Trying to see all of life is like trying to explore a vast cave with a box of matches. This, too, is a typical Zen understanding - that life cannot be described, only experienced. That nothing is a given and, since everything is uncertain, we must put together a world view that might fit roughly with the facts, but is never anything other than a guess - a working fiction. Watts, like Rowe, showed me how we construct our own meanings about life. Life was, in Zen parlance, yugen - a kind of elevated purposelessness. The Meaning of Happiness (1940) and The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) are striking primers to his work, and they underlined what Rowe was already teaching me: that life had no intrinsic meaning, any more than a piece of music had an intrinsic ‘point’. I wasn’t interested in the Four Noble Truths, or the Eightfold Path, and I certainly didn’t believe in karma or reincarnation.Īll the same, I read a couple of Watts’s books. I was suspicious at first, perceiving Zen Buddhism to be a religion rather than a philosophy. But through Watts and his writing, I was exposed directly to the ideas of Zen Buddhism. His name evoked the image of a paper goods sales rep on a small regional industrial estate. It was through Rowe’s writing that I first came across Alan Watts, and he sounded like an unlikely philosopher. Truth is not to be found by picking everything to pieces like a spoilt child Secret, because Rowe knew what the term ‘Buddhist’ implied to the popular imagination (as it did to me) - magical thinking, Tibetan bell-ringing, and sticking gold flakes on statues of the Buddha. While I was researching it, I read the work of the psychologist Dorothy Rowe, a quiet, almost secret, follower of Buddhist philosophy. The consequence of this was my first book, a memoir called The Scent of Dried Roses (1996). Which is perhaps why I fell into an acute depression at the age of 27, and didn’t recover for several years. A sense of encroaching mental chaos was always skulking at the edges of my life. I have never been able to support either strategy. Or they fall for an ideology, perhaps religious or political, that appears to render the world a comprehensible place. Most people seem to have a talent for denying or ignoring life’s contradictions, as the demands of work and life take them over. It is an uncomfortable mindset, and as a result I have always felt the need to build a conceptual box in my mind big enough to fit the world into. Ever since I was a child, I have been acutely sensitive to the idea - in the way that other people seem to feel only after bereavement or some shocking unexpected event - that the human intellect is unable, finally, to make sense of the world: everything is contradiction and paradox, and no one really knows much for sure, however loudly they profess to the contrary.
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