The Wisdom of Insecurity

by Alan W. Watts

the mind is in a whirl to escape itself and find itself at the same time.

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“Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it.”

I read this as uts selgish to give your soul innstead give into your soul.

the law of reversed effort, who declared that those who justify themselves do not convince, that to know truth one must get rid of knowledge, and that nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness—from which men shrink.

Nor is the interval between these two nights an unclouded day,

If living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for beings who are born to reason, hope, create, and love.

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Moved by a zeal and reverence for facts, they have tried to see, understand, and face life as it is without wishful thinking. Yet for all that they have done to improve the conditions of life, their picture of the universe seems to leave the individual without ultimate hope.

However long postponed, everything composed must decompose.

There are even some rather wishful scientists who feel that when modern physics abandoned a crude atomistic materialism, the chief reasons for this conflict were removed. But this is not at all the case. In most of our great centers of learning, those who make it their business to study the full implications of science and its methods are as far as ever from what they understand as a religious point of view.

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The immediate results of this honesty have been deeply unsettling and depressing. For man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future.

These myths give the individual a certain sense of meaning by making him part of a vast social effort, in which he loses something of his own emptiness and loneliness.

“where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.”

There seems to be nothing to lose in such a gamble, for if death is the end, we shall never know that we have lost.

Religious ideas are like words—of little use, and often misleading,

belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith.

unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.

Belief clings, but faith lets go.

Belief has thus become an attempt to hang on to life, to grasp and keep it for one’s own.

you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it.

you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. T...

you can only know God through an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear window.

His life was from the beginning a complete acceptance and embracing of insecurity.

“The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.”

“Unless a grain of corn fall into the ground and die, it remains alone. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.”

The ordinary agnostic, relativist, or materialist fails to reach this point because he does not follow his line of thought consistently to its end—an

We have but to open the eyes of the mind wide enough, and “the truth will out.”

One can be less vulnerable by becoming less sensitive—more of a stone and less of a man—and so less capable of enjoyment.

Almost more common is the sensitive boy

who learns in school to encrust himself for life in the shell of the “tough-guy” attitude. As an adult he plays, in self-defense, the role of the

Philistine, to whom all intellectual and emotional culture is womanish and “sissy.” Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of thi...

The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of ...

Without such willingness there can be no growth in the intensity of consciousness.

Because such a loss is in principle the same as death, this means that the more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.

The real problem does not come from any momentary sensitivity to pain, but from our marvelous powers of memory and foresight—in short from our consciousness of time.

He is insensitive to the immediate realities around him. His mind is preoccupied with something that is not yet here.

For it is of little use to us to be able to remember and predict if it makes us unable to live fully in the present.

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.

Thus to plan for a future which is not going to become present is hardly more absurd than to plan for a future which, when it comes to me, will find me “absent,” looking fixedly over its shoulder instead of into its face.