The Marginalian revisited Alan Watts's The Wisdom of Insecurity in a 2016 essay, presenting his message as a direct response to the anxiety and loneliness that can accompany modern life. Watts, a British writer and speaker who helped introduce Eastern philosophy to Western audiences, argued that our usual way of experiencing the world creates a hidden fracture: we split life into inner self-awareness and outer experience, and then wonder why we feel cut off.
The essay links Watts's insight to the work of physicist John Archibald Wheeler, whose 'It for Bit' model described a participatory universe. Wheeler wrote that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that observer-participancy gives rise to information. The Marginalian notes that Wheeler arrived at this view through physics, while Watts was reaching a similar conclusion through philosophy: the act of observing is not separate from the reality being observed.
For Watts, the divided mind is the root of the problem. As long as we divide life into 'life in here' and 'life out there,' we split our psyches and prevent ourselves from attaining the wholeness at the heart of human happiness. The result is a persistent feeling of isolation, even among people who accept the theory that the universe is an interconnected whole.
Watts draws a sharp distinction between inference and feeling. You can reason that the universe is a unity without feeling it to be so. You can establish the theory that your body is a movement in an unbroken process which includes all suns and stars, and yet continue to feel separate and lonely. For the feeling to match the theory, he writes, you must also discover the unity of inner experience. Without that inward discovery, no theory of connection can dissolve the sense of isolation.
His central example is simple but disorienting: 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. In this view, the observer and the observed are not two things; the experience is what reality is for the person having it. The division between self and world is an abstraction that feeling does not support.
Watts is careful to say that this sense of unity is not a nebulous trance in which all form and distinction disappear. It is not a luminous mist where man and universe merge. Instead, he compares it to the way the body is its various organs: the one and the many, identity and difference, are not mutually exclusive opposites but are each other. To discover that the many are the one, and that the one is the many, is to realize that these words are descriptions of something obvious to sense and feeling yet enigmatic to logic.
He also turns the charge that the universe is meaningless back on itself. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If the world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser. Watts argues that we cannot actually think about life and reality from a position outside them, because that would require thinking about thinking, thinking about thinking about thinking, and so on indefinitely. All philosophical and theological systems, he says, must ultimately fall apart because they try to describe reality from a standpoint of separation. To know reality, you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it.
When the mind remains split, life becomes perpetual conflict, tension, frustration and disillusion. Suffering is piled on suffering, fear on fear, and boredom on boredom. But the undivided mind, Watts writes, is free from the tension of trying always to stand outside oneself and be elsewhere than here and now. Each moment is lived completely, bringing a sense of fulfillment and completeness. When you realize that you live in, and indeed are, this moment now, and no other, the whole problem of justifying nature disappears. It becomes obvious why this universe exists, why conscious beings have been produced, why sensitive organs, why space, time and change. It all exists for this moment. It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.
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