Ornoth

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?

So, having just finished William Barrett's "Irrational Man", I was parsing my local Barnes and Noble for other works on Existentialism. I just can't get terribly excited about plowing through the original works of Nietzsche or Heidegger. I'd plowed all the way to the end of the alphabet before I came across a thin trade paperback with an ugly green spine. But what really caught my eye was the title: "The Wisdom of Insecurity". Well, that certainly has an Existential ring to it; I picked it up for a closer look.

The back cover was even more promising. Here are excerpts from the two reviews printed on the back:

"The wisdom of insecurity is not a way of evasion, but of carrying on [...] It is a philosophy not of nihilism but of the reality of the present—always remembering that to be of the present is to be, and candidly know ourselves to be, on the crest of a breaking wave."

"How is man to live in a world in which he can never be secure, deprived, as many are, of the consolations of religious belief? The author shows that this problem contains its own solution—that the highest happiness, the supreme spiritual insight and certitude are found only in our own awareness that impermanence and insecurity are inescapable and inseparable from life."

Well, that corresponds rather stunningly with my own belief that although life has no inherent meaning, that lack of externally-mandated meaning is incredibly empowering, because it gives man the freedom to infuse his life with whatever meaning he chooses. So I picked the book up and blew through it.

One interesting fact is that the book was originally published in 1951, about the time of Existentialism's prominence in postwar Europe, and seven years before Barrett's book. It also was well before the study of eastern religions became fashionable in the US.

Eastern religions? What do they have to do with Existentialism? Well, Barrett's book actually documents that there are some very strong similarities between Existentialism and the eastern philosophies, particularly Zen Buddhism, which accept the finality of death and assert that life is without inherent meaning, while providing us with examples for accepting those facts without lapsing into nihilism.

Beyond that, the author of "The Wisdom of Insecurity", Alan Watts, is widely-known as a master in comparative religions, and as an interpreter of Zen Buddhism in particular. In fact, "The Wisdom of Insecurity" doesn't talk about Existentialism at all. While it's certainly not a book about Buddhism, either, it does focus on a topic which is the foundation of both Existentialism and Zen: how to deal positively and productively with the belief that life is finie and has no inherent meaning.

I have to say, of all the philosophical books that I've read in the past year, this one is by far the most impressive, because it concerns itself less with stating the problem, and more with how to respond to it.

The first chapter does review the conundrum of modern western man.

"Man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more than what he sees—unless there is an eternal order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death. [...] But what are we to do? The alternatives seem to be two. The first is, somehow or other, to discover a new myth, or convincingly resuscitate an old one. [...] The second is to try grimly to face the fact that life is 'a tale told by an idiot', and make of it what we can. [...] From this point of departure there is yet another way of life that requires neither myth nor despair."

The second chapter describes how man's knowledge of the past and future often overpowers our ability to live fully and completely in the present. Worse yet,

"if I am so busy planning how to eat next week that I cannot fully enjoy what I am eating now, I will be in the same predicament when next week's meals become 'now.' [...] To plan for a future which is not going to become present is hardly more absured than to plan for a future which, when it comes to me, will find me 'absent'."

Chapter three introduces the great Platonic schism, the division of man into the theoretically "eternal" conscious seat of thought versus the earthly, temporal seat of passions and infirmity. It also describes the confusion that results from mistaking thought and theory with chaotic, unpredictable reality.

"Part of man's frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be 'intelligible' in this sense is to want it to be something other than life. [...] To feel that life is meaningless unless 'I' can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch."

The logical conclusion of the Platonic separation of mind and body is revealled in chapter four.

"The brain, in its immaterial way, looks into the future and conceives it a good to go on and on and on forever [...] We are perpetually frustrated because the verbal and abstract thinking of the brain gives the false impression of being able to cut loose from all finite limitations. It forgets that an infinity of anything is not a reality but an abstract concept, and persuades us that we desire this fantasy as a real goal of living. [...] The interests and goals of rationality are not those of man as a whole organism."

Chapter five refutes the traditional western preoccupation with security and permanence.

"There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature momentariness and fluidity. [...] If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. [...] What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking it is painful [...] The principal thing is to understand that there is no safety or security. [...] 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.' [...] Any separate 'I' who thinks thoughts and experiences experience is an illusion."

Chapter six reveals that a positive experience of life depends on fully experiencing the moment that is 'now'.

"It means being aware, alert, and sensitive to the present moment always [...] Once this is understood, it is really absurd to say that there is a choice or an alternative between these two ways of life, between resisting the stream in fruitless panic, and having one's eyes opened to a new world, transformed, and ever new with wonder. [...] There is no rule but 'Look!' [...] By trying to understand everything in terms of memory, the past, and words, we have, as it were, had our noses in the guidebook for most of our lives, and have never looked at the view."

In chapter seven, Watts continues on this theme, but adds to it the Zen concept of the unity of creation.

"When, on the other hand, you realize that you live in, that indeed you are this moment now, and no other, that apart from this there is no past and no future, you must relax and taste to the full [...] The whole problem of justifying nature, of trying to make life mean something in terms of its future, disappears utterly. [...] 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."

Chapter eight continues the theme of living 'now' fully.

"If I feel separate from my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around. [...] The more my actions are directed towards future pleasures, the more I am incapable of enjoying any pleasures at all. For all pleasures are present, and nothing save complete awareness of the present can even begin to guarantee future happiness."

The final chapter returns to a review of religion and a prospect for a genuine spirituality based on Existential principles, and the futility of basing fulfilllment on some future post-death state.

"It is one thing to have as much time as you want, but quite another to have time without end. [...] We desire it only because the present is empty. [...] To those still feverishly intent upon explaining all things, [...] this confession says nothing and means nothing but defeat. To others, the fact that thought has completed a circle is a revelation of what man has been doing, not only in philosophy, religion, and speculative science, but also in psychology and morals, in everyday feeling and living. His mind has been in a whirl to be away from itself and to catch itself. [...] Discovering this the mind becomes whole [...] In such feeling, seeing, and thinking life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself."

Unfortunately, that hardly does justice to the insights described more fully in the book. Still, it will give you a flavor of Watt's thought, some of the commonalities between Zen Buddhism and Existentialism, and how accepting both death and the essential meaninglessness of life need not lead into nihilism nor despair. It certainly hasn't done so in my experience!