The Wisdom of Insecurity

by Alan W. Watts

I am so busy planning how to eat next week that I cannot fully enjoy what I am eating now, I will be in the same predicament when next week’s meals become “now.”

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.

The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it.

Because awareness is a view of reality free from ideas and judgments, it is clearly impossible to define and write down what it reveals.

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.

Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between “I” and “now” has vanished—when there is just this “now” and nothing else.