48 pages • 1 hour read
Alan W. WattsThe Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “On Being Aware”
Chapter V is a crucial turning point in the book. Instead of merely alluding to the revolutionary manner of thinking he prescribes, Watts starts to describe it. A major theme in this chapter is the distinction between the attempt at psychological and spiritual security (Watts makes clear that he is not discussing basic physical sustenance) and the nature of life. The more one chases security, the more painful that pursuit becomes; at the end of the day, “there is no safety or security” (79).
Watts is not arguing that people should not want to feel safe, and notes that “calling a desire bad names doesn’t get rid of it” (79). Instead, he promotes awareness of the current moment. Since awareness is understood as a way of perceiving reality independent of judgements, thoughts, or ideas, it cannot be easily described through those things. Instead, we must inhabit our insecurity. In a Persian parable, a sage receives admittance into the house of God only once he understands that he is not separate from God. Similarly, for Watts, we can only understand our situation when we become properly aware that we are that situation and not outside it.
On the one hand, the present moment is a brief and fleeting thing, but, on the other hand, it is also the only thing that is ultimately real and available. Watts believes that we cannot be self-consciously aware of what we are doing and still actively do the thing. If, for instance, I oscillate between reading and thinking about the fact that I am reading, then I am truly doing two different things. To reiterate his point that the present moment is all that truly exists, he breaks down the attempt to compare present experiences to past experiences. In reality, though, there is only ever the present experience. We never enjoy direct access to the past. Even when we remember some aspect of it, this remembrance is merely part of the present reality. The present moment, then, cannot be transcended, but simply is our ultimate reality. “To understand this,” he writes, “is to realize that life is entirely momentary, that there is neither permanence nor security, and that there is no ‘I’ which can be protected” (86).
Watts again discounts the idea of an experiencer separate from experience. There is no individual having an experience. Rather, there are simply experiences. The autonomous ego is a fiction. He concludes by noting that when listening to music, or feeling joyful or afraid, we are directly aware of the experience so long as we are not reflecting on it. It is only in the reflection that the “I” appears. The solution is to be immediately aware of the present moment.
Chapter 5 Analysis
In one sense Chapter 5 does little more than reiterate the points made in previous chapters. In another sense, it acts as the fulcrum of the book, collating the lessons of the early chapters and synthesizing them for a prescriptive account of the choice to live in full cognizance of the insecurity of the present moment.
Whereas earlier Watts had provided a third way—against the Romantics and Existentialists—to how to respond to the anxiety of our modern world, in this chapter, he states that even asking the question, “What is to be done?” betrays a misunderstanding of the situation. This is not a contradiction: Watts has rhetorically been easing his reader into the concept of visionary experience, first articulating it as a solution amongst others—so that it feels less foreign—and then describing it as a basic visionary mode of awareness. For Watts, if you truly understand the problem, then you already know what you need to do. In that sense, other problem-solvers (Romantics, Existentialists, etc.) must be continuously misunderstanding the root of the problem.
Security is not real. Aiming for security over freedom (or truth) is impossible: Because insecurity is the necessary state of things, trying to avoid it is only to flee from truth. “Understanding comes through awareness” (81), and it is this understanding that brings joy and intensity. One can see, then, that for Watts, several things that are separated and disassociated in much of Western philosophy—knowledge, perspective, emotional state, ethical life, etc.—are all part and parcel of the same wholistic worldview: one of radical openness to the present moment (and hence courageous allowance of vulnerability).
Watts clarifies what this understanding supposedly entails: “Herein lies the crux of the matter. To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it” (80). Standing face-to-face with something, even in true recognition, is still to treat it as other, separate, and distinct. Watts uses a Persian parable in which a wise man knocks on the doors of heaven, seeking admittance, to explain his idea further. When God responds to the man’s knock by asking who’s there, the wise man responds, “It is I” (80). God does not grant admittance. After several similar failures, the man responds, “It is thyself!” and is given open access to the kingdom of God. Watts reads this parable to mean that radical acceptance of oneself as the ultimate transcendent other (God) is the key to the doors of bliss. We may also note the spirituality implicitly endorsed by Watts in this parable: God is awareness and we are God made self-conscious when fully aware of our presence in this manner.
Near the end of the chapter Watts makes the curious claim (for a philosopher) that we ought to be less reflective. When we are experiencing some sensation or powerful emotion, his ethical prescription is to fall headfirst into that feeling, not rationally reflect on it. For a great many philosophers, the act of reflection is the defining element of being human. It is in and through this act that clarity, precision, and definite understanding start to emerge. Watts, however, is primarily concerned with a form of experimental living. For him, reflection is, instead, a secondary form of note taking.
