Page 47 - Bliss Planet Venice Beach Edition - Health Wellness Lifestyle Magazine - Vegan - Happiness - Beat Depression & Improve Relationships

An excerpt from by Alan Watts

Deep down, most people think that
happiness comes from having or
doing something. In Alan Watts’s
groundbreaking second book

(originally published in 1940), he
offers a more challenging thesis:
authentic happiness comes from
embracing life as a whole in all its
contradictions and paradoxes, an
attitude that Watts calls the “way of
acceptance.” Drawing on Eastern

philosophy, Western mysticism, and
analytic psychology, Watts
demonstrates that happiness comes
from accepting both the outer world
around us and the inner world inside
us — the unconscious mind, with its
irrational desires, lurking beyond the
awareness of the ego. Although
written early in his career, The

Meaning of Happiness displays the
hallmarks of his mature style: the
crystal-clear writing, the homespun
analogies, the dry wit, and the
breadth of knowledge that made
Alan Watts one of the most

influential philosophers of his
generation. soul, of the fear of fear, of man’s
consequent isolation from nature,
We hope you will enjoy this excerpt
and of the way in which this isolation
from The Meaning of Happiness: The
has been intensified in the growth of
Quest for Freedom of the Spirit in
civilization. We have also shown how
Modern Psychology and the Wisdom
man is intimately and inseparably
of the East:
connected with the material and
We have examined something of the mental universe, and that if he tries
meaning of unhappiness, of the war to cut himself off from it he must
between the opposites in the human perish. In fact, however, he can only

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