Author: Mike Colagrossi / Source: Big Think
- Anxiety doesn’t exist for someone who has a life lived in the present.
- Our concerns for a spectral future fuel anxiety.
- Taoist philosophy teaches us a new way of living.
Varying degrees of anxiety awash over millions. Whether it’s stress from the workplace, fretting for a future that never comes or getting tangled in the ceaseless political drama of the day.
At the root of this issue is the constant need to live for the future and it is here where our anxiety stems from.One of the solutions for anxiety, and other assorted mental ailments, set forth by Taoists is the idea of mindfulness or being within the present moment. It is from within this philosophy which emerges the art of meditation. The concept of presence flows throughout the Eastern idea of being within the now. It’s been repeated so many times that the words often read as platitude and banality. But the concept cannot be overlooked because it is the missing key toward living a fulfilling life devoid of angst and anxiety.
Here’s how Taoist philosophy rids us of anxiety.
Taoism takes us back to what is real
Our insistence on staying secure in a fluid and metamorphic world is an absurd concept when you get down to the bottom of it. Change is ever constant. The future doesn’t exist. These adages are all ignored. And as they will be continually ignored by the masses in perpetuity — then it will come as no surprise that the concept of anxiety will stay with us.
Though, decide not to ignore this timeless wisdom and one will find a new way to live freely without anxiety. One of the great translators of Taoist ideas, Alan Watts, codified this way of living in his seminal work: The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for An Age of Anxiety.
In this book, Watts argues that our primary way we delude ourselves from the present moment is by leaving the body and retreating behind our minds. The boiling pot of countless worries, thinking, categorizing and calculating space where anxieties and thoughts pouring over thoughts remove us from any truth of the real moment at hand. This is where Watts states that “the ‘primary consciousness,’ the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future.” In other words, our thinking facilities are divorced from the actuality of experience.
Our more methodical thinking processes on the…
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