The Meaning of Happiness. Alan Watts
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happiness because of itself and not because of external events, and this in spite of the fact that it may experience those events in all their aspects and extremes from the highest bliss to the deepest agony.
If, therefore, as both Oriental and Western psychology suggest, the most profound happiness is to be found in a conscious union or harmony between the individual and the unknown Self, the unconscious, inner universe, it is clear that the problem has a number of peculiar difficulties. These arise for two principal reasons: first, that twentieth-century, civilized man is so centered in his own limited self-consciousness that he is quite unaware of its origin, of the directing forces that lie beneath it; and second, that the real problem is not to bring about a state of affairs which does not as yet exist, but to realize something which is already happening—“as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.” For although civilized man appears to live only from his self-conscious center, although he appears divorced from nature, from a spiritual point of view this is a mere conceit. In other words, at this very moment we have that union and harmony in spite of ourselves; we create spiritual problems simply through not being aware of it, and that lack of understanding causes and in turn is caused by the delusion of self-sufficiency. As Christianity would say, the Grace of God is always being freely offered; the problem is to get man to accept it and give up the conceit that he can save himself by the power of his ego, which is like trying to pick himself up by his own belt. This appears to be a vicious circle, the more so for people who cannot believe in the Christian God, having been deprived of their belief by science and rationality, which are essentially powers of self-consciousness. Both Oriental and Western psychology, however, state the problem in a rather different way. They say that if the ego can be made to look into itself, it will see that its own true nature is deeper than itself, that it derives its faculties and its consciousness from a source beyond individual personality. In other words, the ego is not really a self at all; it is simply a function of that inner universe. In much the same way, speech is a function of the human being, and it is possible that one given only the sense of hearing might think that the voice is the man. But in order to fulfill its function the ego must be self-conscious—a faculty at once valuable and dangerous, for if the ego is deceived by that faculty it falls into the vicious circle of trying to find happiness by its own power.
Vicious circles create ever-increasing complications when we attempt to unravel them in their own terms. Therefore in these days people are blinded to the spiritual problem by seeking its answer in the very complex, and even the psychology of the unconscious has not fully delivered itself from the thralldom of complications. But the breaking of the circle is simple if only we can adapt our minds to real simplicity, as distinct from triteness; for this the ego must yield its pride and be humble enough to see something lowly, something which the psychology of Asia has been teaching men to see for thousands of years.
In an altogether odd and apparently mysterious way the whole question of happiness in this sense is far from straightforward. It is unusually complicated because in fact it is unusually simple; its solution lies so close to us and is so self-evident that we have the greatest difficulty in seeing it, and we must complicate it in order to bring it into focus and be able to discuss it at all. This may seem a terrible paradox, but it is said that a paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention. For there are certain truths which have to be stood on their heads before they can be noticed at all; in the ordinary way they are so simple that we fail to perceive them. Our own faces are an example of this. Nothing could be more obvious and self-evident than a man’s own face; but oddly enough he cannot see it at all unless he introduces the complication of a mirror, which shows it to him reversed. The image he sees is his face and yet is not his face, and this is a form of paradox. And here is the reason for all our vagueness and uncertainty concerning the things of the spirit, for if our eyes cannot see themselves, how much less can that something which looks through the eyes see itself.
Therefore we have to find some way of overcoming the difficulty, some way of understanding the most obvious thing in the world, a thing which is ordinarily overlooked because our thoughts and feelings are moving in much more complicated channels. To see it they have to be brought down to a level of humility, not fearful and kowtowing, but having the most direct and childlike openness of mind—“for He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.” It is not surprising, therefore, that these deepest truths of the spirit are often missed by people of the most brilliant and penetrating intellect. This is not to say, however, that they will be any more readily understood by mere lack of intellect. Such insight comes neither with brilliance nor dullness of the mind, for the one is deluded with its own proud glittering and the other just fails to register. To understand such tremendous simplicity one has just to open the eyes of the mind and see; there is no secret about it, for it stands before us in open daylight, as large as life. In the words of the Chinese sage Tao-wu, “If you want to see, see directly into it; but when you try to think about it, it is altogether missed.”
Therefore when it is said that those who search for happiness never find it perhaps the truth is that there is no need to search for it. Like our own eyes, it may be going along with us all the time; only when we turn round to try to see it we make fools of ourselves. Thus a Chinese poem says:3
It is so clear that it takes long to see.
You must know that the fire which you are seeking
Is the fire in your own lantern.
And that your rice has been cooked from the very beginning.
Almost everyone knows the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs. A man and his wife had a mysterious goose that from time to time favored them by laying a golden egg. When this had been going on for some weeks they began to think it rather tiresome of the goose to part with its gold so gradually, for they imagined that it carried a store of such eggs inside itself. Not having the sense to weigh the creature first and find out if it was much heavier than a goose should be, they decided to kill it and cut it open. As might be expected, they found only one ordinary, dead goose, void of gold eggs and unable to produce any more.
There were once scientists, too, who were similarly disappointed when they searched the human anatomy to find an organ that might be described as the soul; there are still scholars who analyze Beethoven down to the last semiquaver and Shakespeare to the last pronoun to find the secret of their genius, and there are also theologians who do much the same thing with the words of the Bible to discover the nature of God. And it is yet the hope of even the most advanced science that the universe will yield up its mysteries, its last mighty secret, to those who dissect its tiniest fragments, learning more and more about less and less. This is known as not being able to see the wood for the trees. It is by no means an error peculiar to scientists and scholars, for the fable of the golden eggs is an ancient tale of human nature.
We have a saying about the virtue of being able to “see life whole,” for all meaning is in wholeness. There could be no golden eggs without the goose, and however tiresome, slow, and stupid the goose might be, he resembled life in that he was an interplay of opposites: he was slow, but his eggs were gold, and if you cut him to pieces to gather the gold and discard the slowness you were left with nothing but a corpse. This will also happen if you carve up the human body to find the mysterious source of its vitality or if you separate the flower of a plant from its muddy roots. Something very similar happens in a much more important way when men love life and hate death or cling to youth and reject old age, which is like expecting a mountain to have only one slope—that which goes up, whereas to be a mountain it must go up and down. For the meaning is in the whole, and not only the meaning but the very existence of the thing. Indeed, we are only aware of life and life is only able to manifest itself because it is divided into innumerable pairs of opposites: we know motion by contrast with stillness, long by short, light by darkness, heat by cold, and joy by sorrow.
Therefore to see life whole is to understand these opposing qualities as essential to its existence, without