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. But to attempt anyway: This is a book about living in the present moment, and it kind of messes with your mind in that great expansive sort of way. Glas i misli Alana Votsa sam prvi put čula u numeri "Dreams" grupe Nuages a guglajući dobila sliku gospodina evropskog porekla sa ducktail bradom i u kimonu. Watts’ objection, however, is that we mistake this essential abstraction for our fundamental nature.

But any nascent belief has its rocky beginnings, and my own early Christian leanings were no exception to this. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Alan Watts has an ability to cut through the bullshit in human life and expose what it means to be alive: nothing. 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. I saw this book as a sort of manual on how to train the mind to experience or be aware of what is now rather than dwelling in the past and the future.It’s only when you invent yourself as a static, separate self does the unity of nature get artificially broken. This pattern of “is it deeply profound or nonsense” alternates back and forth until you’re not quite sure anymore. 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. 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. Ignorance is the failure to see the basic self contradiction of this position - from which arises a futile grasping or controlling of life which is self frustration, and the pattern of life a vicious circle.

Put this one up there with Untethered Soul and The Echart Tolle books and Robert Wright's on Buddhism.However consistent, words tend to cut up reality arbitrarily, and make reality seem static and fixed, rather than changing and fluid. A number of very interesting insights, unfortunately couched in an overwhelming amount of unfounded speculation, illogical and mystical concepts, and baseless assumptions. I recommend the book The Wisdom of Insecurity , but I think if you’re skeptical about these sorts of ideas, a better start is probably his television show, which starts more modestly and with fewer grand assumptions. 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. I'm not sure to what I should attribute this success; maybe it was luck or chance, or maybe it was that incredible unconscious mind that Malcolm Gladwell described that read the reviews on the back cover and through some miracle of unconscious processing arrived at the decision.