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 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Transformation of Life”
Watts distinguishes between theory as an academic speculation and as true vision. Vision entails an intuitive understanding of life and our place in the world; it is not connected to dreams or prophecies. This “healed vision of life” is connected to full awareness of the present moment, “in knowing and feeling that the world is an organic unity” (107).
Watts describes feeling in this visionary experience of the unity of all things. Everything that is—the sun, the earth, the water, etc., is just as essential to existence as one’s body. There is a fundamental difference between feeling this, which is true understanding, and inferring it, which still implies a separation. He quotes poets who express this sense of cosmic unity and notes that this unity extends to all things, not just what we love and admire. The things that make us uncomfortable or afraid are just as integrally related.
Watts stresses the literalness of the experience he describes: “The sense of unity with the ‘All’ is not, however, a nebulous state of mind, a sort of trance, in which all form and distinction is abolished” (112). To understand fundamental reality is not to eliminate the appearance of difference.
Watts believes this fundamental insight into the non-dual core of reality is properly associated with a sense of fulfillment. “Tension, frustration, and disillusionment” are antithetical to this state (115). Questions of deep philosophical import, for Watts, immediately become perfectly obvious: Everything exists for itself in this moment.
Watts ends by returning to the problem of death, a subtheme developed throughout the book. He claims that “nothing is more creative than death” (117). Death reveals that at the end of the day nothing stays as it was, that all forms arise into and pass out of existence, and that creativity and life are born from that which has died off. Watts ends by quoting Goethe, the 18th century writer and philosopher, who states that knowing how to die and be reborn is crucial to our personal fulfillment in this life.
Chapter 7 Analysis
Throughout the text, Watts is consistently in dialogue with other traditions of thought, and generally rejects Western academic philosophy. He writes, “Speculative philosophy, as we know it in the West, is almost entirely a symptom of the divided mind, of man trying to stand outside himself and his experience in order to verbalize and define it. It is a vicious circle, like everything else which the divided mind attempts” (114). The problems of Western philosophy, which have attempted to articulate why we are here, why the universe exists, and what meaning can be extracted from it are all nonexistent questions for Watts, who argues that when we understand the organic unity of all things, no external justification or reasons are necessary. Watts points to this as the major difference between Eastern approaches like Taoism and Zen Buddhism and the speculative philosophy of the Western tradition. Watts imports teachings from Eastern traditions gradually to avoid frightening his Western audience with technical detail or explicit reliance on Eastern sages.
Watts posits a close link between a visionary state and the sense of philosophy as an experimental art of life, not a theory. Watts associates vision as deep understanding of the way the world is with literal seeing. Visionary teaching is not to be found in the theories of books (though they may be helpful, or Watts presumably wouldn’t bother writing them), but rather in attuned engagement with the present moment. Silent attentiveness is the beginning of vision in this sense.
There is another important feature in Watts’s vision of organic unity: the sense that this vision extends widely enough to encompass all the darkness and evil of our world (and selves). Watts dismisses the desire for safety or comfort to reaffirm a fundamental truth. Understanding organic unity may be the grounds for true joy, but that does not mean it entails constant surface-level happiness. It also means accepting the evil of the world as part of oneself. This, as we will see below, is integrally related to the most basic mode of legitimate moral living: love. If we can love even such disturbing aspects of life as our own death, then we can be admitted into the aforementioned heaven of the Persian parable.
We may also note the philosophically interesting linkage between the fact of organic unity and the continuance of distinctive forms. The unity experienced by the person in the visionary state, for Watts, is not one in which all forms extinguish themselves, but rather one in which the connection between distinct forms is deeply felt and understood as loving. Here, again, we find a Platonic connection in the understanding of an endlessly divergent plurality of forms all unified by a central organizing principle, “the Good.”
