The Wisdom of Insecurity

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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. 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. And according to Watts, we don't even have the true past to draw upon, but a memory of the past which is really only part of the present.

Consumerism is the proverbial dangling carrot that only adds to one’s anxieties, leaving them with a feeling of constant discontent.Watts hopes to replace dogma with openness, belief with faith, moral codes with moral creativity, and aspirations with joy in the present moment. This echos the opening line of the Dao De Jing, which says, “The Dao that can be named, is not the true Dao. Since we evolved as survival and replication machines, happiness is not an end goal in our makers’ designs, but an instrumental one.

Unmistakably a book to spend time with, each passage requires a thorough reading with a lot of thinking.I'm not sure to what I should attribute this success; maybe it was luck or chance, or maybe it was that incredible unconscious mind that Malcolm Gladwell described that read the reviews on the back cover and through some miracle of unconscious processing arrived at the decision. Beside the examples of saints and heroes I feel ashamed that I amount to nothing, and so I begin to practice humility because of my wounded pride, and charity because of my self-love.

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. I should also note that if you are not hearing these things for the first time, you will probably find the book repetitive (though I found it rather calming). Yet the very violence of these political religions betrays the anxiety beneath them – for they are but men huddling together and shouting to give themselves courage in the dark.As the influence of organized religion declines, and as people move further away from religion, there is a gaping void left. My philosophical start to 2020 (an attempt to see clearly) continues with this, my first Watts book.