Monday, March 31, 2014

The ability to go through life with crystalline awareness and fully inhabit our experience.


Stop measuring my days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence. Watts argues that the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction. If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future.

We are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.

These predictions are, relatively, so accurate and reliable  that the future assumes a high degree of reality — so high that the present loses its value.  Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances. Faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead.

The brainy modern loves not matter but measures, no solids but surfaces. They spend their days in activities which largely boil down to counting and measuring, living in a world of rationalized abstraction which has little relation to or harmony with the great biological rhythms and processes.

As a matter of fact, mental activities of this kind can now be done far more efficiently by machines than by men. Already the human computer is widely displaced by mechanical and electrical computers of far greater speed and efficiency. If, then, man’s principal asset and value is his brain and his ability to calculate, he will become an unsaleable commodity in an era when the mechanical operation of reasoning can be done more effectively by machines.

If we are to continue to live for the future, and to make the chief work of the mind prediction and calculation, man must eventually become a parasitic appendage to a mass of clockwork. To be sure, Watts doesn’t dismiss the mind as a worthless or fundamentally perilous human faculty. Rather, he insists that it if we let its unconscious wisdom unfold unhampered — like, for instance, what takes place during the “incubation” stage of unconscious processing in the creative process — it is our ally rather than our despot. It is only when we try to control it and turn it against itself that problems arise:
There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. 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.

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. “I know this present experience, and it is different from that past experience. If I can compare the two, and notice that experience has changed, I must be something constant and apart.” You cannot compare this present experience with a past experience. You can only compare it with a memory of the past, which is a part of the present experience.

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