Books like This is It & Other Essays on Zen & Spiritual Experience

\ To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening".\ Recognizing that the experience of presence is the only experience, is also a reminder that our “I” doesn’t exist beyond this present moment - a Paradox. There is no permanent, static, and immutable “self” which can grant us any degree of security and certainty for the future; and yet we continue to grasp for precisely that assurance of the future, which remains an abstraction. Watts argues that our only chance for awakening from this vicious cycle is bringing full awareness to our present experience. He takes especial issue with the very notion of self-improvement and admonishes against the implication at its root. Happiness, he argues, isn’t a matter of improving our experience, or even merely confronting it, but remaining present with it in the fullest possible sense. Watts says, we don’t actually realize that there is no security until we confront the myth of fixed self-hood and recognize that the solid “I” doesn’t exist; which is something modern psychology has termed the self illusion. And yet that is very hard to do, for in the very act of this realization there is a realizing self. He points out that what makes us unable to live with pure awareness is the ball and chain of our memory and our warped relationship with time.Highly Recommended!