The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

Awareness is a way of viewing reality outside of the ideas, concepts, or judgments through which reality is typically filtered. When one is properly aware of reality, there is no separation from it. For Watts, awareness entails understanding of both the problem and the solution. Therefore, gaining the proper perspective through the right awareness is necessary and crucial for all of Watts’s philosophy.

Belief, as the opposite of faith, is the conditional adherence to the truth when/if that truth corresponds to preconceived prejudices that gel with one’s ego. People believe in ideas that buttress their sense of self. However, for Watts, beliefs provide a false sense of security: “Belief is the insistence that truth is what one would ‘lief’ or wish it to be” (24).

Faith, as opposed to belief, entails the unrestrained welcoming of any truth, regardless of whether it supports one’s current system of ideas or views: “Belief clings, but faith lets go” (24). Faith thus entails a fundamental trust in the world and requires a willingness to step into insecurity. Watts writes that faith is a virtue of science and of religion when it is not “self-deceptive” (24).