I love Alan Watts' "The Wisdom of Insecurity." Here's my love notes.

Some books I read once, and never look at again. Others become frequent companions, picked up whenever I need a, well, pick-me-up (non-liquid variety). 

Alan Watts' wonderful "The Wisdom of Insecurity" is one of those books. It's my favorite Watts writing. Every time I read it, the book speaks something fresh to me. Not because the words between the covers have changed.

Because I have. 

Which is the central message of the book. Life is nothing but change. Scary! We don't know what's going to happen! Things could spiral out of control! Death... disease... disability... despair. And that's just some of the nasty stuff starting with "D." There's 25 more letters in the English alphabet!

This morning I re-read the first chapter, The Age of Anxiety. This book was published in 1951; I think we've gotten way more anxious during the intervening sixty-some years.

Watts nails the core problem of life in his first paragraph. (I've divided it into several paragraphs for easier reading.)

By all outward appearances our life is a spark of light between one eternal darkness and another. Nor is the interval between these two nights an unclouded day, for the more we are able to feel pleasure, the more we are vulnerable to pain -- and, whether in background or foreground, the pain is always with us.

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. For the outward appearance does not seem to make much sense.

If living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for beings who are born to reason, hope, create, and love. 

Man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more than what he sees -- unless there is an external order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death.

But that approach, believing in a supernatural realm beyond everyday life, is doomed to failure. It's just another manifestation of the problem: desiring that reality is different from what it is. We keep on splitting ourselves into two, then asking "Why do I feel so divided?"

I've written several love notes about "The Wisdom of Insecurity" over my Church of the Churchless years. They're not as good as reading the book. But maybe I can whet your appetite for the book through these blog posts.

Don't believe, just have faith
Insecurity: the only safe place
Real and false faith
Best reason for why you don't exist

Comments

[George]

Interesting post, but the question is whether the underlying assumption is correct, whether there is in fact some meaningful eternal source hidden beneath it all.

If the nature of reality is meaningless and without order, and we are evolved beings whose existence is pure random chance, then the question is whether our evolved minds are the cause of both our pleasure and pain, or our ultimate success or downfall as a species - could we all go crackers?

Whereas other lifeforms, of which we are aware on earth, just go about there conditioned existence by reacting to their environment to try survive, the human being has developed a brain that appears to have higher-level abilities involving not just conceptual abstract thought and planning, but also heightened powers of memory and emotion.

Along with heightened intelligence and memory, seems to also come heightened emotions such as love, hate, etc. And its often the emotions that seem to get the better of humans and seem to govern their behaviour, and possibly impel or drive us towards finding meaning or patterns (and religion). This inherent psychology, maybe an inherent by-product of our brains, and as a result the need to find pattern and meaning where there might be none (delusion).

And the more societies and cultures open up and liberates itself, the more liberal we become, it also seems the more anxious and neurotic we become.

Its almost as if the two choices to satisfy this inherent search for meaning are either:
- pursue some mystical path, which may create illusions to satisfy such desires, or
- come to terms with the possible meaningless of it all, without deteriating into utter debauchery.

[cc]

"Its almost as if the two choices to satisfy this inherent search for meaning are either:
- pursue some mystical path, which may create illusions to satisfy such desires, or
- come to terms with the possible meaningless of it all, without deteriorating into utter debauchery."

The mental debauchery of coming to meaningful terms with meaninglessness can be a gratifying, worthwhile pursuit of redeeming social value.

[Brian Hines]

George, nicely said. You and Alan Watts are pretty much on the same page. He too talks about how our evolved capacity to abstract and think about the world both increases our sensitivity to reality, and our sensitivity to being hurt by it -- through anxieties, worries, fears of the future, ruminating about the past, etc., etc.

Living in the present as much as possible is one solution offered up. It's been a while since I read The Wisdom of Insecurity. Can't remember exactly how Watts looks upon other ways of dealing with the human condition. I'll know/remember more in a few chapters.

[Mindvalley]

http://thedailybeatblog.blogspot.in/2011/07/jack-kerouac-and-alan-watts.html
https://blog.mindvalley.com/alan-watts/

[Mindvalley]

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