Hello hello,
One of my themes of thought recently has been the difference between nihilism and ideas of non attachment, transcendence through awareness.
Sometimes it feels like the difference comes down to a technicality: intention.
Buddhism speaks of finding nirvana, which is ultimate nothingness.
The nihilist believes that nothing matters, existence is futile.
Sometimes in the quest for non attachment, the pendulum can swing all the way to pure logic and land in a state of nihilism. Once you’re there, it can be hard to escape the lure of checking out entirely. Especially during times of difficulty.
I’ve been slowly working my way through Alan Watts’ Nature, Man, Woman and I wanted to share a portion that seemed to answer this conundrum from a new angle.
It is little wonder, then, that we seek detachment from the body, wanting to convince ourselves that the real “I” is not this quaking mass of tissue with all its repulsive possibilities for pain and corruption. It is little wonder that we expect religions, philosophies, and other forms of wisdom to show us above all else a way of deliverance from suffering, from the plight of being a soft body in a world of hard reality. Sometimes therefore it seems that the answer is to match hardness with hardness, to identify ourselves with a spirit which has principles but no feelings, to despise and mortify the body and to withdraw into the comfortably fleshless world of abstract thought or psychic fantasy. To match the hardness of facts we then identify our minds with such symbols...believing ourselves to belong to a realm of spirit beyond both the hardness of fact and the weakness of flesh. This is, as it were, a shrinking of consciousness from its environment of pain, fathering itself back and back into a knot around its own center.
Yet it is just in this shrinking and hardening that consciousness not only loses its true strength but also aggravates its plight. For the withdrawal from suffering is also suffering, such that the restricted and enclosed consciousness of the ego is really a spasm of fear.
Fully expanded, consciousness feels an identity with the whole world, but contracted it is more inescapably attached to a single minute and perishable organism.
He goes on to quote Lao-tzu, the author of Tao Te Ching:
Man when living is soft and tender; when dead he is hard and tough. All animals and plants are tender and fragile, when dead they become withered and dry. Therefore it is said: the hard and the tough are parts of death; the soft and tender are parts of life. This is the reason why the soldiers when they are too tough cannot carry the day; the tree when it is too tough will break. The position of the strong and great is low, and the position of the weak and tender is high.
It’s a lot but it offers a gentle reminder to lean into the spectrum of experience rather than logically divest from it. Every experience is an impermanent passing phenomena. Rather than embrace what cannot be fully held, we view it with non attachment.
Viewing it with our entire being, with compassion, with softness.
Just as suddenly as chaos rises, it disappears.
You’re the constant through it all.
Sending you my very best,
James