Lectures from watts where he specifically talks about anxiety and practical ways to get rid if it or teaching the mind
I found a few recordings and documents where Watts speaks directly about anxiety, getting rid of it, and methods that involve training or observing the mind.
He describes anxiety as something that can waste “psychic energies for perfectly useless purposes,” and notes that people feel tired because they spend energy worrying without it helping their behavior 5. In another talk, he says that when people are asked how they know they are anxious, they begin to notice concrete bodily symptoms, and this process helps them see “there’s absolutely nothing they can do at all to stop being selfish” 7. That passage suggests a practical strategy of bringing vague anxiety into direct, bodily awareness rather than fighting it abstractly 7.
Watts also talks about a therapeutic process of questioning the deeper assumptions behind anxiety until people can “happily relax” and give up the “frustrating and futile project” of trying to make the false “I” control the false “world” 2. That is one of the clearest places where he links anxiety relief to seeing through the illusion of a separate self that must master experience 2.
On “teaching the mind” or training consciousness, he describes meditation as involving “concentrated attention” on an object, problem, or aspect of consciousness, or else “the relaxed and detached observation of whatever comes into mind” 6. He adds that some methods try to suppress verbal thinking, while others carry rigorous thinking to its conclusions 6. He also mentions methods where one is asked to find out “why he wants liberation, or who it is that wants to be liberated” 6. That gives a fairly direct statement of practical mind-training approaches in his discussions 6.
If you want, I can next pull these into:
1. a list of the most relevant lectures/talks, or
2. a short guide to Watts’s practical method for working with anxiety, based only on these passages.
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