Concepts are the bridge we build between reality and our minds. Our perception grasps the world, and we interpret those perceptions through intuitions, which then become ideas and concepts for our rationality.
Anxiety, for example, is an emotion that arises from our contact with the world. But it’s also a concept that defines a psychological state and can be understood or used both by a science—such as psychology—and by us, in our daily lives. Anxiety is also an idea. One that, nowadays, has immersed us in a liquid modernity, where living in the present moment is confused with a thirst for immediacy, and we constantly think about “what might happen.”
The Eastern Philosophy on the Idea of Anxiety
Eastern philosophies like Zen and Tao can deal with anxiety because those who study their teachings and practices understand anxiety from its very conception. Like any philosophy, both Taoist and Zen thinking have an intrinsic rationality. They also address the great “problem” that all schools of thought have revolved around: the subject-object relationship. In other words, the relationship between the knowing subjects—us—and reality.
Of course, the way of reasoning is different from Western philosophy… Alan Watts, one of the great “translators” of these philosophies to the West, believes that the great virtue of Tao and Zen lies in how these practices deal with this subject-object relationship, specifically with the mind-body relationship. The problem, according to Watts, is that contemporary life leads us to split mind and body, and we tend to retreat into our minds as if they were hiding places. This is where anxiety as a negative idea lurks, and from where we perceive reality with fear of “what might happen.”
Just as we shouldn’t separate mind and body, it’s also important not only to know reality but also the ideas about it. We can’t separate our minds from what reality produces in them. However, we must prevent those ideas from predisposing us and causing us to lose our grounding. That’s where the importance lies, both in Taoism and Zen, of living in the here and now.
For Watts:
“This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.”
This is how Tao teaches us to walk the path—Tao means “path.” It shows us that it’s important to understand concepts like anxiety to be able to reinterpret them, transform them, and sometimes consciously erase them from the mind through meditation.
However, anxiety will still be there, as a nagging idea and often as an emotion. That’s why it’s important, as Zen philosophy teaches us, to learn to deal with obsessive thoughts. The idea of anxiety will be there, but we can intercept it through self-exploration, trying to understand why it’s there and not taking for granted how we understand it.
Ultimately, both in Zen and Tao, it’s about living spontaneously but without separating body and mind. Because, as Master Taisen Deshimaru taught:
“Spiritual is material, and material becomes spiritual. Spirit exists in each of our cells, and ultimately, spirit is the body, the body is the spirit. There’s also activity, energy, which are not dualistic.”
Neither reality, nor ourselves, nor ideas are fixed and monolithic constructions. We always have the opportunity to transform them through our minds and bodies.
This story was written in Spanish in Ecoosfera.