Insecurity: the only safe place

I'll admit it: sometimes I start to lose faith in my faithlessness. I get this craving to believe.

I'm not fully cured of my thirty-year addiction to dogma. I sniff some 80 proof belief and have a little fantasy about bellying up to the church bar again.

Then the saner side of me whispers, Stay strong, Brian. WWWD?

Ah, yes. WWWD. Others, of course, find inspiration in WWJD – but these are folks looking for security, and I've come to realize that this is the root of religious addiction.

So a few days ago I renewed my commitment to sobriety by pondering WWWD: What would Watts do? Or at least, what does Alan Watts advise in his classic, "The Wisdom of Insecurity"?

I love this book. Almost every sentence makes my churchless soul tingle with re-energized faithless faith. It reminds me of the one and only time I saw Watts in person.

It was at San Jose State College, the fall of 1966 or 1967. I'd gotten to the auditorium early and was sitting in the front row, between the podium and an outside door that was left open on this warm California night.

Watts had begun to speak. A dog ran into the auditorium, stopped just inside the door, and started barking at him. He glanced at it, picked up a drinking glass, and smoothly tossed the water at the dog, hitting it right in the face.

The dog shook its wet head and ran out the door.

Watts continued talking without missing a beat. That's the only thing about his presentation that I remember – a spontaneous act, perfectly suited to what was happening at the moment.

And that's the central message of "The Wisdom of Insecurity." Staying with the moment, which is all there is.

So long as the mind is split, life is perpetual conflict, tension, frustration, and disillusion…But the undivided mind is free from this tension of trying always to stand outside oneself and to be elsewhere than here and now. Each moment is lived completely, and there is thus a sense of fulfillment and completeness.

The religious impulse is fed by incompleteness. Religion promises that lacks in our lives will be fulfilled one day. Not this day. But someday.

For when the mind is divided, and "I" wants to get away from present experience, the whole notion of a supernatural world is its happy hide-out. The "I" is resisting an unhappy change, and so clings to the "unchanging" Absolute, forgetting that this Absolute is also the "unfixed."

…The misunderstanding of religious ideas is vividly illustrated in what men have made of the doctrine of immortality, heaven, and hell. But now it should be clear that eternal life is the realization that the present is the only reality, and that past and future can be distinguished from it in a conventional sense alone.

Watts gets it absolutely right when he says that the only security is in the seeming insecurity of the present moment.

We want to control life, but this keeps us from really living. So we feel a lack in our life, and that lack keeps us searching for the control – salvation, satori, self-realization – that will finally bring us to the promised land of Everything is Absolutely Fine.

Only problem is, life doesn't work that way. Our efforts to make it into something that it's not are the problem that we're trying to solve. Crazy.

We have been accustomed to make this existence worth-while by the belief that there is more than the outward appearance – that we live for a future beyond this life here…Human beings appear to be happy just so long as they have a future to which they can look forward – whether it be a "good time" tomorrow or an everlasting life beyond the grave.

…The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings the past and the future are not as real, but more real than the present.

Especially when religious dogmas hold sway. So many promises. To be fulfilled around the corner, not on the spot the believer is standing now.

Truth is, we don't know what's around the corner. We can't. There's no way to be sure of what's going to happen to you, or me, or anyone else in the next instant, much less for eternity.

If there's anything certain in life, it's the uncertainty.

So, embrace it. Dive into it. Accept that never, not ever, not tomorrow, the day after, or any time, will you or I be able to know what's coming up next on the big roulette wheel of life.

It could be our lucky number. It could be the loss of all our chips. We can't know. That's what makes the game so interesting.

Indeed, every experience is in this sense new, and at every moment of our lives we are in the midst of the new and the unknown. At this point you receive the experience without resisting it or naming it, and the whole sense of conflict between "I" and the present reality vanishes.

For most of us this conflict is ever gnawing within us because our lives are one long effort to resist the unknown, the real present in which we live, which is the unknown in the midst of coming into being.

So what to do? The ageless adage: be here now.

The art of living in this "predicament" is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past and the known on the other. It consists in being completely sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.

Comments

[the elephant]

"perfectly suited to what was happening at the moment"
--Have you asked the dog its opinion on this matter? :)

Watts could have written a much more interesting book around this question: why could he--although only mostly reflected in his private life--barely stand this 'insecurity' while in public praise its virtue?

[Robert Paul Howard]

Dear Brian,

I do not wish to be rude in my responses to you today, but I do wish to also ask the following:

You state: "Watts gets it absolutely right when he says...."

Kindly forgive my raising this general question, but might you not be absolutely "...wrong, wrong, wrong"? (Not only about any statement from Watts [or others], but regarding lots of other opinions just as well. [Consider your previous cult-group membership.])

Nevertheless, thanks for your regular essays/thoughts.

Robert Paul Howard

[Brian]

Robert, the assumption behind my "gets it absolutely right" statement is this: it's impossible to know what is coming next in life.

Now, it is possible to predict the paths of mechanical objects. Billiard balls, planets, that sort of thing.

But where is the evidence that complex living beings, who are interacting complexly with a complex environment, can predict precisely what will happen in the next moment?

I'm not a relativist who believes that nothing is knowable. Some things can be known. Otherwise science is useless, a farce.

There are personal opinions, and there are generally accepted facts. I based my statement on what seems to be an undeniable fact: that regarding everyday life, it isn't possible to be secure in one's confidence that such and such will happen in the future.

As Watts says, we then have several choices. We can redouble our efforts to control the world -- the religious approach -- or we can embrace uncertainty (which is, as noted above, reality).

[Robert Paul Howard]

Dear Brian,

Thank you for your prompt response.

I do happen to agree with you. But I, too, could be "...wrong, wrong, wrong."

Robert Paul Howard

[Brian]

I did some "Rhawn Joseph" checking via Google and found that he's as scientifically uninformed as I suspected. I looked over this PDF writing of his and can't figure out what he's getting at.
http://www.elequity.com/contego/nov07/2/BigBangMythology.pdf

Here's an Amazon review of one of his books. Joseph apparently believes that not only is the big bang wrong, but also evolution, general relativity, and the laws of thermodynamics. Well, if you're going to be grandiose, you might as well go all the way.

Review:

"Panspermia, the hypothesis that life did not originate on Earth but Elsewhere, needs to be given serious consideration by the scientific establishment. This book is a huge step in the wrong direction.

In the introduction Joseph throws out evolution. In the first chapter he throws out the Big Bang, General Relativity, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Yes, at least some of our current ideas are probably wrong, but you need something more to throw out the Second Law of Thermodynamics than that it conflicts with your pet Steady State hypothesis.

On top of that, this reads like a rough draft, with punctuation errors and mis-numbered diagrams that a halfway competent editor would have caught on the first read through.

DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK! "