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

“Like flies caught in honey” (39), human beings become more trapped by the fixtures of their lives the more desperately they cling to them. Watts divides the human being into two conceptual parts: “I” and “me” (39). The “I” is a conscious entity, the source of separation and anxiety, while the “me” is the natural self—the body and all our accompanying desires and inclinations.

Watts notes that the poets have written throughout the ages about impermanence, change, and dissolution: “To be passing is to live,” he writes, “to remain and continue is to die” (41). For Watts, it is of the utmost importance that life and death are understand as two sides of the same coin, not oppositional forces in eternal conflict with one another. The “I” may think of itself as a static, secure, and separate entity, but in Watts’s view it is “a stream of experiences, of sensations, thoughts, and feelings in constant motion” (42). In other words, the feeling of security is an illusion. Watts believes that instead of artificially attempting to resist the flow of life, we should “plunge into” (43) its ineffable, impermanent experience.

According to Watts, man has fundamentally confused the relationship between thoughts and the thing represented by thoughts.