The Wisdom of Insecurity

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This state comes about because we crave security, despite that this is both impossible and undesireable.

Watts feels many religions are equally obsessed with the future (eternal life in Heaven) and the past (dogma handed down over the generations). To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. A friend of mine captured it perfectly writing to me: “it’s almost as if time at once is and is not, in that the future/past never actually “exist” but at the same time seem to be such a substantial part of what makes any sort of present”. Our descriptions, measurements and science are an attempt to translate reality into terms we can deal with in our brain. This is similar to all the "reversed effort" stuff he talks about; by trying to be secure, we gain insecurity, and to reach peace, we need to accept that we are running away from insecurity, embrace insecurity, and somehow that leads to us being secure.This is important, Watts’ notes because much of our anxieties and unhappiness stems from trying to find security for the self, to protect it from change. Beside the examples of saints and heroes I feel ashamed that I amount to nothing, and so I begin to practice humility because of my wounded pride, and charity because of my self-love.

It's still a bit of a must read though, because Watts isn't trying to sell us on anything, instead, he seems truly invested in helping us reach the next realization. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. A focus on security is a desire to be separate from life, a separateness that in turn only makes us more insecure. Self-improvement implies a split of self, one of the past, negative view of the self (the mistakes I made, what I need to fix) and one of the future, idealistic self (an unrealistic ideal of the future self, that may or may not come to be).

However, in many situations we are like the man getting surgery—unable to change anything at all, yet also ruining our present moment which is unproblematic. Our process of remembering the past and imagining the future can be so convincing that we often forget that they are occurring in our heads. Unmistakably a book to spend time with, each passage requires a thorough reading with a lot of thinking.

Since we evolved as survival and replication machines, happiness is not an end goal in our makers’ designs, but an instrumental one. And if there is anything objectionable (not that I detect anything, but like I said, my brain is shot), some kind of slant or bias in the writing, it doesn't matter much to me, because I've got the ideas and concepts that I need. He warns about the ever-quickening pace of society, brought on by technology, and how it takes us further away from our authentic experiences and more into planning and scheming for the future, which never ends.In this fascinating book, Alan Watts explores man's quest for psychological security, examining our efforts to find spiritual and intellectual certainty in the realms of religion and philosophy. As short as this book is, I felt the bulk of the points to take away could be established in a quarter of the pages.

No matter how much security we try to gather we will always need more, which only perpetuates our anxious cycles. To the extent that we can say ideas are technologies, this gives the impression that these “spiritual” technologies for living a vastly improved life have been widely available but very rarely employed. And the screws were only JUST THEN beginning to be tightened on our brains by our intense political and cultural pressure!We assert our ego-self by thinking of ourselves as separate from our experience, which leads to unnecessary anxiety. Read it with a fresh mind, read it more than once, and remember that Watts will often sacrifice the clarity of his point for a play on words or a joke.