Your Kindle Notes For:

The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

Alan Watts and Deepak Chopra

Last accessed on Tuesday April 28, 2020

35 Highlight(s) | 5 Note(s)

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Yellow highlight | Page: 2 Note | Page: 2

The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 4 Note | Page: 4

sober examination of what lies before you, leaving aside all assumptions.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 15 Note | Page: 15

On the other hand, the former has the disadvantage that when this “good time” arrives, it is difficult to enjoy it to the full without some promise of more to come.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 15 Note | Page: 15

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 20 Note | Page: 20

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.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 33 Note | Page: 33

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. But he cannot help himself.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 35 Note | Page: 35

So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 41 Note | Page: 41

To be passing is to live; to remain and continue is to die. “Unless a grain of corn fall into the ground and die, it remains alone. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 42 Note | Page: 42

“I,” not understanding that it too is part of the stream of change,

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 52 Note | Page: 52

There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 52 Note | Page: 52

isolated “I” feels miserably insecure and panicky, finding the real world a flat contradiction of its whole being.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 71 Note | Page: 71

In other words, the function of the brain is to serve the present and the real, not to send man chasing wildly after the phantom of the future.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 99 Note | Page: 99

This is not a psychological or spiritual discipline for self-improvement. It is simply being aware of this present experience, and realizing that you can neither define it nor divide yourself from it. There is no rule but “Look!”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 106 Note | Page: 106

If, for example, we want at the same time both peace and isolation, brotherhood and security for “I,” happiness and permanence, our wants are contradictory. Their results, however practical we may be about getting them, will be further contradictions.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 106 Note | Page: 106

If we make it an ideal to be morally superior, we cannot at the same time avoid self-righteousness. If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 107 Note | Page: 107

the mind and its vision of life must be healed before action can be anything but conflict.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 111 Note | Page: 111

Our feelings about the crawling world of the wasps’ nest and the snake pit are feelings about hidden aspects of our own bodies and brains, and of all their potentialities for unfamiliar creeps and shivers, for unsightly diseases, and unimaginable pains.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 113 Note | Page: 113

“When you want to see into it,” answered the sage, “see into it directly. When you begin to think about it, it is altogether missed.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 113 Note | Page: 113

In these things there is a deep meaning, But when we are about to express it, We suddenly forget the words.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 115 Note | Page: 115

The more the fly struggles to get out of the honey, the faster he is stuck. Under the pressure of so much strain and futility, it is no wonder at all that men seek release in violence and sensationalism, and in the reckless exploitation of their bodies, their appetites, the material world, and their fellow men. What this must add to the necessary and unavoidable pains of existence is incalculable.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 121 Note | Page: 121

Indeed, one of the highest pleasures is to be more or less unconscious of one’s own existence, to be absorbed in interesting sights, sounds, places, and people. Conversely, one of the greatest pains is to be self-conscious, to feel unabsorbed and cut off from the community and the surrounding world.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 124 Note | Page: 124

But I fall straight into contradiction when I try to act and decide in order to be happy, when I make “being pleased” my future goal. For the more my actions are directed towards future pleasures, the more I am incapable of enjoying any pleasures at all.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 126 Note | Page: 126

By far the greater part of these acts come from exaggerated desires, desires for things which are not even remotely necessary for the health of mind and body, granting that “health” is a relative term. Such outlandish and insatiable desires come into being because man is exploiting his appetites to give the “I” a sense of security.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 127 Note | Page: 127

The subsequent depressions have a way of getting deeper and blacker, because I am not digesting the depressed state and eliminating its poisons. So I need to get even drunker to drown them. Very soon I begin to hate myself for getting so drunk, which makes me still more depressed—and so it goes.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 128 Note | Page: 128

And so it goes.

Note:Jack kerouak

Yellow highlight | Page: 129 Note | Page: 129

The Christian mind has always been haunted by the feeling that the sins of the saints are worse than the sins of the sinners, that in some mysterious way the one who is struggling for salvation is nearer to hell and to the heart of evil than the unashamed harlot or thief. It has recognized that the Devil is an angel, and as pure spirit is not really interested in the sins of the flesh. The sins after the Devil’s heart are the intricacies of spiritual pride, the mazes of self-deception, and the subtle mockeries of hypocrisy where mask hides behind mask behind mask and reality is lost altogether. The would-be saint walks straight into the meshes of this web because he would become a saint. His “I” finds the deepest security in a satisfaction which is the more intense for being so cleverly hidden—the satisfaction of being contrite for his sins, and contrite for taking pride in his contrition. In such an involved vicious circle the masks behind masks are infinite. Or, to put it in another way, he who would stand outside himself to kick himself, must then kick the self that stands outside. And so forever.

Note:Muslims too

Yellow highlight | Page: 131 Note | Page: 131

is something much more than an emotion. It is not something which you can “feel” and “know,” remember and define. Love is the organizing and unifying principle which makes the world a universe and the disintegrated mass a community.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 132 Note | Page: 132

Nothing is really more inhuman than human relations based on morals. When a man gives bread in order to be charitable, lives with a woman in order to be faithful, eats with a Negro in order to be unprejudiced, and refuses to kill in order to be peaceful, he is as cold as a clam. He does not actually see the other person. Only a little less chilly is the benevolence springing from pity, which acts to remove suffering because it finds the sight of it disgusting.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 134 Note | Page: 134

Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 143 Note | Page: 143

The moment is the “door of heaven,” the “straight and narrow way that leadeth unto life,” because there is no room in it for the separate “I.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 145 Note | Page: 145

Hell is the fatuity, the everlasting impossibility, of self-love, self-consciousness, and self-possession. It is trying to see one’s own eyes, hear one’s own ears, and kiss one’s own lips.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 147 Note | Page: 147

Is it necessary to underline the vast difference between the realization that “I and the Father are one,” and the state of mind of the person who, as we say, “thinks he is God”? If, still thinking that there is an isolated “I,” you identify it with God, you become the insufferable ego-maniac who thinks himself successful in attaining the impossible, in dominating experience, and in pursuing all vicious circles to satisfactory conclusions. I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul!

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 150 Note | Page: 150

Goethe says it in words which, to the modern mind, may be plainer: The highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.

Note:God is wonder.

Yellow highlight | Page: 151 Note | Page: 151

Almost everyone has known it, but only in rare instants when the startling beauty or strangeness of a scene drew the mind away from its self-pursuit, and for a moment made it unable to find words for the feeling. We are, then, most fortunate to be living in a time when human knowledge has gone so far that it begins to be at a loss for words, not at the strange and marvelous alone, but at the most ordinary things.

Note:Mountains. Palestine. Oceans.

Yellow highlight | Page: 152 Note | Page: 152

In such a confession thought has moved full circle, and we are again as children.

Note:Trips

Would you like to take some notes?

You haven’t created any notes for this book yet. You can add or remove bookmarks, highlights, and notes at any location in a Kindle book.

Learn more about notes and highlights

Sorry, we''ve experienced a problem. Please try again.