The Wisdom of Insecurity

Product Information

We are forced to wrestle with the demon of nothingness, until that day when, through thought, prayer and meditation, we - or rather the Being of God - melts it in a Fire of Attention, Love and Peace.

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.” Elegantly reasoned and lucidly written, this philosophical achievement contains all the wisdom and spirit that distinguished Watts’s long career and resonates with us still.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. Because the author’s a bit old-fashioned, as I said, and he offers you at one point only a passe Fifties’ Fad, Vedanta, as a possible solution. That and meditation. 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.

Instead of a method, Watts argues that the problem can be resolved immediately the moment it is properly understood. “When light is brought, the darkness vanishes at once,” Watts explains. 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. The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it.

Even if the observation is correct, the reasoning based on it is absurd. It is as if to say, "You say there is a fire in the basement. You are upset about it. Because you are upset, there is obviously no fire." The Agnostic, the sceptic, is neurotic. but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that "where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." Thus far, I’ve focused more on whether this approach could help resolve the problem of happiness and why it might not be more widely practiced if it is indeed as useful as it claims to be. However, practical issues aren’t the only thing at stake here. Is Watts’ view of reality actually true? 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. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Leadership Journeys [129] – Moiz Arsiwala –“Don’t overthink, just take micro steps and trust the process”

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. 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: Nuclear physics and relativity have, it is true, done away with the old materialism, but they now give us a view of the universe in which there is even less room for ideas of any absolute purpose or design. The modern scientist is not so naive as to deny God because he cannot be found with a telescope, or the soul because it is not revealed by the scalpel. He has merely noted that the idea of God is logically unnecessary. He even doubts that it has any meaning. It does not help him to explain anything which he cannot explain in some other, and simpler, way. This sentiment runs across the gamut of America’s spiritual brands, from Joel Osteen’s ever-purposeful (and vindictive) God to Marianne Williamson’s divinely rewarding cosmos. Take, for example, Osteen’s tweet on November 20: To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.”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.

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. 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 HappinessEven 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. According to Watts there is no method to solve the problem of happiness, “The question ‘What shall we do about it?’ is only asked by those who do not understand the problem.” This suggests that not only is there no method for achieving resolution, but wanting to achieve a resolution is a symptom of the initial problem! Alan Watts was a philosopher, speaker and writer, who spent the majority of his life getting the Western world to open up to Eastern philosophy, primarily from 1930-1970. He had a long-time radio show at a stationin the San Francisco Bay Area, which is also where he gained a large following and wrote most of the over 25 books he published on topics like Zen, Buddhism, religion and spirituality. A few friends recommended I read this book , because of my budding interest in Buddhism and Eastern religions. Alan Watts was one of the big popularizers of Zen and other Asian spiritual philosophies in the 50s and 60s, and I greatly enjoyed his television program.