The Wisdom of Insecurity
June 19, 2022
Ethan Maurice
By: Alan Watts Intro:
The Wisdom of Insecurity is the book that I — as an agnostic, scientifically-trained human with an inkling there might be “something more” but was put off by the dogma of most religions — was looking for.
It uproots many western culture’s most foundational assumptions, from individualism and future focus to our egoic sense of soul, and offers how to aim our awareness in a very different way at this eternally present moment (which, as Watts so poignantly points out, is really all there is).
This book is a maker of mystics, hurling a monkey wrench into vital cogs of the mental mechanics of the cultural approach. Riddled with paradox, it explains why those who have the most feel the least secure, moves purpose from future-focused to present-found, and offers a shift identity from individual to All.
More than any book I’ve ever read, The Wisdom of Insecurity makes it so plain and obvious: here and now is where it’s at.
If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will alway be disappointed, for the water in the bucket does not run. To "have" running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God.
The movement in which I am a pattern or convolution began incalculable ages before the (conventionally isolated) event called birth, and will continue long after the event called death. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
Religion wants to assure the future beyond death, and science wants to assure it until death. 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 can live. There is no other reality than the present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to everlastingly miss the point.
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. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the "I," but it is just the feeling of being an isolated "I" which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I get, the more I shall want.
From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming the past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from the complete unknown which we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless.
Once this is understood, it is really absurd to say that there is a choice or an alternative between these two ways of life, between resisting the stream in a fruitless panic, and having one's eyes opened to a new world, transformed, ever new with wonder... There is no rule but "Look!"
Faith is not clinging but letting go.
Obviously, it all exists for this moment. It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere. You go round and round, but not under the illusion that you are pursuing something, or fleeing from the jaws of hell. How long have the planets been circling the sun? Are they getting anywhere, and do they go faster and faster in order to arrive? The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.
From this other and, we think, deeper point of view, religion is not a system of predictions. Its doctrines have to do not with the future and the everlasting, but with the present and eternal. They are not a set of beliefs and hopes but, on the contrary, a set of graphic symbols about present experience.
It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about "I."
What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows. Steadily he approaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words but a window in the mind, a window whose name is not ignorance but wonder.
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