Tag: Alan Watts

No one “gets it” like Alan Watts gets it. He summarises “it” in a 160 page book called “THE BOOK: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” (1966).  This TAG proves the pattern: no matter what I learn in the other fields and areas of scholarship, I can’t help but return to the metaphoric and comedic language of Alan Watts.

These two paragraphs in the Preface to THE BOOK, (almost) captures the thesis I’m spending hours upon hours trying to write:

“THIS BOOK explores an unrecognized but mighty taboo—our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are. Briefly, the thesis is that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East—in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man’s natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction.

We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which is in accord with the physical facts and which overcomes our feeling of alienation from the universe. For this purpose I have drawn on the insights of Vedanta, stating them, however, in a completely modern and Western style—so that this volume makes no attempt to be a textbook on or introduction to Vedanta in the ordinary sense. It is rather a cross-fertilization of Western science with an Eastern intuition.”

It’s contents includes:

1 Inside Information 11
2 The Game of Black-and-White 29
3 How To Be a Genuine Fake 53
4 The World Is Your Body 82
5 So What? 100
6 IT 125

Reading these paragraphs make me question why I am writing a thesis that seems to take the above two paragraphs and make them a whole lot more complicated?

I guess that’s the process of growth: take things apart, make them more complex, then put them back together, and see if there’s something useful you can add in returning it to the simplicity. Even Watts wrote and spoke at length about “Nothingness”…

I doubt I can add much to the messages Alan Watts conveys so effectively, but given the feeling of alienation of humans from their universe continues, as does the exploitation of our fellow humans and our planet, both which appear connected to understandings of self and world that don’t align with a holistic look at what western science tells us (including evolution, emergence and quantum physics). Maybe my contribution will be exploring how the idea captured in THE BOOK may be put to use in new ways…

THE BOOK is definitely worth a read (or Google the title and PDF and you’ll surely find a free copy) and The Nature of Consciousness (an audio lecture series) is well worth listening to, at least ten times:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhRWYFJ2pyI[/youtube]

Hopefully when my ability to express these ideas improves I will be able to share this in ways that doesn’t simply direct people away from my blog. When one is working over 4-days a week, and trying to write up a long academic thesis by the end of the year, there’s only so much you can do…. I guess it’ll all happen in good time.

“Inefficiency is a good thing,” a wise friend informed me six months ago. I must have looked confused.

“When I said this to a room full of corporates, you should have seen the horror on their faces!” My face would have read pretty much the same. Inefficiency is good???

“How?” I asked in almost disbelief.

“Friendship, for example, spending time with people you love. It’s entirely inefficient… All the things in life that are wonderful, involve being inefficient. Think about it: Art. Love. Reflection. Contemplation. These things don’t happen in a rush. They take time. You need to be inefficient.”

But “Time, we say, is money, and, boy, that’s for real!” says Alan Watts, in Does it Matter?:

“Even sex is becoming acceptable for the same reason: it is good for you; it is a healthy, tension–reducing “outlet”—to use Kinsey’s statistical term for counting orgasms—and some wretched hygienist will soon figure out the average person’s minimum daily requirement of outlets (0.428 would be three times a week) so that we can screw with a high sense of duty and freedom from guilt.”

He goes on to explain that: “We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.”

“The heart of the matter is that we are living in a culture which has been hypnotized with symbols—words, numbers, measures, quantities, and images—and that we mistake them for, and prefer them to, physical reality… A culture is hardly a culture at all when it does not provide for the most sophisticated training in the fundamental arts of life: farming, cooking, dining, dressing, furnishing, and love–making. Where these arts are not cultivated with devotion and skill, time to spare and money to spend are useless.”

For someone from a business and economics background, which based on efficiency, this shift from efficiency = bad, can take a while to truly comprehend, and even longer to integrate into one’s life.

Ever since school I’ve judged myself on how much I have “got done”. How many boxes on my to-do list I have ticked. I couldn’t relax till my homework was complete. My day was a good day if it had been an efficient one.

In my first serious relationship it took time for me to adjust. When you are in love, you tend to spend time doing the most inefficient things. You drive out of your way, you sit around watching TV, you talking for hours, you fight and make up. Almost everything you do when in love is inefficient. Each action is unmeasurable. There’s no tick boxes in love.

I did adjust. I learned to be inefficient. It felt good. It forced me to relax.

It was a long relationship, and few years have passed since it ended. Old habits die hard.

Without a reason to be inefficient I ascended or descended, depending how you judge it, back into my more efficient state. All my time became my time again, to do all the things I wanted to do. If I wanted to work a 14-hour day on my research, I could. There was no one else to think about. Just me. So I “followed my bliss”, got myself wrapped up in research, writing and creative projects that I loved doing. I really love these things. Yet in time, efficiency takes its toll.

Sometimes I catch myself on skype, on the phone, or even in person, with friends or family, and I notice my mind wonder off to think about various ideas and projects. At times I find it hard to go out of my way for others. It can be hard to justify a weekend away, time out, reading novels that aren’t teaching me something, spending time doing nothing. Sometimes even yoga feels like a trade-off – I can do yoga or I can do more study, and I choose to do the latter. The worst feeling is when stuck in traffic or waiting in line or in a dead boring conversation – in any situation where time is being wasted – and some part inside me cringes, an inner frustration of time ticking by.

There has to be some way to navigate the efficient and inefficient.

In the short term being efficient might make me happier than ever, feeling satisfied with all I’m accomplishing. But continued in the long term too much efficiency means we miss out on the deeper, the inefficient, relationships and connectivity that we are on this planet to experience. If we aren’t careful, we will be old, grey, bald, fat, and lonely, and life will have passed us by.

After a walk in the nearby mountains, spending time taking photos like the above shot, I wrote some “notes to self”:

• Don’t get frustrated when time disappears into nothing.
• Put time into friendships without feeling rushed. Be present during that time.
• Learn to say yes, no, or later, as fits with what I wants to do. You can’t do everything.
• Better to do less and do it less efficiently, then feel like you are your own production line. Times have changed since Henry Ford’s assembly line.
• Creativity and quality are assets of the future. Efficiency is the antithesis of creativity.
• Meditate. Exercise. Relax. Find your balance.
• Cherish quality. Put love into your food. Cultivate the arts. Enjoy… Be inefficient.

It is what one does when they are inefficient that makes life worth living.