Articles On Information

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The psychology of the perfect daily routine, how to criticize with kindness, the creative purpose of boredom, Kafka on what books do for the soul, and more</div>
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After the annual reading list of the year’s best books overall, it’s time for the annual summation of the best <em>Brain Pickings</em>
 articles of the year — “best” meaning those most read and shared by 
you, as well as those I took the most pleasure in writing. Please 
(re)enjoy and have an inspired, stimulating, infinitely rewarding new 
year.</div>
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1. <a href="http://articlesoninformation.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><em>An Antidote to the Age of Anxiety: Alan Watts on Happiness and How to Live with Presence</em></a></h3>
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<img src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/alanwatts0.jpg" width="500" /></div>
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What keeps us from happiness, Watts argues, is our inability to fully inhabit the present:</div>
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<blockquote>
The “primary consciousness,” the basic mind which knows 
reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives 
completely in the present, and perceives nothing more than what <em>is</em>
 at this moment. The ingenious brain, however, looks at that part of 
present experience called memory, and by studying it is able to make 
predictions. These predictions are, relatively, so accurate and reliable
 (e.g., “everyone will die”) that the future assumes a high degree of 
reality — so high that the present loses its value.<br />

But the future is still not here, and cannot become a part of 
experienced reality until it is present. Since what we know of the 
future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements — inferences, 
guesses, deductions — it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or
 otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating 
phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is 
why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys
 what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, 
will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such 
abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.</blockquote>
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Watts argues that our primary mode of relinquishing presence is by 
leaving the body and retreating into the mind — that ever-calculating, 
self-evaluating, seething cauldron of thoughts, predictions, anxieties, 
judgments, and incessant meta-experiences about experience itself. 
Writing more than half a century before our age of computers, 
touch-screens, and the quantified self, Watts admonishes:</div>
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<blockquote>
The brainy modern loves not matter but measures, no solids but surfaces.<br />

[…]<br />

The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a
 machine to be batted around by its wheels. 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 — so much so that in a not too 
distant future the human brain may be an obsolete mechanism for logical 
calculation. 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.<br />

[…]<br />

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.</blockquote>
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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 <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/28/the-art-of-thought-graham-wallas-stages/">“incubation” stage of unconscious processing in the creative process</a> — 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:</div>
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<blockquote>
Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of 
“instinctual wisdom.” Thus it should work like the homing instinct of 
pigeons and the formation of the fetus in the womb — without verbalizing
 the process or knowing “how” it does it. The self-conscious brain, like
 the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the 
acute feeling of separation between “I” and my experience. The brain can
 only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is 
designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present 
experience, but being effortlessly aware of it.</blockquote>
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And yet the brain does writhe and whirl, producing our great human 
insecurity and existential anxiety amidst a universe of constant flux. 
(For, as Henry Miller memorably put it, <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/07/henry-miller-of-art-and-the-future/"><em>“It
 is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all 
is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.”</em></a>)
 Paradoxically, recognizing that the experience of presence is the only 
experience is also a reminder that our “I” doesn’t exist beyond this 
present moment, that there is no permanent, static, and immutable “self”
 which can grant us any degree of security and certainty for the future —
 and yet we continue to grasp for precisely that assurance of the 
future, which remains an abstraction. Our only chance for awakening from
 this vicious cycle, Watts argues, is bringing full awareness to our 
present experience — something very different from judging it, 
evaluating it, or measuring it up against some arbitrary or abstract 
ideal. He writes:</div>
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<blockquote>
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 <em>desire</em> for security and the <em>fact</em> 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. <br />

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.</blockquote>
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He takes especial issue with the very notion of self-improvement — something particularly prominent in the season of <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/tag/resolutions/">New Year’s resolutions</a> — and admonishes against the implication at its root:</div>
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<blockquote>
I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an 
ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a 
good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best 
intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the 
two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I” 
will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and
 cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly.</blockquote>
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Happiness, he argues, isn’t a matter of improving our experience, or 
even merely confronting it, but remaining present with it in the fullest
 possible sense:</div>
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<blockquote>
To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to 
understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it. It is 
like the Persian story of the sage who came to the door of Heaven and 
knocked. From within the voice of God asked, “Who is there” and the sage
 answered, “It is I.” “In this House,” replied the voice, “there is no 
room for thee and me.” So the sage went away, and spent many years 
pondering over this answer in deep meditation. Returning a second time, 
the voice asked the same question, and again the sage answered, “It is 
I.” The door remained closed. After some years he returned for the third
 time, and, at his knocking, the voice once more demanded, “Who is 
there?” And the sage cried, “It is thyself!” The door was opened.</blockquote>
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We don’t actually realize that there is no security, Watts asserts, until we confront <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/02/character-personality/">the myth of fixed selfhood</a> and recognize that the solid “I” doesn’t exist — something modern psychology has termed <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/05/31/the-self-illusion-bruce-hood/">“the self illusion”</a>.
 And yet that is incredibly hard to do, for in the very act of this 
realization there is a realizing self. Watts illustrates this paradox 
beautifully:</div>
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<blockquote>
While you are watching this present experience, are you aware of <em>someone</em> watching it? Can you find, in addition to the experience itself, an experiencer? Can you, at the same time, read <em>this</em>
 sentence and think about yourself reading it? You will find that, to 
think about yourself reading it, you must for a brief second stop 
reading. The first experience is reading. The second experience is the 
thought, “I am reading.” Can you find any thinker, who is thinking the 
thought, I am reading?” In other words, when present experience is the 
thought, “I am reading,” can you think about yourself thinking this 
thought? <br />

Once again, you must stop thinking just, “I am reading.” You pass to a
 third experience, which is the thought, “I am thinking that I am 
reading.” Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change 
deceive you into the feeling that you think them all at once.<br />

[…]<br />

In each present experience you were only aware of that experience. 
You were never aware of being aware. You were never able to separate the
 thinker from the thought, the knower from the known. All you ever found
 was a new thought, a new experience.</blockquote>
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What makes us unable to live with pure awareness, Watts points out, is the ball and chain of our <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/04/oliver-sacks-on-memory-and-plagiarism/">memory</a> and our <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/15/time-warped-claudia-hammond/">warped relationship with time</a>:</div>
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<blockquote>
The notion of a separate thinker, of an “I” distinct from
 the experience, comes from memory and from the rapidity with which 
thought changes. It is like whirling a burning stick to give the 
illusion of a continuous circle of fire. If you imagine that memory is a
 direct knowledge of the past rather than a present experience, you get 
the illusion of knowing the past and the present at the same time. This 
suggests that there is something in you distinct from both the past and 
the present experiences. You reason, “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.” <br />

But, as a matter of fact, you cannot compare this present experience 
with a past experience. You can only compare it with a memory of the 
past, <em>which is a part of the present experience</em>. When you see 
clearly that memory is a form of present experience, it will be obvious 
that trying to separate yourself from this experience is as impossible 
as trying to make your teeth bite themselves.<br />

[…]<br />

To understand this is to realize that life is entirely momentary, 
that there is neither permanence nor security, and that there is no “I” 
which can be protected.</blockquote>
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And therein lies the crux of our human struggle:</div>
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<blockquote>
The real reason why human life can be so utterly 
exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called 
death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such
 facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get 
the “I” out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try 
to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, 
and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man
 and his present experience are one, and that no separate “I” or mind 
can be found.<br />

To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are 
thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.</blockquote>
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