The Wisdom of Insecurity

by Alan W. Watts

It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.

It maintains that this insecurity is the result of trying to be secure, and that, contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves.

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

If, then, we are to be fully human and fully alive and aware, it seems that we must be willing to suffer for our pleasures.

The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings the past and the future are not as real, but more real than the present. The present cannot be lived happily unless the past has been “cleared up” and the future is bright with promise.

This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable.

We fall in love with people and possessions only to be tortured by anxiety for them.

Life and death are not two opposed forces; they are simply two ways of looking at the same force, for the movement of change is as much the builder as the destroyer.

To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.

Struggle as we may, “fixing” will never make sense out of change. The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

But if this is what “making sense out of life” means, we have set ourselves the impossible task of making fixity out of flux.

The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security. On the other hand, the more we are forced to admit that we actually live in the real world, the more we feel ignorant, uncertain, and insecure about everything.

There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.

we have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives out of all proportion to “instinctual wisdom,” which we are allowing to slump into atrophy.

The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between “I” and my experience.

To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath.

These defenses lead to divisions between us, and so to more insecurity demanding more defenses.

To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it.

To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this center and soul of our being which we call “I.”

To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.

Fear, pain, sorrow, and boredom must remain problems if we do not understand them, but understanding requires a single and undivided mind. This, surely, is the meaning of that strange saying, “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”

There is never a sensation of what senses sensations, just as there is no meaning or possibility in the notion of smelling one’s nose or kissing one’s own lips.

Memory never captures the essence, the present intensity, the concrete reality of an experience. It is, as it were, the corpse of an experience, from which the life has vanished.

Memories are dead because fixed.

Wanting to get out of pain is the pain; it is not the “reaction” of an “I” distinct from the pain. When you discover this, the desire to escape “merges” into the pain itself and vanishes.

In the widest sense of the word, to name is to interpret experience by the past, to translate it into terms of memory, to bind the unknown into the system of the known.

If we are open only to discoveries which will accord with what we know already, we may as well stay shut.

If we must be nationalists and have a sovereign state, we cannot also expect to have world peace.

Something must therefore be said about the healed vision of life which comes with full awareness, for it involves a deep transformation of our view of the world. As well as words can describe it, this transformation consists in knowing and feeling that the world is an organic unity.

Foregoing self, the universe grows I.

Death is the epitome of the truth that in each moment we are thrust into the unknown.

The sense of not being free comes from trying to do things which are impossible and even meaningless.

In other words, the universal process acts freely and spontaneously at every moment, but tends to throw out events in regular, and so predictable, sequences.

If psychic phenomena exist, there is no reason to suppose that they cannot be studied scientifically, and that they are not simply another aspect of “nature.” Indeed, science is concerned with innumerable things which cannot be experienced with the senses, and which are not present to immediate experience—for example, the entire past, the process of gravity, the nature of time, and the weights of planets and stars. These invisible things are inferred from immediate experience by logic. They are hypotheses which seem to give a reasonable explanation of observed events.

the ancient metaphysicians are perfectly right when they say that the whole universe is a product of the mind. They mean the universe of “things.”

Definition is simply making a one-to-one correspondence between groups of sense data and noises, but because noises are sense data, the attempt is ultimately circular.

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts.”

Metaphysical language is negative because it is trying to say that words and ideas do not explain reality.

The misunderstanding of religious ideas is vividly illustrated in what men have made of the doctrine of immortality, heaven, and hell. But now it should be clear that eternal life is the realization that the present is the only reality, and that past and future can be distinguished from it in a conventional sense alone.

I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul!

It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about “I.”

The timid mind shuts this window with a bang, and is silent and thoughtless about what it does not know in order to chatter the more about what it thinks it knows. It fills up the uncharted spaces with mere repetition of what has already been explored. But the open mind knows that the most minutely explored territories have not really been known at all, but only marked and measured a thousand times over.