Last Saturday our dharma book club discussed a book I recommended.
This post captures some of that discussion, and why I chose the book I
did.
When I was first asked to pick our next book, it was pretty obvious to
me what my selection would be: Alan Watts’ “Wisdom of Insecurity”.
Written in 1951 by a British scholar in comparative religions, it was
one of the first books in English that brought Buddhism to an American
audience, including the Beat Generation. More recently, it also played a
pivotal role in my own movement toward Buddhism.
Back in 2002, I decided to review my existing philosophical beliefs. In
high school, I’d adopted Existentialism after reading Sartre and Camus
and Ionesco in French. It had appealed to me as a typically angst-ridden
adolescent, but did it still serve me as I approached 40?
Coincidentally, I had just begun blogging here on LiveJournal, so as
I spent the next year plowing through Nietzsche and Sartre, I
was able to document many of my thoughts along the way. One of the most
important of those thoughts came from the following passage in William
Barrett’s 1958 book “Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy”,
a book I read in January of 2003.
The Self, indeed, is in Sartre’s treatment, as in
Buddhism, a bubble,
and a bubble has nothing at its center. But neither in Buddhism nor in
Sartre is the Self riddled with negations to the end that we should,
humanly speaking, collapse into the negative, into a purely passive
nihilism. In Buddhism the recognition of the nothingness of ourselves is
intended to lead into a striving for holiness and compassion—the
recognition that in the end there is nothing that sustains us should
lead us to love one another, as survivors on a life raft, at the moment
they grasp that the ocean is shoreless and that no rescue ship is
coming, can only have compassion on one another.
That one somewhat convoluted reference was the first I’d heard of any
commonality between Buddhism and Existentialism. Apparently, although
the two philosophies began with similar assumptions—that there is no paternal creator god, that there is no inherent meaning
in life, and that man has no permanent essence that survives his
corporeal body—Buddhism offered something that I never got from
Existentialism: a positive and ethical way of living one’s life based on
those assumptions. That was the seed that got me thinking about looking
into Buddhism. You can read my original comments on Barrett’s book
here.
Just a few days later, I found myself browsing at a local Barnes & Noble.
I’d scanned the entire Buddhist section and gotten nearly to the end of
the alphabet without seeing anything that called out to me. Then I saw
this tiny little paperback with an eye-searing lime green spine and the
words “THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY - ALAN W. WATTS”. The cover blurbs
seemed to intuit exactly what I’d spent the previous year looking for,
so I immediately picked it up and blew through it.
Watts was the first author I’d read who,
rather than restating the existential problem and wringing his hands,
provided a rational and fulfilling way to respond to those conditions,
without resorting to the self-delusion of unproven faith or its opposite
extreme of pessimism and despair.
Even today, I’m stunned by the serendipity and good fortune I had to
happen upon that exact book, because it was the perfect gateway to all
the wisdom, development, and fulfillment that has followed. You can read
my original reaction to the book here.
So that’s why I selected that particular book. It has an immense amount
of personal meaning for me.
As you might expect, I was a little anxious about sharing something that
personal with others, even my fellow meditators. That feeling was
compounded by the long wait: three months passed between when I was
asked to select a book and our discussion of it!
However, it didn’t take long to get a reaction. As soon as he learned of
my selection, one of the attendees emailed back: “AMAZING
selection!!!!!!! I will definately [sic] be there. I cannot express how
amazing this book is to read.” Okay, that’s one solid vote of
confidence!
Another one came a few weeks later. Socializing after a sitting at CIMC,
one of the attendees showed me her copy of the book and mentioned that
she was enjoying it. That’s two!
But as she flashed the book, its amazingly ugly lime green and purple
patterned cover caught the eye of the woman who had officiated at the
evening’s meditation. She recognized it immediately and also effused
about it, indicating that, like me, it had played a big part in her
coming to Buddhism. That really made me much more confident about the
selection, since she’s a longtime practitioner who is known for managing
CIMC’s “sandwich retreat”.
By the time our book club discussion came around, even the woman who
hosts the group made a point of letting me know that she was enjoying
the book. So I was able to go into the meeting without too much
self-consciousness about it.
That’s not to say that the book received unalloyed praise. Watts’
language was both commended (in his choice of metaphors and images) and
critiqued (in his tangential rants and sometimes inaccessibly complex
sentence structure).
Eleven people attended the meeting, and about half had read the book,
which is a bit better than normal. Let me gloss over a few of the topics
that came up during the discussion.
One comment that was repeatedly made was how pertinent Watts’ words are
today, even sixty years after he wrote them. He wrote about consumerism
and how everyone was chasing the newest, best television. It stunned us
that in 2010, we’re still being sold new and supposedly much better
televisions, just as was the case back in 1951! He also anticipated our need for ever more
rapid and imposing forms of entertainment. He could surely have
been talking about last week in this passage:
There is, then, the feeling that we live in a time of
unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years so many long-established
traditions have broken down—traditions of family and social life, of
government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. As the years
go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold,
fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed
for all time.
We spent some time talking about how religious faith can be a comfort,
but once it has been pierced by skepticism, you can’t ever restore that
belief. That harkens back to my own feeling that you cannot simply
decide what you believe; belief is not an object to be so simply controlled, and you
can do little more than discover and perhaps indirectly influence what
you believe. As one attendee put it: the challenge of Watts’ book is how to stay connected with
modern reality in the absence of mollifying religious faith, without
being scared.
Another big theme that people pulled out was that our feelings of
insecurity are the direct result of the fact that we want security. If
you want something, by definition it is something that you feel you do
not have now, so the more desperately we seek security, the more
insecure we feel. This was likened to the concept of the “power of
attraction”, where one must be careful to cultivate the vision of having
what one wants, not the wanting itself, because focusing your energy on
the wanting presumably reinforces your yearning and the absence of the thing you’re after.
Our discussions also circled around the Buddhist concept of conditioned
behavior, and the large degree to which our actions can be reduced to a
response to the situation we are in, based on
patterns of behavior that have been successful for us in the past. Where
this got interesting was our realization that as dharma friends, we are
each providing conditioning factors for one another, and hopefully
influencing one another such that we will all make wiser, compassionate, and more fulfilling decisions in
the future.
Another amusing tangent had us discussing the idea that on average, your
friends are more popular than you are. This is mathematically true, because
we all tend to be friends with outgoing people who are already very popular.
Obviously, the discussion was much broader than those few items, but I
wanted to capture those in particular, and they’ll also give you a
flavor for where we went with it. Overall, the discussion stayed pretty
well on-topic, and people kept returning to the book and reading key
passages aloud, since Watts’ prose is eminently quotable.
In preparation for the book club, I re-read “Wisdom of Insecurity” myself last
week. After three readings, almost every single page has something
highlighted on it. It’s an extremely dense book in terms of the
profundity of its concepts, and I feel that although it’s only a thin
150-page paperback, one could easily base a semester’s study around it.
I wanted to highlight a few things that I got from this most recent
reading that I didn’t mention in the book club discussion.
Here’s a great passage, where Watts begins by commenting on our
impossible and irrational desire for permanence:
For it would seem that, in man, life is in hopeless conflict
with
itself. To be happy, we must have what we cannot have. In man, nature
has conceived desires which it is impossible to satisfy. To drink more
fully of the fountain of pleasure, it has brought forth capacities which
make man more susceptible to pain. It has given us the power to control
the future but a little—the price of which is the frustration of
knowing that we must at last go down in defeat. If we find this absurd,
this is only to say that nature has conceived intelligence in us to
berate itself for absurdity. Consciousness seems to be nature’s
ingenious mode of self-torture.
In other words, if we’re intelligent enough to realize the futility of
our plight, we must then be nature’s way of mocking itself! When I read
this section about the basic absurdity of humanity’s quest for meaning,
seeking pleasure, and avoiding pain, I realized that the best way to
think about life is as a Zen koan. There is no answer! And any attempt
to arrive at one rationally is bound to fail. Life is a paradox; accept
it and move on!
Another passage:
To understand that there is no security is far more than
to agree
with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the
transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling
that there is something within us which is permanent, something which
endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to
make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring
core, this center and soul of our being which we call
“I”.
What leaps out at me from this section is the absurdity (again) of
feeling that one has to prop up or defend something that we’ve defined
as eternal and immutable. How ridiculous! If there is some permanent “I”
within us, then what need does it have for defense? If such a thing
existed, it would persist irrespective of anything we did or did not do.
Watts spends a great deal of time on the importance of living the
present moment fully, and not letting desired future states obscure our
ability to enjoy and be fully present with what is. The difference
between someone who perpetually looks for fulfillment in the future and
someone who lives for the present couldn’t be more poignant than in this
passage about death:
When each moment becomes an expectation life is deprived
of fulfillment, and death is dreaded for it seems that here expectation
must come to an end. While there is life there is hope—and if one
lives on hope, death is indeed the end. But to the undivided mind, death
is another moment, complete like every moment, and cannot yield its
secret unless lived to the full.
This passage shows how the fear of death is mostly rooted in the fact
that it signals the end of our ability to expect a better, more pleasant
future. It shows that by a simple change of mindset, we can begin to leave this
fear behind. Imagine having a relationship with death that wasn’t
dominated by fear!
Then there’s this little zinger. Compare the following passages:
If it is true that man is necessarily motivated by the
pleasure-pain
principle, there is no point whatsoever in discussing human conduct.
Motivated conduct is determined conduct; it will be what it will be, no
matter what anyone has to say about it. There can be no creative
morality unless man has the possibility of freedom.
That citation, which says that ethics and morality make no sense if man
doesn’t have the freedom to make choices, is from “Wisdom of
Insecurity”. Then:
You are deluded to assume that you are reading this of
your own free
will. My friend, you had no choice but to read this! Will is not the
action of a being; it is the end product of a process. […] Whatever
you do is just a result of complex programming.
This counterpoint is from Ajahn Brahm’s book on jhana practice,
“Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond”, which I reviewed here. Ajahn Brahm
subscribes to the view that free will is an illusion, and that our
behavior and apparent choices are indeed fully determined by present
conditions and our past conditioning. I’d love to get these two in a
room and ask them to debate the topic of choice. Or maybe not…
Finally, consider Watts’ description of hell:
Hell, or “everlasting damnation” is not the
everlastingness of time
going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and
frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can
never be attained.
I might clarify this definition of hell as threefold, comprised of
seeking for pleasure but remaining unfulfilled, running from pain but
never being able to avoid it, and looking to the future for fulfillment
without ever being present at that future. As such, I think this is a
perfectly apt description of many people’s lives, and a good way to
understand why a lot of people find themselves frustrated, angry,
self-absorbed, and suffering from existential angst.
In conclusion, I have to once again say how delighted I am with “Wisdom
of Insecurity”, and how heartily I recommend it to others. It’s amusing,
quotable, succinct, and very deeply profound. It impresses me as much
today, after seven years of Buddhist study and practice, as it did on
day one.
I am truly amazed that it was written sixty years ago, by someone who
was only 36 years old. It contains an amazing amount of wisdom in a very
tidy little package. Well, except for the single ugliest cover ever
created by man.
Ironically, one final surprise is that all that wisdom didn’t
necessarily help its author. In the ’60s, long after this book was published, Alan Watts experimented with
mescaline and LSD, and became something of an advocate of marijuana. He
became an alcoholic, went through three marriages, and died of heart
failure at 58 years of age.
But then it is the nature of all things to change, isn’t it?
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