alan watts Archives - Revolutionary Misfit

I just had my mind blown.

How?

By reading a book by the 60’s era Zen philosopher, Alan Watts. The book is entitled The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, published in 1966.

I only recently learned of Watts via Maria Popova’s blog, Brain Pickings. In fact, ever since I discovered it, I’ve learned a great deal from her blog…

I highly recommend it!

Why did Watts’ book blow my mind?

I’ll use an example from the book to illustrate…

If I asked you what was pictured to the right, you would likely say a circle, correct?

But could it not just as well be a hole in a wall?

Could it not be both?

At the same time?

Because, you see according to Watts, what something is, including you and me, is not defined simply by what’s on the inside, but also by what is on the outside.

That is, the surface of my skin is also the edge of the space around it.

Western thought, influenced largely by Christianity, would lead us to believe that we are separate from everything else, including each other.

I am me and you are you and there is a concrete and delineable separation between us…called space, which is also a separate “thing.”

In fact, religion would go even further and say that God has separated us into a group he likes and another he doesn’t.

Watts would say that to fully describe a human, one must not only look to the actions of the man himself, but also to the environment in which those actions take place…and that environment is the entire universe.

That is, you cannot separate the inside from the outside, because both exist interdependent on the other…they are one and the same “thing.”

There is no inside without an outside and vice versa.

Pretty heady stuff, no?

But then I start asking myself, OK Mr. Watts, that might be so, but so what?

What relevance does it have for my present existence, since the entire set up has been devised along the lines of separateness, as delusional and illusional as that might be…

It’s the “world” we have to live in.

Well, Watt’s philosophy kinda dovetails with the whole mindset that I espouse here in The Revolutionary Misfit blog.

That the impetus for impact should stem from our sameness, not our separateness.

That is, not to just throw money at problems because we have compassion for those poor starving “others.”

When we help others, we are actually helping ourselves. Because, as Watts alludes, we’re all really the same thing…we all make up the universe, which makes up…us.

Neither can exist without the other.

When I read about all the division that reins in our world and spawns such venomous hatred that shows up in many of the FaceBook posts circulating through my news feed…

it’s both enlightening and hope inspiring to read the words of Alan Watts.

I want to be inspired with a good reason or motive for practicing impact mindfulness…for being mindful about anyone else’s problems other than my own.

At times, I will admit, I think, hey what’s the use, or what’s the point of it all?

The point is that what might be happening on the other side of the globe to a small child in a tiny African village does affect me…

because that happening is part of the universal flow of which I am a component.

It’s not a separate event that I can just ignore on my way to more western culture-driven ego inflation.

We’re all doing this activity called life together and I believe impact should be about helping ourselves collectively enjoy that mutually experienced process.

image credit: goldberrybombadil via Compfight cc

The Real You…

It often dawns upon me that there are two separate worlds.

One is the real world where real things exits, where life truly happens…

and then there is this superficial one, largely made up of status signs and symbols.

I ran across a Brain Pickings post today about a book by Alan Watts entitled, Does it Matter – Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality.

No, I haven’t read the book, yet. But I certainly will…

Watts was a English born philosophising sort who was a 60’s guru on Eastern thought, like Zen Buddhism.

Don’t know much about him…I did read this morning that he experimented with LSD…

Don’t fault him for that, as I did too, although by the time I got around to it, Owsley has already exited the scene and the quality of the experience along with him.

Anyway, what particularly struck me from the post was this quote from Watts’ book…

All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is.

Watts then goes on to write…

Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself. A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft. He needs real wealth, in the form of a fishing rod, a compass, an outboard motor with gas, and a female companion. But this ingrained and archaic confusion of money with wealth is now the main reason we are not going ahead full tilt with the development of our technological genius for the production of more than adequate food, clothing, housing, and utilities for every person on earth.

and finally…

It is an oversimplification to say that this is the result of business valuing profit rather than product, for no one should be expected to do business without the incentive of profit. The actual trouble is that profit is identified entirely with money, as distinct from the real profit of living with dignity and elegance in beautiful surroundings…

To try to correct this irresponsibility by passing laws (e.g., against absentee ownership) would be wide of the point, for most of the law has as little relation to life as money to wealth. On the contrary, problems of this kind are aggravated rather than solved by the paperwork of politics and law. What is necessary is at once simpler and more difficult: only that financiers, bankers, and stockholders must turn themselves into real people and ask themselves exactly what they want out of life — in the realization that this strictly practical and hard–nosed question might lead to far more delightful styles of living than those they now pursue. Quite simply and literally, they must come to their senses — for their own personal profit and pleasure.

I really like Watts’ admonition that financiers, bankers and stockholders turn themselves into real people.

The status symbols that we strive to erect to prove that we are alive, or worthy of life, aren’t real.

For example, it wasn’t “real” for the Wolf of Wall Street (Jordan Belfort) to own a 170 foot yacht…which he sunk off the coast of Sardinia in a frantic attempt to salvage his money.

True that it makes for an interesting story, in as much as we adore superficial stories…

but it ain’t real.

That’s not the real world that the majority of the human population faces on a day to day basis.

And I believe that’s what Watts is getting at.

This contrived world of status signs and symbols, primarily represented by money and the superficial things we use it for, infringes on the real one to the extent that the real one is threatened.

This quest for superficiality makes life hard on everyone…even those caught up in it.

Which is why Watts also states…

The moral challenge and the grim problem we face is that the life of affluence and pleasure requires exact discipline and high imagination.

Belfort had neither and his life of course suffered for it.

Using Belfort as an example is of course dramatic hyperbole…

but not really.

There are many caught up in this alternative world of superficiality in far less dramatic ways than Belfort.

They work hard, yes, that’s a given…

but for what?

To have way more than they really need?

And do they not stop to consider that we live in a world of finite resources and for them to have more than they could ever possibly need means that someone else has less than they truly need?

Well it actually does.

And just look at the human and environmental poverty that exists in this world as living proof.

Now that’s the real world.

And it’s one that could be dramatically improved IF and only if…

those in the superficial one…

get real.

image credit: wolfofwallst via Compfight cc

The Singularity of Alan Watts

Superficiality

Connect with RM