East Versus West

Spend any time on Twitter and you'll be exposed to Eastern thought. More and more westerners are digging the East. Meditation, Dzogchen, Jhana. Sam Harris, Osho. Tao Te Ching, Yin Yang, Wu Wei.

Alan Watts, famed ambassador to the East, tells us to relax, stop the striving. You don't dance to reach a certain point on the floor. You dance just to dance! Life is the same way. Just dance, allow life to flow as it will. Clouds don't make mistakes, and neither can you. People rush around trying to achieve things, but there's no need. The point of life is to simply be alive.

Alan Watts lines soothe the western mind. There's nothing to achieve, nothing to chase. What a relief! All I need is within me. I'm a drop in the infinite ocean. I'm the universe exploring itself. I am not my thoughts.

Enter the West. Best I can tell, John Paul Sartre commands us to live in the exact opposite way. "There is no genius other than that  expressed in works of art. In life, a man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing."

He not only calls us to strive. Sartre says we are nothing but our striving. We aren't stamped with some pre-defined nature to guide us. We create ourselves through our actions. Great men and women look squarely at reality and dare to take authentic action. They carve a singular path. They don't go with the flow –– they swim upstream and dent the universe.

It's scary to create yourself, and most people duck this calling and conform. If you fail, that's your fault, too. Creative genius or conforming coward –– the choice is yours.

So which is right? East or West? Or more importantly, how do we reconcile these wildly different worldviews? This is a central question in my life, and I suspect I'm not alone.