48 pages • 1 hour read
Alan W. WattsThe Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Great Stream”
“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. That is, he confuses symbols with reality and is subsequently caught up in a web of symbols. Definitions and explanations are aspects of the symbolic order that do not adequately capture “the vitality of life” (47). These conventions do not touch the essence of our existence, and because of this they manage to convince us of falsehoods. These conventions have increasingly led to specializations that drive us further from instinctual understandings of the nature of our bodies.
This chapter concludes an account of the “great stream”—the ineffable reality in which we exist in the present moment. Watts believes that most spiritual traditions recognize a moment in the development of an individual’s spiritual journey during which the acolyte must shed attachment to the “I” and merge consciousness with the great stream, or ultimate reality. God, Watts continues, is in and of all things, but cannot be said to be any particular thing.
Chapter 3 Analysis
In the first three chapters of this book, Watts moves from a diagnosis of the existential situation of modern man—hemmed in by the truths of science, the obliteration of belief in ancient religious myths, and the incessant noise of the entertainment industry—to the spiritual demand of complete detachment of oneself from the notion of a separate self or ego (“I”), foreshadowing the personal work required in order to shed one’s anxiety, become wise to one’s insecurity, and step wholeheartedly into the present moment.
The strong dichotomy between the “I” and the “me,” i.e., the ego and the natural self, is not uncommon in the history of philosophy and spiritual thought. While the ego is commonly considered a psychological construct used to make sense of the world and bring order and security, the natural self is seen as an objective, sub-psychological existence predicated on natural relationships to other natural beings.
The accepted truism is that the natural self is fundamentally real, while the ego is only a façade or appearance. This ego is a tool of consciousness, but it is a tool that mistakes itself for the toolmaker. The ego is the source of divisiveness and self-pride, enabling existential security by building walls and boundaries that shore up an individual’s emotional safety. It provides us with a defense against psychological forces that might attack our emotional vulnerabilities, like the thought of death or the criticism of a loved one. It gives identity, structure, and stability to a world fundamentally of change and flux. Because of this, the ego may have deep evolutionary usefulness, but it is also fundamentally detached from true reality: Our fixation on concepts, words, and other symbols is a reflection of the vast and convoluted world of the ego, which consistently strives to make static, eternal determinations in a reality deeply antithetical to stasis. On could say, then, that the ego ignores (or even rebels against) reality. Linking this to the previous chapter, one can see that Watts diagnoses the modern era as one of excessive egoic dominion.
Conversely, the natural self of flesh, blood, and psyche, or “me,” as Watts puts it, is a “part of nature” (40), subject to all the forces of nature, such as change and dissolution, as well as “sensations, thoughts, and feelings in constant motion” (42). The ego is as well, but it refuses to recognize itself as such—in fact, the very existence of the ego is predicated on that which it denies. Watts disparages the ego: It is “me” that recognizes the truth of the “great stream” of conscious experience. This stream is really the central theme of the book: the wisdom and courage to embrace the need to be open to dynamic change. Watts analogizes this “great stream” to an actual river, something that flows eternally and is never the same. Here, Watts is echoing the famous saying of the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Heraclitus: “no one ever steps in the same river twice.”
