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

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.