The Wisdom of Insecurity

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If you asked Americans what their religion was in 1948, more than 9 out of 10 would’ve told you they’re Christians. Today, almost 20% of them openly admit to having no religion, meaning they’ve either left church or are just not religious at all. There is no experiencer, only experience. Building on the abstraction of time, the abstraction of the self is also only present as an extrapolation into your memories of the past. Something appears to be consistent amongst all my memories, so that must be “me”! This insight is may seem like a technicality, until it is applied to some of the concepts we believe are central such as time and the self. Insight #2: Time is an Abstraction Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, Watts had the rare gift of ‘writing beautifully the unwritable.’”

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). While Watts’ thoughts seem closer to the mark on actual Eastern religious viewpoints, I think it’s also clear that this isn’t how most of those religions are widely practiced in Asia. 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. Why Isn’t This Approach More Widespread?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.

This suggests, at least to me, that even if this philosophy has been known about for thousands of years, both in the West and Asia, it is unlikely that it was appreciated in Watts’ particular way for all but a small minority of people. Because of this, Watts sometimes is prone to fit the evidence to his particular views of religion. Quoting extensively, he often creatively interprets scripture or sages to suggest they had his particular view of things. I’m not well read enough in these subjects to object to this characterization, but one is definitely left with the distinct impression that Watts’ views and traditional ones may have significant departures. Leadership Journeys [129] – Moiz Arsiwala –“Don’t overthink, just take micro steps and trust the 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.” 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.

God will restore you. He will turn it around. He will vindicate you if you will be still and have faith. The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.” 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. 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.

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.

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Indeed, one of the highest pleasures is to be more or less unconscious of one’s own existence, to be absorbed in interesting sights, sounds, places, and people. Conversely, one of the greatest pains is to be self-conscious, to feel unabsorbed and cut off from the community and the surrounding world.”