The Wisdom of Insecurity

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I was expecting a thought-provoking question or two to rise to the surface, so I kept at it, but in the end was left with the distinct feeling that I'd just listened to a stoner with a big ego ramble on for a while.

Can’t wait to come back to this book when I can look at it with a more critical and experienced mind. While the insights are not truly separate, they are confusing, so I’ve done my best to separate them and present them in a sequence as I understand them. 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.Alan Watts was one of the big popularizers of Zen and other Asian spiritual philosophies in the 50s and 60s, and I greatly enjoyed his television program. And I've been in a lot of pain, not from my philosophical and religious drifting but a medical condition beyond my control.

The problem of happiness is simply that, if we are rational creatures trying to maximize our subjective conscious experience, we do a spectacularly bad job of it. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. I don't think it would do the book justice to summarize but I will do my best to give you an idea of whether or not you should read this book.

Unmistakably a book to spend time with, each passage requires a thorough reading with a lot of thinking. 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. If there is no self, but only experience, and such experience is this changing, fluid process and reality is this changing, fluid process, then it doesn’t take much stretch to claim they are part of the same thing. 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.

To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. A number of very interesting insights, unfortunately couched in an overwhelming amount of unfounded speculation, illogical and mystical concepts, and baseless assumptions. As Watt’s explains, “Part of man’s frustration is that he has become accustomed to expert language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. But in doing this we are not aware of the present moment for we are focused on our memory of the past.We are anxious not only because we are not living in the eternal now but because we think there is a separate I. There's some good work here on the layers that our minds add to the true reality, and some good metaphors to explain why those should not be important to us. It also lies in the assumption that my feelings, actions, thoughts (the self) are somehow faulty and need repairing. My cogitative self is disbursed after putting myself through an endless hard time full of anxiety, underconfidence and feeble self-worth. In fact, it could be argued, that self-improvement is exactly the problem Watts’ argues against, trying to “improve” something which is illusory.