The Wisdom of Insecurity

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Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York.

Too often we fall into the trap of anticipating the future while lamenting the past and in the midst of this negative loop we forget how to live in the now.This basic approach accords much in my understanding with the basics of Zen, which takes Buddhist ideas about the nature of suffering and the nonexistence of the self, but adds to the idea that enlightenment is something instantly attainable through meditation, rather than the product of thousands of lifetimes of karmic investment. The perspective of Alan is very intense for someone who isn't used to seeing things differently than what we've been taught, especially in the Western Culture. However, if we are continuously living in an imagined, abstracted future (or past) moment, then when those moments actually come, we will miss them if we are living again in another imagined moment. It's unbelievable that this short book was written in 1951, foreshadowing massive amounts of today's popular "self-help" ideology.

It argues, among other things, that insecurity, indeterminacy, is the truth of existence, and that to cling to particular things as if they were eternal is to waste your time and strength. His reasoning, citing the Zen approach of koans, is that the right approach is entirely unintellectual—that thinking and philosophizing about Zen ideas is entirely backwards.But any nascent belief has its rocky beginnings, and my own early Christian leanings were no exception to this. It's a very non-Western principle but it contains a depth of truth that Western philosophy has never quite understood. The writing is muddled in places and the continual pushing of the one idea that you understood from the first chapter was repetitive and eventually annoying. I realize that no matter how much security I may gain I will always need more of it, and this striving can set me on an endless “hamster wheel” of anxiety.

The problem, Watts says, is that "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. I don’t think it’s an unfair stretch to say that being happy and fulfilled is a big part of what we want from life. He was the author of a number of books on the philosophy and psychology of religion, which have continued to be in popular demand over the past forty years. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.Now, Being to us in our fractious lives seems to be constantly Threatened by Non-Being - evil, or Nothingness as Sartre puts it. In addition to the "simple" animals, there's something to be said for the simpler *us* that was us during our childhood. How we’re given the ability to think and reminisce and wish and expect but how exactly those things are giving us unrelenting stress and anxiety.

And by planning for the future, again, we are not living in the present moment but a future one that may or may not ever come to be. It is not as if he were thinking about it in a practical way, trying to decide whether he should have the operation or not, or making plans to take care of his family and his affairs if he should die. And so it goes ad infinitum, or until suicide, which will present itself as the only escape if this circle gets its way. It made the familiar strange, and took me out of my habitual ways of thinking and perceiving for a little bit. Although this was not an original idea and can be found in many other philosophers works, there were a few chapters that offered a little insight.As Alan Watts said (probably somewhere in this book), "Explicit opposites are actually implicit allies. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin.