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Real Security by Eve Ensler

Why are we suddenly a nation and a people who strive for security above all else? In fact, security is essentially elusive, impossible. We all die. We all get sick. We all get old. People leave us. People surprise us. People change us. Nothing is secure. And this is the good news. But only if you are not seeking security as the point of your life.

Here’s what happens when security becomes the center of your life. You can’t travel very far or venture too far outside a certain circle. You can’t allow too many conflicting ideas into your mind at one time as they might confuse you or challenge you. You can’t open yourself to new experiences, new people, and new ways of doing things. They might take you off course. You cling desperately to your identity.

Of course now you can no longer feel what another person feels because that might shatter your heart, confuse your basic thinking, destroy the whole structure. Ideas get shorter — they become sound bites. There are evildoers and saviours. Criminals and victims. Those who are not with us are against us. It gets easier to hurt people because you do not feel what’s inside them.

But all of this offers only a false sense of security. Real security means contemplating death, not pretending it doesn’t exist. It means not running from loss, but feeling it, surrendering to sorrow, entering grief.

Real security is not knowing something when you don’t know it.

Real security cannot be bought or arranged or accomplished with bombs. It is deeper. It is a process. It is the acute awareness that we are all utterly interdependent and that one action by one being in one town has consequences everywhere.

Real security is the ability to tolerate mystery, complexity, ambiguity — indeed hungering for these things.

The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan W. Watts

The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts is a book, that explores the idea of reversed effort: “Whoever would save his soul shall lose it.”

Watts discusses this in terms of security and suggests that insecurity is a result of trying to be secure; that safety and peace of mind can only be found in the recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves.

He calls his book the philosophical equivalent of “Alice through the Looking Glass” and emphasizes how with pleasure, pain will always follow. For instance: the more we love a person, the more we grieve at their death.

By looking at reversed effort, Watts reveals that the only solution to this problem is to become more aware and accept that insecurities are inescapable and inseparable from life.

Tags:   alan watts · insecurity · securityNo Comments