THE MEANING OF HAPPINESS by Alan Watts

Now and again I keep coming back to Watts’s books for more and I always take my time with them because there’s no sentence without a deeper meaning behind it.

According to Watts, the way to obtain happiness in your life is not by changing one’s circumstances or changing ourselves but rather, understanding that happiness arises from the awareness of non-duality. By removing the illusion of self that needs to find happiness, we can embrace life as a whole in all its contradictions and paradoxes.

In other words, when we stop searching for happiness and accept the our inner and outer world the way it is, we are on the right path.

It blows my mind that he was only 24 years old when he wrote this book with such depth and awareness.

The message that I resonate the most with is that “we do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”

I’m a big fan of Watts and I like coming back to his writings over time to understand a little more and go a little deeper in his philosophy but if there’s one thing to take away from this book is to turn inwards and be the wholeness that you already are.

“Life and death are in conflict only in the mind which creates a war between them out of its own desires and fears. In fact life and death are not opposed but complementary, being the two essential factors of a greater life that is made up of living and dying just as melody is produced by the sounding and silencing of individual notes.”

“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”