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

In this final chapter, Watts returns to the question of religion. He argues that the impression that, like science, religion is concerned with the past and the future is mistaken. Religion, properly understood, is about the present. Though religion will always be connected to the symbolic order, proper attunement to the role of religion should understand that its symbols point beyond themselves toward the ultimate reality.

Watts believes that this assertion will be criticized by many religious people who claim that it strips religion of its supernatural elements. To grapple with this, Watts creates a new kind of distinction between the supernatural (or Absolute) and the natural. The natural is the province of science, which measures and classifies parts of the world. The supernatural is the immanent, eternal reality that undergirds the natural. Although “At every moment we are aware of it, and it is our awareness” (140), there is no way to describe it, since it is, by necessity, the grounds for the possibility of description. Still, we can associate this supernatural substrate with God the Father in the Abrahamic traditions.

Religions can be connected to this sense of the Absolute, not beholden to dogma—what Watts distinguishes as the perpetual and the eternal.