The Meaning of Happiness - Alan Watts

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nature, and of the way in which this isolation has been intensified in the growth of civilization. We have also shown how man is intimately and inseparably connected with the material and mental universe, and that if he tries to cut himself off from it he must perish. In fact, however, he can only cut himself off in imagination, otherwise he would cease to exist, but we have yet to decide whether this elusive thing called happiness would result from acceptance of the fact of man’s union with the rest of life. But if this is true we have to discover how such an acceptance may be made, whether it is possible for man to turn in his flight into isolation and overcome the panic which makes him try to swim against the current instead of with it. In the psychological realm this swimming against the current is called repression, the reaction of proud, conscious reason to the fears and desires of nature in man. This raises the further question of whether acceptance of nature involves just a return to the amorality of the beast, being simply a matter of throwing up all responsibility, following one’s whims, and drifting about on the tide of life like a fallen leaf. To return to our analogy: life is the current into which man is thrown, and though he struggles against it, it carries him along despite all his efforts, with the result that his efforts achieve nothing but his own unhappiness. Should he then just turn about and drift? But nature gave him the faculties of reason and conscious individuality, and if he is to drift he might as well have been without them. It is more likely that he has them to give expression to immeasurably greater possibilities of nature than the animal can express by instinct, for while the animal is nature’s whistle, man is its organ.

      Even so, man does not like to be put down to the place of an instrument, however grand that instrument may be, for an instrument is an instrument, and an organ does what it is made to do as subserviently and blindly as a whistle. But this is not the only consideration. It may be that man has a wrong idea of what his self is. In the words of the Hindu sage Patanjali, “Ignorance is the identification of the Seer with the instruments of seeing.”11 Certainly man as instrument is an obedient tool whether he likes it or not, but it may be that there is something in man which is more than the instrument, more than his reason and individuality which are part of that instrument and which he mistakenly believes to be his true self. And while as an instrument he is bound, as this he is free, and his problem is to become aware of it. Finding it, he will understand that in fleeing from death, fear, and sorrow he is making himself a slave, for he will realize the mysterious truth that in fact he is free both to live and to die, to love and to fear, to rejoice and to be sad, and that in none of these things is there any shame. But man rejects his freedom to do them, imagining that death, fear, and sorrow are the causes of his unhappiness. The real cause is that he does not let himself be free to accept them, for he does not understand that he who is free to love is not really free unless he is also free to fear, and this is the freedom of happiness.

       2. THE ANSWER OF RELIGION

      The oldest answers in the world to the problem of happiness are found in religion, for the kind of happiness we are considering belongs to the deepest realms of the human spirit. But this should not lead us to suppose that it is something remote from familiar experience, something to be sought out in supernatural spheres far beyond the world which we know through our five senses. The world of the spirit is so often understood in an almost materialistic way, as a locality infinite in space containing things that are eternal in terms of time.1 It is thought to be a world corresponding in form and substance to our own, save that its forms and substances are constructed of spirit instead of matter, and its operations governed by different laws, for nothing changes—all things are everlasting. To understand the world of the spirit in this way is to make it wholly different from the world in which we live, and when religion is concerned with this kind of spiritualism a great gulf appears between the world of the spirit and the world of everyday experience, contact with the former being possible only in a disembodied condition, as after death, or in a state of consciousness where we acquire a new set of senses, spiritual senses that can perceive things to which material vision is not attuned.

      This view of spirituality is so common in religion that many people believe salvation to lie utterly beyond our present life, being something for which earthly existence is only a preparation and which will be inherited either when we have passed beyond the grave or when, even though still living, our thoughts have ascended to a higher sphere so that we are in this world but not of it. It is probable, however, that this idea has arisen because so much religious teaching is presented in the form of allegory; spiritual truths are presented in terms of time and space for purposes of simplification. Heaven and hell are removed in time to the life after death and in place to a different world order; eternity is represented as unending time, which is not eternity but everlastingness. This kind of simplification may have its uses, but in many ways it is an unnecessary complication for the conception has greater value if we think of heaven and hell as here and now, and of eternity as the timeless, eternal Now.

      Religion as a Denial of Life

      However, this is one of the main trends of thought in religion as generally understood, besides which there is yet another believing that spiritual happiness is attainable on earth but in a somewhat utopian and materialistic way. Both of these trends exist in Christianity, some holding that “on this earth we have no continuing home, therefore we seek one to come,” and others working for the establishment of the “kingdom of heaven on earth.” The Christian holding the former opinion feels that he can never be at home in this world which he regards as a kind of anteroom to the life hereafter, a place of trial and temptation where God tests the fitness of His children to enter His kingdom. At the same time he will thank his Lord for all the blessings of this earth, for the pleasures which give him joy as well as for the pains which give opportunities to learn wisdom. Yet he is not content with those pleasures, and because they are so fleeting he regards them as mere hints of the glories of paradise which shall endure forever and ever.

      But in modern Christianity especially there is another element which existed in olden times, though in a different form. An article of the Apostles’ Creed is the belief in the resurrection of the body,2 the belief that the world to come is not only a spiritual state but also a condition of life where the physical world has been recreated by spiritual power. It is said that God will create a new heaven and a new earth, and that “the kingdom of this world shall become the Kingdom of Our Lord and of His Christ.” The modern Christian is apt to regard this teaching in rather a different way, for whereas his ancestors viewed it as something which would happen only at the last day when all the dead would rise from their graves, the modern view is rather that the kingdom of heaven on earth is something which man may create by the Grace of God here and now. Hence the increasing interest of the churches in idealistic politics. Morality becomes something to be practiced, not only to ensure salvation in the world to come, but to improve the lot of mankind in the world as it is. For Christianity has become linked to the idea of progress, and the churches are the foremost advocates of peace, of social service, and of political and economic justice.

      But both among Christians and among followers of other religions there are those who feel that such ideals are rather naive, either because they seem impossible of achievement or else because they do not seem very desirable. Spiritual happiness, as they understand it, has little to do with either material well-being or everlasting glory in a paradise of heavenly music and streets of pure gold. But they share the same suspicion of the world as it is, believing the highest illumination of the spirit unattainable in the flesh or under the particular limitations of the senses which compel us to view life as a transient alternation of pleasure and pain.

      For many centuries there has been a tendency of this kind in the religions of the East, of which the most notable example is Hinayana Buddhism—the type of Buddhism with which the West is most familiar. The Hinayana takes the most gloomy view of the world of any religion, and seeks escape from it by the quickest possible means to a state which is not exactly complete annihilation, but a kind of vague, infinite consciousness from which all personality, all sense of individual identity, and all diversity of form have been removed. In this state there is no pain because there is no pleasure, and no death because there is no longer anyone to die. The gist of its teaching is that when you realize that your personal self does

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