The Wisdom of Insecurity

by Alan W. Watts

Watts the perfect guide for a course correction in life, away from materialism and its empty promises. The new course headed into the most elusive territory one can imagine: the present moment.

The strategy Watts follows is not specifically Buddhist but goes back to the most ancient insights of the Vedic seers of India: eliminate what is unreal, and all that remains will be real.

We have been accustomed to make this existence worth-while by the belief that there is more than the outward appearance—that we live for a future beyond this life here.

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.

It is simply self-evident that during the past century the authority of science has taken the place of the authority of religion in the popular imagination, and that scepticism, at least in spiritual things, has become more general than belief.

As far as we can judge, every animal is so busy with what he is doing at the moment that it never enters his head to ask whether life has a meaning or a future.

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.

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.

Under these circumstances, the life that we live is a contradiction and a conflict.

The object of dread may not be an operation in the immediate future. It may be the problem of next month’s rent, of a threatened war or social disaster, of being able to save enough for old age, or of death at the last. This “spoiler of the present” may not even be a future dread.

The present cannot be lived happily unless the past has been “cleared up” and the future is bright with promise.

For it would seem that, in man, life is in hopeless conflict with itself. To be happy, we must have what we cannot have.

To drink more fully of the fountain of pleasure, it has brought forth capacities which make man the more susceptible to pain.

WE SEEM TO BE LIKE FLIES CAUGHT IN HONEY. BEcause life is sweet we do not want to give it up, and yet the more we become involved in it, the more we are trapped, limited, and frustrated. We love it and hate it at the same time. We fall in love with people and possessions only to be tortured by anxiety for them.

The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true.

But 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.

it has always been taught in religion that “God” is something from which one can expect wisdom and guidance.

We have become accustomed to the idea that wisdom—that is, knowledge, advice, and information—can be expressed in verbal statements consisting of specific directions.

But in fact the kind of wisdom which can be put in the form of specific directions amounts to very little, and most of the wisdom which we employ in everyday life never came to us as verbal information. It was not through statements that we learned how to breathe, swallow, see, circulate the blood, digest food, or resist diseases.

It is simply saying in “medical” language that 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.

Human desire tends to be insatiable. We are so anxious for pleasure that we can never get enough of it.

THE QUESTION “WHAT SHALL WE DO ABOUT IT?” IS only asked by those who do not understand the problem.

When light is brought, the darkness vanishes at once.

How are we to heal the split between “I” and “me,” the brain and the body, man and nature, and bring all the vicious circles which it produces to an end?

We do not need action—yet. We need more light.

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.

The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.

In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want.

We are all familiar with this kind of vicious circle in the form of worry. We know that worrying is futile, but we go on doing it because calling it futile does not stop it.

We do not actually understand that there is no security until we realize that this “I” does not exist.

There is no experience but present experience.

What you know, what you are actually aware of, is just what is happening at this moment, and no more.

We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary.

To say that experience is momentary is really to say that experience and the present moment are the same thing. To say that this moment is always dying, or becoming past, and always being born, or coming out of the unknown, is to say the same thing of experience.

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.

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.

understand this moment I must not try to be divided from it; I must be aware of it with my whole being.

In reality, it is the only thing I can do. Everything else is the insanity of attempting the impossible.