The Wisdom of Insecurity

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It is for this reason that most of the current return to orthodoxy in some intellectual circles has a rather hollow ring. So much of it is more a belief in believing than a belief in God. The contrast between the insecure, neurotic, educated "modern" and the quiet dignity and inner peace of the old-fashioned believer, makes the latter a man to be envied. But it is a serious misapplication of psychology to make the presence or absence of neurosis the touchstone of truth, and to argue that if a man's philosophy makes him neurotic, it must be wrong. "Most atheists and agnostics are neurotic, whereas most simple Catholics are happy and at peace with themselves. Therefore the views of the former are false, and of the latter true." 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.” Alan Watts writes with simple, lucid logic that is nearly impossible for me to summarize. His argument holds together like a long string of connected puzzle pieces and to take any out is to lose the impact of his philosophy. I would thoroughly recommend reading Watts’ work, but would recommend against trusting me to accurately convey his system of thought aside from this one major point: live in the present. From a scientific perspective, this isn’t surprising. Since we evolved as survival and replication machines, happiness is not an end goal in our makers’ designs, but an instrumental one. If being more anxious made us slightly less likely to be eaten by a tiger, but it destroyed many moments of uncomplicated bliss, that would be a positive trade-off. Is There a Solution to the Happiness Problem?

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. 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.”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? Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements--inferences, guesses, deductions--it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead” (60-61). That’s painful. So our brain tells us to do something pleasurable instead, like eating a pizza or having a drink.

Leadership Journeys [132] – Josh Staph –“A good leader knows what questions to ask and what questions need to be answered” 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 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 wisdom is near unbridled, though I found myself a bit lost and struggling to digest some of his ideas in the second half. There is also a lot of repetition, as I feel this book could have been told to the same effectiveness at about half to three quarters its size. Today such convictions are rare, even in religious circles. There is no level of society, there must even be few individuals, touched by modern education, where there is not some trace of the leaven of doubt. It is simply self-evident that during the past century the authority of science has taken the place of the authority of religion in the popular imagination, and that scepticism, at least in spiritual things, has become more general than belief. Visionary Voices [04] – Chris Cirak –“Your true calling is not something that is comfortable to you.” 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.

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. I do not believe, as he contends, that most Christians view the stories in the Bible as being merely metaphors for the process of insight he describes in his book. Many practicing Christians genuinely do believe in an actual future heaven and hell, as opposed to being an analogy for enlightenment and the vicious circles we engage in on this earth. 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.

A Radical Premise or Nonsense?

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). 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. 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.”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. 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.”