Alan Watts wisdom for "the age of anxiety"

3 major points from his best known book

“Things are just so awful nowadays.”

Well, no. Life’s always been somewhat tumultuous. I love hearing people come out with bold statements like: “this is the worst it’s ever been” and “our generation is so unlucky” – like, my man, look at history, ever since we got our asses thrown out of Eden, it’s been one rollercoaster of war, famine, heartbreak, and tragedy.

I know inflation went up by 2.7% this year.

But did you get flayed by Comanches?

Did the Mongols raid your peaceful village and kill half your family? (and enslaved the other?). Did a draught result in literal starvation? If you’re reading this in 2024, I’ll assume not. In the West at least, life is as good as it’s ever been – most people live a more luxurious lifestyle than a king did.

The question is: has this made us happier?

No.

If anything, these breakthroughs in science and commerce has freed up enough time for us to get some real worrying done. We expect happiness and comfort more than ever, but paradoxically, experience it less than our peasant ancestors.

How do I know?

I lived in Bali for a year.

I saw people who had nothing but simple living and a large family; they looked a lot happier than myself and others do. Alan Watts spotted this way back in the ‘50s, and crafted a masterpiece to combat this cultural malady.

Here’s 3 major points from The Wisdom of Insecurity written by the legendary philosopher Alan Watts to combat perennial sadness, and become the happy person you’re meant to be…

“Love is the organising and unifying principle which makes the world a universe and the disintegrated mass a community . . .There is no problem of how to love . . . We are love”

– Alan Watts

🌊 Point 1: The Reversed Law

“I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort . . . When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float”

Someone once burst my tire while unsolicitedly checking its pressure.

Not that I’m holding a grudge, I just think it’s 1) funny, and 2) a good metaphor for something we’ve all experienced: inadvertently making a situation 10x worse by putting in 10x effort. We don’t live in a Newtonian (i.e. cause and effect) universe. Sometimes the effect goes back to the cause; sometimes A leads to C, not B; sometimes going from Y to Z requires us to work back to A.

Every single moment is connected to an infinite number of variables.

Watts made the point that cause and effect is a law of language, not of cosmos.

We think: “that accident happened because I was drunk.” But the factors involved for that one event reach back to the dawn of the phenomenal universe – the moon, stars, who won the election in ‘76; everything affects everything.

Our brilliant cognitive capacity is limited.

Naturally we can only take so many factors into account.

But the mistake is the human hubris of overconfidence in our reasoning abilities. Nobody knows anything, the best we can do is make predictions: guess. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the medical industry, where millions are waking up to inefficiencies and oversights of “medical professionals.”

Instead of receiving wisdom, love and support.

Patients are prescribed questionable medications and textbook answers.

(THIS IS MEDICAL ADVICE): Continue seeing doctors for whatever you’re facing, but seek holistic, spiritual, or just basic human support elsewhere. The world as a whole is a lot better than it was materially 100 years ago, but people still get ill and face hardships – what we’ve gained in scientific advancement we’ve lost in connection to source and others.

The reversed law is a tool.

Consider using it when:

• What you’re doing isn’t working

• You’ve been in a low for some time

• Conventional advice isn’t cutting the mustard

Like how you fall asleep once you’ve stopped trying.

Give up, surrender, just stop trying – you might be surprised.

🐍 Point 2: The Cosmic Serpent

“When we fail to see that our life is change, we set ourselves against ourselves and become like Ouroboros, the misguided snake, who tries to eat his own tail”

Ouroboros is an ancient Western symbol of infinity.

The dragon/snake, blinded by instinct and desire, eats itself at the other end. Often thought to represent a universal principle of death and rebirth, Watts referred to it as a representation of the thinking problem.

Can you stop your mind from incessant thinking?

If you’ve ever tried for a prolonged period, you’ll know it isn’t remotely easy.

But if we can’t control our mind, doesn’t that mean it’s controlling us? Watts said we have a very brainy culture. This wasn’t praise. Emphasis is always put on more:

• More sex

• More cheeseburgers

• More thinking and talking

In the world of YouTube, podcasts and endless media, has this increase in people thinking and talking actually solved anything? We’ve mistaken the map for the territory. We think naming and diagnosing is treatment.

It’s not.

Importance is always put on communicating, learning, becoming more aware.

You’re fighting fire with fire (which doesn’t work by the way). Anxiety is awareness. Awareness of problems, and future and past pain – this now sits in the back of your mind as a kind of infection of the nervous system that won’t let you relax until you’re SURE you’re going to be ok.

(SPOILER ALERT): Everybody dies.

The brain is an organ.

A very useful and impressive one – but it is still only one part of a greater organism. The mistake we’ve made is thinking we are our brain – the “I”, “me”, and “poor-little-old-me.” The Jungians called this the Ego. The Ego cares for 2 things:

1. Avoiding pain

2. Experiencing pleasure

The Ego’s short-sighted.

It thinks (or wants to believe) it will live forever, and has no interest in achieving goals beyond selfish reward. In our argument then, we can say the snake eating itself is the Ego, and the circle it’s trapping us in is our current situation of forever rejuvenating disappointment and dis-ease.

To kill the dragon, is to regain control of our lives.

There is one grace you have: the present moment.

🌳 Point 3: The Only Thing that Exists

“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions”

I read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now many years ago and it changed my life.

But I only realised its real implications after I read Alan Watts.

The present moment isn’t:

• A mindfulness trick

• A way to gain spiritual power

• Even a method of achieving happiness

It’s the only thing there is.

Memories aren’t real; they’re representations of past events, not the events themselves. The future isn’t real; it’s a prediction based on unreliable memories. Life is happening now. And I don’t mean that in a “Just Do It” way – I mean the only time anything really happens is NOW.

Too late.

In the time it took you to read that, the infinitesimal snapshot of time the universe exists in came and went.

When Hindus talk of Maya (the great goddess of illusion), they’re referring to mind’s tendency to create stories, postulate theories, and basically do anything other than be here and present. “I should’ve done this” – you didn’t. “I wish I’d done that” – too late. “I’d beat the sh*t outa that guy” – no one cares.

Your life is just a story your Ego made up.

The way you rid yourself of tragedy, regret, and fear is to simply shed it like snake does its skin.

“While you are watching this present experience, are you aware of someone watching it? Can you find, in addition to the experience itself, an experiencer? Can you, at the same time, read this sentence and think about yourself reading it? You will find that, to think about yourself reading it, you must for a brief second stop reading”

– Alan Watts

Thanks for reading.

Let me know your thoughts.

I spent the last 4 years studying everything I could find on Jungian psychology.

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Suggested reading & bonus links

• A great Alan Watts lecture

• Tao: The Water Course Way by Alan Watts