"Wisdom of Insecurity" by Alan W. Watts

This book was the first I have ever read from Alan Watts, first published in 1951 and even 75 years later it has been a defining catalyst in how I’ve come to perceive and experience the world specially after going through depressions and anxiety attacks in an age riddled with finding meaning in life while confusing it for work.

From this book I will quote here the most thoughtful passages that have come to leave in me an indelible taste of equanimity.

• If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp.

• will-o’-the-wisp means a giddy flame that is a metaphor for a hope or a goal that leads one on but is impossible to reach.

• The Human Problem: There is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

  By remembering the past, we can plan for the future — But the ability to plan for pleasure is “offset” by the ability to dread pain and fear of the unknown.
  Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and the future gives us a correspondingly dim sense of the present.

• The perishability and changefulness of the world is part and parcel of its liveliness and loveliness.

  This is why poets are so often at their best when speaking of change, of the transitoriness of human life.

  The beauty of such poetry lies in something more than a note of nostalgia which brings a catch in the throat.

  • Poetic Transience:

    “The worldly hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes — or it prospers, and anon, like snow upon the desert’s dusty face lighting a little hour or two — is gone.”

    —The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

• It is in vain that we can predict and control the course of events in the future, unless we know how to live in the present.

• It is in vain that doctors prolong life if we spend extra time being anxious to live still longer.

• It is in vain that engineers devise faster and easier means of travel if the new sights that we see are merely sorted and understood as mere prejudices.

• It is in vain that we get the power of the atom if we are just to continue in the rut of blowing people up.

• Despite all theories, you will feel that you are isolated from life so long as you are divided within.

• But you will cease to feel isolated when you recognize, for example, that you do not have a sensation of the sky: YOU ARE THAT SENSATION.

• For all purposes of feeling, your sensation of the sky is the sky and there is no “you” apart from what you sense, feel and know.

• Foregoing self, the Universe grows I.

  • “I live not in myself, but I become portion of that around me; and to me high mountains are a feeling, but the hum of human cities torture: I can see nothing to loathe in nature, save to be a link reluctant in a fleshy chain, classed among creatures, when the soul can flee, and with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.”

    — Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Lord Byron

• That there is a Sun apart from my sensation of it is an inference. The fact that I have a brain, though I cannot see it, is likewise an inference.

• With as many theories as there may be on the unity of the Universe, they still do not deliver humanity from the isolation of egotism, from conflict, and from fear of life, because there is a world of difference between an inference and a feeling.

• You can reason that the Universe is a unity without feeling it to be so.

• Our perceptions of the world offer us not a literal transcription of reality but rather a seamless illusion woven from both the data of our senses and the models in our memories. Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations — a kind of controlled hallucination.

• Process and form, energy and matter, myself and experience, unity and multiplicity, identity and difference — Opposites are not mutually exclusive. We can feel that individually, we are the center of the world, center of a circle.

• Death is the epitome of the truth that in each moment we are thrust into the known.