The Wisdom of Insecurity

by Alan W. Watts

Alan Watts also proposes a paradox that being insecure is a malady of the psyche and at the same time an open door to an invisible reality, the only place where the cures for fear and anxiety will ever be found.

Lasting happiness—the underlying quest in almost all of Watts’s copious writing—can only be achieved by giving up the ego-self, which is a pure illusion anyway. The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.

“… tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live.”

“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.”

can it really be that human life is no more than a brief flicker of time, full of chaos and pain, between the darkness that precedes birth and the darkness that follows death?

which is that pleasure can never cure pain since the two are connected.

centered above all on the concept that there is no individual ego-self. As a mirror of our own inner division, we have fragmented the world into inner and outer experience. We embrace our separateness without realizing that there is only one reality.

Once the mind has seen through all fear and all hope, it finds peace within itself, in a state of awareness beyond thought.

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.

BY ALL OUTWARD APPEARANCES OUR LIFE IS A SPARK of light between one eternal darkness and another.

Man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more than what he sees—unless there is an eternal order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death.

Human beings appear to be happy just so long as they have a future to which they can look forward—whether it be a “good time” tomorrow or an everlasting life beyond the grave.

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.

He has merely noted that the idea of God is logically unnecessary. He even doubts that it has any meaning. It does not help him to explain anything which he cannot explain in some other, and simpler, way.

We do not, and in all probability cannot, know whether God exists. Nothing that we do know suggests that he does, and all the arguments which claim to prove his existence are found to be without logical meaning. There is nothing, indeed, to prove that there is no God, but the burden of proof rests with those who propose the idea.

Theoretically, it is simple agnosticism. For it is of the essence of scientific honesty that you do not pretend to know what you do not know, and of the essence of scientific method that you do not employ hypotheses which cannot be tested.

Yet the very violence of these political religions betrays the anxiety beneath them—for they are but men huddling together and shouting to give themselves courage in the dark.

Once there is the suspicion that a religion is a myth, its power has gone.

But this does not prove that God is a reality. It proves, at most, that believing in God is useful.

So much of it is more a belief in believing than a belief in God.

“Since the whole thing is futile anyhow, let’s pretend it isn’t.” The second is to try grimly to face the fact that life is “a tale told by an idiot,” and make of it what we can, letting science and technology serve us as well as they may in our journey from nothing to nothing.

The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it.

Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be.

Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.

the incredible truth that what religion calls the vision of God is found in giving up any belief in the idea of God. By the same law of reversed effort, we discover the “infinite” and the “absolute,” not by straining to escape from the finite and relative world, but by the most complete acceptance of its limitations.

For the animal, happiness consists in enjoying life in the immediate present—not in the assurance that there is a whole future of joys ahead of him.

Unquestionably the sensitive human brain adds immeasurably to the richness of life. Yet for this we pay dearly, because the increase in over-all sensitivity makes us peculiarly vulnerable.

If we are to have intense pleasures, we must also be liable to intense pains. The pleasure we love, and the pain we hate, but it seems impossible to have the former without the latter.

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.

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 ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

After all, the future is quite meaningless and unimportant unless, sooner or later, it is going to become the present.

They fail to live because they are always preparing to live.

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.

We fall in love with people and possessions only to be tortured by anxiety for them. The conflict is not only between ourselves and the surrounding universe; it is between ourselves and ourselves.

The truth is rather that the images, though beautiful in themselves, come to life in the act of vanishing.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

We think that making sense out of life is impossible unless the flow of events can somehow be fitted into a framework of rigid forms. To be meaningful, life must be understandable in terms of fixed ideas and laws, and these in turn must correspond to unchanging and eternal realities behind the shifting scene.

Part of man’s frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give.

All the various definitions of the universe have had ulterior motives, being concerned with the future rather than the present. Religion wants to assure the future beyond death, and science wants to assure it until death, and to postpone death.

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.

“What is time?”—“I know, but when you ask me I don’t.”

To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead,

But to be used rightly it must be put in its place, for the brain is made for man, not man for his brain. In other words, the function of the brain is to serve the present and the real, not to send man chasing wildly after the phantom of the future.

Light, here, means awareness—to be aware of life, of experience as it is at this moment, without any judgments or ideas about it. In other words, you have to see and feel what you are experiencing as it is, and not as it is named.

It must be obvious, from the start, that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.

In moments of great joy we do not, as a rule, stop to think, “I am happy,” or, “This is joy.”

At such times we are so aware of the moment that no attempt is made to compare its experience with other experiences. For this reason we do not name it, for names which are not mere exclamations are based on comparisons. “Joy” is distinguished from “sorrow” by contrast, by comparing one state of mind with the other. Had we never known joy, it would be impossible to identify sorrow as sorrow.

Sometimes, when resistance ceases, the pain simply goes away or dwindles to an easily tolerable ache. At other times it remains, but the absence of any resistance brings about a way of feeling pain so unfamiliar as to be hard to describe. The pain is no longer problematic.