Watts - Meaning of Happiness: The Quest for Freedom of the Spirit in Modern Psychology and the Wisdom of the East

Copyright 1940, 1968 by Alan W. Watts

Copyright 2018 by Joan Watts and Anne Watts

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, or otherwithout written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Watts, Alan, 19151973, author.

Title: The meaning of happiness : the quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology and the wisdom of the East / Alan Watts.

Description: Novato : New World Library, 2018. | Originally published: New York : Harper & Brothers, c1940. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018019350| ISBN 9781608685400 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781608685417 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Happiness. | Mysticism.

Classification: LCC BJ1481 .W37 2018 | DDC 158dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019350

First New World Library printing, August 2018

ISBN 978-1-60868-540-0

Ebook ISBN 978-1-60868-541-7

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

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CONTENTS

I was two years old in 1940 when The Meaning of Happiness was originally published. I dont remember ever reading the book or having a copy of it until just recently. My father, Alan Watts, was all of twenty-four years old when he wrote it, and my mother, Eleanor (his first wife), to whom he dedicated it, was barely twenty. The copy I have now is the second edition, published by James Ladd Delkin in 1953, and, ironically, inscribed to Alans third wife, Mary Jane, in 1959. I often wondered about the title of the book and whether he developed his theory on happiness to understand the depression and resulting unhappiness Eleanor dealt with throughout her life. He mentioned in his autobiography, In My Own Way, that Eleanor was involved in reading the manuscript and encouraged him to be honest and to really think through what he meant.

Alan, at the time, told his parents he was developing a philosophy of acceptance for a new book. The title then became The Anatomy of Acceptance, which the publisher, Harper, changed to The Meaning of Happiness. Reading it, Ive tried to wrap my head around the fact that this man understood what he did about the human condition at the young age of twenty-four. He looks at happiness from every possible angle. His initial premise for the book was to address the question, What do Eastern and Western psychology, taken together, have to say about the elusive and pressing subject of human happiness? The concept of duality, a common theme in his writings, emerges here with the thesis that in order to experience happiness, one must suffer sadness and that such opposites eventually become complementary.

Alan wrote in a letter to his parents in June 1940, just two months after the book came out, When I finished that book, I thought it reasonably free from inadequacies, but now, each week shows me another hole in it. There are things left unsaid and I say to myself, There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.

At the time he wrote this book, Alan admits he was somewhat under the influence of Carl Jung, but then notes a sense of inadequacythat he, Alan, had in fact described a psychological process without any metaphysical foundation. In retrospect, Alan felt that Jungs refusal to relate his psychology to any one system of metaphysics became his own books profound weakness.

Despite all that, my feeling is that The Meaning of Happiness is as timely in its philosophical premise as it was nearly eighty years ago. I leave subsequent interpretation to the reader.

Joan Watts

Livingston, Montana

June 2018

T his book first appeared in the spring of 1940, at the very moment when the Second World War broke loose in all its violence. Despite the fact that it was published at that most inauspicious time and the fact that its title gave it the outward appearance of a type of inspirational literature far removed from its inner content, The Meaning of Happiness has been sold out for many yearsduring which I have received repeated requests for its republication.

I have hesitated to comply with this demand because in so many ways my ideas have gone far beyond the philosophy of a book written when I was only twenty-four years old. Yet this book and an even earlier book, The Spirit of Zen, remain the favorites of many readers. Setting aside, however, certain immaturities of style and organization, as well as of certain lines of development, the essential theme of this book is, for me, as valid and as important as ever. It has continued as the basic insight of all that I have written subsequentlybooks in which I have tried to express it in terms of a variety of differing philosophical and religious languages.

This theme is concerned with the realization of happiness in the Aristotelian and Thomistic sense of mans true end or destiny, in which sense happiness means union with God, or, in Oriental terms, harmony with the Tao, or moksha, or nirvana. The point on which I have insisted in many different ways is, in brief, that this special and supreme order of happiness is not a result to be attained through action, but a fact to be realized through knowledge. The sphere of action is to express it, not to gain it.

The exposition of this theme involves a number of peculiar logical and psychological difficulties. From a rigorously logical point of view, the words in which this theme is stated mean exactly nothing. In the terms of the great Oriental philosophies, mans unhappiness is rooted in the feeling of anxiety which attends his sense of being an isolated individual or ego, separate from life or reality as a whole. On the other hand, happinessa sense of harmony, completion, and wholenesscomes with the realization that the feeling of isolation is an illusion. In fact, that which feels itself to be the separate, individual consciousness is identical with that universal and undivided Reality of which all things are manifestations.

The Meaning of Happiness explains that the psychological equivalent of this doctrine is a state of mind called total acceptance, a yes-saying to everything that we experience, the unreserved acceptance of what we are, of what we feel and know at this and every moment. To say, as in the Vedanta, that All is Brahman, is to say that this whole universe is to be accepted. To put it in another way, at each moment we are what we experience, and there is no real possibility of being other than what we are. Wisdom therefore consists in accepting what we are, rather than in struggling fruitlessly to be something else, as if it were possible to run away from ones own feet.