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An Antidote to the Age of Anxiety: Alan Watts on Happiness …

Posted: August 23, 2015 at 3:48 pm


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by Maria Popova

Wisdom on overcoming the greatest human frustration from the pioneer of Eastern philosophy in the West.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives, Annie Dillard wrote in her timeless reflection on presence over productivity a timely antidote to the central anxiety of our productivity-obsessed age. Indeed, my own New Years 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?

This concept of presence is rooted in Eastern notions of mindfulness the ability to go through life with crystalline awareness and fully inhabit our experience largely popularized in the West by British philosopher and writer Alan Watts (January 6, 1915November 16, 1973), who also gave us this fantastic meditation on the life of purpose. In the altogether excellent 1951 volume The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (public library), 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:

If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are crying for the moon. 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.

Alan Watts, early 1970s (Image courtesy of Everett Collection)

What keeps us from happiness, Watts argues, is our inability to fully inhabit the present:

The primary consciousness, 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 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., everyone will die) that the future assumes a high degree of reality so high that the present loses its value.

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 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. 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.

Watts argues that our primary mode of relinquishing presence is by leaving the body and retreating into the mind 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:

The brainy modern loves not matter but measures, no solids but surfaces.

[]

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 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, mans 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.

[]

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.

To be sure, Watts doesnt dismiss the mind as a worthless or fundamentally perilous human faculty. Rather, he insists that it if we let its unconscious wisdom unfold unhampered like, for instance, what takes place during the incubation stage of unconscious processing in the creative process 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:

Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of instinctual wisdom. Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the fetus in the womb without verbalizing the process or knowing how 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 I 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.

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, It 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.) Paradoxically, recognizing that the experience of presence is the only experience is also a reminder that our I doesnt exist beyond this present moment, that there is no permanent, static, and immutable self which can grant us any degree of security and certainty for the future 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 something very different from judging it, evaluating it, or measuring it up against some arbitrary or abstract ideal. He writes:

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 for security and the fact 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 I, but it is just the feeling of being an isolated I which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want.

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.

He takes especial issue with the very notion of self-improvement something particularly prominent in the season of New Years resolutions and admonishes against the implication at its root:

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 I who is going to improve the bad me. I, who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward me, and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently I will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make me behave so badly.

Happiness, he argues, isnt a matter of improving our experience, or even merely confronting it, but remaining present with it in the fullest possible sense:

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, Who is there and the sage answered, It is I. In this House, replied the voice, there is no room for thee and me. 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, It is I. The door remained closed. After some years he returned for the third time, and, at his knocking, the voice once more demanded, Who is there? And the sage cried, It is thyself! The door was opened.

We dont actually realize that there is no security, Watts asserts, until we confront the myth of fixed selfhood and recognize that the solid I doesnt exist something modern psychology has termed the self illusion. 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:

While you are watching this present experience, are you aware of someone watching it? Can you find, in addition to the experience itself, an experiencer? Can you, at the same time, read this 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, I am reading. Can you find any thinker, who is thinking the thought, I am reading? In other words, when present experience is the thought, I am reading, can you think about yourself thinking this thought?

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

[]

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.

What makes us unable to live with pure awareness, Watts points out, is the ball and chain of our memory and our warped relationship with time:

The notion of a separate thinker, of an I 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, I 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.

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. 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.

[]

To understand this is to realize that life is entirely momentary, that there is neither permanence nor security, and that there is no I which can be protected.

And therein lies the crux of our human struggle:

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 I 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 I or mind can be found.

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.

The Wisdom of Insecurity is immeasurably wonderful existentially necessary, even in its entirety, and one of those books bound to stay with you for a lifetime.

Thanks, Ken

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An Antidote to the Age of Anxiety: Alan Watts on Happiness ...

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August 23rd, 2015 at 3:48 pm

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Alan Watts – Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

Posted: August 10, 2015 at 8:56 am


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Alan Wilson Watts (Chislehurst Kent, 6 de enero de 1915 Mt. Tamalpais California, 16 de noviembre de 1973) fue un filsofo britnico, as como editor, sacerdote anglicano, locutor, decano, escritor, conferenciante y experto en religin. Se le conoce sobre todo por su labor como intrprete y popularizador de las filosofas asiticas para la audiencia occidental.

Escribi ms de veinticinco libros y numerosos artculos sobre temas como la identidad personal, la verdadera naturaleza de la realidad, la elevacin de la conciencia y la bsqueda de la felicidad, relacionando su experiencia con el conocimiento cientfico y con la enseanza de las religiones y filosofas orientales y occidentales (budismo Zen, taosmo, cristianismo, hinduismo, etc.)

Alan Watts fue un conocido autodidacta. Becado por la Universidad de Harvard y la Bollingen Foundation, obtuvo un mster en Teologa por el Seminario teolgico Sudbury-Western y un doctorado honoris causa por la Universidad de Vermont, en reconocimiento a su contribucin al campo de las religiones comparadas.

Watts naci en una familia de clase media en el pueblo de Chislehurst (actualmente barrio londinense de Bromley), Kent, Inglaterra en 1915.[1] Su padre, Laurence Wilson Watts, era representante de la oficina londinense de la compaa de neumticos Michelin; su madre, Emily Mary Buchan, era un ama de casa cuyo padre haba sido misionero. Con modestos medios familiares, decidieron vivir en la buclica periferia, y Alan, hijo nico, creci aprendiendo los nombres de la flores salvajes y mariposas, jugando entre arroyos y celebrando ceremonias funerarias para los pjaros muertos.

Probablemente por la influencia de la familia de su madre, muy religiosa, los Buchans, creci en l un inters por "la naturaleza ltima de las cosas", que se combin con la pasin de Alan por los libros de fbulas y cuentos romnticos del entonces misterioso Lejano Oriente. Watts tambin escribi ms tarde sobre una especie de visin mstica que experiment cuando, de nio, estaba enfermo con fiebre. Durante esa poca fue influido por las pinturas de paisajes del Lejano Oriente y por los bordados que su madre haba recibido de misioneros regresados de China. En cuanto a las pinturas chinas que haba visto en Inglaterra, Watts escribi "Yo estaba estticamente fascinado por una cierta claridad, transparencia y espaciosidad del arte chino y japons. Pareca flotar..."[segn se dice en su autobiografa]. Estas obras de arte enfatizaban la relacin participativa del hombre con la naturaleza, un tema que sera importante para l a lo largo de su vida.

Segn su propia opinin, Watts era imaginativo, testarudo, y hablador. Fue enviado a un internado (que inclua instruccin acadmica y religiosa) desde joven. Durante las vacaciones en su adolescencia, Francis Croshaw, un rico epicreo con gran inters por el budismo y por aspectos poco conocidos de la cultura europea, llev a Watts en un viaje a travs de Francia. No mucho despus Watts se sinti obligado a decidir entre el cristianismo anglicano de su entorno o el budismo, sobre el que haba ledo en varias bibliotecas, incluyendo la de Croshaw. Escogi el budismo, y se hizo miembro del "London Buddhist Lodge", fundado por tesofos, siendo dirigido entonces por el abogado Christmas Humphreys. Watts se convirti en secretario de la organizacin a los 16 aos (1931). El joven Watts experiment con varios tipos de meditacin durante esos aos.

Watts asisti a la King's School, junto a la catedral de Canterbury. Aunque era en general un alumno aventajado, y le fueron encomendadas responsabilidades en la escuela, desaprovech la oportunidad de obtener una beca en Oxford por escribir uno de los exmenes definitivos en un estilo que fue considerado presuntuoso y caprichoso.

Por tanto, cuando se gradu en la escuela secundaria, Watts se vio obligado a buscar empleo, trabajando en una imprenta y ms tarde en un banco. Dedic su tiempo libre al "Buddhist Lodge" y tambin estuvo bajo la tutela de un gur llamado Dimitrije Mitrinovi (Mitrinovi, a su vez, haba recibido influencias de Piotr Uspenski, G. I. Gurdjieff y las diversas escuelas psicoanalticas de Sigmund Freud o prximas al psicoanlisis como las de Carl Gustav Jung y Alfred Adler). Durante este perodo, Watts tambin ley extensamente obras de filosofa, historia, psicologa, psiquiatra y sabidura oriental.

Durante el perodo de la Segunda Guerra Mundial se convirti en el capelln episcopaliano de la Northwestern University. Ms tarde fue catedrtico y decano en la Academia Americana de Estudios Asiticos en San Francisco. A mediados de los sesenta viaj con sus estudiantes de la Academia Americana a Japn, visitando Birmania, Ceiln (actual Sri Lanka) y la India, pudo tener contacto con el filsofo budista Zen Dr. Suzuki. Tambin hizo televisin: su programa, emitido en la National Educational Television, se titulaba Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life.

Tras su muerte, su hijo, Mark Watts, fund la Electronic University para continuar la obra de su padre y hacer realidad su visin de la educacin a travs de los medios electrnicos.[2]

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ALAN WATTS: What if money was no object? – ZEN PENCILS

Posted: July 31, 2015 at 9:43 am


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Alan Watts (1915-1973) was an English philosopher and writer who played a large part in popularising Zen Buddhism in the west. He gained a wide following after moving to the United States where he published numerous books on Zen and Eastern philosophy. During the 60s and 70s he toured extensively on the college lecture circuit and became a celebrity among the growing youth movement. Watts had over 25 books published and recorded over 400 lectures, many of which have found a new audience on YouTube.

This is another example of my readers educating me. I had never heard of Alan Watts before so thanks to everyone who suggested I look into him and adapt one of his quotes.

Watch the great YouTube video this quote was taken from. Theres a ton of Alan Watts stuff on YouTube, some of his lectures have even been animated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. You can also get an Alan Watts app for the iPhone containing all his lectures. The official Alan Watts website. Im finally on Google+, check out the new Zen Pencils page.

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Alan Watts

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The Alan Watts Mountain Center is currently under construction in a rural area near the Pt. Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco, and will facilitate the work of the educational non-profit. Our primary mission is to produce educational programs that enhance the human potential, and although we have traditionally created materials for public radio, today our offerings include a podcast and YouTube components with downloads approaching the ten million mark.

One of the long-term missions of the Center is to complete the Alan Watts digital archive, and of course to continue the dissemination of his extensive collection of recordings. In addition to online publishing, we will continue to make the Alan Watts archive accessible for educational and creative productions by providing materials to libraries, educators, producers, writers, musicians, editors, animators, and others.

In the near term the Center facilities will become home to Alan Watts web publishing, online broadcasting and podcasting (see alanwattspodcast.com). The Center will also be a meeting place for working groups and occasional retreats, and the Center's library will house a unique collection of works related to Alan Watts' passion for visual language, including calligraphy by Japanese artist Sabro Hasegawa and an extensive photo archive. The Center is being built using ecologically appropriate materials, including wood from fallen fir and cypress trees, and has been designed according to principles of sustainable architecture pioneered by organic architect Daniel Libermann. To date sixty-five percent of the main Lodge to house library and film resources has been completed, and studio and guest facilities are in various stages of construction. At present we are focusing on raising funds for completion of the library and film center in Phase I.

In Phase II we will complete a separate production studio, and in Phase III we will add a guest wing to the Lodge. Upon completion each building phase will add to the Center's capabilities.

The Center is currently seeking support on all levels, and anyone interested in helping should contact Mark Watts by email at watts@alanwatts.com.

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Alan Watts

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Alan Watts Lectures and Essays

Posted: July 1, 2015 at 8:48 pm


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Today, serious heresy, and rather peculiarly in the United States, is a deviant state of consciousness. Not so much deviant opinions as having a kind of experience which is different from "regular" experience. And as Ronald Lang..has so well pointed out, we are taught what experiences are permissable in the same way we are taught what gestures, what manners, what behavior is permissable and socially acceptable. And therefore, if a person has so-called "strange" experiences, and endeavors to communicate these experiences, because naturally one talks about what one feels, and endeavors to communicate these experiences to other people, he is looked at in a very odd way and asked "are you feeling all right?" Because people feel distinctly uncomfortable when the realize they are in the presence of someone who is experiencing the world in a rather different way from themselves. They call in question as to whether this person is indeed human. They look like a human being but because the state of experience is so different you wonder whether they really are. And you get the kind of.. the same kind of queasy feeling inside as you would get if, for example, you were to encounter a very beautiful girl, very formally dressed, and you were introduced, and in order to shake hands she removed her glove and you found in your hand the claw of a large bird. That would be spooky, wouldn't it?

The Value of Psychotic Experience

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Alan Watts – Brain Pickings

Posted: June 2, 2015 at 1:42 pm


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by Maria Popova

The cause of and cure for the illusion of separateness that keeps us from embracing the richness of life.

During the 1950s and 1960s, British philosopher and writer Alan Watts began popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, offering a wholly different perspective on inner wholeness in the age of anxiety and what it really means to live a life of purpose. We owe much of todays mainstream adoption of practices like yoga and meditation to Wattss influence. His 1966 masterwork The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (public library) builds upon his indispensable earlier work as Watts argues with equal parts conviction and compassion that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East. He explores the cause and cure of that illusion in a way that flows from profound unease as we confront our cultural conditioning into a deep sense of lightness as we surrender to the comforting mystery and interconnectedness of the universe.

Envisioned as a packet of essential advice a parent might hand down to his child on the brink of adulthood as initiation into the central mystery of life, this existential manual is rooted in what Watts calls a cross-fertilization of Western science with an Eastern intuition.

Alan Watts, early 1970s (Image courtesy of Everett Collection)

Though strictly nonreligious, the book explores many of the core inquiries which religions have historically tried to address the problems of life and love, death and sorrow, the universe and our place in it, what it means to have an I at the center of our experience, and what the meaning of existence might be. In fact, Watts begins by pulling into question how well-equipped traditional religions might be to answer those questions:

The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are as now practiced like exhausted mines: very hard to dig. With some exceptions not too easily found, their ideas about man and the world, their imagery, their rites, and their notions of the good life dont seem to fit in with the universe as we now know it, or with a human world that is changing so rapidly that much of what one learns in school is already obsolete on graduation day.

Watts considers the singular anxiety of the age, perhaps even more resonant today, half a century and a manic increase of pace later:

There is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out.

He weighs how philosophy might alleviate this central concern by contributing a beautiful addition to the definitions of what philosophy is and recognizing the essential role of wonder in the human experience:

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Alan watts – Going beyond the gods – Video

Posted: May 5, 2015 at 11:43 am


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Alan watts - Going beyond the gods
For the continuation of this lecture please go to: http://youtu.be/pax9Hd6EWSw I took the above picture in my garden, however I do not own a copyright to the recording. It belongs to http://www.alanwatts...

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Alan Watts – Desirelessness – Video

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Alan Watts - Desirelessness
For the continuation of this lecture please go to: http://youtu.be/yEIQ5ynKW8g I took the above picture in my garden, however I do not own a copyright to the recording. It belongs to http://www.alanwatts...

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Alan Watts – An introduction to the art of meditation – Video

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Alan Watts - An introduction to the art of meditation
For the continuation of this lecture please go to: http://youtu.be/aWg1ZLehs_s I took the above picture in my garden, however I do not own a copyright to the recording. It belongs to http://www.alanwatts...

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Alan Watts – There is no method – Video

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Alan Watts - There is no method
For the continuation of this lecture please go to: http://youtu.be/ZuUXpuAj7Bs I took the above picture in my garden, however I do not own a copyright to the recording. It belongs to http://www.alanwatts...

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