Alan Watts: On Insecurity and Anxiety

A few days ago I wrote a post about the thought of Alan Watts, a popularizer of philosophy who I discovered long ago.  And yesterday I wrote about depression and anxiety. The combination of these two posts reminded me of a book by Watts that I had forgotten about: The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (1951).

In the book Watts wrote about mindfulness a half century before it became popular. He argued that our inability to be mindful is the root of much of our anxiety. We claim to only enjoy the present if we are assured of a happy future, but there are no such assurances. In fact we can’t really experience the future. So to be happy we must live in the present, we must be mindful.

Watts also believed that Western culture was neurotic. In it people spend their days doing jobs they hate for money, but which bring little happiness. As he said elsewhere about money: “If you say that money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time: You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is, in order to go on doing things you don’t like doing — which is stupid!” Instead we should use our minds, if possible, to be creative, which is to be in the present.

Still most of us anxiety and insecurity confronted with life’s constant change. Most of all we want to hang on to ourselves, but this is an illusion. For, as we pointed out in a previous post, there is no enduring self or ego or I. Here is Watts explaining this lack of self:

While you are watching this present experience, are you aware of someone watching it? Can you find, in addition to the experience itself, an experiencer? Can you, at the same time, read this sentence and think about yourself reading it? You will find that, to think about yourself reading it, you must for a brief second stop reading. The first experience is reading. The second experience is the thought, “I am reading.” Can you find any thinker, who is thinking the thought, I am reading?” In other words, when present experience is the thought, “I am reading,” can you think about yourself thinking this thought?

Once again, you must stop thinking just, “I am reading.” You pass to a third experience, which is the thought, “I am thinking that I am reading.” Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into the feeling that you think them all at once …

In each present experience you were only aware of that experience. You were never aware of being aware. You were never able to separate the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known. All you ever found was a new thought, a new experience.

This is the doctrine of no-self in Buddhism, and the same point that David Hume made when he said:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic’d reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him.

But why then is the idea of the ego so entrenched? Watts thinks that psychological continuity is to blame.

If you imagine that memory is a direct knowledge of the past rather than a present experience, you get the illusion of knowing the past and the present at the same time. This suggests that there is something in you distinct from both the past and the present experiences …

But, as a matter of fact, you cannot compare this present experience with a past experience. You can only compare it with a memory of the past, which is a part of the present experience. When you see clearly that memory is a form of present experience, it will be obvious that trying to separate yourself from this experience is as impossible as trying to make your teeth bite themselves.

To understand this is to realize that life is entirely momentary, that there is neither permanence nor security, and that there is no “I” which can be protected.

I am more philosophically sophisticated than when I first read Watts. But reading him never ceases to surprise me. He seems to have a unique talent to express the nearly inexpressible. It seems there is a wisdom to insecurity.