The Wisdom of Insecurity

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To be aware of reality, of the living present, is to discover that each moment the experience is all. There is nothing else beside it--no experience of ‘you’ experiencing the experience” (89). What I find especially overbearing and arrogant is the author judging about giving birth, being a man and also apparently a medically totally uninformed and unqualified person. Giving birth wasn't easier in "former times" as it was supposedly more "natural", as he depicts it. Childbirth was and still is one of the most fatal situations any woman can find herself in and still nowadays many women and/or their newborns die or are severely harmed during the process especially in regions where there is no proper medical assistance and care available.

Realize that you live in, that indeed you are this moment now, and no other, that apart from this there is no past and no future, you must relax and taste to the full, whether it be pleasure or pain” (115-116). While some of these notions may seem so abstract, Watts takes time and care to illustrate how Western religions have put forward the same ideas couched in different language and distorted by time. By the mid-fifties a “Zen Boom” was underway as Beat intellectuals in San Francisco and New York began celebrating and assimilating the esoteric qualities of Eastern religion into an emerging worldview that was later dubbed “the counterculture” of the 1960’s. Following the 1966 publication of The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, which sold very well, requests for appearances poured in. Alan lectured at colleges throughout the U.S. and conducted seminars at fledging “growth centers” across the country, such as the world-renowned Esalen Institute of Big Sur, California. Broadcasts of his talks continued at KPFA and KPFK, and spread east to WBAI in New York and WBUR in Boston. The weekly shows attracted a wide audience and Alan became an important figure in the counterculture movement. According to Watts there is no method to solve the problem of happiness, “The question ‘What shall we do about it?’ is only asked by those who do not understand the problem.” This suggests that not only is there no method for achieving resolution, but wanting to achieve a resolution is a symptom of the initial problem! This chase for happiness will never be over. It’s just what society’s trying to sell you, because it still hasn’t managed to come up with a better way of giving you true fulfillment. I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I” will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly.

What are some of the main summary points from the book?

What science has said, in sum, is this: We do not, and in all probability cannot, know whether God exists. Nothing that we do know suggests that he does, and all the arguments which claim to prove his existence are found to be without logical meaning. There is nothing, indeed, to prove that there is no God, but the burden of proof rests with those who propose the idea. If, the scientists would say, you believe in God, you must do so on purely emotional grounds, without basis in logic or fact. Practically speaking, this may amount to atheism. Theoretically, it is simple agnosticism. For it is of the essence of scientific honesty that you do not pretend to know what you do not know, and of the essence of scientific method that you do not employ hypotheses which cannot be tested.

According to Watts the only option left for those of us in the modern day for whom all myths have lost their potency, and who are uncannily aware of the indifferent coldness of the universe which in due time will destroy everything we love including our life itself, is to accept our situation, jump into the universal river, and go along for the ride: Alan Wilson Watts was an English writer, speaker and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Japanese, Chinese and Indian traditions of Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience. Book details 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. To want life to be ‘intelligible’ in this sense is to want it to be something other than life.”I have been taught by the very liberal community in which I have grown up to be skeptical of anything written by a white man in the 1950s and, in general, I think this skepticism is probably warranted. 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? But we've already covered that I've been feeling pretty shot and my brain is no longer working as well as it once did. I needed the digest version. And if there is anything objectionable (not that I detect anything, but like I said, my brain is shot), some kind of slant or bias in the writing, it doesn't matter much to me, because I've got the ideas and concepts that I need. At the end of the day, the source for these kinds of things doesn't matter much; it's just getting the ideas and running with them. This book is incredible on so many levels, and so very timely, especially for minds caught in quarantine: