Book summary “This is it, and other essays on Zen and spiritual experience”: summary

Introduction

You live in a state of chronic anxiety because your analytical intelligence constantly divides reality into isolated fragments. You treat your mind as an instrument for dominating the present moment, creating a perpetual conflict between who you are and who you think you ought to be. This frantic search for meaning and control blinds you to the immediate perfection of existence.

Alan Watts argues that spontaneous moments of insight reveal the universe as completely right and self-sufficient just as it is. You discover that the separate ego is an illusion and that your conceptual thinking prevents you from experiencing reality directly.

The book explores these ideas across three main areas. You will examine the roots of spiritual anxiety, the paradoxical nature of Zen control, and the dissolution of the barrier between spirit and flesh.

• How does analytical thought trap you in constant self-frustration?
• What happens when you abandon the effort to control your own mind?
• How can you experience the eternal present without spiritual intermediaries?

1. The Nature of Spiritual Insight and Anxiety

Analytical intelligence creates chronic anxiety by dividing reality into isolated facts, while spontaneous insights reveal the immediate present as complete and self-efficient.

Spontaneous moments of insight reveal the universe as completely right and self-sufficient just as it is. You dissolve the sense of life as a problem. During these sudden experiences, you feel an overwhelming certainty that the immediate present is the goal of all living. Existence needs no justification or explanation, making the world appear luminous and transparent.

Bernard Berenson experienced this while standing on a tree stump in early summer. He felt immersed in a quality of absolute reality he called Itness, where he and the surroundings were one.

Civilized intelligence causes chronic anxiety because it breaks reality into separate facts and forces you into a state of isolated responsibility. Intelligence operates by analyzing the world in series rather than all at once. This creates a heightened awareness of time and an isolated ego. You cannot review all possible data before making a decision. This process produces persistent doubt, fear of the future, and a sense of alienation from nature.

Systematic doubt cannot trust itself, leading to bureaucratic stalemates, over-regulation, and systemic paralysis. Analytical intelligence relies on systematic doubt. It cannot inherently trust unanalyzed collaborators, data, or its own conclusions. Society must use obsessive double-checking, legal safeguards, and complex administrative procedures that paralyze functioning.

A department at the University of California required a complex form with twelve carbons, four of which were illegible, just to spend twenty-five dollars on a supply typist.

Nature operates more like music or dancing without a destination than like business or politics aimed at a goal. Human purposes are pursued within a circling universe that lacks a specific utilitarian purpose. Treating life purely as a problem-solving mechanism causes you to miss living it. A musician overly focused on improving techniques fails to delight in the actual music.

Analytical anxiety stems from the false belief that there is a separate little man inside your mind owning and controlling consciousness.

When consciousness examines itself closely, it finds that it does not generate its own power. No separate ego owns it. Recognizing that there is no independent controller dissolves both the feeling of being a victim of fate and the delusion of being the absolute master of nature.

Relieving existential anxiety requires directly experiencing the concrete relationship and mutual interdependence between yourself and the universe. Normal perception treats things as isolated entities because language and thinking struggle with relationships. When you experience things through the lens of relativity and connection rather than separation, determinism and free will merge into a single harmonious reality.

Profound spiritual breakthroughs often occur during moments of total extremity or despair when you completely surrender proprietorship. Release from mental torment comes through facing and passing through a problem rather than running away from it. By abandoning the struggle to control or possess the self, the weight of identity disappears and the world becomes transparent.

Watts experienced this as an eight-year-old delirious with fever in a terrifying dream about a spinning steel ball. Surrender caused the terrifying object to disintegrate into harmless fragments.

2. Zen and the Problem of Control

The human attempt to control the self results in a logical paradox and psychological paralysis.

When you try to control the aspect of yourself that does the controlling, you create a self-contradictory loop. This dualistic split between a higher controlling self and a lower controlled self inevitably leads to failure and anxiety.

A public speaker frustrates themselves through the very effort to speak well.

The Control Paradox

Mental and moral control is regained not by fighting against your nature, but by accepting and cooperating with it. Just as a judo master does not resist an attack but swings with it, you must accept your current state rather than creating an internal civil war.

An automobile driver turns in the direction of a skid to recover control. Alternatively, you can sail a boat by tacking against the wind.

The Christian commandment to love God sincerely creates an inescapable double-bind by demanding willed spontaneity. Believers are commanded to love God completely and sincerely with their whole heart. If the heart is commanded to convert itself through will, it produces a contradiction because forced spontaneity is impossible.

Jesus condemned the Pharisees for obeying the law with their lips and hands instead of their hearts.

Awakening occurs when the illusory barrier between the separate thinker and the flow of thoughts collapses. Students struggling with koans eventually realize that the ego trying to control the mind is a fiction. When you let the mind think whatever it likes without interference, the separate observer disappears, leaving only the direct flow of consciousness.

Beat Zen and Square Zen

Western appropriations of Zen often split into rigid institutionalism or rebellious Bohemianism, missing its spontaneous essence.

Square Zen represents traditional Japanese monastic schools with hierarchies, certificates, and strict meditation practices, bordering on spiritual snobbery. Beat Zen uses Zen phrases and practices to justify caprice, social nonparticipation, and self-defensive Bohemianism.

In the 1958 year, the Chicago Review published the original essay on these cultural divisions. In the 1959 year, Gary Snyder returned to Kyoto for further Zen study. John Cage presented musical performances consisting of silence and random ambient noises to invoke awareness.

Zen views human existence as an inseparable continuum with nature, where everyday life is fundamentally beyond moral valuation. Rooted in Chinese Taoism, Zen regards human actions and natural phenomena as a unified whole, much like the stars in the sky that require no moral judgment. The fully awakened sage is ordinary, natural, and free from the chronic guilt generated by absolute moral systems.

A Zen master answered a question about escaping the summer heat by suggesting going to the place where it is neither hot nor cold, defined as sweating in summer and shivering in winter.

Authentic Zen art harnesses accidental effects within a deeply disciplined framework rather than promoting indiscriminate lawlessness. Traditional Asian artists and modern masters use accidental occurrences, such as running glaze on pottery or irregular brush strokes, as expressions of organic pattern. Framing total randomness or absolute mess without structural context fails to convey the Tao.

An old Japanese tea master repaired a shattered ceramic tea caddy with gold lines, enhancing its beauty through an accidental break.

The fully realized Zen adept lives with artless grace, lacking internal conflict, aggression, or the need for self-justification. Unlike the austere, unreachable ascetic of Indian traditions or the stern Christian saint burdened by moral anxiety, the Zen sage is completely ordinary, secure, and at home in the transient world. He functions continuously without getting caught in vicious circles of anxiety.

Gary Snyder lived a quietly individualistic life of voluntary poverty, physical labor, writing, and Zen meditation.

3. Spirituality, Sensuality, and the New Alchemy

Society forces a false choice between the spiritual angel and the material animal, creating internal conflict and the extreme mugwump who bounces between rigid piety and licentiousness.

Dissolving the false dichotomy between spirit and flesh reveals that Eros and Logos are one, while psychedelic instruments suspend sensory screening to show the universe as a moving process.

Spirituality and Sensuality

Religious and technological ideals project a perfected human who has transcended the physical body and materiality. Meanwhile, earth-bound sensualists embrace the physical world. Ordinary people feel guilty for being torn between these two extremes, leading to hypocrisy or severe psychological torment, particularly in vocations like clerical and academic circles.

The saint-sinner appears publicly as a champion of the spirit while privately engaging in rakish behavior, tortured by pangs of conscience between intense holiness and outrageous licentiousness.

Western society tolerates the integration of spirit and flesh only in the artist because it dismisses art as an entertaining and harmless irrelevance. While priests and professors face severe public scandal for private misconduct, artists are granted immunity because beauty is viewed as neither good nor devilish, but merely decorative surface work. Society treats the artist as a clown whose function is irrelevant to serious business.

Terms separable in language are inseparable in reality, and the absolute triumph of spirit or thought over matter would destroy the very value of existence. The human mind creates an illusion of a real choice between opposites like good and evil or spirit and nature. However, perception relies on contrast; without sorrow there is no joy, and without resistance there is no action. Unhindered omnipotence and wish-fulfillment would destroy all value, as demonstrated when infinite greed results in losing everything.

In a fairy tale, a fisherman catches a golden fish that grants wishes to his rapacious wife. After she ascends from a cottage to a mansion, then an archduchess, she finally demands rule over the sun, moon, and all men, whereupon the fish returns them both to their original rags.

The New Alchemy

Psychedelic chemicals like LSD and mescaline do not manufacture mystical experiences out of nothing, but rather act as internal instruments that suspend the brain's sensory screening mechanisms. Just as a telescope or microscope is useless without training, consciousness-changing chemicals are not mystical experiences in a bottle. They partially suspend the inhibitory mechanisms that ordinarily screen out sense data, allowing the subject to experience extraordinary visual complexity, vivid colors, and a heightened sense of general significance.

Alan Watts took 100 micrograms of lysergic acid at the request of a psychiatric research group, experiencing kaleidoscopic senses, multidimensional arabesques, and a suspension of normal interpretative evaluation. He used 75 to 100 micrograms in subsequent experiments.

Under the influence of consciousness-changing chemicals, the conventional duality of subject and object transforms into a direct polarity where the knower and the known become a single event. When the selective screening of sense impressions ceases, the observer stops feeling like a detached little man inside the head having sensations. Instead, the experiencer and the experience merge into a self-forming process happening of itself, mirroring the transactional relationship between an organism and its environment described by John Dewey and Arthur Bentley.

The universe consists entirely of process and action rather than static substances and agents, meaning past events do not push present events like dominoes. Common sense assumes that every action requires a separate agent or substance behind it, modeled after manufacture like a carpenter making tables. In reality, the world is form and formation, and what we call agents or past causes are merely earlier and later stages of the same continuous self-moving pattern.

Ecclesiastical hells and the fear of death are empty dramatizations and psychological scarecrows designed to guard deeper spiritual mysteries from the immature. When viewing horrific depictions of hell under heightened perception, the imagery appears as an artificial drama. Recognizing that the Devil is God inverted strips away the terror of malice. Similarly, the fear of death is a baseless mirage because personal non-existence cannot be imagined as a dark void; death is simply the termination of a stream of consciousness.

Alan Watts looked at a reproduction of Hubert van Eyck's Last Judgment where hell is dominated by a skeleton and screaming bodies, turned the picture upside down, and burst into laughter upon realizing the scene was an empty dramatic scarecrow.

Spiritual insight reveals that intuition and intellect, love and reason, are not mutually exclusive, but complement and fructify one another. Rather than forcing man to remain an embodied paradox of reason fighting instinct, deep perception shows that Eros and Logos are one. The intricate organization of both nature and the human nervous system is simultaneously intelligence and love, uniting opposed realms into a single harmonious way of life.

Conclusion

Nondual awareness, the surrender of control, and the unity of opposites fit together into a single realization. You do not need to alter reality or chase future spiritual states because the present moment is already complete. Analytical division and the compulsive drive for self-improvement create the very spiritual friction you seek to escape.

1. Stop fighting your own experience and accept the current state of your mind without judgment.
2. Drop the illusion of a controller standing apart from your thoughts, actions, and feelings.
3. Treat everyday sensations, work, and bodily life as the direct expression of the ultimate reality.
4. Abandon the pursuit of artificial goals and future rewards that distract you from the eternal present.
5. Trust the spontaneous movement of nature rather than trying to force outcomes through sheer willpower.

10 Key Ideas

1. Analytical intelligence creates chronic anxiety by dividing reality into isolated facts, while spontaneous insights reveal the immediate present as complete and self-efficient.
2. Analytical anxiety stems from the false belief that there is a separate little man inside your mind owning and controlling consciousness.
3. When you try to control the aspect of yourself that does the controlling, you create a self-contradictory loop and psychological paralysis.
4. Mental and moral control is regained not by fighting against your nature, but by accepting and cooperating with it.
5. Western appropriations of Zen often split into rigid institutionalism or rebellious Bohemianism, missing its spontaneous essence.
6. Authentic Zen art harnesses accidental effects within a deeply disciplined framework rather than promoting indiscriminate lawlessness.
7. Society forces a false choice between the spiritual angel and the material animal, creating internal conflict and hypocrisy.
8. Terms separable in language are inseparable in reality, and the absolute triumph of spirit or thought over matter would destroy the very value of existence.
9. Psychedelic chemicals like LSD and mescaline do not manufacture mystical experiences out of nothing, but rather act as internal instruments that suspend the brain's sensory screening mechanisms.
10. Under the influence of consciousness-changing chemicals, the conventional duality of subject and object transforms into a direct polarity where the knower and the known become a single event.