I used to be a Christian; I used to be an atheist; I used to be an agnostic; and then I couldn't even commit to not committing to anything. Rather, he is thinking about the operation in an entirely futile way, which both ruins his present enjoyment of life and contributes nothing to the solution of any problem. However, I suppose I shouldn’t get too caught up in this contradiction, seeing as for a man who believed in the essential unexplainability of Zen, Watts’ himself wrote over twenty books about it. Because the author’s a bit old-fashioned, as I said, and he offers you at one point only a passe Fifties’ Fad, Vedanta, as a possible solution.

Alan Watts was one of the big popularizers of Zen and other Asian spiritual philosophies in the 50s and 60s, and I greatly enjoyed his television program. What we are remembering about the past is happening right now and thus becomes part of our present experience. My philosophical start to 2020 (an attempt to see clearly) continues with this, my first Watts book. Unmistakably a book to spend time with, each passage requires a thorough reading with a lot of thinking.I realize that no matter how much security I may gain I will always need more of it, and this striving can set me on an endless “hamster wheel” of anxiety.

This comes from that game where both players try to last as long as they can not thinking about polar bears. While the insights are not truly separate, they are confusing, so I’ve done my best to separate them and present them in a sequence as I understand them. On the subject of achieving desired results in life, he says, "When each moment becomes an expectation, life is deprived of fulfillment, and death is dreaded, for it seems that here expectation must come to an end. He plays with thoughts like how a chess master plays with the figures on the board: while he dances around with ease along his thoughts, the patterns and conclusions are striking.Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. I went into this thinking it would be a book about self-acceptance, reading “insecurity” in the way that I wanted it to be: it’s not. And if there is anything objectionable (not that I detect anything, but like I said, my brain is shot), some kind of slant or bias in the writing, it doesn't matter much to me, because I've got the ideas and concepts that I need. One gets the sense that Watts has wrestled with his own demons and developed a depth of self-awareness that would scare many of us.