Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), as we begin today ‘let us remember this about ‘Attention’.
Our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. Attention: is important and most of the times we are so indifferent to it. It is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. We feed the hunger blindly. Once the mechanism is brought to our attention and we begin to study it, it is as if a veil has been stripped off ordinary life, and we become freer in our action and choices.
This week I bring to your attention an excerpt titled ‘Pursuing the Future’ from the book titled ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’ by Alan W Watts.
‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’ underlines the importance of our search for stability in an age where human life seems particularly vulnerable and uncertain.
Pursuing the Future
The miracles of technology cause us to live in a hectic, clockwork world that does violence to human biology, enabling us to do nothing but pursue the future faster and faster. Deliberate thought finds itself unable to control the upsurge of the beast in humans – a beast more ‘beastly’ than any creature of the wild, maddened and exasperated by the pursuit of illusions. Specialisation in verbiage, Classification, and mechanised thinking has put humans out of touch with many of the marvellous powers of ‘instinct’ which govern their body. It has, furthermore, made humans feel utterly separate from the universe and their own ‘selves’. And thus when all philosophy has dissolved in relativism, and can make fixed sense of the universe no longer, isolated ‘I’ feels miserably insecure and panicky, finding the real world a flat contradiction of its whole being.
Of course there is nothing new in this predicament of discovering that ideas and words cannot plumb the ultimate mystery of life, that Reality, or if you will, God, cannot be comprehended by the finite mind. The only novelty is that the predicament is now social rather than individual; it is widely felt, not confined to the few. Almost every spiritual tradition recognizes that a point comes when two things must happen: humans must surrender their separate-feeling ‘I’ and must face the fact that they cannot know, that is, define the ultimate. These traditions also recognise that beyond this point there lies a vision of God’ which cannot be put into words. They also indicate that this vision is a restoration of something which we once had, and ‘lost’ because we did not or could not appreciate it. This vision is, then, the unclouded awareness of this indefinable ‘something’ which we call life, present reality, the great stream, the eternal now – an awareness without the sense of separation from it.
Excerpt from ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’ by Alan W Watts
I am sure that you will enjoy reading this book; you can buy your copy from the following link:
Enjoy reading it with your family, friends and near and dear one’s.
Concluding today’s post and podcast episode, I thank all who take time out and read (the blog post) and listen to the episodes each week. For those who listen and have not subscribed to the podcast I suggest you do and click on the bell icon so that you can be notified for all the new episodes that get uploaded every week.
Namaste.
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