The Wisdom of Insecurity - Alan Watts Flashcards
HIGHLIGHTS
- Myths (like religion) give meaning through making you part of a vast social effort.
- We must drown out the realisation that the whole thing is futile and meaningless.
- If everything is under the control of God this amounts to saying nothing.
- Seeking relief from the tedium through intervals of expensive pleasure.
- The legitimate use of images is to express the truth, not to possess it.
- For animals, instinct rather than anxiety seems to govern their few preparations for the future.
- The sensitive human brain adds immeasurably to the richness of life. Yet we pay for this dearly because the increase in sensitivity makes us peculiarly vulnerable.
- With enjoyable memories and expectations assured, man is able to put up with an extremely miserable present. (He also becomes dimly aware of the present)
- People fail to live because they are always preparing to live. Instead of earning a living they are mostly earning an earning.
- There is no other reality than the present reality.
- We live for the future. The future is an abstraction, a rational inference from experience which only exists for the brain.
- Money is a mere symbol of real wealth and the most blatant example of confusing measurement with reality.
- The working inhabitants of a modern city spend their days in activities which largely boil down to counting and measuring.
- Life is a dance and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere. Life requires no future to complete itself, nor explanation to justify itself.
- Modern civilisation is in almost every respect a vicious circle. It is insatiably hungry because its way of life condemns it to perpetual frustration.
- We look for security by fortifying and enclosing ourselves in innumerable ways. The principal thing is to understand that there is no safety or security.
- So long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at the moment, there can be no freedom.
- It needs but slight imagination to realise that everlasting time would be a monstrous nightmare.
Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure. Salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves.
We have become accustomed to make this existence worthwhile by the belief that there is more than the outward appearance - that we live for a future beyond this life here.
Human beings appear to be happy just so long as they have a future to which they can look forward - whether it be a “good time” tomorrow or an everlasting life beyond the grave.
The decay of belief has come about through the honest doubt, the careful and fearless thinking of highly intelligent men of science and philosophy.
Logic, reason and intelligence satisfied but the heart goes hungry. For the heart has learned not to feel that we live for the future.
The idea of God is logically unnecessary.
If everything which happens is said to be under the providence and control of God, this actually amounts to saying nothing.
Man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future.
These myths give the individual a certain sense of meaning by making him part of a vast social effort, in which he loses something of his own emptiness and loneliness. Very difficult to extricate yourself from this kind of thing.
Yet the very violence of these political religions betrays the anxiety beneath them - they are but men huddling together and shouting to give themselves courage in the dark.
Once there is the suspicion that a religion is a myth, it’s power has gone.
So much of it is more a belief in believing than a belief in God.
It is a serious misapplication of psychology to make the presence or absence of neurosis the touchstone of truth, and to argue that if a man’s philosophy makes him neurotic, it must be wrong.
Our age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation and addiction to “dope”. Somehow we must grab what we can while we can, and drown out the realisation that the whole thing is futile and meaningless. This “dope” we call our high standard of living, a violent and complex stimulation of the senses, which makes them progressively less sensitive and thus in need of yet more violent stimulation. We crave distraction - a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills and titillations into which as much as possible must be crowded in the shortest possible time.
To keep up this “standard” most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work. Or we imagine that the justification of such work is the rearing of a family to go on doing the same kind of thing, in order to rear another family…and so ad infinitum.
This is no caricature. It is the simple reality of millions of lives, so commonplace that we need hardly dwell upon the details, save to note the anxiety and frustration of those who put up with it, not knowing what else to do.
There is another way of life that requires neither myth nor despair. But it requires a complete revolution in our ordinary, habitual ways of thinking and feeling.
The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality.
To discover the ultimate reality of life you must cease to try to grasp it in the form of idols. The legitimate use of images is to express the truth, not to possess it.
Paradox as it may seem, we likewise find life meaningful only when we have seen that it is without purpose, and know the “mystery of the universe” only when we are convinced that we know nothing about it at all.
At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but they do not seem to make a “problem” of it. Their lives seem to have so few complications. They eat when they are hungry and sleep when they are tired, and instinct rather than anxiety seems to govern their few preparations for the future. As far as we can judge, every animal is so busy with what he is doing at the moment that it never enters his head to ask whether life has a meaning or a future. For the animal, happiness consists in enjoying life in the immediate present - not in the assurance that there is a whole future of joys ahead of him.
The animal brain is unable to reason and make abstractions, and has extremely limited powers of memory and prediction. Unquestionably, the sensitive human brain adds immeasurably to the richness of life. Yet for this we pay dearly, because the increase in overall sensitivity makes us peculiarly vulnerable.
If we are to have intense pleasures, we must also be liable to intense pains.
Might it not be better to turn the course of evolution backwards to the relative peace of the vegetable?
Partial suicide - something of myself is already dead.
If we are to be fully human and fully alive and aware, it seems that we must be willing to suffer for our pleasures. Without such willingness there can be no growth in the intensity of consciousness.
For the animal to be happy it is enough that this moment be enjoyable. But man is hardly satisifed with this at all. He is much more concerned to have enjoyable memories and expectations - especially the latter. With these assured, he can put up with an extremely miserable present.
The “spoiler of the present” may not even be a future dread. It may be something out of the past, some memory of an injury, some crime or indiscretion, which haunts the present with a sense of resentment or guilt. The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings the past and the future are not as real but more real than the present. The present cannot be lived happily unless the past has been “cleared up” and the future is bright with promise.
If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of the present.
This kind of living in the fantasy of expectation rather than the reality of the present is the special trouble of those business men who live entirely to make money. So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live. Instead of earning a living they are mostly earning an earning, and thus when the time comes to relax they are unable to do so.
If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon”. We have no such assurance.
If we are citizens of this world, and if there can be no final satisfaction of the soul’s discontent, has not nature, in bringing forth man, made a serious mistake?
For the perishability and changefulness of the world is part and parcel of its liveliness and loveliness.
Religion, as most of us have known it, has quite obviously tried to make sense out of life by fixation.
Real wealth, such as food, is perishable. Thus a community may possess all the gold in the world, but if it does not farm its crops it will starve.
To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.
The Universe described in formal, dogmatic religion is nothing more than a symbol of the real world, being likewise constructed out of verbal and conventional distinctions.
A certain measure of “debunking” is highly necessary.
Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.
Modern civilisation is in almost every respect a vicious circle. It is insatiably hungry because its way of life condemns it to perpetual frustration. The root of this frustration is that we live for the future, and the future is an abstraction, a rational inference from experience, which exists only for the brain.
To pursue the future is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilisation are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes and assurances.
The stream of stimulants is designed to produce cravings for more and more of the same. These cravings drive us to do work which is of no interest save for the money it pays - to buy more lavish radios, sleeker automobiles, better TV sets, all of which somehow conspire to persuade us that happiness lies just around the corner if we will buy one more.
Animals spend much of their time dozing, and idling pleasantly.
We are increasingly incapable of real pleasure, insensitive to the most acute and subtle joys of life which are in fact extremely common and simple.
Money is the perfect symbol of all such desires, being a mere symbol of real wealth, and to make it one’s goal is the most blatant example of confusing measurements with reality.
A less brainy culture would learn to synchronise its body rhythms rather than its clocks.
We are perpetually frustrated because the verbal and abstract thinking of the brain gives the false impression of being able to cut loose from all finite limitations.
The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its wheels. They spend their days in activities which largely boil down to counting and measuring, living in a world of rationalised abstraction which has little relation to or harmony with the great biological rhythms and processes.
In a not too distant future the human brain may be an obsolete mechanism for logical calculation.
There are few grounds for hoping that, in any immediate future, there will be any recovery of social sanity.
The brain can only assume it’s proper behaviour when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it.
To exist at all, human beings must have a minimum livelihood in terms of food, drink and clothing - with the understanding, however, that it cannot last indefinitely.
We look for security by fortifying and enclosing ourselves in innumerable ways. The principal thing is to understand that there is no safety or security.
Life is entirely momentary, there is neither permanence nor security and there is no “I” which can be protected.
Nervous and frustrated people are always busy, even in being idle, such idleness being the “laziness” of fear, not of rest.
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
If we are open only to discoveries which will accord with what we know already, we may as well stay shut.
It is vain that doctors prolong life if we spend the extra time being anxious to still live longer.
If we make it an ideal to be morally superior, we cannot at the same time avoid self-righteousness.
Life is a dance and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere.
Death is the epitome of the truth that in each moment we are thrust into the unknown. Death is the unknown in which all of us lived before birth.
The more my actions are directed towards future pleasures, the more I am incapable of enjoying any pleasures at all.
So long as there is the motive to become something, so long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at the moment, there can be no freedom.
We have adopted the prevalent view that the existence of God, of any absolutes, and of an eternal order beyond this world is without logical support or meaning.
It needs but slight imagination to realise that everlasting time is a monstrous nightmare, so that between heaven and hell as ordinarily understood there is little to choose.
The true splendour of science is not so much that it names and classifies, records and predicts, but that it observes and desires to know the facts, whatever they turn out to be.
Life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself.
