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The Wisdom of Insecurity

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Since we evolved as survival and replication machines, happiness is not an end goal in our makers’ designs, but an instrumental one. But any nascent belief has its rocky beginnings, and my own early Christian leanings were no exception to this. This suggests, at least to me, that even if this philosophy has been known about for thousands of years, both in the West and Asia, it is unlikely that it was appreciated in Watts’ particular way for all but a small minority of people.

This insight is may seem like a technicality, until it is applied to some of the concepts we believe are central such as time and the self. Only by being paradoxical and confusing, will the student surrender, admit there is nothing to intellectualize and become enlightened. I can imagine the criticism that might develop from reading a book of philosophy that is so secondhand; why not go straight to the source?The third explanation is that the ideas do work, and they can be employed readily, but we don’t want to use them. Some sacrifice of present enjoyment, could be merited, if it would create a greater future happiness or avoid a greater future pain. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology.

The desire for perfect control, of the environment and of oneself, is based on a profound mistrust of the controller. We can practice imagining the future, but when it finally comes it often doesn’t feel much like our imaginations and once it has been dealt with it is quickly replaced with a new hope or worry. Such an instantaneous release of the problem comes from appreciating key insights about reality and the self. I do not believe, as he contends, that most Christians view the stories in the Bible as being merely metaphors for the process of insight he describes in his book.

He says, "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. 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. There may be some beauty in that, in the sense of an organic stream of thought, but to me it felt untidy and consequently difficult to draw conclusions from his theoretical prattling (of which nothing was backed up with any real world reference). A focus on security is a desire to be separate from life, a separateness that in turn only makes us more insecure. Even if you were to take the less extreme position that, perhaps, we desire happiness in addition to some non-subjective things, it appears we often don’t even do that, failing to maximize our happiness even when there is no appreciable benefit to any other purpose we might have.

Watts feels many religions are equally obsessed with the future (eternal life in Heaven) and the past (dogma handed down over the generations). This is to say that it may be, despite Watts’ assertions to the contrary, possible to actively work on cultivating a mental habit of attentional control. The Wisdom of Insecurity is a classic book which draws on Watts’ extensive experience both in Eastern philosophy (he was almost a Zen monk) and Western religion (he was an ordained Anglican priest). In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable.While this puts Watts’ on better grounds for arguing the truth of this approach, I’m not convinced it creates entirely separate magisteria, cutting off the possibility of scientific investigation into any of these approaches. Alan Watts has an ability to cut through the bullshit in human life and expose what it means to be alive: nothing. I’m not well read enough in these subjects to object to this characterization, but one is definitely left with the distinct impression that Watts’ views and traditional ones may have significant departures. But in doing this we are not aware of the present moment for we are focused on our memory of the past. This echos the opening line of the Dao De Jing, which says, “The Dao that can be named, is not the true Dao.

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