What keeps us from happiness? Watts argues...
"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.
To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. 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."
Acclaimed philosopher Alan Watts shows us how-in an age of unprecedented anxiety-we can find fulfillment by embracing the present and living more fully in the now.
Alan Wilson Watts (1915 - 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, speaker and one of the pioneers in spreading Eastern wisdom to the West.
Drawing on a wide variety of traditions (such as Chinese philosophy, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and modern science) Watts synthesizes the main teachings that allow the individual to find himself with his deep nature.
With great lucidity of thought and simplicity of language, Watts presents answers to the fundamental misunderstanding, the central mystery of existence, the reality of who we are.
As a great interpreter of Eastern disciplines, Watts spread that our conception of ourselves is a myth; the entities we call "separate things" being merely aspects or characteristics of the same unit.
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