48 pages • 1 hour read
The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
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Chapter 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Marvelous Moment”
Building off the concept of awareness developed in the previous chapter, Chapter VI details the wonder of the present moment. Watts relates a Chinese parable, the upshot of which is that the only way out of our suffering is to plunge into it headfirst.
Still, people anxiously attempt to avoid the present experience. One route for doing so is via memories. In our memories we attach ourselves to things that may bring us comfort, or at least stability and familiarity. The present experience, on the other hand, is always novel. Each moment is totally original. “The art of living in this ‘predicament’” (95) requires attentive receptivity to the newness of every moment. Watts admits that he is not proposing a theory of philosophy but rather an experimental way of living, an art like judo or Taoism. Watts believes that one gains mastery of the opposition when one learns how to give oneself over to it. By giving ourselves over to the present, we will no longer be frightened of it.
Watts believes that an important quality of the human mind consists in its ability to absorb shocks while remaining stable. The mind should be neither too rigid nor too ill-formed. He notes that “nervous and frustrated” (96) people do not know how to be idle because they cannot absorb the shock of the present moment. Instead, they flee into their busy lives. This is due, in part, to their dependency on the ego: “But so long as you are not aware of the inseparability of thinker and thought, you will try to escape” (97). The inability to absorb the shock of pain causes much more pain.
Watts believes that we have no real option other than to be aware of the present moment. It is a “choice” between “fruitless panic” and becoming transfixed with wonder at the world (99). There is no technique or method for achieving this state, and to seek one is to miss the point: Methods are part of the symbolic order that we confuse for the real thing. We can become mistakenly attached to a method. While “memory, thought, language, and logic” are all useful tools in human life, it is a mistake to use them when one should more properly have a still mind: “it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about” (101).
It is with the still mind that new insights emerge. In this silent attentiveness, we find reality revealing itself: “Here, life is alive, vibrant, vivid, and present, containing depths which we have hardly begun to explore” (104).
Chapter 6 Analysis
The crucial importance of Awareness, The Present Moment, and the Self is connected to the art of living that Watts begins articulating in “The Marvelous Moment.” Watts consistently avoids making rules for living, instead describing what it is like to truly be in and of the present moment, which is “neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past and the known on the other. It consists in being completely sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive” (95). This wholesale receptivity underlies Watts’s teaching that the self and the world are not opposing, separate forces, but are one and the same. Flow along the great stream of the now means avoiding the pitfalls of academic metaphysical views on determinism and free will—ideas that will be developed more in the final chapters, particularly “Creative Morality.”
This version of the art of living, as we noted in the previous chapter, goes against theoretical philosophy. Whereas theoretical philosophy tends to propagate abstractions under the form of static categories and deterministic concepts, the experimental art of living focuses on the concrete, such as the novelty and uniqueness of each experience. This fascination by the present moment opposes the tendency of scientists, theologians, and other sense-makers to classify and delimit.
For Watts, the present moment is, necessarily impossible to categorize or delimit in a theoretical manner: Since the present moment is all that truly exists, it is definitionally unrelatable to anything else. The past and future, and all the baggage of ideas that supplement those dimensions of time, are simply aspects of the present. Given this, the present cannot be subject to categorization—it is unclassifiable. This view explains Watts’s dismissal of methods and techniques, which sets him apart from other New Age gurus and spiritual leaders, not just traditional Western theorists. This dismissal stems, in part, from the fact that methods and techniques treat new moments as if they were the same as previous moments in which the technique or method proved fruitful. The tendency of methods, then, is to see all time as fundamentally uniform. Watts rejects this alleged uniformity, stressing the novelty and difference of each moment.
The novelty of experience has within itself an ethical and perspectival component. One imagines that Watts would speak approvingly of the famous Einstein quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.” By grasping for security, a person treats nothing in life as a miracle. In proper engagement with the present moment, though, a person is fully in love with the endless, ever-changing miracle of life.
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