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I didn’t plan on writing this today.
I had an article about my problems with modern-day Hollywood after watching the newest Dune movie.
I planned on being negative by calling out their obviously vapid and overtly commercial ways.
Instead, I thought I’d do something positive.
I want to talk about Alan Watts.
© Smithsonian
If you’re unfamiliar with him, he was among the first famous Western practitioners of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hindu philosophy.
He spoke about Eastern philosophy.
He wrote about Eastern philosophy.
Alan Watts lived Eastern philosophy.
“The Way of Zen” was one of the first best-selling books on Buddhism in the West.
Watts was particularly popular with hippies and the counter-culture of the 1960s, with him advocating the use of psychedelics and exploring the human consciousness.
I don’t want to write a biography on Alan Watts, though.
That’s much too boring.
We’re going to go through some of his quotes instead.
Quote #1
“And if you stay in your mind all the time, you are over rational. In other words, you’re like a very rigid bridge which because it has got no give, no craziness in it, is going to be blown down in the first hurricane”
I would wager most people suffer from staying in their minds all the time.
I certainly do.
Rationality is my usual modus operandi, which tends to leave me incredibly rigid in my life plans.
I enjoy order and structure.
I like having a lighted-up path of where I’m going because uncertainty terrifies me.
I imagine it’s common to worry about the future’s uncertainty. But learning to accept it is one of the hardest things to do.
Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring.
Will it be destruction?
Is nuclear war finally going to happen?
Are we blowing ourselves up before we can mitigate the problem of humans being a single-planet species?
Or will we wake up to another day of limitless potential and relatively clean air?
The perceived lack of control is bothersome and a mindset problem that needs mending.
We’ve never had control anyway.
Quote #2
“Nirvana is right where you are, provided that you don’t object to it.”
Accept where and who you are in this moment, and let go.
We spend so much time looking forward and backward that we forget to exist in the now, and by doing that, we spend a lot of time wrapped up in dangerous emotions.
You and I have the power to be unbothered, free of desire, greed, and ignorance at any moment in time.
It’s a conscious choice we make to have these feelings.
But to be rid of them requires accepting universal truths and letting go of frustration.
The frustration that these universal truths might not be what you had in mind and that none of it matters.
It’s funny and backward.
By not caring, you can get everything you thought you cared about.
We get what we want by not getting what we think we want.
We can achieve these things in abundance by placing no importance on them.
By detaching, you stop investing your emotions and place less emphasis on it; therefore, it doesn’t matter whether you ever attain it in the first place.
Quote #3
“No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”
There’s been a massive uptick in self-diagnosed anxiety over the past decade.
People love prescribing problems to define themselves by.
In reality — they rarely have an anxiety problem. They wind up convincing a doctor they need to take bullshit medicine to mask their shortcomings, which gives them a manufactured way out of a completely normal issue.
It won’t change the outcome, though.
Life will continue happening.
You can’t ignore reality.
If you’re anxious about your bills every month, it won’t change the fact that they’re still due.
Being anxious is a wasted emotion. It’s hesitation about uncomfortable situations. It will rear its ugly head, whether it’s a monetary, emotional, or physical issue.
The only fix for this is acknowledgment.
Acknowledge that you feel it.
You might be tight on money, physically feel bad, or be going through a break-up.
None of it will change the outcome.
Acknowledge the anxiety.
Look it in the face and accept it.
Then move on with your day.
Quote #4
“Transiency is a mark of spirituality. A lot of people think the opposite… that the spiritual things are the everlasting things. But, you see, the more a things tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
Change is inevitable. The faster we accept it, the quicker we grow.
Staying rigid in a constantly changing world is like running INTO a gust of wind. You’re gonna have a bad time.
Embrace change.
Embrace the impermanence of everything. Impermanence has a unique quality of being temporary.
It’s seasonal.
You might enjoy something today that could very quickly cease to exist tomorrow.
What are you going to do then?
You’ll find something else, which will be temporary, too.
Closing
Don’t be serious all the time.
Stop letting people qualify your interests.
And subscribe to this newsletter.
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