{"id":187247,"date":"2021-07-12T12:00:25","date_gmt":"2021-07-12T11:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=187247"},"modified":"2021-06-17T06:18:59","modified_gmt":"2021-06-17T05:18:59","slug":"an-antidote-to-the-age-of-anxiety-alan-watts-on-happiness-and-how-to-live-with-presence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/07\/an-antidote-to-the-age-of-anxiety-alan-watts-on-happiness-and-how-to-live-with-presence\/","title":{"rendered":"An Antidote to the Age of Anxiety: Alan Watts on Happiness and How to Live with Presence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Wisdom on overcoming the greatest human frustration from the pioneer of Eastern philosophy in the West.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cHow we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,\u201d<\/em> Annie Dillard wrote in her timeless reflection on presence over productivity<\/a> \u2014 a timely antidote to the central anxiety of our productivity-obsessed age. Indeed, my own New Year\u2019s resolution has been to stop measuring my days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence. But what, exactly, makes that possible?<\/p>\n

This concept of presence is rooted in Eastern notions of mindfulness \u2014 the ability to go through life with crystalline awareness and fully inhabit our experience \u2014 largely popularized in the West by British philosopher and writer Alan Watts<\/strong> (January 6, 1915\u2013November 16, 1973), who also gave us this fantastic meditation on the life of purpose<\/a>. In the altogether excellent 1951 volume The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), Watts argues that the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction. He writes:<\/p>\n

If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are \u201ccrying for the moon.\u201d We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die. If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Alan Watts, early 1970s (Image courtesy of Everett Collection)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What keeps us from happiness, Watts argues, is our inability to fully inhabit the present:<\/p>\n

The \u201cprimary consciousness,\u201d the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more than what is<\/em> at this moment. The ingenious brain, however, looks at that part of present experience called memory, and by studying it is able to make predictions. These predictions are, relatively, so accurate and reliable (e.g., \u201ceveryone will die\u201d) that the future assumes a high degree of reality \u2014 so high that the present loses its value.<\/p>\n

But the future is still not here, and cannot become a part of experienced reality until it is present. Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements \u2014 inferences, guesses, deductions \u2014 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. 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Watts argues that our primary mode of relinquishing presence is by leaving the body and retreating into the mind \u2014 that ever-calculating, self-evaluating, seething cauldron of thoughts, predictions, anxieties, judgments, and incessant meta-experiences about experience itself. Writing more than half a century before our age of computers, touch-screens, and the quantified self, Watts admonishes:<\/p>\n

The brainy modern loves not matter but measures, no solids but surfaces.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its wheels. They spend their days in activities which largely boil down to counting and measuring, living in a world of rationalized abstraction which has little relation to or harmony with the great biological rhythms and processes. As a matter of fact, mental activities of this kind can now be done far more efficiently by machines than by men \u2014 so much so that in a not too distant future the human brain may be an obsolete mechanism for logical calculation. Already the human computer is widely displaced by mechanical and electrical computers of far greater speed and efficiency. If, then, man\u2019s principal asset and value is his brain and his ability to calculate, he will become an unsaleable commodity in an era when the mechanical operation of reasoning can be done more effectively by machines.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

If we are to continue to live for the future, and to make the chief work of the mind prediction and calculation, man must eventually become a parasitic appendage to a mass of clockwork.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To be sure, Watts doesn\u2019t dismiss the mind as a worthless or fundamentally perilous human faculty. Rather, he insists that it if we let its unconscious wisdom unfold unhampered \u2014 like, for instance, what takes place during the \u201cincubation\u201d stage of unconscious processing in the creative process<\/a> \u2014 it is our ally rather than our despot. It is only when we try to control it and turn it against itself that problems arise:<\/p>\n

Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of \u201cinstinctual wisdom.\u201d Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the fetus in the womb \u2014 without verbalizing the process or knowing \u201chow\u201d it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between \u201cI\u201d and my experience. 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And yet the brain does writhe and whirl, producing our great human insecurity and existential anxiety amidst a universe of constant flux. (For, as Henry Miller memorably put it, \u201cIt is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.\u201d<\/em><\/a>) Paradoxically, recognizing that the experience of presence is the only experience is also a reminder that our \u201cI\u201d doesn\u2019t exist beyond this present moment, that there is no permanent, static, and immutable \u201cself\u201d which can grant us any degree of security and certainty for the future \u2014 and yet we continue to grasp for precisely that assurance of the future, which remains an abstraction. Our only chance for awakening from this vicious cycle, Watts argues, is bringing full awareness to our present experience \u2014 something very different from judging it, evaluating it, or measuring it up against some arbitrary or abstract ideal. He writes:<\/p>\n

There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire<\/em> for security and the fact<\/em> of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the \u201cI,\u201d but it is just the feeling of being an isolated \u201cI\u201d which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want.<\/p>\n

To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He takes especial issue with the very notion of self-improvement \u2014 something particularly prominent in the season of New Year\u2019s resolutions<\/a> \u2014 and admonishes against the implication at its root:<\/p>\n

I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good \u201cI\u201d who is going to improve the bad \u201cme.\u201d \u201cI,\u201d who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward \u201cme,\u201d and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently \u201cI\u201d will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make \u201cme\u201d behave so badly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Happiness, he argues, isn\u2019t a matter of improving our experience, or even merely confronting it, but remaining present with it in the fullest possible sense:<\/p>\n

To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it. It is like the Persian story of the sage who came to the door of Heaven and knocked. From within the voice of God asked, \u201cWho is there\u201d and the sage answered, \u201cIt is I.\u201d \u201cIn this House,\u201d replied the voice, \u201cthere is no room for thee and me.\u201d So the sage went away, and spent many years pondering over this answer in deep meditation. Returning a second time, the voice asked the same question, and again the sage answered, \u201cIt is I.\u201d The door remained closed. After some years he returned for the third time, and, at his knocking, the voice once more demanded, \u201cWho is there?\u201d And the sage cried, \u201cIt is thyself!\u201d The door was opened.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We don\u2019t actually realize that there is no security, Watts asserts, until we confront the myth of fixed selfhood<\/a> and recognize that the solid \u201cI\u201d doesn\u2019t exist \u2014 something modern psychology has termed \u201cthe self illusion.\u201d<\/a> And yet that is incredibly hard to do, for in the very act of this realization there is a realizing self. Watts illustrates this paradox beautifully:<\/p>\n

While you are watching this present experience, are you aware of someone<\/em> watching it? Can you find, in addition to the experience itself, an experiencer? Can you, at the same time, read this<\/em> sentence and think about yourself reading it? You will find that, to think about yourself reading it, you must for a brief second stop reading. The first experience is reading. The second experience is the thought, \u201cI am reading.\u201d Can you find any thinker, who is thinking the thought, I am reading?\u201d In other words, when present experience is the thought, \u201cI am reading,\u201d can you think about yourself thinking this thought?<\/p>\n

Once again, you must stop thinking just, \u201cI am reading.\u201d You pass to a third experience, which is the thought, \u201cI am thinking that I am reading.\u201d Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into the feeling that you think them all at once.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

In each present experience you were only aware of that experience. You were never aware of being aware. You were never able to separate the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known. All you ever found was a new thought, a new experience.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What makes us unable to live with pure awareness, Watts points out, is the ball and chain of our memory<\/a> and our warped relationship with time<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The notion of a separate thinker, of an \u201cI\u201d distinct from the experience, comes from memory and from the rapidity with which thought changes. It is like whirling a burning stick to give the illusion of a continuous circle of fire. If you imagine that memory is a direct knowledge of the past rather than a present experience, you get the illusion of knowing the past and the present at the same time. This suggests that there is something in you distinct from both the past and the present experiences. You reason, \u201cI know this present experience, and it is different from that past experience. If I can compare the two, and notice that experience has changed, I must be something constant and apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, as a matter of fact, you cannot compare this present experience with a past experience. You can only compare it with a memory of the past, which is a part of the present experience<\/em>. When you see clearly that memory is a form of present experience, it will be obvious that trying to separate yourself from this experience is as impossible as trying to make your teeth bite themselves.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

To understand this is to realize that life is entirely momentary, that there is neither permanence nor security, and that there is no \u201cI\u201d which can be protected.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And therein lies the crux of our human struggle:<\/p>\n

The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the \u201cI\u201d out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate \u201cI\u201d or mind can be found.<\/p>\n

To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, \u201cI am listening to this music,\u201d you are not listening.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Wisdom of Insecurity<\/em><\/strong><\/a> is immeasurably wonderful \u2014 existentially necessary, even \u2014 in its entirety, and one of those books bound to stay with you for a lifetime.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired UK and<\/em> The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>. Email: brainpicker@brainpickings.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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