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 recently read Rachel Naomi Remen’s book “Kitchen Table Wisdom”, wherein the author relates the story of how she went from her purely intellectual orientation as a physician to a more spiritual place, as well as the stories of other people she came into contact with that inspired her.

Overall, the book didn’t really blow me away, but there was one story about the author’s childhood that struck a resonant chord, so I thought I’d record that here, since I think it directly addresses the anxiety that people feel about not knowing the “meaning” of their lives.

The author relates that her family always put together jigsaw puzzles without the aid of the picture on the box, in order to make it more of a challenge and a surprise. As a young girl, she was just learning what jigsaw puzzles were. She was attracted to the colorful pieces, but she intuitively disliked the darker ones, so she took the latter away and hid them, to the consternation of her parents.

As an adult, the author used this as a metaphor for how life’s meaning reveals itself to us. I’d like to share and extend that metaphor a bit.

Our lives are indeed like a jigsaw puzzle whose final image isn’t known until we place the final pieces. Each day we place another piece, but progress is slow and the picture only makes sense as it nears completion.

If you focus solely on what today is like, all you see is one minuscule piece of your life. Today’s piece of the puzzle might be light or dark, colorful or muted, busy or empty, but you really can’t infer anything about your life overall from this one little piece. And even if today is a dark or painful part, you can’t assemble a great picture without the contrast of light and dark pieces, just as you can’t go through life with only mindlessly saccharine-sweet days. You can’t complete a jigsaw puzzle or a meaningful life if you ignore, avoid, or deny the existence of its dark parts.

Our past is the part of the puzzle we have completed. We can step back and look at what our life has been like so far, what kind of image it makes and what meaning it holds. By looking at the past, we can begin to make some sense of our life, or at least our life so far. If you look at the past, you can start to see meaning, but things could—and will—change substantially from here forward.

The future is, of course, unknown. We know the shape and color of the past, but we only have limited knowledge about what our next piece of the puzzle might look like. It could be a carbon copy of today’s, or it might introduce a completely new theme, like the first appearance in a puzzle of a person or the edge of a building. Our lives might have been all ocean as far as we have seen, but the next piece could be the point where the sea meets a beach or a rocky coastline, or it could be the first part of a gorgeous sunset on a distant horizon.

One of the great lessons here is that looking for the “meaning” of your life is futile. Meaning isn’t something that you are handed; it’s not a mandate from family, church, or job. Meaning isn’t an input, but an output; you create that meaning with every decision you make and every action you take. Meaning is the result of living, and thus can only be seen retrospectively.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t have principles that guide our actions. Just remember that the principles aren’t what gives your life meaning; meaning derives solely from the actions that those principles have promoted. Your principles die with you, and are only made visible to the world through your actions.

While at the same time, each and every action you take contributes to that meaning. Whether you live according to your highest ethics or just spend your time on autopilot, every day you contribute the exact same amount toward the ultimate meaning of your life. So if the meaning of your life matters to you, it’s imperative that you live each day according to the values you cherish most.

This is what I have learned: it takes great presence of mind and strength of will to live according to one’s highest values, and no one is perfect. We make mistakes. None of us are Mother Theresa, but over time we can gradually learn to see our autonomic behavior and then replace our mindless habits with better choices. That’s why Buddhism calls it “practice” and a lifelong path.

Sorry this one’s late. That’s material for a subsequent post…

What do you most want to be remembered for?

I’d like to be remembered for founding an online community that successfully encouraged and nurtured hundreds of aspiring amateur writers. I’d like to be remembered by everyone associated with that community for my wisdom and leadership in running that group.
 

What quotation best fits your outlook on life?

Honestly, I don’t think there’s any one quote, but there have been plenty of good examples among the philosophical treatises I’ve posted here (friends-only) over the past 18 months.
 

What single achievement are you most proud of in the past year?

I don’t know as there’s one single one. I’m pleased with how I ran the 2003 Dargon Writers’ Summit. I’m naturally pleased with my cycling, which included climbing Evans Notch and doing the 200-mile PMC ride, which also included my fundraising for the Jimmy Fund. I’m also particularly proud of how well I’ve done in graphic design school. But in addition, I’m also pleased with my philosophical investigations and exploration of Zen, my participation in Boston’s war protests, my Web work for Onyx, and my administration of DargonZine’s advertising campaign on Google. And I’m especially pleased when I look back at how successful my social life has been over the past year.
 

What about the past ten years?

Well, again, there’s several things. Ten years is a long time. It would be impossible to overemphasize my return as editor and my leadership of DargonZine. There’s also my work for Sapient, which in addition to being very lucrative, offered me the opportunity to work on some of the most prestigious Web projects on the planet, such as National Geographic’s Web site, online banking, online brokerages, and much more. There’s my move into Boston and then my subsequent condo purchase. There’s my evolution as a person and the gradual increase in “healthiness” of my relationships, which is a particular point of pride.
 

If you were asked to give a child a single piece of advice to guide them through life, what would you say?

I think the most important thing is to be aware that you’re responsible for your own life and your own happiness. Don’t do anything just because other people expect it of you; do it because you know it’s going to make you happier. Enjoy each day, rather than always live for a tomorrow that never comes because there are always more tomorrows to worry about. Make all your decisions based on the criteria of having absolutely nothing to regret when you’re on your deathbed looking back at your life.