I Wish, I Wish He'd Go Away

The Chinese artist Liu Bolin

“Why is the mutual interdependence between ourselves and the external world not the most obvious and dominant fact of consciousness?” Alan Watts asked in his 1960 book This Is It.

“Why do we not see that the world that we try to control, our whole inner and outer natural environment, is precisely that which gives us the power to control anything? It is because we look at things separately instead of simultaneously.

“When we are busy trying to control or change our circumstances, we ignore and are unconscious of the dependence of our consciousness and energy upon the outer world.

“When, on the other hand, we are oppressed by circumstances and feel controlled by the outer world, we forget that our very own consciousness is bringing that world into being.

“For, as I said, the sun is light because there are eyes to see it — noises because there are ears to hear them, hard facts because there is soft skin to feel them.”

“…If, therefore, consciousness ceases to ignore itself and becomes fully self-conscious, it discovers two things: (1) that it controls itself only very slightly, and is thoroughly dependent on other things — father and mother, external nature, biological processes, God, or what you will, and (2) that there is no little man inside, no ‘I’ who owns this consciousness.

“And if that is so, if I do not own my consciousness, and if there is even no ‘me’ to own it, to receive it, or to put up with it, who on earth is there to be either the victim of fate or the master of nature? ‘What is troubling us,’ said Wittgenstein, ‘is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.’”

I’m reminded of the 1899 poem Antigonish by the American educator and poet William Hughes Mearns:

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there.

He wasn’t there again today,

I wish, I wish h’'d go away...

I think I know what’s on the landing at the top of those stairs. It’s a mirror.

Alan Watts: What Haunts the Present

Author and thinker Alan Watts

“The object of dread may not be an operation in the immediate future. It may be the problem of next month’s rent, or a threatened war or social disaster, of being able to save enough for old age, or of death at the last. The ‘spoiler of the present’ may not even be a future dread. It may be something out of the past, some memory of an injury, some crime or indiscretion, which haunts the present with a sense of resentment or guilt. The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings the past and the future are not as real, but more real than the present. The present cannot be lived happily unless the past has been ‘cleared up’ and the future is bright with promise.

“There can be no doubt that the power to remember and predict, to make an ordered sequence out of a helter skelter chaos of disconnected moments, is a wonderful development of sensitivity. In a way, it is the achievement of the human brain, giving man the most extraordinary powers of survival and adaptation to life. But the way in which we use this power is apt to destroy all its advantages, For it is of little use to us to be able to remember and predict if it makes us unable to live fully in the present.”

— Alan Watts, “The Wisdom of Insecurity” (1951)

Thought Surfing

The ego, as Alan Watts observed, is effectively just the focus of conscious attention.

All You Need Is Less

You should be practical about money. That necessarily means that you should not be obsessed with money, as most Americans are. Practicality always exits when obsession joins the party.

And the venal duplicity of commercialism that inevitably taints the atmosphere insures that nobody left at the party is going to be too happy.

Buddhist thinkers and stoics share a disdainful sense of perspective about wealth.

“The only wealth which you will keep forever is the wealth you have given away,” said Marcus Aurelius who, as Roman emperor, knew something about great wealth.

“The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination,” wrote the Zen thinker Alan Watts. “There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money... they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.”

You, Sir, Are a Habit

By Dan Hagen

“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor turned stoic philosopher.

And Alan Watts, the English clergyman turned freelance Zen philosopher, said, “The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.”

In other words, what you routinely prefer to think about, what you routinely permit yourself to think about, is to a great extent what you actually are, what you make of yourself. Your existence precedes your essence, as the existentialists observed.

Zen Buddhism and stoicism would agree that those habitual thoughts — whether rational inquiry or meta-rational meditation — should be aimed at providing you with an untroubled spirit.

Therefore, inauthenticity comes at a higher cost than most people realize, bringing its own inner winter of discontent. As Marcus Aurelius said, “Be content to seem what you really are.”

The Facts of Life

By Dan Hagen

Running my eye along my bookshelf of biographies, I am struck by how many of these people accomplished significant things in the broad world while pretty much being shits in their immediate world.

Charles Schulz, Dorothy Parker, Alan Watts, Ayn Rand, Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Hellman — none of them made it easy on their friends, or even on themselves. All are best appreciated at a distance in time and space. They aren’t people with whom one could be comfortably involved.

What’s that all about? Does stellar accomplishment in one’s art or career require so much drive that it distorts the personality, drains it of some of the energy and empathy necessary for day-to-day decency? That’s another price that has to be paid for greatness, maybe. The great run up quite a bill.

But happily, some seem to avoid the charge. That shelf also displays the biographies of people I would have liked to befriend.

There’s Julia Child, a genuinely loving woman who understood that expert cooking is a way of nurturing and protecting the most intimate of human relationships on the most ineffable, elemental level.

There’s David Hockney, the visual artist whose talent never seems to run dry because he constantly replenishes it from the well of childhood wonder and play that he has carried with him into advanced age.

There’s Daniel Boone, who was mystified at his transformation into a mythic frontier hero during his own lifetime and horrified at being ballyhooed as an unstoppable “Indian fighter.”

“I never kilt but three,” Boone said plaintively, guiltily.

And there was Dashiell Hammett, the essential author of the hardboiled American private detective story, once a hardboiled American private detective himself and yet a man of deep social conscience who gave away his considerable earnings to people in need about as fast as the checks came in.

Despite his crippling alcoholism, I’d have loved to know the man. Hammett was a genuine stoic, a man who could go to prison for his convictions without complaint.

Hammett has one of his protagonists say, “I can stand whatever I’ve got to stand.” That sounded like fiction, but it wasn’t.


Incidental Intelligence:

I asked my friends to chime in on this topic. Here’s some of what they said:

Lynne Parker: I think it just shows that the arts are peppered with assholes the same as the rest of the population.

Dan Hagen: Yet I would have thought better of people of deep understanding.

Lynne Parker: That is confusing intellect and emotion. I'm inclined to believe the greater the understanding or intellect the more outraged a person may be. Far from being one of the media benumbed sheep, they know what is going on. I can't help but think of my own brother as well. He has Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism. He was bullied during his school years and continues to house a deep rage over it. He is, however, one of the most intelligent people I know. Far smarter than I am.

Aren't most very intelligent or creative people a "little off"? Society treats such people poorly until everyone agrees on that person's worth. Then they are treated as celebrities.

Patricia Poulter: As always, thought-provoking. Perhaps it is that some people, in focusing on the broad human condition, become myopic with regard to the beauty and necessity of genuine human(e) interaction.

Michael Jones: I often think that walking around with that kind of demanding, consuming genius inside tends to make 'victims' a little antisocial, impatient, otherworldly and obsessive. NOT a good combination for those who would live in peaceful, mutually considerate relationships with them. Look at Picasso. Beethoven. The more intense the genius, the more difficult to be a human.

Thommy Berlin: Oh I think I'd have enjoyed getting drunk with all of them. NONE of us are perfect.

Hell, You could launch a Saturn 5 at perfect from here and fall short, lol.

I've had the good luck to meet several of my 'heroes' (all musical) and by and large was very favorably impressed.

Our Mr. Hagen here (who I have never met), is impressive.

So there you go.

The inability to focus on anything beyond themselves.

I find only one thing repellent in humans:

Michelle Mueller Teheux: Can all of us just blame all our faults on our genius?

Sam Lisuzzo: In years gone by genius expressing bad behavior often seemed to have a special societal privilege and were often forgiven. I think of Jackson Pollock, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Eugene O'Neal or Arthur Rimbaud. Today there is advanced cognitive therapy, numerous forms of meditation and "Rehab.” I don't think in today's society genius and chronic dysfunction need necessarily be tantamount to each other. As you love Hammett, I love his soul-mate, Lillian Hellman.....

Dan Hagen: She was a handful, though. I did became a close friend/protégé to one of my great heroes — the novelist Elleston Trevor/Adam Hall — and he was everything I expected him to be, and more. No clay on those well-shod Brit feet.

Sam Lisuzzo: Hellman was a handful... A year or so ago I sat at a dinner for two hours with Van Cliburn. He was quite the gentleman I'm happy to report. We had great fun.

Tom Key: I am surrounded by "handfuls" who are not likely to be known to history. I'm going to tell them to step it up.

Phyllis Nastri-Nelson: Yes, I would say that in my experience (both live & from books) most genuinely creative people are high maintenance. If by chance they are also mentally stable, then they might also be emotionally intelligent - which makes for quite a unique human being indeed! I met a few of each in my life.

Michelle Mueller Teheux: Another reason newsrooms tend to be very interesting places to work ... Lots of creative weird people not concerned about social norms. Not always geniuses, but usually quite thoughtful.

Dan Hagen: I'm starting to think that greatness may be overrated.

Sam Lisuzzo: I love Virginia Woolf. She committed suicide probably because she was having a difficult change of life. I find her death a great tragedy. Perhaps if she'd had resources that are available today, the greatest female writer ever might have enjoyed a longer life. It hurts me today that she took rocks and put them in her pockets to ensure her total demise. The sadness and loneliness she experienced is unspeakable. Damn it, I'd have liked a better end for such a great lady!

Phyllis Nastri-Nelson: Thank goodness there are so many artistic & creative ways for great minds to have worked out some of their angst — albeit messing up personal relationships in the process.

Expand the Awareness

By Dan Hagen

Mindfulness.

Examining one’s thoughts as if they were as remote as the dancing reflection in the pond of the distant streaks of clouds high in the sky.

Mindfulness is awareness of one’s physical and emotional state in the precise here and now of the immediate world. It is not urgency, but calm. It is not tying your courage to the sticking point and trying, but untying and untrying.

Think of your mind as a broad lake, reflecting the world and the sky clearly when calm, and distortedly when agitated. Breathe deeply, fill the senses, expand the field of awareness within and without, and restore calm.

“The adult brain remains open to change throughout the lifespan,” wrote psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel. “Though many brain scientists have … stated that the mind is just the activity of the brain, we now can look at the connection between these two dimensions of our lives from a different perspective. When we consider the mind as an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information, we come to realize that we can actually use the mind to change the brain. The simple truth is that how we focus our attention, how we intentionally direct the flow of energy and information through our neural circuits, can directly alter the brain's activity and its structure.”

In the New York Times, they call mindfulness “presence.” You can also call it “meditation,” as author Alan Watts did.

“We could say that meditation doesn't have a reason or doesn't have a purpose,” Watts wrote. “In this respect, it’s unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.”

Whatever you call it, it’s the necessary counterweight to the nerve-deadening, attention-fragmenting, solitude-extinguishing daily distractions inherent in the digital age.

Alan Watts and his influences