U G Krishnamurti, who is quite the most crotchety and fantastically subversive enlightened man to have ever had his vitriol recorded in print. Best of all, he completely disparages the notion of copyright (since there is no 'him' to claim ownership of anything anyway), so all his books can be freely downloaded here
Much better than Wei Wu Wei as an introduction to these ideas is Leo Hartong's book Awakening to the Dream and Tony Parson's book The Open Secret
Also Ram Tzu and Nathan Gill, quite a few authors are good at dispelling the apparent difficulty of this subject and bringing clarity to the notions.
The sufi parable that I like most that illustrates this point has the Mullah Nasrudin charging about the market place all flustered on the back of his donkey, panting and sweating. Eventually somebody reins in the animal and asks the Mullah "What on Earth are you getting so flustered about? What are looking for?"
Nasrudin replies "Out of my way! I'm looking for my donkey!" |
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