Just So: Money, Materialism, and the Ineffable, Intelligent Universe

From the time I was quite young, I've harbored this notion that past existences, past experiences, and, let's not mince words, past lives, somehow shaped me. As much as this idea was very much at the core of who I was, I would also look upon it at times as though from afar and wonder: where the hell did I get this idea? More curiously, did anyone else have this same feeling? Intuitively, I knew these were not the kinds of question one might ask of teachers or aunts or even friends, and so I did not, not ever. In a way, then, I can best describe Alan Watts as a relief - for not only do I feel he would understand these questions, but that these notions, which seemed so far removed from the staid midwestern life that surrounded me, were not perhaps as decidedly odd as I had assumed.


And that is how Watts is for me: assurance that I am not losing my mind, but allowing myself to find it. Early on he introduces the idea of the wiggly world and returns to it often. Essentially, it's like this: the universe is comprised of wiggles, which is to say the concave and the convex, the worms and snakes inching through life, the waves of wind through a field of wheat, the spirals of a snail shell. Few straight lines occur organically in nature, and as Watts continued to elaborate on the idea throughout Just So, I realized how much of the tension is my own life has derived from trying to force the squiggly and wiggly to become something straight. Eventually, like the caterpillar grown too large for its cocoon, the wiggles can simply no longer be contained and burst forth. Perhaps they've sprouted wings and colors and bear the name butterfly rather than caterpillar, but the essence remains.


Earlier this summer I read Gavin de Beck's The Gift of Fear, about the power and the value of intuition. Unfortunately, de Beck tells his reader, in most cases we've been taught to reason our intuition away. Watts makes the same argument when he writes "Your brain is capable of finding out, but if you don't trust it, you will fumble along and do silly things, and you have been habituated to not trust your brain," (p. 178). As proof he cites similar circumstances to de Beck: "when you find yourself in crisis and you just spontaneously act with intelligence when there is absolutely no time to go over options and think through various decisions. Your own being steps in and comes to your aid" (p. 180). In my own life, I am reminded of the spring 2001, when I was admitted to the business school at UM, a goal toward which I had worked for, I don't know, 10 years. And yet, as I handed over the acceptance, something deep within me surged forth, in hindsight, a crisis, and I demanded back the acceptance papers and instead submitted the papers that indicated I would decline the offer of admission to one of the top business schools in America, a school from which 22-year-old graduates even 20 years ago could often expect starting salaries in the range of 100K. At the critical moment, though, I knew this was not for me.


And how appropriate that I should remember this incident while reading a book whose subtitle begins Money, Materialism.... because it reminds me that my knowing, that is, the deeply personal intuition lodged among my core beliefs, has correctly calibrated the value - and point - of money all along. As Watts says, it "isn't practical until you spend it and, more importantly, enjoy it."


As with other of Watts's books, his treatment of technology is eerily prescient. All of our wires and cables may not have disappeared, but we are able to untether in ways that much of Watts's early audience would have found unfathomable, even if he was already fathoming it. Certainly it's the case that "everything we'd ever wish to know or learn [is] available on a screen right in front of us" (p. 64). So, too, have our "ordinary telephones disappear[ed] to be replaced by individual devices" (p.85) and if they may be a bit larger than the "size of a pocket watch" one of them is, in fact, a wristwatch. And when Watts posits that "at some point in the future, electronic communication will even take the place of air travel, because...I'll be able to re-create myself in front of my father in England, just as if I were sitting the same room with him" (p. 86), well: Zoom, much? As to his concerns about privacy, I'll say nothing more than 'Amazon Halo.' (Actually, I will say more: the Halo is really, really creepy. But don't take my word for it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/27/amazon-halo-wearable/.)


But, as always, with Watts this is personal. It's personal when he writes of having nothing to fear once you've nothing to lose, and I see myself in my old office divulging to the one friend I had there my plan to quit and then to out our boss for being a total lecher. I remember how I'd worked out the night before I could do it - and then, less than 24 hours later, how I was offered a split position with my current job....which would only seem to support Watts notion that "there's no use in worrying about whether or not this what you're supposed to be doing...as..the most pleasurable things in life almost always happen unexpectedly" (p. 170). Well, that one landed like a ton of bricks, actually.


I can't help but compare it to the idea that if the real troubles in your life are the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday (bonus points for naming the lyric!), so too are the real joys. Enumerating those joys - from the opportunity to return to MSU nearly a decade and a half ago to many of my most rewarding friendships - I am struck again and again by this pattern. This pattern is all the more breathtaking (and I mean breath taking in the literal and original sense of the word) for my recent revelation that I actually don't need - in fact, no longer even want - the proverbial crystal ball. I have experienced too many times too recently the intermingling of positive and negative, the overwhelming gratitude that comes from situations that would appear only to offer hearthache and pain, the unbounded truth that our lives are not always peopled by those we would want in them, but always - always - by the people we need in them.


Often when I read, I find various songs going through my mind. I'd be no child of the 80s if Material Girl hadn't pulsated through my brain at least a couple of times, but really, the song I kept hearing as I read Just So was The Dance. I can hear Garth Brooks's twang: "I'm glad I didn't know | The way it all would end the way it all would go | Our lives are better left to chance I could have missed the pain | But I'd have had to miss the dance."


Fittingly, Watts compares life to dance, argues that life is a form of dancing. I'm a terrible dancer and so I never do, but maybe I should start.