The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

For Watts, “The principal thing is to understand that there is no safety or security” (79). He notes that there is a necessary contradiction between the brute fact of endless impermanence and the desire for a secure, static existence that stably resists all change. Moreover, this entails an even more fundamental problem: If life is change, then the attempt to wall oneself off from change is to “separate from life” (77). In other words, the cost of security is spiritual and emotional death—surely too high a cost. Thus, given that our existential security cannot reasonably be avoided, the only other option is to make the most of it.

This doesn’t mean merely accepting our death, or similar terrors: “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). Ultimately, Watts argues for a non-dual metaphysics, in which the separation between mind and body, self and other, God and world, are obliterated. When we realize that the self, the “I,” we hope to keep safe does not exist, but is, rather, necessarily merged with its sensations and perceptions, then we will see that we are what we inhabit.