It’s only when you invent yourself as a static, separate self does the unity of nature get artificially broken. 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.

In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable.Instead of a method, Watts argues that the problem can be resolved immediately the moment it is properly understood. We are forced to wrestle with the demon of nothingness, until that day when, through thought, prayer and meditation, we - or rather the Being of God - melts it in a Fire of Attention, Love and Peace. But to the undivided mind, death is another moment, complete like every moment, and cannot yield its secret unless lived to the full. I'd just been studying Daoism, Buddhism and Hinduism in school and these schools of thought appealed to me but I didn't know how to go about making them mine. Watts’ objection, however, is that we mistake this essential abstraction for our fundamental nature.

Quite the contrary, it’s the stability and usefulness of this abstraction that makes it very easy to confuse for reality.If there is no self, but only experience, and such experience is this changing, fluid process and reality is this changing, fluid process, then it doesn’t take much stretch to claim they are part of the same thing. Yet, if you look at a large amount of human activity, it does seem to fall into Watts’ diagnosis that we’re in a state of anxiety and hunger, for no discernible net benefit to happiness.

Planning for the future brings with it anxiety, a false sense of security and safety, both of which do not exist.I need someone like Watts to challenge me with a discomforting perspective that forces my self-examination, even when he says things I don’t like.