48 pages • 1 hour read
The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
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Themes
Insecurity as Opportunity
For Watts, “The principal thing is to understand that there is no safety or security” (79). He notes that there is a necessary contradiction between the brute fact of endless impermanence and the desire for a secure, static existence that stably resists all change. Moreover, this entails an even more fundamental problem: If life is change, then the attempt to wall oneself off from change is to “separate from life” (77). In other words, the cost of security is spiritual and emotional death—surely too high a cost. Thus, given that our existential security cannot reasonably be avoided, the only other option is to make the most of it.
This doesn’t mean merely accepting our death, or similar terrors: “To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it” (80). Ultimately, Watts argues for a non-dual metaphysics, in which the separation between mind and body, self and other, God and world, are obliterated. When we realize that the self, the “I,” we hope to keep safe does not exist, but is, rather, necessarily merged with its sensations and perceptions, then we will see that we are what we inhabit. Therefore, understanding our insecurity requires playing present attention to it. It requires thinking and feeling ourselves as the experience of insecurity. Once we understand that we are our feeling of insecurity, rather than an abstract subject that has insecurities, we will be able to solve this situation by fully embracing and becoming it.
Watts uses a Chinese parable to illustrate what he means. In the story, a sage is asked, “‘How shall we escape the heat?’—meaning, of course, the heat of suffering. He answered, ‘Go right into the middle of the fire.’ ‘But how, then, shall we escape the scorching flame?’ ‘No further pain will trouble you!’” (90). This story can be understood in two ways. First, that the only way to escape suffering is through death. To live is to suffer, and the quicker we realize there is no safety net to protect us from this existential reality, the better we will be in to handle it. Second, the sage may be saying that the only way to overcome suffering is by embracing, not escaping it. In doing so, you may not change the heat, but you will change your ability to withstand it. Either way, the fundamental insecurity of life is self-evident. There is no way to live without opening oneself to suffering.
Watts argues that there is an opportunity to find joy and fulfillment in the present moment despite its pain. The modern age, paradoxically enough, is for him the perfect time for this, “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). When every aspect of the world around us contains the sublime, we can be transfixed by wonder at its profundity and incomprehensibility. For Watts, this is the apex of spiritual bliss.
Symbol and Reality
One of the most serious existential and epistemological crises of the modern world, for Watts, is the strong proclivity to mistake symbols for reality. In Watts’s estimation, there are two levels to experience: the real world and the symbolic representation of that world. Symbolic representations—whether scientific, religious, economic, or otherwise—are merely theoretical abstractions. They cannot adequately describe the real. The problem of modernity, then, is that we are becoming steadily more ensnared in symbolic orders, frightfully detached from reality, and subsequently isolated in boxes of conceptual confinement:
Thus a community may possess all the gold in the world, but if it does not farm its crops it will starve. In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas, and words are ‘coins’ for real things. They are not those things, and though they represent them, there are many ways in which they do not correspond at all. As with money and wealth, so with thought and things: ideas and words are more or less fixed, whereas real things change (45).
For Watts, then, the problem is deeper than the simple difference between a description of reality and the reality itself. The problem is that ideas, words, and thoughts do not describe reality at all. Symbols are a poor substitute for the real thing because they cannot capture its organic whole. Therefore, words and concepts do not merely miss the depths of the original in favor of a copy, but are a grossly inaccurate representation of the original, a faithless reproduction.
There is no way to understand the present moment except to be in and of the present moment. This is because, by its essential nature, the present moment is constantly fleeting into the next. It is both ephemeral and eternal, and its temporal dimension cannot be transcended.
In the symbolic world, though, elements of this world are treated as if they are permanent fixtures. This fact of symbolic representation cannot be compensated for by depictions of dynamic processes or statements about life’s impermanence. Watts acknowledges that even his own teachings and writings are of the symbolic order. Though they may hopefully be used to point one in the right direction, i.e., toward an awareness of ultimate reality, they can never function as a substitute.
“The more we try to live in the world of words,” he writes, “the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security” (50). The symbolic order, by its very nature, separates and isolates. It has real effects on the way people think and feel. In other words, this is not merely an academic dispute about metaphysics or the proper epistemological access to reality. It is an existential quandary about how we live our lives and what we need to do to change our attitudes.
Awareness, The Present Moment, and the Self
Perhaps no concepts in The Wisdom of Insecurity are more frequently employed than “awareness” and “the present moment.” Through keen awareness of our present experience—unvarnished by distractions—we understand the truth of our situation and master our anxiety. This understanding yields an intuitive sense, or feeling, of the organic unity of all things.
Awareness is a necessary feature of sapience, which is why Watts advocates conscious and complete awareness. For instance, he criticizes the merely partial awareness of those who are constantly caught up in fantasy and memory:
If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and head, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now (35).
Without full and profound awareness of the present moment, we can form habits and patterns of thought that are deeply opposed to the production of love.
Watts’s vision of the “organic unity of all things” is a non-dual perspective. Whereas dualist philosophies divide the world into two parts (such as the intelligible and the material, the mind and the body, heaven and earth, and so on), the non-dualist takes the view that all things ultimately yield their separate nature and reveal themselves as one substance. The self may disappear in such a world, but so does the sense of otherness and foreignness. We become part of the creative landscape. In many Western perspectives, the resolute individual of moral action must will themselves to improvement and the betterment of their world: They have a free will and must strive against the natural inclinations of the body. In the non-dual perspective, though, both free will and determinist causality are nonsensical. The self is neither acted on by opposing forceless, nor a powerful actor capable of shaping the world in its image—both of which require a self. But in non-dual awareness of present reality we realize that there is no such self. Instead, Watts argues, we merge into the creative “dance” of existence.
One of the things that many people find frightening about the non-dualist perspective is the idea that the “I,” as a separate self, or soul, safe from the eternal flux of ever-changing reality, is not real. There is no afterlife or immortal core. Instead, death is real and final. For Watts, though, awareness of our death is not something to be afraid of: “Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that ‘I’ cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting it go he finds it” (117-18). In other words, when we let go of the anticipation of our own demise and the memories of past experiences that we cling to for identity and stability, we can enter more fully into the present moment, wherein true happiness and love are situated anyway.
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