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The Law of Reversed Effect

Posted on February 5, 2023     Leave a Comment

We should all get a little more familiar with what Alan Watts called the ‘backwards law’ or the ‘law of reversed effect’. It is the operating law underlying quicksand, where struggling only takes you further into the dip. It appears when people make themselves very stiff and sturdy only to quickly lose their balance, and […]

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On Living & Dying

Posted on June 25, 2021     Leave a Comment

‘The psychological curve of life’, writes Carl Jung in The Soul and Death, often fails to conform to the natural curve of our biological development. Acting like it is morning when it is midday, ‘we straggle behind our years, hugging our childhood as if we could not tear ourselves away’. He notes, We stop the […]

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A Game

Posted on May 24, 2021     Leave a Comment

In one of his many insightful talks on the nature of consciousness, self and ego, fear and insecurity, Alan Watts plays a game which he would humorously refer to as ‘chasing the heebie-jeebies’. The point of this game was to reveal the ‘below surface’ thoughts operating when we think. Take, for example, death. I am […]

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On Vulnerability

Posted on January 6, 2021     Leave a Comment

With tender and invisible threads, we are inextricably bound to one another. Although we choose to live mainly through shadowy abstractions of the ‘I’ and ‘me’, they only momentarily disguise the indisputable truth: we cannot live without each other. Of course, there are those who try. They retreat into the mountains, or run away on […]

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