Presence

I just finished Alan Watts's The Wisdom of Insecurity, a book I've been meaning to read for years. Boy, did I need it, and boy, is it great. Full of sage advice about acceptance and exploration of what is, now, as the only meaningful way of life. It was published in 1951, and it reads like a prophecy of exactly what would be wrong with the culture 60 years later. Here are some of my favourite gems:

"[O]ur age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to 'dope.' Somehow we must grab what we can, and drown out the realization that the whole thing is futile and meaningless. This 'dope' we call our high standard of living, a violent and complex stimulation of the senses, which makes them progressively less sensitive and thus in need of yet more violent stimulation. We crave distraction — a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills, and titillations into which as much as possible must be crowded in the shortest possible time.

"To keep up this 'standard' most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work. Or we imagine that the justification of such work is the rearing of a family to go on doing the same kind of thing, in order to rear another family... and so ad infinitum." [pp. 21–22]

"The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it. Religious ideas are like words — of little use, and often misleading, unless you know the concrete realities to which they refer. The word 'water' is a useful means of communication amongst those who know water. The same is true of the word and the idea called 'God.'" [p. 23]

"The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would 'lief' or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception." [p. 24]

"Because consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain, to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness. Because such a loss is in principle the same as death, this means that the more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love." [p. 32]

"[T]he future is quite meaningless and unimportant unless, sooner or later, it is going to become the present. Thus to plan for a future which is not going to become present is hardly more absurd than to plan for a future which, when it comes to me, will find me 'absent,' looking fixedly over its shoulder instead of into its face." [p. 35]

"If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the 'I,' but it is just the feeling of being an isolated 'I' which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want.

"To put it still more plainly; the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet." [p. 78]

"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." For this we think to be the real man — the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings, and the knower of our knowledge. We do not actually understand that there is no security until we realize that this 'I' does not exist." [pp. 80–81]

And, if you still have any room left for present moment appreciation after all that, here's some recently composed haiku:

Rain-soaked maple leaves
Tumble freely in the wind
And stick to the road.

The smell of wood smoke
On a cold November night
Warms even the stars.

Huddled on the shore,
We look out at the island.
Sunset's early now.