The Wisdom of Insecurity

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Given this description of the problem, is it possible to get out of it? The answer, according to Watts’, is yet another seemingly paradoxical yes-and-no situation. 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."

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”!

Even the best modern apologists for religion seem to overlook this fact. For their most forceful arguments for some sort of return to orthodoxy 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.

To Watts, the problem of happiness is like the Polar Bear Game. This comes from that game where both players try to last as long as they can not thinking about polar bears. Unfortunately, the only way to win is not to play! For as soon as you try to play the game you’re inevitably going to think about polar bears.

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Insightful and entertaining essays spanning 40 years of lectures by Alan Watts on Zen, Taoism, psychedelics, and comparative philosophy. This no-method view with resolving a fundamental life problem could be said to put Watts firmly against much of the philosophy of personal development. In fact, it could be argued, that self-improvement is exactly the problem Watts’ argues against, trying to “improve” something which is illusory. 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? 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.

What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.” If there is a moment to be enjoyed, it must be a present moment. However, if we are continuously living in an imagined, abstracted future (or past) moment, then when those moments actually come, we will miss them if we are living again in another imagined moment.

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. 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.” 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). Watts’ considers an illustrative example of this needless unhappiness by imagining a man waiting for an unavoidable surgery: