48 pages • 1 hour read
The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
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Chapter 9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “Religion Reviewed”
In this final chapter, Watts returns to the question of religion. He argues that the impression that, like science, religion is concerned with the past and the future is mistaken. Religion, properly understood, is about the present. Though religion will always be connected to the symbolic order, proper attunement to the role of religion should understand that its symbols point beyond themselves toward the ultimate reality.
Watts believes that this assertion will be criticized by many religious people who claim that it strips religion of its supernatural elements. To grapple with this, Watts creates a new kind of distinction between the supernatural (or Absolute) and the natural. The natural is the province of science, which measures and classifies parts of the world. The supernatural is the immanent, eternal reality that undergirds the natural. Although “At every moment we are aware of it, and it is our awareness” (140), there is no way to describe it, since it is, by necessity, the grounds for the possibility of description. Still, we can associate this supernatural substrate with God the Father in the Abrahamic traditions.
Religions can be connected to this sense of the Absolute, not beholden to dogma—what Watts distinguishes as the perpetual and the eternal. “Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between ‘I’ and ‘now’ has vanished—when there is just this ‘now’ and nothing else” (145). Eternal life is not an afterlife, which is merely the continuation of the self. True faith understands that there is no self, and that our awareness is simply in and of eternity. From this perspective, knowing how long one will live or what the afterlife is like—or whether there is one—becomes irrelevant. Eternity is happening now.
Watts summarizes his core views on spiritual religion with the following:
For this is the meaning of that universal and ever-repeated religious principle that to know God, man must give up himself. It is as familiar as any platitude, and yet nothing has been harder to do, and nothing so totally misunderstood. How can a self, which is selfish, give itself up? (146)
For Watt the “I” is antithetical to spiritual development and the individualization of the personality. Great scientists are impressed by how little they know, and how wide and wonderful the world is. In this we see the diminishment of the ego. Watts quotes Goethe and St. John of the Cross to emphasize that wonder at the incomprehensible grandeur of God/reality is the apex of spiritual progress.
Chapter 9 Analysis
The concluding chapters are the strongest articulation of Watts’s vision of a spiritual life as an antidote to the divided mind and the anxiety over the existential insecurity that plagues white, heterosexual, financially secure Western man in the 1950s.This plague is not a hopeless case, Watts reassures:
We are, then, most fortunate to be living in a time when human knowledge has gone so far that it begins to be at a loss for words, not at the strange and marvelous alone, but at the most ordinary things. The dust on the shelves has become as much of a mystery as the remotest stars (151).
Spiritual progress, for Watts, is best understood as the ability to wonder passionately. By the 1950s, science, though not itself a spiritual enterprise, has revealed just how weird, complex, and misunderstood our world is. In investigating the natural world, science has unwittingly created the circumstances ripe for the possibility of authentic spiritual growth via a healthy sense of wonder about the world we inhabit. For Watts, we are in and of this world just as much as we are in and of God. This world, in a real sense, is God, where God means the highest, truest, and most amazing of organizing principles. In this sense, too, God is love.
One of the fascinating things Watts attempts in his reinvestigation of religious consciousness (in light of the developments of the book) is to reclaim and redefine the term “supernatural.” Whereas supernatural traditionally means “beyond/above the natural,” Watts uses it to emphasize the natural itself, against its symbolic façade. In the present moment and the expression of creative morality via love, we are invested with the primacy of the natural, not the weak symbolic representation of it. The upshot of this is that the natural world is not on the bottom end of the hierarchy—a degenerate product of a greater supernatural God or transcendent reality. Rather, in Watts’s scheme, it is on top.
The concept of the “interested person” comes up several times in the last few chapters and can justly be called an integral part of life in the light of Watts’s transformative vision. As Watts puts it, “The only interesting people are interested people” (148). The “I” is not an aspect of human personality, and the development of the ego, in fact, detracts from the development of this personality. When one is truly aware of the present moment (that is, fully engrossed in the wonder of the world, not caught up in memories, ideas, or plants), one is interested. This interest in the world is part and parcel of the transformed life, of enrapturement at the mystery of existence. In morality, it expresses itself as love for others, not as an attempt to make oneself perfect or morally superior. In religion (and science), this engaged interest means basking in the eternity of the now, not pining for the perpetuity of the self. Thematically, Watts continuously develops his concern with Awareness, the Present Moment, and the Self. In short, with full awareness of the wonder of the present moment, the sense of self is obliterated, reality reveals its power, and the world is filled with love.
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