Book Review : The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts

The incomparable Alan Watts. One of the greatest influences on my life even if, for the most part, I have failed to apply his knowledge to my betterment.

This is the good news : Being insecure is an open door to an invisible reality, the only place where the cures for fear and anxiety will ever be found.

On religion : Once there is a suspicion that a religion is a myth, its power has gone. A myth can only work if it is thought to be truth. Religious peoples most forceful arguments 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.

There is anxiety that one may be missing something in one's life, so the mind flits nervously and greedily from one pleasure to another, without finding rest and satisfaction in any.

However, if we are to be fully human and fully alive and aware, it seems that we must be willing to suffer for our pleasures.

The lives we think we have are artificial. Your name is just a label, it is not you and has nothing to do with you. When we give ourselves names we think we give ourselves identities. You feel separate and static, whereas you should feel fluid and with nature.

We could learn a lot from animals. They are constantly 'being' and not 'doing'. Cats of course are the greatest Zen masters of all.

The 'miracles' of technology cause us to love in a hectic, clockwork world that does violence to human biology, enabling us to do nothing but pursue the future faster and faster. We are maddened and exasperated by the pursuit of illusions. Mechanized thinking has put man out of touch with many of the marvellous powers of "instinct" which govern his body.

We have been taught to neglect, despise, and violate our bodies, and to put all our faith in our brains. There is a schism now between brain and body.

THIS IS ASTONISHING (WRITTEN IN 1951!):

To pursue (the future) is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.

Thus the "brainy" economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which either manufacture more and more pleasures of collapse - providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect "subject" for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio (think smartphone), preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from the television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-without-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity - shock treatments - as "human interest" shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings. The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire.

For this stream of stimulants is designed to produce cravings for more and more of the same, though louder and faster, and these cravings drive us to do work which is of no interest save for the money it pays - to buy more lavish radios (smartphones), sleeker cars, glossier magazines, and better TV's, all of which will somehow conspire to persuade us that happiness lies just around the corner if we buy one more.

Despite the immense hubbub and nervous strain, we are convinced that sleep is a waste of valuable time and continue to chase these fantasies far into the night. Animals spend much of their time dozing and idling pleasantly, but, because life is short, human beings must cram into the years the highest possible amount of consciousness, alertness, and chronic insomnia so as to be sure not to miss the last fragment of startling pleasure.

Generally speaking, the civilized man does not know what he wants. He works for success, fame, a happy marriage, fun, to help other people, or to be a "real person." But these are not real wants because they are not actual things. They are the by-products, the flavours and atmospheres of real things - shadows which have no existence apart from some substance.

Money is the perfect symbol of all such desires, being a mere symbol of real wealth, and to make it one's goal is the most blatant example of confusing measurements with reality.

As in eating a man's eyes are bigger than his stomach, so in love he judges woman by standards that are largely visual and cerebral rather than sexual and visceral. He is attracted to his partner by the surface gloss, by the film on the skin rather than the real body. He wants something with a bone structure like a child's which is supposed to support the exterior curves and smooth undulations of femininity - not a woman but an inflated rubber dream.

If a man's principal asset and value is his brain and his ability to calculate and reason, he will become an unsaleable commodity in an era when the mechanical operation of reasoning can be done more effectively by machines.

We want the protection of being "exclusive" and "special", seeking to belong to the safest church, the best nation, the highest class, the right set, and the "nice" people.

However there is no safety in this. Seeking it is painful and when we think we have found it, we don't like it.

If we could really understand THAT SAFETY IS ISOLATION (NOT GOOD) and the damage we cause ourselves in seeking it, we should see that we do not want it at all.

The principal thing to understand is that there is no safety or security :

One of the worst vicious circles is the problem of the alcoholic. In very many cases, he knows quite clearly that he is destroying himself, that , for him, liquor is poison, that he actually hates being drunk, and even may dislike the taste. AND YET HE DRINKS.

For, dislike it as he may, the experience if not drinking is worse. It gives him the "horrors", for he stands face to face with the unveiled basic insecurity of the world.

There is no experience but present experience. What you know, what you are actually aware of, is just what is happening at this moment, and no more.

What about memories? They are just a present trace of the past, like the wake of a ship.

We know no other moment than the present moment. It is always drying, always turning into in the past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown which we call the future. Thinking about this almost makes you breathless!

To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, "I am listening to this music," you are not listening. To understand joy or fear, you must be wholly and undividedly aware of it. So long as you are calling it names and saying, "I am happy," or "I am afraid," you are not being aware of it. Fear, pain, sorrow, and boredom must remain problems if we do not understand them, but understanding requires a single and undivided mind.

The human organism has the most wonderful powers of adaption to both physical and psychological pain. But these can only come into full play when the pain is not being constantly re-stimulated by this inner effort to get away from it, to separate the "I" from the feeling. The effort creates a state of tension in which the pain thrives. But when tension ceases, mind and body begin to absorb the pain as water reacts to a blow or cut.

When we try to understand the present (for example when we experience something unpleasant) by comparing it with memories, we do not understand it as deeply as when we are aware of it without comparison. We don't want to be aware of this present, but it won't work, as reality will catch up with us.

And this is not all. The more we accustom ourselves to understanding the present in terms of memory, the unknown by the known, the living by the dead, the more desiccated and embalmed, the more joyless and frustrated life becomes. So protected from life, man becomes a sort of mollusc encrusted in a hard shell of "tradition," so that when at last reality breaks through, as it must, the tide of pent-up fear runs wild.

Do not run away from opposing forces. Give in to them. Be like a shock absorber.

There is no magic needed to appreciate the present moment. Just LOOK!

To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words - to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about.

It is not only your brain that is essential to your existence. The sun, air and water are also essential. So if you call your brain 'I' then the sun, air and water are also 'I'.

FISH ARE ARE ONE WITH WATER (EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE TECHNICALLY NOT WATER) , JUST AS WE ARE AT ONE WITH NATURE.

Philosophy in the West is a symptom of the divided mind, of man trying to stand outside himself and his experience in order to verbalize and understand it. It is a vicious circle.

So long as the mind is split, life is perpetual conflict, tension, frustration and disillusion. Suffering is piled upon suffering, fear on fear, and boredom on boredom. The more the flu struggles to get out of the honey, the faster he is stuck. Under the pressure of so much strain and futility, it is no wonder at all that men seek release in violence and sensationalism, and in the reckless exploitation of their bodies, their appetites, the material world, and their fellow men. What this must add to the necessary and unavoidable pains of existence is incalculable.

THE BEST PLEASURE ARE THOSE FOR WHICH WE DO NOT PLAN.

YOU CANNOT PLAN TO BE HAPPY. TRUE!!!

DEPRESSION AND DRINKING:

I am depressed, and want to get "I" out of this depression. The opposite of depression is elation, but because depression is not elation, I cannot force myself to be elated.

I can, however, get drunk! This makes me wonderfully elated, and so when the next depression arrives, I have a quick cure. The subsequent depressions have a way of getting deeper and blacker, because I am not processing the depressed state (observing it, being mindful of it) properly and not eliminating its poisons. So I need to get even drunker to drown them. Very soon I begin to hate myself for getting so drunk, which makes me still more depressed - and so on it goes.

I start to feel ashamed that I am amounting to nothing, and so I begin to practice humility and charity. The urge is ever to make "I" amount to something. I must be right, good, a real person, heroic, loving, self-effacing (not seeking attention/modest). I efface myself in order to assert myself, and give myself away in order to keep myself. It is a contradiction!

So long as there is the motive to become something (better), so long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at the moment, there can be no freedom! One has to live in the present moment to be free, even if you have the best of intention for the future.

The "saint" who appears to have conquered his attention seeking and tries to convince others that she has found the "true way" has only, in fact, concealed it.

Of course it sounds as if it were the most abject fatalism to have to admit that I am what I am, and that no escape or division is possible. It seems then that if I am afraid, then I am "stuck" with fear. But in fact I am chained to the dear only so long as I am trying to get away from it! On the other hand, when I do not try to get away I discover that there is nothing "stuck" or fixed about the reality of the moment. When I am aware of this feeling without naming it, without calling it "fear," "bad," "negative," etc., it changes instantly into something else, and life moves freely ahead. The feeling no longer perpetuates itself by creating the feeler behind it.

NOTHING IS REALLY MORE INHUMAN THAN HUMAN RELATIONS BASED ON MORALS. WHEN A MAN GIVES BREAD IN ORDER TO BE CHARITABLE, LIVES WITH A WOMAN IN ORDER TO BE FAITHFUL, EATS WITH A NEGRO IN ORDER TO BE UNPREJUDICED, AND REFUSES TO KILL IN ORDER TO BE PEACEFUL, HE IS AS COLD AS A CLAM. HE DOES NOT ACTUALLY SEE THE OTHER PERSON. ONLY A LITTLE LESS CHILLY IS THE BENEVOLENCE SPRINGING FROM PITY, WHICH ACTS TO REMOVE SUFFERING BECAUSE IT FINDS THE SIGHT OF IT DISGUSTING.