The Wisdom of Insecurity

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Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, Watts had the rare gift of ‘writing beautifully the unwritable.’”— Los Angeles Times We must simply stop looking at pain and pleasure as negative or positive emotions and understand that both are a necessary part of life. We should move towards a perspective where we do not worry about avoiding the pain. 4. Living In the Present To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam. Leadership Journeys [129] – Moiz Arsiwala –“Don’t overthink, just take micro steps and trust the process”

Indeed, one of the highest pleasures is to be more or less unconscious of one’s own existence, to be absorbed in interesting sights, sounds, places, and people. Conversely, one of the greatest pains is to be self-conscious, to feel unabsorbed and cut off from the community and the surrounding world.”Change, Watts proclaims in his next chapter, is an unchanging reality of life. Everything changes and “when we fail to see that our life is change, we set ourselves against ourselves and become like the Ouroboros” (43). Watts argues that words cannot capture reality, but are only symbols representing parts of the infinitely complex, interconnected universe. He takes time to explore the inadequacy of both science and religion in grasping reality through defining it--a slippery and unsatisfying pursuit. So, what is reality? It is “this ultimate something which cannot be defined or fixed [and] can be represented by the word God” (55). We have made a problem for ourselves by confusing the intelligible with the fixed. We think that making sense out of life is impossible unless the flow of events can somehow be fitted into a framework of rigid forms. To be meaningful, life must be understandable in terms of fixed ideas and laws, and these in turn must correspond to unchanging and eternal realities behind the shifting scene. But if this what "making sense out of life" means, we have set ourselves the impossible task of making fixity out of flux.” He who thinks that God is not comprehended, by him God is comprehended; but he who thinks that God is comprehended knows him not. God is unknown to those who know him, and is known to those who do not know him at all.” Everyone wants to lead a happy and fulfilled life. At the same time, no one wants to experience tribulations. They spend their lives worrying about how to make it all easy and make the pain go away. Despite some opinions to the contrary, this is still the general view of science. In literary and religious circles it is now often supposed that the conflict between science and belief is a thing of the past. There are even some rather wishful scientists who feel that when modern physics abandoned a crude atomistic materialism, the chief reasons for this conflict were removed. But this is not at all the case. In most of our great centers of learning, those who make it their business to study the full implications of science and its methods are as far as ever from what they understand as a religious point of view.

The third explanation is that the ideas do work, and they can be employed readily, but we don’t want to use them. That is, our evolutionary psychological design which was undermining our happiness earlier, is now undermining our attempts to rid the problems of happiness. That, despite our protests, what we are really motivated to act on isn’t happiness maximization, but a blind, Sisyphean quest for greater evolutionary fitness. But, Is It True? Alan W. Watts’s “message for an age of anxiety” is as powerful today as it was when this modern classic was first published. This insight is may seem like a technicality, until it is applied to some of the concepts we believe are central such as time and the self. Insight #2: Time is an Abstraction

Why Isn’t This Approach More Widespread?

Leadership Journeys [125] – Abhinav & Raghav Aggarwal –“You are the sum of all the things you do daily” Insightful and entertaining essays spanning 40 years of lectures by Alan Watts on Zen, Taoism, psychedelics, and comparative philosophy. If you can learn to process the painful parts asjust one half of the whole thing, you’ll learn to see these emotions as temporary and that both are a necessary part of life. As Watt’s explains, “Part of man’s frustration is that he has become accustomed to expert language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be ‘intelligible’ in this sense is to want it to be something other than life.”

There is no experiencer, only experience. Building on the abstraction of time, the abstraction of the self is also only present as an extrapolation into your memories of the past. Something appears to be consistent amongst all my memories, so that must be “me”!

What is it All About?

While this puts Watts’ on better grounds for arguing the truth of this approach, I’m not convinced it creates entirely separate magisteria, cutting off the possibility of scientific investigation into any of these approaches. In particular, Watts’ ideas inevitably make specific claims about cognitive science and how our brains must work. This occurs because we believe that there exists a separate experiencer in addition to our experiences that persists through time. No such experiencer exists as anything other than an abstract concept. We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.” I love this book. Im glad I added it to my collection. It's a book that can be reread multiple times. It's definitely a mind blower. The perspective of Alan is very intense for someone who isn't used to seeing things differently than what we've been taught, especially in the Western Culture. Even if you were to take the less extreme position that, perhaps, we desire happiness in addition to some non-subjective things, it appears we often don’t even do that, failing to maximize our happiness even when there is no appreciable benefit to any other purpose we might have.

All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. What science has said, in sum, is this: We do not, and in all probability cannot, know whether God exists. Nothing that we do know suggests that he does, and all the arguments which claim to prove his existence are found to be without logical meaning. There is nothing, indeed, to prove that there is no God, but the burden of proof rests with those who propose the idea. If, the scientists would say, you believe in God, you must do so on purely emotional grounds, without basis in logic or fact. Practically speaking, this may amount to atheism. Theoretically, it is simple agnosticism. For it is of the essence of scientific honesty that you do not pretend to know what you do not know, and of the essence of scientific method that you do not employ hypotheses which cannot be tested. In The Book,Alan Watts provides us with a much-needed answer to the problem of personal identity, distilling and adapting the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta. There are, then, two ways of understanding an experience. The first is to compare it with the memories of other experiences, and so to name and define it. This is to interpret it in accordance with the dead and the past. The second is to be aware of it as it is, as when, in the intensity of joy, we forget past and future, let the present be all, and thus do not even stop to think, “I am happy.” It is essential to realize that pain and pleasure are two sides of the same coin. Without experiencing the painful moments of life and without facing tribulations, one cannot truly savour the satisfaction of happy times. Similarly, experiencing happiness gives us the motivation to go through the painful times in life, because we know that there will be joy ahead.But…those things cost money. Ugh! But maybe if you put your head down, work hard and impress your boss, you’ll get the promotion next time, and then you can buy even nicer clothes, eat even fancier dinners and go to even more expensive clubs! In the meantime, why not just get some credit to pay for all this stuff? To be aware of reality, of the living present, is to discover that each moment the experience is all. There is nothing else beside it--no experience of ‘you’ experiencing the experience” (89). Once there is the suspicion that a religion is a myth, its power has gone. It may be necessary for man to have a myth, but he cannot self-consciously prescribe one as he can mix a pill for a headache. A myth can only "work" when it is thought to be truth, and man cannot for long knowingly and intentionally "kid" himself.