Spiritwalk Teachers: Alan Watts

Spiritwalk
Teachers

Alan Watts
(1915-1973)




Contents
Biography
Quotations
Literature
Notes
Bibliography
Links



Biography

Born in England in 1915, Alan Watts attended King's College School Canterbury, served on the Council of the World Congress of Faiths (1936-38), and came to the United States in 1938. He held a Master's Degree in Theology from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and an Honorary DD from the University of of Vermont in recognition of his work in the field of comparative religions. Alan Watts become widely recognized for his Zen writings and for The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. He died in 1973 at his home in California, and is survived by his second wife and seven children. For more than forty years, Alan Watts earned a reputation as a foremost interpreter of Eastern philosophies for the West. Beginning at age sixteen, when he wrote essays for the journal of the Buddhist Lodge in London, he developed an audience of millions who were enriched through his books, tape recordings, radio, television, and public lectures. In all Watts wrote more than twenty-five books and recorded hundreds of lecture and seminars, all building toward a personal philosophy that he shared in complete candor and joy with his readers and listeners throughout the world. His overall works have presented a model of individuality and self-expression that can be matched by few philosophers. His life and work reflect an astonishing adventure: he was an editor, Anglican priests, graduate dean, broadcaster, author, lecturer, and entertainer. He has fascinations for archery, calligraphy, cooking, chanting, and dancing, and still was completely comfortable hiking alone in the wilderness. He held fellowships from Harvard University and the Bollingen Foundation, and was Episcopal Chaplain at Northwestern University during the Second World War. He became professor and dean of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, made the television series "Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life" for National Educational Television, and served as a visiting consultant for psychiatric institutions and hospitals, and for the United States Air Force. In the mid-sixties he traveled widely with his students in Japan, and visited Burma, Ceylon, and India.

See The Alan Watts timetable at http://www.alanwatts.com/library1.htm .

Quotations

Understanding yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth...




"Well," you ask. "How do I get rid of it?" And my answer to that is: That's the wrong question. How does one get rid of what? You can't get rid of your hallucination of being an ego by an activity of the ego. Sorry, but it can't be done . . . . If you try to get rid of your ego with your ego you will just end up in a vicious circle. You'd be like somebody who worries because they worry because they worry.


Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap.
Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious
and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense
technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to
the use of technology in a hostile spirit ~ to the "conquest" of nature instead of
intelligent co-operation with nature.

~ Alan Watts, Psychedelics and Religious Experience

Be sure to tune in to this "virtual interview" with Alan Watts http://deoxy.org/audio/watts/hey_alan.htm


writings

THE ESSENTIAL ALAN WATTS On NOTHINGNESS The idea of nothing has bugged people for centuries, especially in the Western world.We have a saying in Latin, Ex nihilo nuhil fit, which means "out of nothing comes nothing." It has occured to me that this is a fallacy of tremendous proportions. It lies at the root of all our common sense, not only in the West, but in many parts of the East as well. It manifests in a kind of terror of nothing, a put-down on nothing, and a put-down on everything associated with nothing, such as sleep, passivity, rest, and even the feminine principles. But to me nothing -- the negative, the empty -- is exceedingly powerful. I would say, on the contrary, you can't have something without nothing. Image nothing but space, going on and on, with nothing in it forever. But there you are imagining it, and you are something in it. The whole idea of there being only space, and nothing else at all, is not only inconceivable but perfectly meaningless, because we always know what we mean by contrast. On FAITH Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don't grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be. On GOD The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible. When we look through our telescopes and microscopes, or when we just look at nature, we have a problem. Somehow the idea of God we get from the holy scriptures doesn't seem to fit the world around us, just as you wouldn't ascribe a composition by Stravinsky to Bach. The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe. It's hard to conceive of the author of the other. On EGO I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination. What we really are is, first of all, the whole of our body. And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment. Obviously a body requires air, and the air must within a certain temperature range. The body also requires certain kinds of nutrition. So in order to occur the body must be on a mild and nutriative planet with just enough oxygen in the atmosphere spinning regularly around in a harmonious and rythmical way near a certain kind of warm star. That arrangement is just as essential to the existence of my body as my heart, my lungs, and my brain. So to describe myself in a scientific way, I must also describe my surroundings, which is a clumsy way getting around to the realization that you are the entire universe. However, we do not normally feel that way because we have constructed in thought an abstract idea of our self. On SELF Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I. And the more you become aware of the unknown self -- if you become aware of it -- the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is. You are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. You look and look, and one day you are going to wake upand say, "Why, that's me!" And in knowing that, you know that you never die. You are the eternal thing that comes and goes, that appears -- now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown -- and so it goes, forever and ever and ever.

Much more writings at http://deoxy.org/watts.htm

Notes

A personal note from Roger:
Alan Watts has particular importance to me. Not only was he the author who introduced me to Buddhism, but I credit his two books ~ The Book... and The Way of Zen with helping me to maintain sanity during my year in Vietnam (1968). Many days I spent lost in the teachings of Alan Watts and the spiritual psychology which would eventually inspire me to take up my current professional endeavors.


Bibliography


Alan Watts Audio > http://www.alanwatts.com/
Most of the materials on this page were lifted from this Alan Watts website. Do visit it.

Alan Watts > http://deoxy.org/watts.htm
Major resource for Alan Watts lectures and essays.
[The Bibliography came from this deoxy watts page]

Read the transcript of the famous (infamous?) "Houseboat Summit"
A Conversation with Featuring Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg
held on Alan Watts Sausalito Houseboat in February, 1967 as recorded in the
7th edition of the San Francisco Oracle.
http://www.sirius.com/~regent/Summit.html

Mystic Fire has an Alan Watts page in its "archive" in the "biographies area."
Be sure to check out the links here > http://www.mysticfire.com/


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Spiritwalk Teachers ~ Alan Watts http://www.spiritwalk.org/watts.htm