The Wisdom of Insecurity

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Utterly disappointing. It's like listening to a reasonably intelligent person talk out loud while cleaning his navel. The degree, the job, the nice car, the house, once you have all that, retirement’s still a long way away, so you might as well deal with the important questionsnow. Lesson 3:Pleasure and pain are just two ends ofone spectrum, one always includes the other. Enter consumerism. Yes, you could spend your Saturdaypondering why you didn’t get the promotion, what else you could do with your career and work out a life plan. Oooooor, you can go shopping, eat steak for dinner and then to a club! That sounds like a lot more fun. Let’s do that! This idea, if true, is a fairly radical premise, and not without some obvious difficulties. But I think it is provocative in that it also neatly resolves some of the practical and metaphysical problems I see with a more standard, scientific Western view of the world. The Problem of Happiness Even the best modern apologists for religion seem to overlook this fact. For their most forceful arguments for some sort of return to orthodoxy are those which show the social and moral advantages of belief in God. But this does not prove that God is a reality. It proves, at most, that believing in God is useful. "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Perhaps. But if the public has any suspicion that he does not exist, the invention is in vain.

What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things.” Another way of putting the ideas, is that Watts advocates living fully in the present moment. Focusing attention on current experience, rather than being subsumed in the world of thoughts, memories and future projections. Consumerism is the proverbial dangling carrot that only adds to one’s anxieties, leaving them with a feeling of constant discontent. 3. Pain and Pleasure are Two Sides of the Same Coin This is what I would call the problem of happiness. The problem of happiness is simply that, if we are rational creatures trying to maximize our subjective conscious experience, we do a spectacularly bad job of it.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. The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually “grasp” reality.” In other words, the past and future are not something we directly perceive, but merely infer, based on the traces we have in memory. Reality is always a process of becoming, being born and dying continually. Time is merely how we extrapolate some patterns in that process. 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.

Because if you live in a recurring state of High Anxiety quite often (remember the HILARIOUS Mel Brooks movie?) you may not like it - but, on the other side of it, to more sophisticated readers of 2021, it may seem trite: This doesn’t mean time isn’t a reliable or useful concept. Quite the contrary, it’s the stability and usefulness of this abstraction that makes it very easy to confuse for reality. Our process of remembering the past and imagining the future can be so convincing that we often forget that they are occurring in our heads. To Watts, the problem of happiness is like the Polar Bear Game. This comes from that game where both players try to last as long as they can not thinking about polar bears. Unfortunately, the only way to win is not to play! For as soon as you try to play the game you’re inevitably going to think about polar bears. What do you want in life? I don’t think it’s an unfair stretch to say that being happy and fulfilled is a big part of what we want from life. While I can imagine sacrificing my happiness for an even greater purpose towards others, I can’t see a reason to sacrifice my happiness without some greater benefit.Now, Being to us in our fractious lives seems to be constantly Threatened by Non-Being - evil, or Nothingness as Sartre puts it. 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.” This is to say that it may be, despite Watts’ assertions to the contrary, possible to actively work on cultivating a mental habit of attentional control. Rather than simply having it be the product of an instantaneous enlightenment which may never come. For Those Interested in Knowing More…

Now, this book is a bit like The Idiot’s Guide to Nothingness... hey! It was written a full 70 years ago!All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. I think the best indicator of how much you will like this book is how similar you are to me. If you: Because of this, Watts sometimes is prone to fit the evidence to his particular views of religion. Quoting extensively, he often creatively interprets scripture or sages to suggest they had his particular view of things. I’m not well read enough in these subjects to object to this characterization, but one is definitely left with the distinct impression that Watts’ views and traditional ones may have significant departures. If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.” Alan Watts draws on the wisdom of Eastern philosophy and religion in this timeless and classic guide to living a more fulfilling life. His central insight is more relevant now than ever: when we spend all of our time worrying about the future and lamenting the past, we are unable to enjoy the present moment—the only one we are actually able to inhabit.

Directly perceived reality contains no “I”. If you look for a self in the contents of your experience, you cannot find it. Instead, you can only find experience. To some this is a welcome release from the restraints of moral, social, and spiritual dogma. To others it is a dangerous and terrifying breach with reason and sanity, tending to plunge human life into hopeless chaos. To most, perhaps, the immediate sense of release has given a brief exhilaration, to be followed by the deepest anxiety. For if all is relative, if life is a torrent without form or goal in whose flood absolutely nothing save change itself can last, it seems to be something in which there is "no future" and thus no hope. Of course there are no easy answers to suchbig, existential questions – you can’t find them overnight. What you can find overnight though, are things like alcohol, TV and a new handbag. Lesson 2:Consumerism comes with an empty promise of happiness. 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.

find life meaningful only when we have seen that it is without purpose, and know the ‘mystery of the universe’ only when we are convinced that we know nothing about it at all. The second explanation is that they work, but are incredibly hard to employ. Watts’ approach which denies a method to resolve the problem, suggests as much. This inaccessibility of the philosophy could explain why it didn’t become the dominant understanding in most religions, since most people couldn’t reach past the metaphors and so, instead, hung onto them as literal truth.