The Vicious Circle
The Teaching
“We are all familiar with this kind of vicious circle in the form of worry. We know that worrying is futile, but we go on doing it because calling it futile does not stop it. We worry because we feel unsafe, and want to be safe. Yet it is perfectly useless to say that we should not want to be safe. Calling a desire bad names doesn’t get rid of it.
The doctor tells you that you have to have an operation and automatically everybody worries. But since worrying takes away your appetite and your sleep, it’s not good for you. But you can’t stop worrying, and therefore you get additionally worried that you are worrying. You are worried because you worry. That is a vicious circle.
If I am in need of improvement, the person who is going to do the improving is the one who needs to be improved — and there immediately we have a vicious circle.
This is why modern civilization is in almost every respect a vicious circle. The root of this frustration is that we live for the future. Yet the future is never; as we move forward it becomes the present. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead.”
Commentary
Something interesting happens when you take the idea of manifestation seriously and follow it back to its source. Every tradition that touches this territory agrees: consciousness shapes reality. Where they diverge from the popular version is in what they say about the nature of the wanting itself.
Before we get there, something needs to be named that most people feel but rarely hear acknowledged directly: the effort isn’t working. Not because the principle is wrong, but because the mechanism is subtly off. The vision board goes up. The intention is set. And underneath all of it, the hum continues, about whether it will happen, about whether you’re doing it right, about whether you can hold the intention strongly enough. And that hum is itself a kind of intention. It is broadcasting alongside the visualization. It is part of the signal.
Watts called this structure the vicious circle, one of the most honest descriptions of the anxious modern mind ever written. The worry generates the grasping. The grasping generates more worry. The effort to stop worrying becomes its own form of worry. And the crucial observation, the one that closes the obvious exit, is that knowing this doesn’t help. Calling the desire bad names doesn’t get rid of it. Understanding the vicious circle intellectually doesn’t release you from it.
The Buddhist Fire Sermon arrives at the same diagnosis from a different direction. The Buddha does not say the fires of passion, aversion, and delusion are morally wrong. He says they are burning you. The question is not whether you should want things, it is whether the wanting is consuming the energy you actually need. Epictetus, a freed slave who had every reason to grasp for security, spent his life making a single distinction: between what is genuinely in our power and what is not. Desire, aversion, intention, these are ours. Outcomes are not. And the vicious circle is precisely what happens when we spend our energy trying to control what was never ours to control.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is a precise diagnosis. And a precise diagnosis is the beginning of something, because it points to exactly where the release needs to happen. Not in the object of the wanting. Not in the technique of the visualization. In the wanting itself. In the thing that is doing the grasping.