The Wisdom of Insecurity

by Alan W. Watts

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.

Because life is likewise a flowing process, change and death are its necessary parts. To work for their exclusion is to work against life.

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.

To be passing is to live; to remain and continue is to die.

I am simply this body bounded by a skin in space, and by birth and death in time. Where do I begin and end in space?

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.

Memory never captures the essence, the present intensity, the concrete reality of an experience.

you cannot separate yourself from the present and you cannot define it.

Death is the unknown in which all of us lived before birth.