The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan W. Watts

Author:Alan W. Watts [Watts, Alan W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80986-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

1 The word “awareness” is used in the sense given to it by J. Krishnamurti, whose writings discuss this theme with extraordinary perception.

VI. THE MARVELOUS MOMENT

YOU ARE LISTENING TO A SONG. SUDDENLY I ASK, “AT this moment, who are you?” How will you answer this question immediately and spontaneously, without stopping to find words? If the question does not shock you out of listening, you will answer by humming the song. If the question surprised you, you will answer, “At this moment, who are you?” But if you stop to think, you will try to tell me, not about this moment, but about the past. I shall get information about your name and address, your business and personal history. But I asked who you are, not who you were. For to be aware of reality, of the living present, is to discover that at each moment the experience is all. There is nothing else beside it—no experience of “you” experiencing the experience.

Even in our most apparently self-conscious moments, the “self” of which we are conscious is always some particular feeling or sensation—of muscular tensions, of warmth or cold, of pain or irritation, of breath or of pulsing blood. There is never a sensation of what senses sensations, just as there is no meaning or possibility in the notion of smelling one’s nose or kissing one’s own lips.

In times of happiness and pleasure, we are usually ready enough to be aware of the moment, and to let the experience be all. In such moments we “forget ourselves,” and the mind makes no attempt to divide itself from itself, to be separate from experience. But with the arrival of pain, whether physical or emotional, whether actual or anticipated, the split begins and the circle goes round and round.

As soon as it becomes clear that “I” cannot possibly escape from the reality of the present, since “I” is nothing other than what I know now, this inner turmoil must stop. No possibility remains but to be aware of pain, fear, boredom, or grief in the same complete way that one is aware of pleasure. The human organism has the most wonderful powers of adaptation to both physical and psychological pain. But these can only come into full play when the pain is not being constantly restimulated by this inner effort to get away from it, to separate the “I” from the feeling. The effort creates a state of tension in which the pain thrives. But when the tension ceases, mind and body begin to absorb the pain as water reacts to a blow or cut.

There is another story of a Chinese sage who was asked, “How shall we escape the heat?”—meaning, of course, the heat of suffering. He answered, “Go right into the middle of the fire.” “But how, then, shall we escape the scorching flame?” “No further pain will trouble you!” We do not need to go as far as China. The same idea comes in The Divine Comedy, where Dante and Virgil find that the way out of Hell lies at its very center.

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