This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Wisdom of Insecurity" by Alan Watts. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Why is Eastern spirituality the best solution to mental health issues? What’s Eastern spirituality’s perspective on insecurity?
In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts is critical of the Western approach to mental health solutions. Instead, he advises people to turn to Eastern spirituality for help with insecurity and anxiety.
Find out more about the positive link between Eastern spirituality and mental health recovery.
How Eastern Spirituality Helps You Accept Insecurity
Based on his understanding of Eastern spirituality and mental health recovery, Watts says that using religion and science to cope with insecurity is inadequate for a few reasons. First, it strengthens your tendency to identify with your thinking self over your animal self—you believe you can classify experiences because you’re an objective, outside observer. Watts says that you’re not outside of experience—you are your experience. He reasons that if everyone is their experience, then all of existence is composed of experience—which means that you’re part of an ever-changing, unified whole, rather than a stable, independent entity (your thinking self).
(Shortform note: While Watts doesn’t explain which Eastern philosophies he draws from in this book, he notes in another book, The Way of Zen, that Mahayana Buddhism offers similar wisdom. According to the concept of maya in Mahayana Buddhism, the words you use contribute to the illusion that anything is separate from anything else (including your supposed separation from the rest of experience). And according to the Mahayana principle called moksha, you can be liberated from this illusion and come to understand your true self as part of the integrated whole of existence. Mahayana Buddhists believe that moksha enables you to understand and deal with insecurity.)
Second, Watts argues that religion and science are merely representations of existence, so they’ll never be fulfilling; clinging to these representations is like clinging to a photo of your friends instead of to your friends themselves. He adds that though religions attempt to represent existence, existence can’t be understood by the thinking self—it can only be understood experientially by the animal self that’s living in the moment. Trying to name and classify existence as an independent, objective observer removes you from the experience, so you’ll miss out on aspects of the experience. For example, according to this logic, you’d learn more about running by going for a run than you’d learn by reading about running or watching others run.
(Shortform note: Watts believes that the best way to understand life is through experience, but you may not be able to learn everything you need to know through experience. For example, doctors need to know about a variety of illnesses, and they can’t (and probably shouldn’t) contract every known illness to gain that knowledge. In some cases, it’s more helpful to refer to shared human wisdom about how the world works (like religious wisdom or a body of scientific knowledge) than to rely on your own experience. However, experience can be a useful teacher—and some experts suggest that to maximize your learning, it’s best to pair experience with reflection.)
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Wisdom of Insecurity summary:
- Philosopher Alan Watts's treatise on the origins and solutions to anxieties
- Why seeking security makes us anxious and how to accept insecurity
- How Eastern religions can help anxiety and Western ones make it worse
