Sehnsucht: Alan Watts and the autumn longing

On June 15, I’ll publish the second issue of The Living Dark Reader, my quarterly PDF journal of essays, fragments, and reflections intended for deep and relaxed offline reading, away from the shifting currents of the “live” online experience. The journal is an extension of The Living Dark newsletter. If you’d like to see what it’s like, you can download the first issue, which I published in March.

The lead piece in the upcoming issue is an 18,000-word essay titled “The Autumn Longing: A Personal Phenomenology of Transcendental Desire.” It explores a particular experience of intense, ethereal longing that has come over me repeatedly since early adolescence, and which I eventually came to recognize as sehnsucht, Romanticism’s classic “nostalgia for the infinite,” after C. S. Lewis helpfully gave me that word for naming it.

The excerpt below comes from the essay’s appendix, where I gather several extended quotations from writers and thinkers whose reflections on this longing appear in the main text. This passage concerns Alan Watts:

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Alan Watts’s project in Beyond Theology was to reinterpret Christian theology through the lens of Advaita Vedanta, the Hindu philosophical tradition whose central insight is expressed in the eighth-century philosopher Sankara’s formulation: “Brahman is real, the world is false, the individual self is only Brahman, nothing else.” Brahman, in this framework, is the universal, central self whose divine dreaming gives rise to all finite selves and the cosmos in which they exist. These selves and their lives are real, but they are real as dreams, as projections of Brahman into the play of finite existence, which the tradition calls lila, the divine game or dance, unfolding within maya, the dream or illusion of space, time, and separate identity.

Within this outlook, Watts finds a warrant for appreciating the Christian experience of alienation and longing in a new light. The individual self’s sense of lostness, incompleteness, and yearning for something beyond itself becomes, in his reading, the experience of Brahman dreaming itself so deeply into finite form that it temporarily forgets its own nature: “If … the Christian imagery is set within the context of the Hindu, the razor-edge path between salvation and damnation, with all the magnificent and appalling consequences this illusion has had for mankind, becomes one of the greatest dramatic situations of all time,” because it illustrates just how deeply Brahman can allow itself to become lost in its dream, even to the point of forgetting that it is dreaming and that it therefore possesses the power to awaken.

The experience of individuated selfhood thus becomes, in Watts’s formulation, “a dream that I am not dreaming at all, that I will never wake up, that I have completely lost myself somewhere down the tangled corridors of the mind, and, finally, that I am in such excruciating agony that when I wake up, it will be better than all possible dreams.” In other words, it becomes the dream of the wholly alienated Christian creature-self, lost in a vale of tears and anxiously longing for the inconceivable bliss of Paradise, to be known in the hereafter by those who have been saved through Christ.

It is out of this schema, and specifically out of a model of human individuality as “two spheres with a common center,” the outer sphere being the conscious ego and the inner sphere being the real self that the ego has forgotten, that Watts’s description of a primal human longing emerges. This longing, in his reading, is the inevitable epiphenomenon of a consciousness that has temporarily forgotten what it most deeply is, and that sometimes, in certain rare and luminous moments, it half-remembers:

This fantasy religion would then require the final condition that at some time the two spheres would merge, that my inmost Self would awaken from its dream to transform my superficial ego with a shock of recognition. Perhaps this is why we sometimes have a strangely pleasant sensation of having forgotten something extremely important from long, long ago. Occasionally, this shadow of a memory comes with hints of a forgotten paradise, some luminous landscape of hills and waters which is utterly familiar and yet completely unidentifiable. Every now and then the “real” world reminds us of it, and we think, “This is what I have always been looking for. This place feels like home.” At other times, the memory has a much deeper dimension—a sensation of being immeasurably ancient and knowing, as somehow prior to time and space. But there is nothing at all specific about it, for though the sensation is vivid, it is tantalizingly ephemeral. These are, then, intimations of something to be remembered which is, as it were, a vast dimension of one’s being which has been kept hidden—perhaps from the moment of birth. For consciousness, or conscious attention, is the trick of noticing the figure and ignoring the background, and in the same way I seem to notice my ego and forget my background, the larger Self which underlies my ego.

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The Living Dark Reader, no. 2, will be available on June 15 to paid subscribers of The Living Dark. To subscribe, click here: The Living Dark.

The oracle in your private journal

If you do any private writing like I do, maybe you’ve shared my experience of finding a kind of oracle in your private journal, a bracing realization that this kind of writing can become a divinatory forecast of the themes and obsessions you’ll spend your life on. Pretty much everything I’ve ever been destined to write about first appeared in my private journal many years ago. Sometimes I stumble back across this fact.

Here’s an example that’s included in volume 2 of my collected journals, as shown in the accompanying page image:

If you really want to produce anything worthwhile, anything authentic and full of your soul’s life, you can’t allow yourself to think about your “life’s work,” the eventual outline of what you will have produced and accomplished when it comes time for you to die. You can, you must, only turn your attention to what’s here. What’s to do now? What is true or right for this moment, this work? The recognition of and reflection on the overall “meta” outline of your life is the business of others to attend to, or for you if you’re at that moment when you know your story is over. Aside from that moment, your proper focus, your proper business, resides in the present, in the now, inside this. You have no business trying to step outside and view this moment sub specie aeternitatis, as an entry in the eventually completed story of your life.

I wrote that in August 2003. Fast forward 22 years, and there I was, publishing Writing at the Wellspring just five months ago. And that book talks in depth about giving up the attempt to plan or plot your creative or life path into the future. Instead, “live into the dark” by realizing that your proper business is to focus exclusively on taking the next step before you in the present moment, devoting yourself to whatever your work is right now, and letting any larger pattern or meaning simply reveal itself spontaneously across time.

When I wrote that, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that I first articulated this principle to myself in private more than two decades ago.

Which, come to think of it, effectively illustrates the principle itself.

A portable inner monastery of the muse

Twenty-two years ago I read Morris Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture and encountered one of the most personally resonant ideas that I’ve ever found in a work of cultural criticism: the “monastic option” and the “new monastic individual.” The idea was that we can each become a monk, cultivating a kind of portable inner monastery.

Berman argued that in a time of cultural decline, the most meaningful forms of resistance and preservation may need to remain private, small-scale, and largely outside the attention economy (though he didn’t actually use the latter term). “The more individual the activity is, and the more out of the public eye,” he wrote, “the more effective it is likely to be.” That struck me deeply when I first read it in 2004, and it has only grown more meaningful over time.

Some people are natural joiners and institution-builders. Others aren’t. Increasingly, I find myself drawn to the image of the solitary monk, someone who pursues a deeply and personally meaningful path of preservation and transmission, and who relates to others through affinity based on this inner orientation, instead of through external organizational structures. Organizations carry a built-in tendency to become inward-turned in their own way over time. They eventually and inevitably betray their founding principles by focusing on sheer self-perpetuation. Maybe it’s prudent to keep an ironic awareness of this fact, and to invest in our real ideals at the individual level, in the sanctity of our selves.

Berman wrote that we can each choose “a way of life that becomes its own ‘monastery.’” That phrase has stayed with me for years. It eventually became one of the guiding ideas in Writing at the Wellspring, where I describe the possibility of carrying “a portable inner monastery of the muse.”

I’ve published a new Living Dark post that reflects on all of this: Berman, the solitary monastic ideal, institutions and inward life, and the idea of preserving a living connection with reality during an age of noise and collapse. It’s titled “The Monastery of Your Life.”

The dream of the outside world

Without mincing words: The dominant consensus reality is a hallucination. It’s a mirage, and also a trance. A dream of the outside world.

Anything that resembles a reality or a view of reality imposed from without, from outside of you, any explanation or model of things that tries to tell you what’s ultimately real from the vantage point of an objective, external world that you, as a separate individual, inhabit—in other words, the dominant consensus reality—is a sucker punch. It’s a trick.

The “outside world” isn’t outside at all. It exists inside you as pure consciousness. So does the “you,” the notionally independent self that seems to be located in and confronted by such a world.

The objective perspective, then, is an inverted view of things that’s constantly attempting to undermine the reality of your actual situation. You’re not a separate individual inhabiting a world. Instead, you’re absolute, pure awareness, and the world is a kind of virtual experience arising within you—including your experience or perception of being an individual unit, a separate being within it.

Holding to this understanding in a culture whose consensus view maintains the opposite will make you seem like an outlier to most people. The social consequences may be severe. But then, this perceived social reality, along with the perceived consequences of rejecting it, is likewise unfolding within the field of your own being. It’s you being reflected back to yourself.

Learning to navigate this reflection or projection is like learning to navigate your nocturnal dreams. You only ever encounter your own self, divided into the seemingly separate centers of subjective perceiver and objective perceived.

If you cultivate the habit of recognizing and greeting everything that arises, including your own subjective weather, as a complementary and ultimately harmonious dance of Yourself with Yourself (including when the feeling of it isn’t harmonious at all), everything takes on a rather wondrous aspect. Sometimes thrillingly so, sometimes mysteriously so, and sometimes darkly so.

This is just the way of dreams.

The mystery of the self and the dream of reality

We commonly overlook the fact that the ultimate mystery of existence and reality is our own mystery—the mystery of the self. We ourselves are the center of the wheel. And at those moments when we reawaken to the wonder, fascination, and longing of it all, what we are really feeling and perceiving, often unawares, is our very own Identity: the awesome Absolute in its sheer being, consciousness, and imperturbability.

“The world is nothing but the picture of your own ‘I’ consciousness,” Nisargadatta Maharaj once said (as recorded in Prior to Consciousness). “Do not worry about the world. First start from here: the ‘I Am,’ and then find out what is the world. Find out the nature of this ‘I.’” And also, as recorded in Consciousness and the Absolute (the final book of his transcribed and edited talks to be published before his death in 1981, “Not only is the body-mind unreal, but this manifest consciousness, this universe, is also unreal. The ‘I Amness’ is dream-like, ephemeral.” And thus: “Find out what you are and you will get all the answers.”

Having assumed the dreamlike perspective of individual beings inhabiting an objective world that is separate from us, we begin to receive intuitive intimations of a higher unity and an awesome, scintillating mystery that characterizes both our inner and outer experience. And it dawns on us that this wondrous infusion of a new felt perspective, which inflects and transforms our sense of both self and cosmos, is simply the way it feels for a dream character to recognize its simultaneous illusory nature as a separate being and its real identity as the One that dreamt all this, and that is still dreaming it now.