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Key insights from
The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for
an Age of Anxiety
By
Alan Watts
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What you’ll learn
The late religion scholar and philosopher Alan Watts
(1915-1973) observed many of life’s sure foundations that had been taken
for granted as dependable and unshakable crumble throughout Western
culture. This experience of getting the rug yanked out from under us time
and again has filled many hearts with anxiety and left them grasping for a
sense of security. But what if this stripping away of dogmatic certainty
were a pathway to peace and a more intimate experience with life? In The
Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts invites us to embrace insecurity as a
way to die to the illusory “I,” and discover new life and awareness
awaiting us in the present moment.
Read on for key insights from The Wisdom of Insecurity.
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1. Our modern age
of anxiety is not a burden, but a new opportunity to release a burden way
too heavy for us.
We can think of life as a blip of light between two deep
darknesses. And when we contemplate this blip of light, we might consider
it a cruel joke that our stories end with question marks and incompleteness
when we humans are so full of hopes, dreams, yearning, and a hunger for
meaning. But the hunger for meaning, the desire to make sense of what is
happening in our lives, is like trying to wrap up water in a parcel and
mail it to a friend. There’s no good way to do it. How do you contain this
chaotic, dynamic liquid inside a package? The water will seep through the
paper before you ever tie it up with a bow—let alone send it off.
Yet this temptation to bottle up life always dangles in
front of us. We are constantly trying to draw lines around everything in an
attempt to make sense of it all. Plenty of geniuses in philosophy, art,
literature, economics, and politics have tried to do the same. It’s actually
tragic how many of the best minds are ground down to dull futility in their
attempts to capture the essence of this or that phenomenon in life. They’re
trying to put something as complex as life and experience into an
explainable, static package.
You’d think we’d learn. Life appears to be speeding up. New
historical discoveries and scientific findings outmode our old assumptions
before we even let go of the older assumptions. The packaging we try to put
around the raw chaotic experience of life continues to burst in our faces.
This experience of constantly having what we’re sure of
debunked has bled into even the most deeply held foundational traditions
and religious beliefs. Even among the staunchest believers, Doubt’s chilly
fingers still shock and sting our fundamental beliefs. The popularization
of scientific exploration has given rise to a tidal wave of skepticism,
leading to brilliant discoveries in this world, but also doubts about a
world beyond this one.
Some philosophers and apologists have tried to coax those
who waver back into the fold of traditional orthodoxies via intellectual
arguments. But these arguments lack any compelling vibrancy. The myths have
already been emptied of their power, thanks to the skeptics.
So between skepticism about the reality of anything eternal
and unsatisfying arguments that the eternal exists, we are left in an
existential pickle: The conundrum fills us with anxiety, driving us to
desperately and voraciously pursue whatever pleasure we can find along the
way. To ease the frustration, anxiety, and unsettledness that we feel, we
pursue distraction and stimulation in our free moments and work jobs that
leave us wondering, “What for?”
What are our options? In the face of this anxiety, we could
try to create a new myth to replace the old ones, or we could try to live
as if the old religious myths were true. Another option is to face down the
void, say it’s all meaningless, and hope that science and technology make
our passage into the void a little more comfortable.
But what if all of this uncertainty and insecurity were a
blessing rather than a curse? Something to find hope in, rather than
despair? What if the stripping away of systems and shattering of our
reliance on dogma were an opportunity to embrace the eternal in a new way?
What if fretfully clinging to our beliefs and symbols has so far prevented
us from truly embracing the transcendent? What if insecurity is emptying
out the bowl so that it can finally be filled with something? Maybe you’ve
never seen the sky before because you’ve been busy painting a glass ceiling
blue. A new way of embracing uncertainty could be a help and a relief both
to those who neurotically cling to their images of God and to those who
neurotically cling to their beliefs that there is no God.
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2. The systems we
desperately cling to form the idolatry of our age.
Religious systems are attempts to point us to Ultimate
Reality, but many convince themselves that their religious system is
Ultimate Reality itself. What if our calcified systems of belief were the
very thing keeping us from experiencing life in its fullness? What if we
hold to these systems so vigorously that we miss the opportunity to be held
by the things those creeds point to? It’s a lot like sucking the thumb of
the hand that points to Truth. Some traditions call this desperate
clutching “idolatry.”
While images and symbols and creeds are meant to express
truth, they are not a means of controlling or clutching a truth. Chinese,
Japanese, and Indian spiritual traditions respect mystery and entertain
ambiguity far better than we do in the West. What many Christians miss (and
miss out on) is the way Christ embodies comfort and the embrace of
insecurity. He leaves the security of heaven and takes on human
incarnation. He’s a wandering vagabond moving from town to town, teaching
his disciples how to do the same. They are learning to move forward in the
face of uncertainty. Jesus doesn’t have a den or a nest like foxes or birds
do.
So here is Christ, the God image himself pointing the way to
God. And it's only through his destruction that we can get in touch with
the Ultimate Reality that he was pointing to. He died to the things that we
try to hold on to for security. As he reminds his disciples, “Unless a
grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it
dies it brings forth much fruit.”
So it’s only by dying to our need for certainty, for
concrete facts, and by acknowledging the limitations of our knowledge that
we become available to God, to the infinite, to the absolute. As hungry as
we are to possess the mysteries of the universe, the power of these
mysteries comes only when we let go of the impulse to possess it. For
atheists and the religious alike, the temptation is to shed openness to
reality and harden our posture into dogmatic stances. But in doing so, we
close ourselves off to mystery and to wonder, and we can’t see beyond what
we think we already know. Without meaning to, we’ve imposed a ceiling on
our imagination.
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3. Life is
constant flux and flow, and we miss out on it when we stand back and try to
freeze and contain the river of experience.
We manage to get nowhere faster and faster when we try to
look for security and permanence in a world that never ceases to be in
flux. We end up fighting ourselves, like the snake that tries to eat its
tail. As long as we fight against the way things are, the parts inside us
will fight each other.
As long as we try to change by attempting to freeze and
tinker with everything in our lives, we will never understand change. Life
is something we flow with— not something we can pick apart like a mechanic
in an auto shop. Instead of resisting change, we understand it better when
we jump into it and learn how to work with it, to dance with it.
As we’ve discussed above, religions make a fatal flaw when
they try to figure out life through fixation and obsession, when they try
to distill everything down to a point of doctrine. For whether we use
religious language or not, the idea that we can make meaning of life by
shoehorning our experiences into a list of immutable laws and boxes means
missing out on the ebb and flow of life itself.
We are really quick to forget that words and language we use
are just conventions. These conventions make life manageable, but they
don’t make life meaningful. The word water is a more efficient way of
communicating a concept than dragging someone to a river and pointing, but
there’s also no substitute for the experience of bracing cold water rushing
over your legs. Conventions help us move through life efficiently, but when
we take conventions too literally or too seriously, they can turn rigid and
close us off from the deeper meaning beneath the conventions.
Part of our confusion comes from believing that by defining
something we have truly understood it. We overestimate the power of words.
Intellectuals aren’t the only ones who do this. They merely play out an
extreme version of a process that all of us engage in—believing that
conscious thinking and articulation capture the heart of something. We
delude ourselves when we think this.
Words help us to define ourselves in the world around us,
but that doesn’t mean we understand ourselves or the world around us.
Moreover, by defining ourselves with words, we cut ourselves off from that
flow of life. We remove ourselves with our words; we make ourselves static
and separate.
But life is constant movement that we attempt to freeze
through thought. That’s a lot like trying to pinpoint the exact location of
a train speeding to the next station: As soon as you finish saying the
train is “here,” it’s no longer there. Paradoxically, we will open
ourselves to more of life when we stop overestimating the ability of words
and language to capture it. As soon as we try to make life intelligible
through our words, we end up with something other than life.
It is a grand paradox that God, the eternal Word, cannot be
adequately expressed through words. And every spiritual tradition
recognizes that we must surrender the “I”—the part of us that insists on
knowing and defining itself—if we ever hope to lose the feeling of
isolation and separateness. When we begin to admit, “I do not know” and “I
cannot make sense of this,” visions of God and the infinite begin, too. As
soon as you try to name God, and think your words can capture the eternal,
you end up with something else.
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4. The body
reminds us that our deepest wisdom is implicit and instinctual—not a list
of rules we followed to the letter.
We’ve discussed problems with trying to capture life with
words, and that we run into the same problem when we try to capture God
with words. It's like trying to capture wind in a box: the moment you do
the breeze is gone, the mystery unravels.
Still we insist on looking to God for wisdom. The problem is
not that ultimate reality gives us no wisdom, but us looking for explicit
knowledge, advice, and facts to give us a sense of direction. From the
indescribable, mysterious source of life, we expect clear, definable
instruction.
There’s a tremendous amount of wisdom to be found in the
body. Think about it: Your body never needed written or spoken instructions
on how to digest food, fight disease, or pump blood through your body.
These miraculous and complicated processes are performed instinctually. No
matter how much instruction or how many books you read, it does nothing to
aid the body’s instinctual know-how. That know-how can’t be replicated
through written or oral instructions.
The truth is that the wisdom we rely on most is instinctual
rather than explicit. The more explicit the instructions we receive, the
more removed they are from the way we actually go about life. It seems the
more we try to calculate and create gadgets and techniques to solve
problems, the more we mess things up. Conscious thinking can only get us so
far, and we’ve deprived the deep, unconscious intuitions of any say in our
lives.
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5. Awareness comes
when we experience the present moment—not from standing back and analyzing
it.
We are split into “I” and “me,” where “I” is the conscious
self that stands outside of life and experience and attempts to explain and
understand it. It also incessantly critiques the “me,” that part of us that
experiences life as it is. “Me” takes a dip in the river and lets the river
flow over it, and “I” makes judgments of how cold it is and how silly it is
that you got yourself all wet. When we split these parts and they are not
cooperating, the “I” usually rules us, and keeps us critiquing and analyzing
experiences without living them. Some call this way of operating “European
dissociation,” where we split brain and body, mind and nature, thought and
experience.
So what’s the solution? This is the question that springs
from most people’s lips, but it also reflects that we failed to really
understand the problem. We assume we can, by some explicitly stated
direction or technique, solve the conundrum. But no matter how you thrash
your arms up and down or side to side in the dark, you don’t get rid of the
darkness. A light has to be switched on.
By “light” we mean awareness. We mean a way of attending to
the world in which we experience things in the present moment, while also
resisting the temptation to name everything we’re experiencing and put it
in boxes. Can you observe life as it is, let it “be” without judging it?
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6. The hunger for
security and the feeling of deep insecurity are the same thing.
What are we looking for in the moments when we judge and
define life and our experiences? We’re looking for security, a type deeper
than just physical security. It’s a spiritual, psychological, and
existential security that we want even underneath material comforts. We are
trying to guard ourselves, to fortify the “I” which has become isolated and
lonely by separating itself from life. Hunting for security in a universe
that is fundamentally impermanent is a hard ask. Paradoxically, hungering
for security and the feeling of deep insecurity are one in the same. When
you hold your breath you cut yourself off from breath. If we could learn to
stop hungering for security, we would not experience the feeling of
insecurity. We would be able to take another breath instead of holding on
the last one.
This discussion brings us to the subject of worry. Worry is
very much bound up in our hunger for security. We know at some superficial
level that worrying does us no good, and yet we compulsively do it. Simply
reminding ourselves or having other people remind us not to worry does
little to assuage our worry or prevent us from going right back into a
state of worry.
Demonizing the desire for safety doesn’t help much either.
What will help us more is understanding that there is no safety in
isolation as we presume. Uncertainty and insecurity are always with us. If
we manage to let go of the idea of an internal continuous self, then the
compulsion to grasp for security to protect it will slowly diminish. There
is no “I” that we need to save.
And as we let go of this hunger and compulsion to save
ourselves, we slowly begin to experience life in the moment as it is. In
other words, we have space freed up to become aware. We can enjoy what is
in our lives instead of anxiously turning every experience, person, and
object in our lives into an anxiety-mitigation tool.
Awareness is full immersion in the present moment, a deep
attending to an experience right in front of you. To understand things
means to not be divided within yourself, with one foot in the experience
and the other part separate from it picking it apart. The moment you tell
yourself, “I am listening to music right now,” you are no longer listening
to music. The moment you stop laughing at a joke and start analyzing its
structure, the magic of the humor dies. To say “I’m afraid,” or “I’m full
of joy,” or “I’m excited” takes you out of the immediacy of the moment. But
to simply be with yourself and your experiences without labeling them
allows you to gain awareness. You can finally stop thrashing your arms
around in the dark, hoping it will chase the night away, and you can begin
to notice the light appearing on the horizon.
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Endnotes
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of The
Wisdom of Insecurity here. And since we get a commission on
every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.
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