Leadership Journeys [128] – Marjukka Niinioja –“I had to learn to stop myself from speaking to listen more.” Even if the observation is correct, the reasoning based on it is absurd. It is as if to say, "You say there is a fire in the basement. You are upset about it. Because you are upset, there is obviously no fire." The Agnostic, the sceptic, is neurotic. but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that "where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, Watts had the rare gift of ‘writing beautifully the unwritable.’”— Los Angeles Times Leadership Journeys [132] – Josh Staph –“A good leader knows what questions to ask and what questions need to be answered” Yet, if you look at a large amount of human activity, it does seem to fall into Watts’ diagnosis that we’re in a state of anxiety and hunger, for no discernible net benefit to happiness.

You can tell from the audio quality that the recordings are old, sometimes take place in classrooms, yet don’t feel like a lecture. So what’s that about? Of course there are no easy answers to suchbig, existential questions – you can’t find them overnight. What you can find overnight though, are things like alcohol, TV and a new handbag. Lesson 2:Consumerism comes with an empty promise of happiness. Our mission is to foster a universal passion for reading by partnering with authors to help create stories and communicate ideas that inform, entertain, and inspire. Everyone wants to lead a happy and fulfilled life. At the same time, no one wants to experience tribulations. They spend their lives worrying about how to make it all easy and make the pain go away.

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The first, is that the tools don’t work. Despite all the false profundity of the writing, they hinge on an incorrect premise. The nature of reality and human existence doesn’t fit with this picture, or if it does, there is nothing we can do about it. This sentiment runs across the gamut of America’s spiritual brands, from Joel Osteen’s ever-purposeful (and vindictive) God to Marianne Williamson’s divinely rewarding cosmos. Take, for example, Osteen’s tweet on November 20: I do not believe, as he contends, that most Christians view the stories in the Bible as being merely metaphors for the process of insight he describes in his book. Many practicing Christians genuinely do believe in an actual future heaven and hell, as opposed to being an analogy for enlightenment and the vicious circles we engage in on this earth. Consumerism is the proverbial dangling carrot that only adds to one’s anxieties, leaving them with a feeling of constant discontent. 3. Pain and Pleasure are Two Sides of the Same Coin In other words, the past and future are not something we directly perceive, but merely infer, based on the traces we have in memory. Reality is always a process of becoming, being born and dying continually. Time is merely how we extrapolate some patterns in that process.

It is the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply arrangements of old words and ideas.” The pain of all the hardships of a painter will always be accompanied byfeelings of gratitude, joy and passion, because you’re doing what you really love. Just like the fourthvodka martini comes with a terrible hangover the next day. What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things.” We have made a problem for ourselves by confusing the intelligible with the fixed. We think that making sense out of life is impossible unless the flow of events can somehow be fitted into a framework of rigid forms. To be meaningful, life must be understandable in terms of fixed ideas and laws, and these in turn must correspond to unchanging and eternal realities behind the shifting scene. But if this what "making sense out of life" means, we have set ourselves the impossible task of making fixity out of flux.”Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.” While not being all sunshine and rainbows, the strong and indoctrinated morals and beliefs of religion gave people a sense of comfort and fulfillment. Knowing you’re working towards an afterlife in paradise is reassuring and lets you put up with a lotpain.

This basic approach accords much in my understanding with the basics of Zen, which takes Buddhist ideas about the nature of suffering and the nonexistence of the self, but adds to the idea that enlightenment is something instantly attainable through meditation, rather than the product of thousands of lifetimes of karmic investment. Human beings in general, but particularly in our modern age, live in a near-constant state of dissatisfaction and anxiety. Alternatively yearning or fearing things which are not here. Insightful and entertaining essays spanning 40 years of lectures by Alan Watts on Zen, Taoism, psychedelics, and comparative philosophy. Leadership Journeys [121] – Sufiyan Sait –“The delta between your expectation and reality is inversely proportional to happiness”The second explanation is that they work, but are incredibly hard to employ. Watts’ approach which denies a method to resolve the problem, suggests as much. This inaccessibility of the philosophy could explain why it didn’t become the dominant understanding in most religions, since most people couldn’t reach past the metaphors and so, instead, hung onto them as literal truth. Once there is the suspicion that a religion is a myth, its power has gone. It may be necessary for man to have a myth, but he cannot self-consciously prescribe one as he can mix a pill for a headache. A myth can only "work" when it is thought to be truth, and man cannot for long knowingly and intentionally "kid" himself. If you can learn to process the painful parts asjust one half of the whole thing, you’ll learn to see these emotions as temporary and that both are a necessary part of life.

If there is a moment to be enjoyed, it must be a present moment. However, if we are continuously living in an imagined, abstracted future (or past) moment, then when those moments actually come, we will miss them if we are living again in another imagined moment. When belief in the eternal becomes impossible, and there is only the poor substitute of belief in believing, men seek their happiness in the joys of time. However much they may try to bury it in the depths of their minds, they are well aware that these joys are both uncertain and brief. This has two results. On the one hand, there is the anxiety that one may be missing something, so that the mind flits nervously and greedily from one pleasure to another, without finding rest and satisfaction in any. On the other, the frustration of having always to pursue a future good in a tomorrow which never comes, and in a world where everything must disintegrate, gives men an attitude of "What's the use anyhow?"Given this description of the problem, is it possible to get out of it? The answer, according to Watts’, is yet another seemingly paradoxical yes-and-no situation. Instead of a method, Watts argues that the problem can be resolved immediately the moment it is properly understood. “When light is brought, the darkness vanishes at once,” Watts explains.