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?

I joined LJ six years ago, on February 16, 2002.

It’s kind of amusing that my fourth and fifth posts, on February 24th 2002, discussed the first steps I took on the long path of philosophical inquiry I’ve been on in the years since. So this journal is all bound up with my review of my previous Existential beliefs, a survey of the overall philosophical landscape, and my adventures in Theravada Buddhism.

Arguably my biggest discovery along the way was the commonalities between Existential and Buddhist thought. Which makes it odd that only now, six years later, I recognized another very basic tenet those two philosophical systems share: sensualism.

A key Buddhist view is to experience the fullness of life in the present moment by maintaining one’s focus on the bodily sensations like touch, sound, and smell, and to rein in discursive thought like fearing and planning about the future, as well as reminiscing about the past. To actually experience your life requires you to live in full sensory perception of each moment of “now”, as it arises and passes away. Anything else is a distraction from what is most vital, in both senses of the word (i.e. both “essential” and “characteristic of living beings”). So Buddhism promotes a certain kind of sensualism.

Existentialism, with its rejection of theism and focus on the individual, also puts a lot of stock in sensualism. The best example that leaps to mind is from albert Camus’ “L’étranger”, which describes the blinding heat of a North African beach and its effect upon the protagonist. Meursault is overcome by the glare of the sun, which drives him to shoot a friend’s rival. He is unmoved by major events in his life, and he is only really present for the more sensory experiences of sex and swimming.

By the way, the irony is not lost on me that this revelation came to me as I sat on a tropical beach this morning.

However, be careful about that word “sensualism”. Americans usually use the word to refer to someone who is a thrill-seeker, searching out ever more extreme sensory input. The sensualism of Buddhism and Existentialism is not so radical. Instead, it’s the simple and easy act of being present to all your sensory input at each moment of “now”, rather than spending those precious moments thinking about the past or the future. We can all recognize and appreciate the silhouette of a tree or the sound of crashing surf or the smell of breakfast in the morning. The essence of life isn’t to be found in manipulating abstract concepts with our minds, but in sensing, noting, and fully experiencing the beauty of the world around us, in every moment of our lives, including even the most mundane.

Among the books I got this Xmas were two with a common theme: bicycle racing. Having little else to do this week, I sat down and read them both on Saturday, and I found an interesting, if not totally unexpected, commonality.

First, I’d like to share a few citations with you. I’ve kept a larger part of the context, but I’ve bolded the particularly pertinent sections.

The first excerpt is from Tim Krabbé’s novel “The Rider”, his not-really-fictional telling of his participation in the 150k half-day Tour de Mont Aigoual race. It’s one of the few true classics of the genre:

In interviews with riders that I’ve read and in conversations I’ve had with them, the same thing always comes up: the best part was the suffering. […] How can that be: suffering is suffering, isn’t it? […] Because after the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is Nature’s payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses: people have become woolly mice. They have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. ‘Good for you.’ Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lady with few suitors these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms she rewards passionately. That’s why there are riders. Suffering you need; literature is baloney.

The next two excepts are from Lance Armstrong’s new/second book, “Every Second Counts”:

I’d suffered more in winning the Tour a second time […] But in a way, suffering made it more gratifying. Suffering, I was beginning to think, was essential to a good life, and as inextricable from such a life as bliss. It’s a great enhancer. It might last a minute, or a month, but eventually it subsides, and when it does, something else takes its place, and maybe that thing is a greater space. For happiness. Each time I encountered suffering, I believed that I grew, and further defined my capacities—not just my physical ones, but my interior ones as well, for contentment, friendship, or any other human experience.

And he goes on to say:

The experience of suffering is like the experience of exploring, of finding something unexpected and revelatory. When you find the outermost thresholds of pain, or fear, or uncertainty, what you experience is an expansive feeling, a widening of your capabilities. Pain is good because it teaches your body and soul to improve.

Here’s one final example, from Paul Fournel’s Oulipo avant-garde classic “Need for the Bike”, wherein he talks about bonking, which he calls “blowing up”:

Why not give up the bike after a blowup? Because the blowup is a journey, and the cyclist is first and foremost a traveler. Then because, after a blowup, your organism is altered. There’s a kind of purification in falling flat, an impression of fasting. A threshold is crossed …

I find it interesting that suffering is such a universal thread in writing about cycling. The discussions go far beyond the more familiar “no pain, no gain” mantra and describe suffering as necessary, integral to happiness, and even transformational. The texts, especially Krabbé and Fournel, wax poetic when talking about the suffering of cyclists, reading more like Zen Buddhism or Existential philosophy than a description of riding a bike. Here’s more of Fournel’s treatise on bonking. Note the eloquence and panache that he uses to describe this most humbling of experiences.

There are warning signs of a blowup, but they aren’t appreciably different from from the signs of normal tiredness. Now that I think about it, metaphysical anxiety might be one hint. Riding is absurd—climbing to descend, going in circles, behind this mountain there’s another, why hurry? … Riding is absurd like peeling vegetables, skiing, thinking deeply, or living. The moment these questions come up, while you’re riding, you should take note. That’s when your quads are demanding more oxygen from your heart than your lungs can provide. That’s when it gets foggy. If you’re on a friend’s wheel, he’ll pull away by two bike-lengths without accelerating. You come back, dancing on your pedals, but then you lose the two lengths again. You do this rubber-band trick ten or so times, and then you let him go, telling yourself you’ll catch up soon. In fact, the next time you see him is when he turns around and comes back, worried, to find out what happened. At that point you won’t recognize him, or, better yet, you’ll recognize him, but only as someone who might buy your disgusting bike.

Well, if drugs make for more interesting novelists, and tortured lives make for better painters and composers, why shouldn’t the kind of cycling-induced mental impairment I talk about in this previous post (Defining the Natural High, 6/11/03) produce better philosophers? It does, however, make me wonder about my recent enquiries into Existentialism and Buddhism, though!

One of the gifts I asked for and received over the holiday season was William Barrett's 1958 "Irrational Man", which was one of the most influential books in introducing Existential philosophy to America. Despite being written 45 years ago, like most philosophy books it retains much of its value, and if anything the intervening years have only underscored many of its points.

The basic thesis of Existentialism, as interpreted by Barrett, is that man has become a stranger to his god, nature, and his increasingly technological and bureaucratic society, and that he has become alienated from his own self.

Barrett sees two key moments in human history. The first occurs during the lives of Socrates and, especially, Plato, who are among the first to identify rational consciousness as a differentiated psychic function. For the first time, western man began to deal with concepts as the true basis of meaning, and thus gave birth to the western sciences and their view of nature as a vast pool of resources to first understand, and then exploit: an orientation which was unique among all major human cultures.

The second key moment was World War I. For those who lived through it, this terrible war represented the logical and inevitable conclusion of the dispassionate logic of the Greeks and the relentless march of science up to the Industrial Revolution. Rationality had separated us from morality and our very humanity, and left to its own devices, seemed very capable of demeaning and destroying human life on a massive scale.

For philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzche who laid the groundwork for Existentialism, the single basic fact about the evolution of western man was the decline of religion. Religion once surrounded man from birth to death, and was an omnipresent concern throughout his life. As rationalism and scientific inquiry grew, spiritual faith declined because it required not merely faith beyond reason, but faith that was often in direct contradiction to reason.

While it might be a very healthy thing for western man to shed the heavy mantle of Catholic guilt or druidic superstitions, those revelations came at a very dear price. For in freeing himself from his connection to his gods, man also cut himself lose from the hope of redemption and an afterlife, and the meaning and structure that the religious framework gave to his life. A spiritual man always has a ready answer to the question of the meaning of his life, whereas modern man weaves his way through a life that, because it is devoid of spirituality, seems equally devoid of ultimate meaning or purpose. This is one of the ways that western man has suffered alienation.

This same faith in science which supplanted man's spiritual groundwork also disconnected him from his place in nature. To the scientific mind, nature became a challenge to explore, an adversary to wrest secrets from, and finally a resource to exploit. Barrett says, "Technological man faces the objects in his world with no need or capacity for intimacy with them beyond the knowledge of what button has to be pressed in order to control their working." This attitude displaced man's reverence for nature and separated him from his place in the natural world, much to his own loss.

But if western man's passion for dispassionate logic led him to view nature as simply a collection of resources to be managed and exploited, it did the exact same thing to man himself. Our very lives are now governed in exactly the same way. We, as "human resources", are impersonally ordered, organized, allocated, manipulated, and efficiently disposed of by a society that is optimized for mass production and mass consumption -- not just of natural resources, but of human resources, as well. Kierkegaard held that the chief movement of modernity is a technocracy that strips modern man of the sense of his own individuality and his value as a human being.

Pascal observed that men escape considering their condition closely by means of the two sovereign anodynes of "habit" and "diversion". "Solidly ensconced in habit, the good citizen, surrounded by wife and family and secure in his job, need not cast his eye on the quality of his days as they pass." Barrett dispels the illusion that America has an answer for life's meaningful questions when he says, "Despite all its apparently cheerful and self-satisfied immersion in gadgets and refridgerators American life, one suspects, is nihilistic to its core. Its final 'What for?' is not even asked, let alone answered."

Most Americans dismiss Existentialism as a European fad because of the residual optimism of America's fresh start as a nation. Even today, most Americans remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that the scientific and industrial age, along with its many benefits, simultaneously divorced western man from his spirituality, subverted his morality, disconnected him from nature, and stripped him of his human dignity. Modern man is spiritually impoverished, and is left at a loss to describe the purpose of his life or of his society.

For the Existentialist, the only things that are sure are life and death, and by soberly accepting the inescapable fact of the latter, the Existentialist comes to appreciate the value of the former, moreso than most. The Existentialist, having accepted death, knows that he is empowered to create his own purpose and is committed to experiencing the value of each day. Barrett, speaking of Dostoevsky, says, "His grasp of nihilism as the basic fact in modern life was itself never nihilistic". The reason for Dostoyevsky's hope, and the part of Existentialism that is most powerful for man, is that "The only meaning he can give himself is through the free project that he launches out of his own nothingness". This empowerment is the basic fact that Americans fail to see about Existentialism: "Though terrifying, the taking of death into ourselves is also liberating: it frees us from servitude to the petty cares that threaten to engulf our daily life and thereby opens us to the essential projects by which we can make our lives personally and significantly our own."

In my own words, Existentialism is the freedom to decide you own life's ultimate purpose and meaning, and taking complete responsibility for that choice. I find that incredibly empowering, and as I've experienced it, it has been a very positive and rewarding philosophy of life.

Having already developed a strong personal philosophy outside of any structured study, I bought the book "Philosophy for Dummies" in order to get an overview of the great philosophers and philosophies of history. I was hoping that I'd be exposed to some new ideas that I hadn't accounted for in my own philosophy, and/or find some more details about philosophers whose opinions coincided with the ones I've developed during my life.

While the book was a passable overview of the major questions of life, the author presented it in a very biased and judgemental way, which is unfortunate because I disagree with him on most issues. Still, I was able to think about my opinions in a more structured fashion, and come up with a few specific statements that I believe, even if they're no different from the beliefs I had going into the exercise. Here are some highlights:

1. We will probably never have the ability to answer some of life's biggest questions. We are in a situation where we must act based on limited information about what life is all about. So the most logical thing we can do is make conscious decisions and live our lives with the meaning that we choose to give them.
2. Similarly, because there is no inherent or apparent meaning to life, we have the freedom and opportunity to give our lives meaning and enjoy our lives while we're here. What matters is what gets you through your life with the most meaning and happiness possible.
3. Most people never enjoy the life they have now; they're always looking somewhere else, either in the future or the past, like a housewife who has misplaced her keys and is looking everywhere but where they are: right under her nose. This is exacerbated because we live in such an acquisitive culture, where you never seem to have "enough" of whatever it is you think will make you happy. Life is a process, and if you die never having reached a point where you're satisfied and content with your lot, you will have lived without ever having known happiness and contentment.
4. Philosophy in general cannot prove anything, nor even provide much evidence on which to base an opinion about life's biggest questions. Because it doesn't make sense to believe that something is an absolute without evidence, I don't believe there can be any universal definition of morality or good (i.e., I believe in moral relativism or ethical subjectivism). There are certainly ample examples of people violating commonly-held morality, while adhering to what they believe is right. Even Hitler believed that he was doing something moral and good.
5. I also believe in "amoral relativism". That is, you can define "evil" very simply and succintly as someone whose morals and values differ from your own. That's why, when people have philosophical difference, people are tempted to view the opposing viewpoint as "evil" or "amoral".
6. We like to think that we "decide" what we believe, but belief is not subject to direct control. While we might be able to indirectly influence it, belief is one of the few things that is equally emotional as it is rational, and sometimes we only discover what we believe when we're put in a position that tests or challenges our belief. In fact, although we like to think that we "know" what we believe, it is just as difficult to understand as it is to control, which is why so many people refer to examining their beliefs as a "process of discovery".
7. Humanity is the result of random evolution; we were not "created".
8. Although most people refuse to accept it, man is not significantly different than most animals. Even a cat or dog has a memory, makes decisions based on experience, can understand cause and effect and future consequences, and lives much the same kind of life as we have. The only significant difference I can see is in scale: mankind's capacity to learn and communicate is radically higher than that of other beasts.
9. When we die, like any animal, we die. There is no essense or spirit which survives when our brain activity ceases. Because death is and inevitable end of our being, and because we never live to experience it, it is illoigcal to fear death. On the other hand, it certainly is logical to fear suffering and pain, if those are part of your road to death. But death itself should be accepted as the ultimate, immutable fact of life. Accept it and move on and enjoy your life, motivated further by the knowledge that your portion of life is finite.
10. Because of their dispassionate opinions, history's existential philosophers have been viewed by the majority as depressed, defeatist, and negative. However, existentialism can also be a very positive, empowering philosophy. When you accept the fact that life is transitory, it makes that time much more precious an experience, and drives you to consciously enjoy every moment as it occurs. The world is full of wonder and beauty, and each precious fleeting moment should be savored while it is available to you. And when you accept that there is no God or other meaning to your life, it gives you the amazing freedom to define what your life will mean, and pursue your own happiness and fulfilment. For me, existentialism is clearly the road which is the most positive, empowering, and likely to lead to a happy and fulfilling life.

So "Philosophy for Dummies" didn't really add much beyond what I originally came to the exercise with, unless you could the insight that there's not much out there that is going to significantly change my world-view. And because the book completely dismissed existentialism and the essence of my personal philosophy, the next thing for me to do is conduct a more thorough study of the thinkers who have expressed ideas that run in a similar vein to my own.