The Wisdom of Insecurity

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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. Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, Watts had the rare gift of ‘writing beautifully the unwritable.’” 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”!

While Watts’ thoughts seem closer to the mark on actual Eastern religious viewpoints, I think it’s also clear that this isn’t how most of those religions are widely practiced in Asia. Traveling in Asia makes it clear that most Buddhists and Hindus there are engaged in superstitious rituals with a more literal interpretation of scripture than Watts’ winking at the reader suggests. Why Isn’t This Approach More Widespread? What to do, then? Burkeman’s response is the ‘negative path to happiness.’ Using a Chinese finger trap—those cheaply woven bamboo tubes they give away at Jersey Shore boardwalk casinos—as an example, he reminds us that the harder we pull, the more our fingers become trapped. So it goes with our minds. Reality might require the counterintuitive flow of judo at times, but that might only be because we declared that reality operate in our favor in the first place. The happiness problem is similar in that it is caused by unfulfilled desires and fears which pull us away from experiencing the present moment. But the thought, “this living in the present sounds like something I’d like to have, how can I get it?” is just another unfulfilled desire pulling you out of the present, thus a paradox. Leadership Journeys [121] – Sufiyan Sait –“The delta between your expectation and reality is inversely proportional to happiness”I have been taught by the very liberal community in which I have grown up to be skeptical of anything written by a white man in the 1950s and, in general, I think this skepticism is probably warranted. I can imagine the criticism that might develop from reading a book of philosophy that is so secondhand; why not go straight to the source? But we've already covered that I've been feeling pretty shot and my brain is no longer working as well as it once did. I needed the digest version. And if there is anything objectionable (not that I detect anything, but like I said, my brain is shot), some kind of slant or bias in the writing, it doesn't matter much to me, because I've got the ideas and concepts that I need. At the end of the day, the source for these kinds of things doesn't matter much; it's just getting the ideas and running with them.

Given this description of the problem, is it possible to get out of it? The answer, according to Watts’, is yet another seemingly paradoxical yes-and-no situation. 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.” Leadership Journeys [135] – Manish Kumar –“You never get enough time to spend with your loved ones”

While not being all sunshine and rainbows, the strong and indoctrinated morals and beliefs of religion gave people a sense of comfort and fulfillment. Knowing you’re working towards an afterlife in paradise is reassuring and lets you put up with a lotpain. 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. 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.

The reason answering these questions is so hard is that both finding the answers and accepting them leads to a lot of pain. Even if you know you’d like to be a painter, going for it is hard. You won’t conform to other peoples’ expectations of you any more, you might not make a lot of money, maybe you can never even make a full-time living. 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.”

This chase for happiness will never be over. It’s just what society’s trying to sell you, because it still hasn’t managed to come up with a better way of giving you true fulfillment. If you asked Americans what their religion was in 1948, more than 9 out of 10 would’ve told you they’re Christians. Today, almost 20% of them openly admit to having no religion, meaning they’ve either left church or are just not religious at all. But I bought it and it was the perfect book for me. I had questions and Watts had answers. I'd just been studying Daoism, Buddhism and Hinduism in school and these schools of thought appealed to me but I didn't know how to go about making them mine. And this book essentially solved my problem. I honestly think that if I had spent many years studying East Asian philosophy (drawing from literature and other sources as well, as Watts does) and compiling my findings into a short book, I would have come up with something very similar. But I've been unwell and unable to do much work or thinking at all, even what is required for my day-to-day life, and it really feels like a godsend that someone has done exactly the work that I would have wanted in exactly the way that I would have done it and it's just fallen into my lap. The constant overthinking that our brain does cheats us of other experiences that our body and our subconscious has to offer. A person’s full potential to lead a holistic life is defined by all these experiences and not only one. We have to slow down our constant thought processes.