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Gary's Reviews > Psychotherapy East & West
Psychotherapy East & West
by
by
I initially rated it 3 stars, but since then I have been thinking about it quite a bit, and anything that sticks with me this long after reading it deserves at least 4 stars. The first chapter and the last are keepers. In fact the last chapter was such a doozy that I had to read bits and pieces out loud to my wife. The middle section was a bit dull for my taste (hence the initial 3 stars).
The book is a comparison of 2 ways of self-liberation; the western way (psychotherapy, with a focus on Jung and Freud) and the Eastern way (the eastern religion-philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, and Yoga). At the heart of the problem is self-contradiction, and his point of view is that western religion contributes to self-contradiction and hatred of one's own nature rather than self-liberation. To that regard he says "the minister might become an extraordinarily helpful person if he could see through his own religion."
After a cursory glance at western religion Watts then turns to Society, and here he provides what I think is the best definition of society that i've come across:
"As a patter of behavior, society is avocet all a system of people in communication maintained by consistent action. To keep the system going, what is done has to be consistent with what has been done. The pattern is recognizable as a patter because it goes ahead with reference to its own past; it is just this that establishes what we call order and identity, a situation in which trees do not suddenly turn into rabbits and in which on man does not suddenly behave like another so that we do not know who he is. "Who" is consistent behavior."
He goes on to say that the "maintenance of society would be simple enough if human beings were content just to survive. In this case they would be simply animal, and it would be enough to eat, sleep, and reproduce. But if these are their basic needs, human beings go about getting them in the most complicated way imaginable." It's funny because it's true.
Watts says "when we say that an organism likes to go on living, or that it goes on living because it likes it, what evidence is there for this "like" except that it does in fact go on living - until it doesn't? Similarly, to say that we always choose what we prefer says no more that that we always choose what we choose." That's easy enough to follow, but then he says that the "transformation of food and air into the pattern of the organism is what we call existence." and then "to say that the organism needs food is only to say that it is food. To say that it eats because it is hungry is only to say that it says when it is ready to eat." In a way I get it... I was especially thinking about this part a few days ago at the wild animal park when the guides kept talking about animals "liking" this, and the "purpose" of adaptations, which, I get why they use the terms, but there is no "purpose" in an adaptation - no end goal. The anthropomorphization of it all bugs me. In Watts's words, "the consistencies or regularities of nature are patterns that do occur, not patterns that must occur."
Anyways Watts says that society is essentially a game we all play, and if you want to belong to society you must play the game, and "the first rule of the game is this game is serious, i.e. not a game."
One thing that stuck with me is how man is a self-frustrating organism, "For example, one of our greatest assets for survival is our sense of time, our marvelously sensitive memory, which enables us to predict the future from the pattern of the past. Yet awareness of time ceases to be an asset when concern for the future makes it almost impossible to live fully in the present, or when increasing knowledge of the future makes it increasingly certain that beyond a brief span we have no future."
Watts says that our self-frustrating activity is what the buddhists actually mean by samsara (the cycle of death and reincarnation). In other words, it is a metaphor and later dedicates a whole chapter to the idea of eastern religious beliefs being more metaphor than literal belief. But sometimes literal belief. But really just metaphor. Except when they really believe it.
A major focus of the book, is the separation of ourselves from our egos, and this is what I struggled with. I sort of get it, but I don't know how to do it, but that wasn't the point anyways. It wasn't meant to be an instruction manual. Still in chapter one and he turns to the classic problem of free will and responsibility - he asks the question but never actually answers it, which bugged me. He says "The problem is, of course, that if men are patterns of action and not agents, and if they individual and the world act with each other, mutually, so that action does not originate in either, who is to be blamed when things go wrong? [my question exactly!!]
Anyways, the book goes on. Here are the parts I underlined:
On perception:
"Our perception of the the world is relative to our neurological structure and the ways in which social conditioning has taught us to see. Because the latter can to some extent be changed, it means something to say that it is imaginary."
On Society:
"Society is always insecure and thus hostile to anyone who challenges its conventions directly. To disabuse oneself of accepted mythologies without becoming the vicim of other people's anxiety requires considerable tact."
On positive dishonesty:
"A Japanese coastal village was once threatened by a tidal wave, but the wave was sighted in advance, far out on the horizon, by a lone farmer in the rice fields on the hillside above the village. At once he set fire to the fields, and the villagers who came swarming up to save their crops were saved from the flood. His crime of arson is like the trickery of the guru, the doctor, or the psychotherapist in persuading people to try to solve a false problem by acting consistency upon its premises."
On trusting your own nature:
"If men [...] do not trust their own nature or the universe of which it is a part, how can they trust their mistrust? Going deeper, what does it mean either to trust or to mistrust, accept or reject oneself, if one cannot actually stand apart from oneself as, say thinker and thoughts?"
On problems in nature:
"The Taoist's position [...] is that while there may be logical problems there are no natural, physical problems; nature or Tao is not pursuing any purpose, and therefore is not meeting any difficulties.
On fake humility:
"There is a certain contradiction in saying "I am liberated" if the ego is unreal. But there is also the false modesty of so imitating humility that it becomes more important to be humble that to be liberated. Golden chains are as binding as chains of iron."
Parody of insight:
"The stereotyped attitudes of a culture are, of course, always a parody of the insights of its more gifted members. Not caring is the parody of serenity, just as worrying is the parody of concern."
On the organism and its environment being one:
"The question as to which side of a curved surface moves first is always unanswerable."
On morality:
"Practical morality, whether Judaic or Christian, capitalist or communist, is a provision for the future - a perpetual renunciation or postponement. This is a future which no one is ever going to be able to enjoy because, by the time it arrives, everyone will have lost the ability to live in the present. Thus the test of liberation is not whether it issues in good works; the test of good works in whether they issue in liberation."
On repression, war, and rage:
"In no sense are the wars and revolutions of modern times examples of what happens when the civilized repression is removed. They are the outbursts of sadistic rage for which the civilization of repression must always provide; they are its price, but a technological civilization can no longer afford its price."
On hard work as a virtue:
"Technology is not permitted to abolish labor because "... of all things, hard work has become a virtue instead of the curse which it was always advertise to be by our remote ancestor.... Our children should be prepared to bring their children up so the won't have to work as a neurotic necessity. The necessity to work is a neurotic symptom. It is a crutch. It is an attempt to make oneself feel valuable even through there is no particular need for one's working."
"When technology is used - quite absurdly - to increase employment rather than to get rid of it, work becomes "busywork" [amen to that!] - an artificial creation of ever more meaningless routines, and interminable production of things that are not so much luxuries for physical gratification than pretentious trash." [OUCH. I love it.]
On bougie zombies:
"As Marcuse says, "to link performances on assembly lines, in offices and shops with instinctual needs is to glorify dehumanization as pleasure." The type of human being who submits to this culture is, almost literally a zombie. He is docile and "mature" in the style of our drab and dismal bourgeoisie; he is quite incapable of gaiety or exuberance; he believes that he is dancing when he is shuffling around a room; he thinks he is being entertained when he is passively watching a couple of muscle-bound thugs in a wrestling match; he thinks he is being scholarly and intellectual when he is learning to speak with modesty and "all due reservations" about some minor Elizabethan playwright; worse still, he thinks he is revealing against all this when grow a beard and gets himself a dingy "pad" in the slums." [OUCH! Who doesn't love a good smackdown?]
On spontaneity:
"The absence of spontaneity at almost any gathering of psychotherapists is one of the sorriest sights in the world."
On moralists:
"There was never a moralist at any time who was not certain that things were going from bad to worse."
On grammar nazis:
"The task of the grammarian and lexicographer is to maintain orderly change - not to lay down the law, but to stabilize linguistic change by keeping all members of a society informed as to what rules are being used."
The book is a comparison of 2 ways of self-liberation; the western way (psychotherapy, with a focus on Jung and Freud) and the Eastern way (the eastern religion-philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, and Yoga). At the heart of the problem is self-contradiction, and his point of view is that western religion contributes to self-contradiction and hatred of one's own nature rather than self-liberation. To that regard he says "the minister might become an extraordinarily helpful person if he could see through his own religion."
After a cursory glance at western religion Watts then turns to Society, and here he provides what I think is the best definition of society that i've come across:
"As a patter of behavior, society is avocet all a system of people in communication maintained by consistent action. To keep the system going, what is done has to be consistent with what has been done. The pattern is recognizable as a patter because it goes ahead with reference to its own past; it is just this that establishes what we call order and identity, a situation in which trees do not suddenly turn into rabbits and in which on man does not suddenly behave like another so that we do not know who he is. "Who" is consistent behavior."
He goes on to say that the "maintenance of society would be simple enough if human beings were content just to survive. In this case they would be simply animal, and it would be enough to eat, sleep, and reproduce. But if these are their basic needs, human beings go about getting them in the most complicated way imaginable." It's funny because it's true.
Watts says "when we say that an organism likes to go on living, or that it goes on living because it likes it, what evidence is there for this "like" except that it does in fact go on living - until it doesn't? Similarly, to say that we always choose what we prefer says no more that that we always choose what we choose." That's easy enough to follow, but then he says that the "transformation of food and air into the pattern of the organism is what we call existence." and then "to say that the organism needs food is only to say that it is food. To say that it eats because it is hungry is only to say that it says when it is ready to eat." In a way I get it... I was especially thinking about this part a few days ago at the wild animal park when the guides kept talking about animals "liking" this, and the "purpose" of adaptations, which, I get why they use the terms, but there is no "purpose" in an adaptation - no end goal. The anthropomorphization of it all bugs me. In Watts's words, "the consistencies or regularities of nature are patterns that do occur, not patterns that must occur."
Anyways Watts says that society is essentially a game we all play, and if you want to belong to society you must play the game, and "the first rule of the game is this game is serious, i.e. not a game."
One thing that stuck with me is how man is a self-frustrating organism, "For example, one of our greatest assets for survival is our sense of time, our marvelously sensitive memory, which enables us to predict the future from the pattern of the past. Yet awareness of time ceases to be an asset when concern for the future makes it almost impossible to live fully in the present, or when increasing knowledge of the future makes it increasingly certain that beyond a brief span we have no future."
Watts says that our self-frustrating activity is what the buddhists actually mean by samsara (the cycle of death and reincarnation). In other words, it is a metaphor and later dedicates a whole chapter to the idea of eastern religious beliefs being more metaphor than literal belief. But sometimes literal belief. But really just metaphor. Except when they really believe it.
A major focus of the book, is the separation of ourselves from our egos, and this is what I struggled with. I sort of get it, but I don't know how to do it, but that wasn't the point anyways. It wasn't meant to be an instruction manual. Still in chapter one and he turns to the classic problem of free will and responsibility - he asks the question but never actually answers it, which bugged me. He says "The problem is, of course, that if men are patterns of action and not agents, and if they individual and the world act with each other, mutually, so that action does not originate in either, who is to be blamed when things go wrong? [my question exactly!!]
Anyways, the book goes on. Here are the parts I underlined:
On perception:
"Our perception of the the world is relative to our neurological structure and the ways in which social conditioning has taught us to see. Because the latter can to some extent be changed, it means something to say that it is imaginary."
On Society:
"Society is always insecure and thus hostile to anyone who challenges its conventions directly. To disabuse oneself of accepted mythologies without becoming the vicim of other people's anxiety requires considerable tact."
On positive dishonesty:
"A Japanese coastal village was once threatened by a tidal wave, but the wave was sighted in advance, far out on the horizon, by a lone farmer in the rice fields on the hillside above the village. At once he set fire to the fields, and the villagers who came swarming up to save their crops were saved from the flood. His crime of arson is like the trickery of the guru, the doctor, or the psychotherapist in persuading people to try to solve a false problem by acting consistency upon its premises."
On trusting your own nature:
"If men [...] do not trust their own nature or the universe of which it is a part, how can they trust their mistrust? Going deeper, what does it mean either to trust or to mistrust, accept or reject oneself, if one cannot actually stand apart from oneself as, say thinker and thoughts?"
On problems in nature:
"The Taoist's position [...] is that while there may be logical problems there are no natural, physical problems; nature or Tao is not pursuing any purpose, and therefore is not meeting any difficulties.
On fake humility:
"There is a certain contradiction in saying "I am liberated" if the ego is unreal. But there is also the false modesty of so imitating humility that it becomes more important to be humble that to be liberated. Golden chains are as binding as chains of iron."
Parody of insight:
"The stereotyped attitudes of a culture are, of course, always a parody of the insights of its more gifted members. Not caring is the parody of serenity, just as worrying is the parody of concern."
On the organism and its environment being one:
"The question as to which side of a curved surface moves first is always unanswerable."
On morality:
"Practical morality, whether Judaic or Christian, capitalist or communist, is a provision for the future - a perpetual renunciation or postponement. This is a future which no one is ever going to be able to enjoy because, by the time it arrives, everyone will have lost the ability to live in the present. Thus the test of liberation is not whether it issues in good works; the test of good works in whether they issue in liberation."
On repression, war, and rage:
"In no sense are the wars and revolutions of modern times examples of what happens when the civilized repression is removed. They are the outbursts of sadistic rage for which the civilization of repression must always provide; they are its price, but a technological civilization can no longer afford its price."
On hard work as a virtue:
"Technology is not permitted to abolish labor because "... of all things, hard work has become a virtue instead of the curse which it was always advertise to be by our remote ancestor.... Our children should be prepared to bring their children up so the won't have to work as a neurotic necessity. The necessity to work is a neurotic symptom. It is a crutch. It is an attempt to make oneself feel valuable even through there is no particular need for one's working."
"When technology is used - quite absurdly - to increase employment rather than to get rid of it, work becomes "busywork" [amen to that!] - an artificial creation of ever more meaningless routines, and interminable production of things that are not so much luxuries for physical gratification than pretentious trash." [OUCH. I love it.]
On bougie zombies:
"As Marcuse says, "to link performances on assembly lines, in offices and shops with instinctual needs is to glorify dehumanization as pleasure." The type of human being who submits to this culture is, almost literally a zombie. He is docile and "mature" in the style of our drab and dismal bourgeoisie; he is quite incapable of gaiety or exuberance; he believes that he is dancing when he is shuffling around a room; he thinks he is being entertained when he is passively watching a couple of muscle-bound thugs in a wrestling match; he thinks he is being scholarly and intellectual when he is learning to speak with modesty and "all due reservations" about some minor Elizabethan playwright; worse still, he thinks he is revealing against all this when grow a beard and gets himself a dingy "pad" in the slums." [OUCH! Who doesn't love a good smackdown?]
On spontaneity:
"The absence of spontaneity at almost any gathering of psychotherapists is one of the sorriest sights in the world."
On moralists:
"There was never a moralist at any time who was not certain that things were going from bad to worse."
On grammar nazis:
"The task of the grammarian and lexicographer is to maintain orderly change - not to lay down the law, but to stabilize linguistic change by keeping all members of a society informed as to what rules are being used."
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