BOOK SPECIAL An Antidote to the Loneliness of the Divided Mind
“All things physical are
information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe,” the great theoretical physicist John Archibald
Wheeler wrote in his influential It
for Bit model
of the nature of reality, adding: “Observer-participancy
gives rise to information.”
Wheeler arrived at this notion that the
universe doesn’t exist out there, independent of us, through the gateway of
physics just as his British contemporary Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973) was arriving
at it through philosophy. In introducing Eastern thought into the West, Watts
spoke and wrote with unparalleled lucidity about the way in which our
self-referential awareness of an experience (or observer-participancy, in
Wheeler’s words) shapes the experience itself, nowhere more elegantly than
in The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of
Anxiety — his timeless and increasingly timely
treatise on how
to live with presence.
Watts argues that as long as we divide life
into interior self-awareness and exterior experience, into life in here and
life out there, we split our psyches asunder and doom ourselves to never
attaining the wholeness at the heart of human happiness. With an eye to the
inherent interconnectedness of the universe, he
writes:
There is a world of difference between an
inference and a feeling. You can reason that the universe is a unity without
feeling it to be so. You can establish the theory that your body is a movement
in an unbroken process which includes all suns and stars, and yet continue to
feel separate and lonely. For the feeling will not correspond to the theory
until you have also discovered the unity of inner experience. Despite all
theories, you will feel that you are isolated from life so long as you are
divided within.
But
you will cease to feel isolated when you recognize, for example, that you do
not have a sensation of the sky: you are that
sensation. For all purposes of feeling, your sensation of the sky is the sky,
and there is no “you” apart from what you sense, feel, and know.
Like the physicist who builds models of how
the universe works but remains completely blind to her own interior world, we
risk being only half-human when we worship at the altar of the outrospective
intellect to the exclusion of our introspective intuition, the seedbed of
belonging to the integrated wholeness of the universe — that is, when we
approach the world as separate experiencers of it rather than as participatory
parts of it. Watts admonishes:
The sense of unity with the “All” is not,
however, a nebulous state of mind, a sort of trance, in which all form and
distinction is abolished, as if man and the universe merged into a luminous
mist of pale mauve. Just as process and form, energy and matter, myself and
experience, are names for, and ways of looking at, the same thing — so one and
many, unity and multiplicity, identity and difference, are not mutually
exclusive opposites: they are each other, much as the body is its various
organs. To discover that the many are the one, and that the one is the many, is
to realize that both are words and noises representing what is at once obvious
to sense and feeling, and an enigma to logic and description.
[…]
When
you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around
the countryside thinking, “I amall this.” There is simply “all
this.”
More than half a century before physicist
Sean Carroll held up the beautiful notion of “poetic
naturalism” as a counterpoint to the scientific
contention that the universe is inherently meaningless, Watts inverts that
common charge and writes:
If the universe is meaningless, so is the
statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser,
and the pot is calling the kettle black.
In
the strictest sense, we cannot actually think about life and reality at all,
because this would have to include thinking about thinking, thinking about
thinking about thinking, and so ad infinitum. One can only attempt
a rational, descriptive philosophy of the universe on the assumption that one
is totally separate from it. But if you and your thoughts are part of this
universe, you cannot stand outside them to describe them. This is why all
philosophical and theological systems must ultimately fall apart. To “know”
reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be
it, and feel it.
Watts argues that this impulse for
description over experience, for attempting to make sense of reality by
standing outside it rather than surrendering to it, is symptomatic of the
divided mind — the mind that robs us of inner
wholeness. He writes:
So long as the mind is split, life is
perpetual conflict, tension, frustration, and disillusion. Suffering is piled
on suffering, fear on fear, and boredom on boredom… But the undivided mind is
free from this tension of trying always to stand outside oneself and to be
elsewhere than here and now. Each moment is lived completely, and there is thus
a sense of fulfillment and completeness.
[…]
When
… you realize that you live in, that indeed you are this moment now, and no
other, that apart from this there is no past and no future, you must relax and
taste to the full, whether it be pleasure or pain. At once it becomes obvious
why this universe exists, why conscious beings have been produced, why
sensitive organs, why space, time, and change. The whole problem of justifying
nature, of trying to make life mean something in terms of its future,
disappears utterly. Obviously, it all exists for this moment. It is a dance,
and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere… The meaning
and purpose of dancing is the dance.
The Wisdom of Insecurity remains an indispensable read. Complement this
particular portion with trailblazing physicist David Bohm and Buddhist monk
Matthieu Ricard on how
we shape what we call reality, then
revisit Watts on what
makes us who we are, the
difference between money and wealth, the
art of timing, and learning
not to think in terms of gain or loss.
BRAIN PICKINGS
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