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In My Own Way: An Autobiography
In this edition of his autobiography Watts tracks his spiritual & philosophical evolution from a child of religious conservatives in rural England to a freewheeling spiritual teacher who challenged Westerners to defy convention & think for themselves. From early in this intellectual life, he shows himself to be a philosophical renegade & wide-ranging autodidact who came to Buddhism thru the teachings of Christmas Humphreys & D.T. Suzuki. Told in a nonlinear style, In My Own Way wonderfully combines his brand of unconventional philosophy & often hilarious accounts of gurus, celebrities, psychedelic drug experiences & wry observations of Western culture. A charming foreword written by his father sets the tone of this warm, funny & beautifully written story of a compelling figure who encouraged readers to "follow your own weird"--something he always did himself, as his remarkable account of his life shows.
Foreword
Preface
Prologue
The Stoned Wood
Tantum Religio
I Go to the Buddha for Refuge
On Being Half-miseducated
My Own University
Dawn in the Western Sky
The Sunwise Turn
Paradox Priest
Interlude
Journey to the Edge of the World
Beginning a Counterculture
Other Selves
Breakthrough
The Soul-searchers
The Sound of Rain
Index
Foreword
Preface
Prologue
The Stoned Wood
Tantum Religio
I Go to the Buddha for Refuge
On Being Half-miseducated
My Own University
Dawn in the Western Sky
The Sunwise Turn
Paradox Priest
Interlude
Journey to the Edge of the World
Beginning a Counterculture
Other Selves
Breakthrough
The Soul-searchers
The Sound of Rain
Index
386 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1972
348 people are currently reading
3160 people want to read
About the author
Alan W. Watts
253 books7,889 followersAlan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer and speaker, who held both a Master's in Theology and a Doctorate of Divinity. Famous for his research on comparative religion, he was best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Asian philosophies for a Western audience. He wrote over 25 books and numerous articles on subjects such as personal identity, the true nature of reality, higher consciousness, the meaning of life, concepts and images of God and the non-material pursuit of happiness. In his books he relates his experience to scientific knowledge and to the teachings of Eastern and Western religion and philosophy.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 118 reviews
June 10, 2020
A 3.5 star book, IMO. Written in a style Watts called "clear," but a frustrating book for anyone that likes their biographies to proceed in chronological order. I mentioned in my review post that I was going to start this review with a poem by T'ao Ch'ien, a Chinese poet of the 4th-5th Century. I've decided to add that poem, which also contains a bit of prefatory prose, at the end as a coda to sum up, in a small way, how Alan Watts lived his life.
But before bursting into poetry from the 5th Century, let me go down a couple of other paths. On the first path, a story comes to mind. My best friend is a professor who reads a lot of "hard" books and plows through 900-page tomes like they're pulp fiction. He was reading Hannah Arendt--Eichmann in Jerusalem, I believe, and around that time I listened to a podcast of "In Our Time," a show that airs on BBC Radio 4. In this program, Melvyn Bragg, the highfalutin host, usually invites 3 professors, all experts in the program topic, to join him in a staid, proper British interchange. This is a good podcast for those of you who have trouble falling asleep.
The topic of "In Our Time" concerned Hannah Arendt, a German lady who had a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg and carried on a five-year romance with the philosopher Martin Heidegger--a dalliance that Arendt terminated when Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933. Being Jewish, she was slightly offended that her lover had embraced a Jew-hating political faction. Arendt eventually fled Germany for Paris and made her way to New York City. In the US, she began writing some well-regarded books of political philosophy, including The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), among many other works having to do with political philosophy. I've yet to read any of them, though my professor friend has read them all. To make a long story longer, after Melvyn Bragg and his erudite guests finished discussing Arendt's life and ideas, Bragg posed the questions, "What was she?" This day the panel consisted of the usual 3 professors and two were Brits and another was American. The American pedagogue spoke, hailing Arendt as a noted philosopher. One of the British professors rejoinded haughtily, "Perhaps in America she was a philosopher, in Britain, she was a journalist."
What's this story have to do with Alan Watts? Well, no one is quite sure what category to put him in? Even Watts himself was uncertain but did indicate several times in "In My Own Way" that he was a philosopher. He also alluded that he was a philosophical entertainer. He disliked the notion that he was a "popularizer," though he knew that most academicians thought so. Most professional philosophers would not include Watts among their rarefied coterie. Here's one philosopher's take on Watts, who seems to be regarded by modern academic Aristotles as something of a huckster. Here's one academic philosopher's blog post opining on Alan Watts:
"He could talk for hours, without notes, weaving in arcane references with hip terms like ‘grooving on the Eternal Now’, all delivered with a slightly-plummy musicality and skilful use of the dramatic pause. I personally find his lectures a bit pompous and repetitive – as I do the YouTube sermons of Jordan Peterson – but the kids love it. Like Peterson, he speaks with such authority and drama that one can switch off the critical mind and let it all wash over you, and still feel a hell of a lot wiser by the end. It’s not analysis so much as rhapsody. That’s why his talks goes so well with ‘chillstep’ soundtracks and collages of images. Light a joint and drop the Watts!"
from: https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blo...
I liked a reply from to the above blog by a poster named Daniel, giving his take on who Alan Watts was:
"Alan Watts never followed what he "preached" because he did not preach. He simply attempted to describe the mystical experience. He definitely failed in our relative social expectations of what a good person should be and he would agree. I think his ability to talk about life and the internal struggles so well is because he was very aware of his own. Everyone has a dark side and traits that hard to even admit to yourself. Its easy to point fingers at others and say they should be different or that they don't live up to what they say. No one ever lives up to what they think or say.Any ideal person, saint, sage, philosopher or anyone you pedalstalize has that position simply because of your opinion. When you put down someone else, you're putting yourself up.When you can reconcile your opposites, you will see the divine everywhere.When I think of Alan Watts I see reality personified. He is charismatic, humorous, disgusting, evil, healing, destructive, intelligent, pitiful, inspiring, heartfelt, deceptive, cheater, saviour, etc.He is the Brahman, as we all are. Infinite, boundless, and indescribable."
TO BE CONTINUED
But before bursting into poetry from the 5th Century, let me go down a couple of other paths. On the first path, a story comes to mind. My best friend is a professor who reads a lot of "hard" books and plows through 900-page tomes like they're pulp fiction. He was reading Hannah Arendt--Eichmann in Jerusalem, I believe, and around that time I listened to a podcast of "In Our Time," a show that airs on BBC Radio 4. In this program, Melvyn Bragg, the highfalutin host, usually invites 3 professors, all experts in the program topic, to join him in a staid, proper British interchange. This is a good podcast for those of you who have trouble falling asleep.
The topic of "In Our Time" concerned Hannah Arendt, a German lady who had a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg and carried on a five-year romance with the philosopher Martin Heidegger--a dalliance that Arendt terminated when Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933. Being Jewish, she was slightly offended that her lover had embraced a Jew-hating political faction. Arendt eventually fled Germany for Paris and made her way to New York City. In the US, she began writing some well-regarded books of political philosophy, including The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), among many other works having to do with political philosophy. I've yet to read any of them, though my professor friend has read them all. To make a long story longer, after Melvyn Bragg and his erudite guests finished discussing Arendt's life and ideas, Bragg posed the questions, "What was she?" This day the panel consisted of the usual 3 professors and two were Brits and another was American. The American pedagogue spoke, hailing Arendt as a noted philosopher. One of the British professors rejoinded haughtily, "Perhaps in America she was a philosopher, in Britain, she was a journalist."
What's this story have to do with Alan Watts? Well, no one is quite sure what category to put him in? Even Watts himself was uncertain but did indicate several times in "In My Own Way" that he was a philosopher. He also alluded that he was a philosophical entertainer. He disliked the notion that he was a "popularizer," though he knew that most academicians thought so. Most professional philosophers would not include Watts among their rarefied coterie. Here's one philosopher's take on Watts, who seems to be regarded by modern academic Aristotles as something of a huckster. Here's one academic philosopher's blog post opining on Alan Watts:
"He could talk for hours, without notes, weaving in arcane references with hip terms like ‘grooving on the Eternal Now’, all delivered with a slightly-plummy musicality and skilful use of the dramatic pause. I personally find his lectures a bit pompous and repetitive – as I do the YouTube sermons of Jordan Peterson – but the kids love it. Like Peterson, he speaks with such authority and drama that one can switch off the critical mind and let it all wash over you, and still feel a hell of a lot wiser by the end. It’s not analysis so much as rhapsody. That’s why his talks goes so well with ‘chillstep’ soundtracks and collages of images. Light a joint and drop the Watts!"
from: https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blo...
I liked a reply from to the above blog by a poster named Daniel, giving his take on who Alan Watts was:
"Alan Watts never followed what he "preached" because he did not preach. He simply attempted to describe the mystical experience. He definitely failed in our relative social expectations of what a good person should be and he would agree. I think his ability to talk about life and the internal struggles so well is because he was very aware of his own. Everyone has a dark side and traits that hard to even admit to yourself. Its easy to point fingers at others and say they should be different or that they don't live up to what they say. No one ever lives up to what they think or say.Any ideal person, saint, sage, philosopher or anyone you pedalstalize has that position simply because of your opinion. When you put down someone else, you're putting yourself up.When you can reconcile your opposites, you will see the divine everywhere.When I think of Alan Watts I see reality personified. He is charismatic, humorous, disgusting, evil, healing, destructive, intelligent, pitiful, inspiring, heartfelt, deceptive, cheater, saviour, etc.He is the Brahman, as we all are. Infinite, boundless, and indescribable."
TO BE CONTINUED
January 23, 2015
An ever-green book, almost a friend, to return to. I've read it a number of times before, and will read it again. It strongly brings a elegiac feeling to me - the sense of a life past and passing and a slight sadness underneath the exuberant surface. Watts had a beautiful way of seeing (he would'be liked me to say hearing-smelling-tasting-dancing!) the world, and his early death was a real loss to the world. A precious picture-book from his tour through life ... deeply moving.
February 2, 2008
I seem to be on a real Watts kick...what more can I say
September 1, 2021
first of all, let me take a moment to officially claim this book as one of my all time favourites.
the language, the depth, the challenge, the beauty, the mind. oh what a mind.
"as I am also a you, this is going to be the kind of book that I would like you to write for me."
reading Alan Watts always feels like coming back home. there are so many ideas floating out there, and such a constant chaos of the extremes in my mind, so I am fighting my way through it all - and yet here it is, home, no need to strive, it's there, open arms and all.
"you pick up a seashell not just because it is pretty, but because its twirled perfection and the way the light comes through its walls remind you of the most important thing you have ever forgotten."
he is always brilliant, but his autobiography has touched me more than any other of his writing - yet when I run through the list of the quotes I picked out, they don't sound overly impressive, which in a way just proves his point of elements within context, and the silliness of slicing and dicing the universe just so it can fit our way of thinking.
"if a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field - moreover, a field as discussed in physics, an integrated pattern of energy, a field which would not only be flowering, but also earthing, raining, shining, birding, worming and beeing. a sensitive flower would, through its roots and membranes, feel out into this entire pattern and so discover itself as a particular exultation of the whole field."
the language, the depth, the challenge, the beauty, the mind. oh what a mind.
"as I am also a you, this is going to be the kind of book that I would like you to write for me."
reading Alan Watts always feels like coming back home. there are so many ideas floating out there, and such a constant chaos of the extremes in my mind, so I am fighting my way through it all - and yet here it is, home, no need to strive, it's there, open arms and all.
"you pick up a seashell not just because it is pretty, but because its twirled perfection and the way the light comes through its walls remind you of the most important thing you have ever forgotten."
he is always brilliant, but his autobiography has touched me more than any other of his writing - yet when I run through the list of the quotes I picked out, they don't sound overly impressive, which in a way just proves his point of elements within context, and the silliness of slicing and dicing the universe just so it can fit our way of thinking.
"if a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field - moreover, a field as discussed in physics, an integrated pattern of energy, a field which would not only be flowering, but also earthing, raining, shining, birding, worming and beeing. a sensitive flower would, through its roots and membranes, feel out into this entire pattern and so discover itself as a particular exultation of the whole field."
February 15, 2016
I know of Alan Watts because of a couple videos which went extremely viral on Facebook a couple years ago. You should watch these before continuing with this review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMRrC...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khOaA...
Note that Watts’ aged, grizzled English, combined with awe-inspiring images of the galaxies, nature, and humans doing human things is to our generation what a highly colorful flower is to a bee, to say nothing of the content of these videos, which is like water for the parched viewers.
Mostly millennials like myself, the viewers have been starved of philosophy of any kind, and I mean philosophy strictly in the sense of “meaningful guiding principles for life.” In universities we are trained to think critically about our world, but never in how to live a good life. This results in a spiritual void in which we adopt others’ social cues as this “general doctrine” and wonder why they don’t work for us. You see, Alan Watts has done society a huge service. Just in these short three to four minute bursts of oration he has opened the minds of thousands to alternative, more holistic models of morality and human behavior.
But I don’t want to be the type of person who simply takes a sip of water and is done with it, I need to down at least a glass or several; my thirst is not so shallow. I also have no time to drink the ocean (Watts has published innumerable works), I figured his autobiography would do. I believe that how one goes about living life is a far greater indicator of one’s actual beliefs than the ideas he jots on paper, so in this sense Watts' autobiography takes on a peculiar significance which his other treatises must lack.
Though it started off slowly, it was a worthwhile read. Watts was a colorful character who never took himself or life too seriously, finding the humor (both ironic and riotous) in everything, enriching the lives of those he associated with (Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, D.T. Suzuki, John Cage among others), championing a truly holistic view of mysticism and spirituality separate from the charlatanism of the occult and the rigidity of the devout. A real bon vivant.
Watts doesn’t state this in the book, but I get the sense he had a vast fear of being forgotten: he tried to disseminate himself and his ideas as much as possible into the universe before finally passing away, this cannot be denied.
I need to remove one star from this review because Watts fell into the same trap as most autobiographers, which is that they pretend they can recall all the tiniest little details about their childhoods, all the way down to how ornaments were displayed in their neighbors’ houses. Though I respect Alan Watts, I don’t believe for a second that he had such an elephantine memory; if I cannot recall now at 23 what I did at 7, there is no way Watts could recall at 50 what he did at 6, and certainly not at such descriptive length.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:
“Love of money and imagination in spending it seem to be mutually exclusive.”
“Conscious thought, reflection, analysis, cultivation, and intention are simply using the mind’s radar or scanning beam for purposes which the mind as a whole can do of itself, and on its own, with far more intelligence and less effort.”
“Only those who can accept their own annihilation can have the courage to be true individuals.”
“John slept that night on a divan in the living room, where we kept a hamster in a cage furnished with a vicious wheel, or bhavachakra, wherein the benighted creature could run forever without getting anywhere.
“In this house I have made some of my greatest friendships, so much so that I cannot think of it without that curious pleasure-pain which the Japanese call aware - the sense of echoes in the courtyards of the mind after the sun has left and the people have gone their ways forever.”
“Leo impressed upon me the important idea that the ego was neither a spiritual, psychological, or biological reality but a social institution of the same order as the monogamous family, the calendar, the clock, the metric system, and the agreement to drive on the right or left of the road.”
“Now it is curious that wherever there flourishes what may loosely be called a bohemian style of life, the affluent bourgeoisie are filled with envy and want to move in, so that the land values go up and the artists, writers, hippies, and other weird characters who gave the place its color can no longer afford to live there.”
Quoting poet James Broughton:
When I gave up trying to understand,
said the Camel’s Eye to the Needle,
then I began to get the point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMRrC...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khOaA...
Note that Watts’ aged, grizzled English, combined with awe-inspiring images of the galaxies, nature, and humans doing human things is to our generation what a highly colorful flower is to a bee, to say nothing of the content of these videos, which is like water for the parched viewers.
Mostly millennials like myself, the viewers have been starved of philosophy of any kind, and I mean philosophy strictly in the sense of “meaningful guiding principles for life.” In universities we are trained to think critically about our world, but never in how to live a good life. This results in a spiritual void in which we adopt others’ social cues as this “general doctrine” and wonder why they don’t work for us. You see, Alan Watts has done society a huge service. Just in these short three to four minute bursts of oration he has opened the minds of thousands to alternative, more holistic models of morality and human behavior.
But I don’t want to be the type of person who simply takes a sip of water and is done with it, I need to down at least a glass or several; my thirst is not so shallow. I also have no time to drink the ocean (Watts has published innumerable works), I figured his autobiography would do. I believe that how one goes about living life is a far greater indicator of one’s actual beliefs than the ideas he jots on paper, so in this sense Watts' autobiography takes on a peculiar significance which his other treatises must lack.
Though it started off slowly, it was a worthwhile read. Watts was a colorful character who never took himself or life too seriously, finding the humor (both ironic and riotous) in everything, enriching the lives of those he associated with (Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, D.T. Suzuki, John Cage among others), championing a truly holistic view of mysticism and spirituality separate from the charlatanism of the occult and the rigidity of the devout. A real bon vivant.
Watts doesn’t state this in the book, but I get the sense he had a vast fear of being forgotten: he tried to disseminate himself and his ideas as much as possible into the universe before finally passing away, this cannot be denied.
I need to remove one star from this review because Watts fell into the same trap as most autobiographers, which is that they pretend they can recall all the tiniest little details about their childhoods, all the way down to how ornaments were displayed in their neighbors’ houses. Though I respect Alan Watts, I don’t believe for a second that he had such an elephantine memory; if I cannot recall now at 23 what I did at 7, there is no way Watts could recall at 50 what he did at 6, and certainly not at such descriptive length.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:
“Love of money and imagination in spending it seem to be mutually exclusive.”
“Conscious thought, reflection, analysis, cultivation, and intention are simply using the mind’s radar or scanning beam for purposes which the mind as a whole can do of itself, and on its own, with far more intelligence and less effort.”
“Only those who can accept their own annihilation can have the courage to be true individuals.”
“John slept that night on a divan in the living room, where we kept a hamster in a cage furnished with a vicious wheel, or bhavachakra, wherein the benighted creature could run forever without getting anywhere.
“In this house I have made some of my greatest friendships, so much so that I cannot think of it without that curious pleasure-pain which the Japanese call aware - the sense of echoes in the courtyards of the mind after the sun has left and the people have gone their ways forever.”
“Leo impressed upon me the important idea that the ego was neither a spiritual, psychological, or biological reality but a social institution of the same order as the monogamous family, the calendar, the clock, the metric system, and the agreement to drive on the right or left of the road.”
“Now it is curious that wherever there flourishes what may loosely be called a bohemian style of life, the affluent bourgeoisie are filled with envy and want to move in, so that the land values go up and the artists, writers, hippies, and other weird characters who gave the place its color can no longer afford to live there.”
Quoting poet James Broughton:
When I gave up trying to understand,
said the Camel’s Eye to the Needle,
then I began to get the point.
April 23, 2016
Alan Watts is what I like to call a "Mystic rascal." Unlike the majority of Mystics, he was a rather sensuous man, and was delighted in so many of the things in this life most mystics would turn down as impediments to enlightenment. However, he had it, and an ability to articulate it so eloquently and beautifully. This book was fantastic, well-written and imagery driven.
January 8, 2012
It's shocking that I couldnt find a single copy of this book for lending in the Sacramento CA library system [in Dec. 2011]. Why shocking? Because the author is so much associated with northern California, and prominent to boot.
I read and loved this book when I discovered it 25 years ago in the county library of the small western Colorado city of Grand Junction. A unique and delightful recount. Southern Baptists may not like it.
I read and loved this book when I discovered it 25 years ago in the county library of the small western Colorado city of Grand Junction. A unique and delightful recount. Southern Baptists may not like it.
May 29, 2018
Alas, kill your darlings folks. Even Mr. Watts—for all his enlightened ideas—gave me a few “yikes” moments in the margins when he seemed to be objectifying women.
To my eyes this was a portrait of the aristocratic English world—both it’s intelligence and it’s hindrance. & a portrait of how a supposed “counter-culture” can build its own prejudice, erasure, and oppression towards some people.
The legacy of The Beats™️ will always be haunted by these realities. While they touched on some important ideas of liberation, they often neglected to apply these ideas to other groups of people besides cis-het-white-men. &that’s not to knock all white men, but it is an example of how pervasive ideologies like whiteness and hyper masculinity can deep into the best laid intentions of revolution.
I recommend this book to readers with a critical eye.
To my eyes this was a portrait of the aristocratic English world—both it’s intelligence and it’s hindrance. & a portrait of how a supposed “counter-culture” can build its own prejudice, erasure, and oppression towards some people.
The legacy of The Beats™️ will always be haunted by these realities. While they touched on some important ideas of liberation, they often neglected to apply these ideas to other groups of people besides cis-het-white-men. &that’s not to knock all white men, but it is an example of how pervasive ideologies like whiteness and hyper masculinity can deep into the best laid intentions of revolution.
I recommend this book to readers with a critical eye.
May 10, 2015
As an autobiography it is acceptable. Alan had such a great effect on his times that you'd think he was deeper or more self realized. Yet he throws off all weight in an effort to be weightless. There are moment of insight and these are far between. He is a man who appears superficial because of this. Much swirling and little center.
July 4, 2016
I really love Alan Watts' philosophy and his super sexy voice, but this book was a let down. He spent less time discussing his philosophy and way too much time discussing the big "names" he met throughout his life. Got a little repetitive and boring. I wanted to hear more about his life and his thoughts but really got a long list of everyone he ever met in his life. Had to give up on it.
May 26, 2015
Alan is a hero. You should definitely read this and other books of his, such as The Book, Tao: The Watercourse Way, and The Way of Zen.
May 11, 2019
In My Own Way is a congenial reminiscence of counter-cultural currents from the 1930s through to the 1960s, written by a self-indulgent sensualist for whom spiritual exploration never seemed to require much in the way of self-sacrifice or even self-discipline – although Alan Watts's public life was certainly productive, with a stream of publications and lectures that have done much to popularise Eastern thought in the West.
The title foregrounds Watts's freethinking non-conformism: never lacking in self-assurance, Watts recounts explaining the concept of Braham to Swami Prabhavananda and telling C.G. Jung why his term "the unconscious" was "unfortunate"; and despite his association with Japanese Zen, Watts dismissed the meditative practice of Zazen as a largely unnecessary discipline, designed to keep youngsters from clerical families in line. Broad-brush pronouncements such as "Zen is basically Taoism" will make scholars shudder, and raises the issue of at what point doing it "in my own way" becomes a trivialising act of appropriation, despite Watts's criticisms of "Beat Zen".
This applies to Watts's own culture as much as to his encounters with the East: despite professing Buddhism from his teenage years in Kent, Watts managed to justify to himself getting ordained as an Episcopal priest, and here doing it "in my own way" suggests a cavalier attitude to Christian doctrine and practice that raises doubts about his claim to be "sincere but not serious". According to another review of the book I've seen, Watts's daughter was of the view that he was motivated by a desire to avoid military service during the War. If so, then we must wonder at how a life of introspection is no protection against self-delusion. Certainly, his breezy assertion that it would have been "futile" to remain in England with his American wife (Eleanor Everett, the daughter of Ruth Fuller Sasaki) in 1937 after having failed an Officer Corp theoretical test comes across as self-serving and comically lacking in self-awareness.
A bon viveur, it seems that Watts also never admitted to himself that he was an addict - both an old goat who dressed up lechery as an appreciation of women and an alcoholic, the latter condition probably being the cause of his unexpected early death a few years after the memoir was published.
In his defence, though, Watts never claimed to be a saint or an academic ("I am unashamedly in showbiz"), although his self-criticisms are hedged away to nothing: he describes himself as having been "a terrible father", but this is "by all the standards of this society". His instinctual alignment with the insights of Eastern philosophies was for their perennial value as a way of life, and his down-to-earth approach works against an exoticising Orientalism. Also, despite the esoteric and occult aspects of counter-culture thought (he notes the Theosophical context of early Buddhism in Britain), Watts also expressed scepticism about psychic claims, and regarded ideas such as reincarnation as not particularly significant.
There are many familiar names in Watts's memoir: Christmas Humphreys, D. T. Suzuki, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell (who arranged for Watts to get a Bollingen grant), John Cage (introduced to Watts through Campbell's wife Jean Erdman), Gregory Bateson and Timothy Leary are among those who are still current. However, Watts also reminds us of some lesser-celebrated figures, ranging from serious scholars like Henry Murray through to marginal eccentrics: "one of the major taboos of our culture is against realizing that vegetables are intelligent – an insight which I owe to an inspired eccentric named Thaddeus Ashby"; "in those days, Theos Bernard—the nephew of Oom the Omnipotent, Pierre—had returned from Tibet in the guise of a lama, married the singer and millionairess Ganna Walska, and set up an ashram in Santa Barbara". A chapter on "other selves" expresses his appreciation of various associates: he describes Elsa Gidlow as his "older sister" (he coyly mentions her female "companion" Isabel Grenfell Quallo), and refers to Jung's student Joseph Henderson as "Jung’s principal successor". His account of "Building a Counterculture" brings in Crist Lovejieff and the Japanese printmaker Sabro Hasegawa.
Watts's account also helps us to trace how ideas spread, via personal connections, groups such as Dimitrije Mitrinović's "New Britain Movement", bookshops and publishers. London's Watkins Books is judged to be "one of the world's most important centers of 'spiritual gossip'"; another bookseller mentioned is Harry Hill, described as associated with Fritz Künkel in San Francisco. Publishers and editors who get a mention include Eugene Exman, religious editor of Harpers, and Marguerite Block, editor of the Columbia Review of Religion. Watts’s acquaintance with Campbell came about through Kurt and Helen Wolff, after Watts choose to publish with Pantheon Books after being impressed by the firm's typography.
The title foregrounds Watts's freethinking non-conformism: never lacking in self-assurance, Watts recounts explaining the concept of Braham to Swami Prabhavananda and telling C.G. Jung why his term "the unconscious" was "unfortunate"; and despite his association with Japanese Zen, Watts dismissed the meditative practice of Zazen as a largely unnecessary discipline, designed to keep youngsters from clerical families in line. Broad-brush pronouncements such as "Zen is basically Taoism" will make scholars shudder, and raises the issue of at what point doing it "in my own way" becomes a trivialising act of appropriation, despite Watts's criticisms of "Beat Zen".
This applies to Watts's own culture as much as to his encounters with the East: despite professing Buddhism from his teenage years in Kent, Watts managed to justify to himself getting ordained as an Episcopal priest, and here doing it "in my own way" suggests a cavalier attitude to Christian doctrine and practice that raises doubts about his claim to be "sincere but not serious". According to another review of the book I've seen, Watts's daughter was of the view that he was motivated by a desire to avoid military service during the War. If so, then we must wonder at how a life of introspection is no protection against self-delusion. Certainly, his breezy assertion that it would have been "futile" to remain in England with his American wife (Eleanor Everett, the daughter of Ruth Fuller Sasaki) in 1937 after having failed an Officer Corp theoretical test comes across as self-serving and comically lacking in self-awareness.
A bon viveur, it seems that Watts also never admitted to himself that he was an addict - both an old goat who dressed up lechery as an appreciation of women and an alcoholic, the latter condition probably being the cause of his unexpected early death a few years after the memoir was published.
In his defence, though, Watts never claimed to be a saint or an academic ("I am unashamedly in showbiz"), although his self-criticisms are hedged away to nothing: he describes himself as having been "a terrible father", but this is "by all the standards of this society". His instinctual alignment with the insights of Eastern philosophies was for their perennial value as a way of life, and his down-to-earth approach works against an exoticising Orientalism. Also, despite the esoteric and occult aspects of counter-culture thought (he notes the Theosophical context of early Buddhism in Britain), Watts also expressed scepticism about psychic claims, and regarded ideas such as reincarnation as not particularly significant.
There are many familiar names in Watts's memoir: Christmas Humphreys, D. T. Suzuki, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell (who arranged for Watts to get a Bollingen grant), John Cage (introduced to Watts through Campbell's wife Jean Erdman), Gregory Bateson and Timothy Leary are among those who are still current. However, Watts also reminds us of some lesser-celebrated figures, ranging from serious scholars like Henry Murray through to marginal eccentrics: "one of the major taboos of our culture is against realizing that vegetables are intelligent – an insight which I owe to an inspired eccentric named Thaddeus Ashby"; "in those days, Theos Bernard—the nephew of Oom the Omnipotent, Pierre—had returned from Tibet in the guise of a lama, married the singer and millionairess Ganna Walska, and set up an ashram in Santa Barbara". A chapter on "other selves" expresses his appreciation of various associates: he describes Elsa Gidlow as his "older sister" (he coyly mentions her female "companion" Isabel Grenfell Quallo), and refers to Jung's student Joseph Henderson as "Jung’s principal successor". His account of "Building a Counterculture" brings in Crist Lovejieff and the Japanese printmaker Sabro Hasegawa.
Watts's account also helps us to trace how ideas spread, via personal connections, groups such as Dimitrije Mitrinović's "New Britain Movement", bookshops and publishers. London's Watkins Books is judged to be "one of the world's most important centers of 'spiritual gossip'"; another bookseller mentioned is Harry Hill, described as associated with Fritz Künkel in San Francisco. Publishers and editors who get a mention include Eugene Exman, religious editor of Harpers, and Marguerite Block, editor of the Columbia Review of Religion. Watts’s acquaintance with Campbell came about through Kurt and Helen Wolff, after Watts choose to publish with Pantheon Books after being impressed by the firm's typography.
May 10, 2012
BRILLIANT man, but a down-to-earth person you can relate to. He is (was) a foremost Western authority on Zen Buddhism, which permeates his auto-bio, and though I'm not into Zen, I found this book highly entertaining and educational. He passed away in 1973 at the young age (IMO) of 57 and I wonder how he had the prescience to write his autobiography the year before. I highly recommend this book for anyone.
May 10, 2012
I came to Watts by many routes during high school, he being one of the more popular writers in my circle, and read this partial autobiography during college. I found the portions about psychedelics and C.G. Jung and the Jungians to be most interesting. However, Watts himself seemed often too full of himself.
Want to read
September 8, 2010Liz, you are on page 192 or even further but this book looks like a must read to me. Anyone who tells others to "follow your weird," is someone I am interested in knowing better. He wrote many books during my formative adolescent years and I had all but forgotten him.
December 21, 2015
Spiritual and down to earth at the same time. A glimpse into the times, people, and places that made Alan Watts the philosopher he was. A delight to read.
March 20, 2019
If you don't listen to anything else by this extraordinary soul, read this autobiography. Freed from the constraints of his deeply perceptive intellect, Watts shares the story of how he came to be the way he was (and remains, in fond collective memory). He does this by showing, rather than telling, with delicious wit and kindly humor. And the narrator is superb!
Read
November 24, 2021Read this a loooooooong time ago, so long ago that I have little recollection of the contents other than to remember our old pal Alan lived a dang good life as a writer, teacher, and lover of wisdom. One of his best essays is "Square Zen, Beat Zen, Zen" but I would recommend many of his books even though they are pretty dated in terms of cultural references and language.
An excellent life narrative of one of the 20th century's finest wisdom teachers, a man who was instrumental in uniting the consciousness of Asia and the West.
An excellent life narrative of one of the 20th century's finest wisdom teachers, a man who was instrumental in uniting the consciousness of Asia and the West.
Read
December 9, 2020This is one of my favorite books. It’s Alan's most insightful, most entertaining, and funniest. A disbeliever in history, he terms this not the history of his life but “the mystery of his life.” This is the autobiography of a man who has seen beyond the illusion of the self, who is interested in every facet of existence, who has plumbed the depths of being, most deeply his own. Alan was the rare philosopher who actually lived his philosophy out. And I hate to sum up his philosophy so bluntly (and go against the spirit of his philosophy), but in my view it really boils down to “Is it serious?” That’s it really. Do we take existence seriously or not?
What’s so riveting about Alan is he is so absolutely explicit in his unseriousness, in his light-heartedness, in his playful attitude towards life. The poets and artists are playful and light-hearted as well, but in them it manifests implicitly. “I am sincere but not serious, and one of my most sincere convictions is that God is not serious.” Alan’s intense detachment gives him some of the most clear-thinking and beautiful and honest (and therefore hilarious) perspectives on what it is to be at all.
This is a meandering, freewheeling book, that you can open anywhere and enjoy right away. You’ll get his opinion on nearly every aspect of life, school, religion, marriage, everything. So I'll be expounding on my favorite swaths herein. I love so many of the anecdotes and stories he tells, they are so hilarious. The first half of the book is the most beautiful, and at times is very reminiscent of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” in its effects. Note here his Whitmanian stream of images of his childhood hometown:
Most striking is the last clause. Alan notes how this state of innocence and wonder is "a kind of incarnate music that was sufficient to itself." That’s exactly how each person perceives their own childhood experience. I now look back onto my own childhood and see it as a sort of perfect mirage, as a distant dream, a vision I had instead of actually me, incarnate music indeed.
Here’s one of my favorite parts, a retelling of his championship in the hilarious game "You Are the Target":
This is so sly, so playful, so delightful. We get Alan’s thoughts on the other fundamentals of life, such as crapulation, constipation, the philosophy of hats, and the irrationality of adults. Here’s a humorous and heartening thought about the foolishness of adults, and all too true
Next he begins to describe his inculcation into Christianity. After recounting the very first prayer his mother taught him, he says humorously:
Alan’s troubles with his fear of death and his fear of hell, his uncertainty of salvation, his doubts whether he had committed the “unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost”, all these are too relatable and hilarious for a fellow former card-carrying Christian. As he traverses the years of his life, his concerns with religion begin manifest fully. Finally, his sentiment begins to approach what I would consider a sort of ‘voice of a generation’, capturing the attitude of the century towards the oppression of Christian hegemony. Consider these the words not just of Alan Watts, but of modern culture in its entirety:
Here is also where his attitude against seriousness begins to show. He notes that the Church just can’t be taken seriously anymore, as much as it wants us to. This is the church’s flaw. He notes how a truly religious person would be okay poking fun at his religion, since his faith would be strong enough. He begins to delve into religion as an exploration of the mystery of being rather than a concept, religion as feeling and experience rather than a theory. Which is why his participation in the Church is so drab and lifeless:
He brings up the insane warring and quarreling over the Christian attempts to be definite and precise about the nature of God. He notes how our verbal definitions of God are subtler and more insidious idols than physical ones, since these are abstract images and more difficult to remove. Either way, any reduction of religion into a creed or image or idol removes the actual experience of divinity, and so is for naught. He explains his draw towards the mysticism of the East as opposed to the practicality of the West:
Of high interest is the self-schooling he would have arranged for himself, given the chance. I would have loved a Wattsian education:
Alan was a notorious womanizer, so his advice on women is also good. After discussing his problems with one of his first pseudo-GF’s he says:
I think back a lot to September 11, 2001 (weird segue I know). I imagine what it’d be like to be in the World Trade Center as it was collapsing. At times, it feels like modernity is a collapsing skyscraper in itself, and Alan has advice for even this:
Alan’s purview is so large because he knows the primality of experience, as opposed to of material. Only experience is real, only the interplay of chaos and order is real, only relation is real. Under this perspective, you are no longer fooled by the irrelevance of data or facts. There is only this experience. We have systems that approximate and help us navigate this experience. They’re called stories, religions, myths, art. In this view, science is grounded in metaphor, not the other way around. In this regard, he hits the nail on the head when it comes to human personality. We seek Shakespeare plays and novels, and not histories and biographies:
Alan ventures into social and political commentary but not from any ideological bent. He frighteningly prophesies that our military has past the point of usefulness, and would eventually be used against its own citizens (which it has). He notes he is apolitical and identifies with no ideology, party, state, or nation, yet he’s intensely interested in many political problems that are still pertinent to this day -- he’s an early advocate of UBI! He has no tolerance for militarism. But for Christianity, he still sees the potential for an awakening into the truth of Christ’s message:
Note Alan's self-conception of what he was doing. He sees himself without identifying with himself, as if he were not just someone else, but as if other selves weren’t real. He likens himself to a nutrient spontaneously produced by the world to fill a particular need.
To conclude. There are some people who you just can’t imagine having actually existed. Who you can’t picture having had a flesh and blood experience just like you. Who you can’t imagine having a consciousness and having a mind just like you. Much less can you imagine them achieving and accomplishing everything they did within their human lifetime, a lifetime just like yours. People like Christ, Mozart, Washington, Lincoln, Newton, Shakespeare. Whatever conscious experience was like for these folks, it was certainly not part of this universe. They transcend the plane of normal human experience. We can hardly imagine an actual flesh and blood consciousness, called Christ, who spoke all he spoke -- he seems so otherworldly. A guy who underwent all the events that we’re familiar with in third person, but in first person, the way we experience our own lives in first person. Washington -- larger than life, a mythological character like Achilles or Odysseus. Newton’s discoveries and inventions make him so alien to us, the possibility of him so inconceivable. Shakespeare is perhaps the most unimaginable human to us, other than Christ (we even have conspiracies against not just his authorship but his existence!). He is so remote and nonexistent in his own plays, and the plays are such sublime towering achievements, they seem so beyond human capacity. We deem him so close to the divine as any human ever got, -- and at the same time, embody most perfectly the human.
Sometimes it’s hard to even accept that the people you interact with day-to-day are conscious beings undergoing an experience--sometimes one feels one’s consciousness is the only human thing in the universe.
All to say: the reason I find Alan so compelling is because more than any other figure, on some levels more than one’s own family members, one gets the sense that Alan Watts truly was a human, a flesh and blood embodied consciousness just like you and me, who had an experience of reality just like you and me, who thought things through to the end of thought, who felt deeply everything life had to offer. I get this feeling most intensely when I read this, like deja vu but really going beyond that. It’s of having lived this beautiful life before -- of living this beautiful life now -- not vicariously through the book but in actuality, in Experience, in some consciousness somewhere in the universe, happening now--there I am now, in my room in the north California seaside forest, in bed sitting across from my beloved, staring into each others jewel-eyes for eternity.
What’s so riveting about Alan is he is so absolutely explicit in his unseriousness, in his light-heartedness, in his playful attitude towards life. The poets and artists are playful and light-hearted as well, but in them it manifests implicitly. “I am sincere but not serious, and one of my most sincere convictions is that God is not serious.” Alan’s intense detachment gives him some of the most clear-thinking and beautiful and honest (and therefore hilarious) perspectives on what it is to be at all.
This is a meandering, freewheeling book, that you can open anywhere and enjoy right away. You’ll get his opinion on nearly every aspect of life, school, religion, marriage, everything. So I'll be expounding on my favorite swaths herein. I love so many of the anecdotes and stories he tells, they are so hilarious. The first half of the book is the most beautiful, and at times is very reminiscent of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” in its effects. Note here his Whitmanian stream of images of his childhood hometown:
“The routine of shops on the Parade, the clop-clop of horses going by, the trees, fields, and bracken, the flowers, vegetables, and insects; and mother and father playing and singing in the drawing room with its Chinese embroideries - all this was unproblematic, a kind of incarnate music that was sufficient to itself.”
Most striking is the last clause. Alan notes how this state of innocence and wonder is "a kind of incarnate music that was sufficient to itself." That’s exactly how each person perceives their own childhood experience. I now look back onto my own childhood and see it as a sort of perfect mirage, as a distant dream, a vision I had instead of actually me, incarnate music indeed.
Here’s one of my favorite parts, a retelling of his championship in the hilarious game "You Are the Target":
“I am also the world’s champion in a game called “You Are the Target,” in which anyone better than I would be dead. The game is to shoot an arrow straight up and see how near to you it can be allowed to land. You have to watch its fall very carefully, but I have had it hit the ground exactly between my feet. Of course, there were no witnesses. Had there been, they would forcefully have discouraged the experiment. I was using a fifty-five pound bow.”
This is so sly, so playful, so delightful. We get Alan’s thoughts on the other fundamentals of life, such as crapulation, constipation, the philosophy of hats, and the irrationality of adults. Here’s a humorous and heartening thought about the foolishness of adults, and all too true
"Why don’t adults understand that the siesta, however delectable for themselves after an ample luncheon with good wine, and with the companionship of a pleasing lover, is a colossal bore to a child who gets neither wine nor lover?"
Next he begins to describe his inculcation into Christianity. After recounting the very first prayer his mother taught him, he says humorously:
“This doggerel inspired in me entirely unnecessary terrors of darkness and death, and made 'going to heaven' as depressing as the alternative, 'going to hell' was horrendous. For Christians have never had a good idea of heaven.
Be my last thought “How sweet to rest/ Forever on my Savior’s breast”
This might be fun for a nun, but for a man it is an invitation to the boredom of a homosexual paradise - which is not to say that I condemn homosexuallity, but only that I do not enjoy it.”
Alan’s troubles with his fear of death and his fear of hell, his uncertainty of salvation, his doubts whether he had committed the “unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost”, all these are too relatable and hilarious for a fellow former card-carrying Christian. As he traverses the years of his life, his concerns with religion begin manifest fully. Finally, his sentiment begins to approach what I would consider a sort of ‘voice of a generation’, capturing the attitude of the century towards the oppression of Christian hegemony. Consider these the words not just of Alan Watts, but of modern culture in its entirety:
“I simply couldn’t get along with the Christian God. He was a bombastic bore, and not at all that sort of fellow you would want to entertain for dinner, because you would be sitting on the edge of your chair listening to his subtle attempts to undermine your existence and probe the unauthentic nature of your life. He was like the school chaplain who took you aside for a VERY SERIOUS TALK. He had no gaitie d’esprit, no charm, no lilt, no laughter, and no sensual delight in the world of nature which he had supposedly created...I had to get out from under the monstrously oppressive God the Father - nothing like my own father.”
Here is also where his attitude against seriousness begins to show. He notes that the Church just can’t be taken seriously anymore, as much as it wants us to. This is the church’s flaw. He notes how a truly religious person would be okay poking fun at his religion, since his faith would be strong enough. He begins to delve into religion as an exploration of the mystery of being rather than a concept, religion as feeling and experience rather than a theory. Which is why his participation in the Church is so drab and lifeless:
“When I first received the Holy Communion, there was nothing interesting about it… no joy, no camaraderie or conviviality, no sense of being turned-on, but only an intense and solitary seriousness.”
He brings up the insane warring and quarreling over the Christian attempts to be definite and precise about the nature of God. He notes how our verbal definitions of God are subtler and more insidious idols than physical ones, since these are abstract images and more difficult to remove. Either way, any reduction of religion into a creed or image or idol removes the actual experience of divinity, and so is for naught. He explains his draw towards the mysticism of the East as opposed to the practicality of the West:
“I wanted to plumb and understand being itself, the very heart and ground of this universe, not to control it, but simply to wonder at it, for I was - and still am - amazed at my own existence...In a world of flowers, birds, butterflies, clouds, stars, music, friendly boys, and lovely girls, I did not want to waste my consciousness on such textureless, tasteless, and colorless figurations.”
Of high interest is the self-schooling he would have arranged for himself, given the chance. I would have loved a Wattsian education:
“Looking back I would have arranged for myself to be taught survival techniques for both natural and urban wildernesses. Elementary medicine, sexual hygiene, vegetable gardening, astronomy, navigation, and sailing; cookery and clothesmaking, metalwork and carpentry; drawing and painting; printing and typography; botany and biology; optics and acoustics; semantics and psychology; mysticism and yoga; electronics and mathematical fantasy; drama and dancing; singing and playing an instrument by ear; in wandering, in advanced daydreaming, in prestidigitation, in techniques of escape from bondage, in disguise, in conversation with birds and beasts, in ventriloquism, in French and German conversation, in planetary history, in morphology, and in classical Chinese. Actually the main thing left out of my education was a proper love for my own body, because one feared to cherish anything so obviously mortal and prone to sickness.”
Alan was a notorious womanizer, so his advice on women is also good. After discussing his problems with one of his first pseudo-GF’s he says:
“She thus taught me that it is not so much the girl herself as what goes with her.”
I think back a lot to September 11, 2001 (weird segue I know). I imagine what it’d be like to be in the World Trade Center as it was collapsing. At times, it feels like modernity is a collapsing skyscraper in itself, and Alan has advice for even this:
“When you are standing on top of a collapsing skyscraper there is nothing for it but to take wings, if you can find them.”
Alan’s purview is so large because he knows the primality of experience, as opposed to of material. Only experience is real, only the interplay of chaos and order is real, only relation is real. Under this perspective, you are no longer fooled by the irrelevance of data or facts. There is only this experience. We have systems that approximate and help us navigate this experience. They’re called stories, religions, myths, art. In this view, science is grounded in metaphor, not the other way around. In this regard, he hits the nail on the head when it comes to human personality. We seek Shakespeare plays and novels, and not histories and biographies:
“All interesting descriptions of human character are poetic, imaginative, dramatic, and fantastic, whereas all attempts at valid description are myopic, interminable, and dull.”
Alan ventures into social and political commentary but not from any ideological bent. He frighteningly prophesies that our military has past the point of usefulness, and would eventually be used against its own citizens (which it has). He notes he is apolitical and identifies with no ideology, party, state, or nation, yet he’s intensely interested in many political problems that are still pertinent to this day -- he’s an early advocate of UBI! He has no tolerance for militarism. But for Christianity, he still sees the potential for an awakening into the truth of Christ’s message:
“To me, all idealism, all setting-apart-as-an-example, is simply postponement; it is pushing the reality which is Christ to the elsewhere and the tomorrow. If he is risen; if he is the Truth and the Life, he must be immediately here and now. To set him up in any special way is then to 'gild the lily' and so destroy it.”
Note Alan's self-conception of what he was doing. He sees himself without identifying with himself, as if he were not just someone else, but as if other selves weren’t real. He likens himself to a nutrient spontaneously produced by the world to fill a particular need.
"I regard my philosophizing simply as an attempt to describe what is happening in the world, and this describing, in turn, as an action of the world… I regard my work as the spontaneous arisal of a vitamin or nutrient which the world happens to need at this time, and which it is producing through me and many others."
To conclude. There are some people who you just can’t imagine having actually existed. Who you can’t picture having had a flesh and blood experience just like you. Who you can’t imagine having a consciousness and having a mind just like you. Much less can you imagine them achieving and accomplishing everything they did within their human lifetime, a lifetime just like yours. People like Christ, Mozart, Washington, Lincoln, Newton, Shakespeare. Whatever conscious experience was like for these folks, it was certainly not part of this universe. They transcend the plane of normal human experience. We can hardly imagine an actual flesh and blood consciousness, called Christ, who spoke all he spoke -- he seems so otherworldly. A guy who underwent all the events that we’re familiar with in third person, but in first person, the way we experience our own lives in first person. Washington -- larger than life, a mythological character like Achilles or Odysseus. Newton’s discoveries and inventions make him so alien to us, the possibility of him so inconceivable. Shakespeare is perhaps the most unimaginable human to us, other than Christ (we even have conspiracies against not just his authorship but his existence!). He is so remote and nonexistent in his own plays, and the plays are such sublime towering achievements, they seem so beyond human capacity. We deem him so close to the divine as any human ever got, -- and at the same time, embody most perfectly the human.
Sometimes it’s hard to even accept that the people you interact with day-to-day are conscious beings undergoing an experience--sometimes one feels one’s consciousness is the only human thing in the universe.
All to say: the reason I find Alan so compelling is because more than any other figure, on some levels more than one’s own family members, one gets the sense that Alan Watts truly was a human, a flesh and blood embodied consciousness just like you and me, who had an experience of reality just like you and me, who thought things through to the end of thought, who felt deeply everything life had to offer. I get this feeling most intensely when I read this, like deja vu but really going beyond that. It’s of having lived this beautiful life before -- of living this beautiful life now -- not vicariously through the book but in actuality, in Experience, in some consciousness somewhere in the universe, happening now--there I am now, in my room in the north California seaside forest, in bed sitting across from my beloved, staring into each others jewel-eyes for eternity.
Basically my own laughter at myself has something to do with the incongruity of such a clown being God in disguise, of the “big act” called Alan Watts being a manifestation of the infinite energy of the universe. For behind the scenes you see all the strings, tacks, wire, and masking tape that prop up the show, and as I witness the universe getting away with me I wonder what other uproarious deceptions it will perpetrate. I say this mainly so that you -dear reader- possibly ashamed of your own string and wire, may have the courage to go on with your show.
June 6, 2019
Do you think God takes Himself seriously? Two of the most important practices we must learn are how to laugh and how to breath. Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter. Buddhism is less a religion and more of a way to clarify one’s state of consciousness. Religion is more about feeling and experience than conceptions and theories. All opposites mutually define one another.
The most basic form of the material world is composed of light. Linear talk about talk is like an intellectual game of chess, which through symbolism of language, has little to nothing to do with the realities of nature. Notions of God must necessarily be vague, in the same sense our personal identity is ultimately vague. Love for earning money appears to be mutually exclusive to imaginative spending of money, because the real reward is not the results but rather the acts.
Through the Raja-Yoga text, breath-control demonstrates how there’s no distinction between inner and outer worlds. What we do and what happens to us is no different from each other. Thus, life is central to action, to doing.
One real secret: when writing by candlelight, when one gets stuck, simply push a piece of wax back into the flame, then new ideas will come. The secret is in the sequential placement of one’s attention and effortless focus. Through the struggle of trying to identify who we are, we can let go of our hang ups through the realization that all of life is an ongoing process. There’s ultimately nothing to hold on to. To become one with God is how determinism becomes freedom. The ways to authentic spiritual one conception are as many as the lives of humankind.
The ego is a construct of social conditioning. The difference between the gross and subtle bodies of oneself can be understood as the former being how others see you, and the latter, how you see yourself. Zen is spontaneous living, without calculating or abiding by rigid paradigms. Staying in the present moment is how we learn to feel as one process with the whole energy of the universe. The present is simply a constant flow. You can tell a true yogi by his laugh. The trick is to dig the non-sense.
The nervous system works much like technology. In all precepts and concepts, there works a binary system of intricate complexity. We see this one harmony when trying to bridge the spiritual world from the earthly. Do we feel the ego? Are we conscious purposefully?
Asking for meaning is like asking simply for another set of signs. What is meaning, and what has meaning, is an essential distinction for every philosopher. All religions approach the same point in a different way. An authentic religious and sexual experience cannot be put into words, but rather only experienced. There’s always as much above as there is below. Depending on where we look from, every failure is a success, and vise versa. We must look at human affairs in the same way we look at nature: naturally spontaneous.
The field of reality is represented by the tree of life. Words, concepts and meanings encircle the tree of life, but they are not the reality of the beings within that is the tree. Faith is the gamble and means of accepting some type of order to the flow of the universally unified field of energy. This faith is a love that has no other object than to share the joy of itself with others. Reality cannot be contained in words because we cannot classify that which is relative and relevant to all existing classes. This is what makes space and silence such essential constructed aspects of our true reality.
Language is illogical, thus we use the logic of symbols, illogically. Religious doctrines should specify which type of speech they’re using. Growth can never be forced. Emotional honesty is essential. We must never cling to one another. Beliefs could be the antithesis of faith. Self-improvement is a form of vanity. There’s often a lack of correspondence between what we feel and what we think we feel.
Responsiveness to inner feelings is an art, untaught in schools. It’s possible the intelligence of the entire nervous system is greater than the intelligence of the conscious mind. We must avoid thinking of history and past events as one-way, linear matters and models. Christianity’s worship of form, and Jesus’s words written in permanent form, are what spoil its theology. These forms do not want to be clung to. To cling to security is to cling to oneself. This is why whoever abandons oneself finds God. It isn’t emptiness, but rather awareness, that enables us to let go. We only find what we want by not trying to possess it. Holding up moral ideals often only increases fear. Love as stated by the church is more political/social than spiritual. Trying not to be oneself, and rather a version of oneself in an idealized form is simply the original selfishness in a different form. Where there’s no understanding, the vicious circle goes on. All effort to set things apart is further avoidance of an issue to be confronted.
Personality is fluid. It’s wore like clothing, to fit the relative circumstances. Upon close examination of oneself, we find that the ever-shifting scope of our awareness, internal and external, is the closest we can come to grasping some form of our own personality. It’s better to be sincere than serious. There’s much verbal similarity between cosmic and comic. Faith is nonsense and nonsense is faith. There’s a distinction between those who believe in salvation by faith alone, and those who believe in salvation through work and faith. The difference is often sexual intercourse. Who or what do you think you really are? I know what time is, but when you ask me about it, I can’t explain it.
Finding a practical way to spiritual liberation has more to do with a shift in common sense thinking, then an effort to overcome the ego; it’s like convincing one that the world is round rather than flat. The ego is a conceptual hallucination. The concept of self is beyond all conceptualization. Our challenge is penetrating the illusion. Meditation is effective insofar as it shows that the ego and its willing are unreal. There’s no external world because there’s nobody listening to you listen.
That which is not contrived demonstrates the fundamental energy undulations of the universe. Does it make sense to try to sever pleasure and leisure from one’s working professional life? The way of Zen is understanding the fundamental flow of life, by getting rid of fruitless quests and questions. When we stop trying to understand we then get the point. Being spontaneously natural is the simplest thing that needs prolonged practice.
“Nature, Man and Woman” was Watts’ best book from a literary perspective. Gentile academia is mock modesty, studied objectivity, cautious opinion, and a horror of enthusiasm. On reincarnation: reincarnation is found in the cycles of nature, only moves more slowly than our attention and comprehension can grasp.
We confuse symbols with reality in that life is not a linear and mechanical process, but rather organic. Intuition needs to be developed over intelligence at this point in modern society. Events don’t occur in isolation like letters and words. Instead, all aspects of life go with each other. This is why our socialization and social organizations are becoming increasingly less organic in nature. By trying to pin down natural events with numbers and words, reality becomes replaced with illusion. This is why we struggle with maintaining and managing social order and the natural environment. This also hinges on the faith that nature makes no mistakes. Every perception is an awareness of contrasts. A linear code can never accurately represent a multi-dimensional universe. All there is is this, energy, which is God, by no name. Regression is an important part of the maturation process.
Life is an unconscious process with conscious aspects. A double-bind is when two statements are in mutual contradiction, such as “I am lying,” which is false if true, and true if false.
The most basic form of the material world is composed of light. Linear talk about talk is like an intellectual game of chess, which through symbolism of language, has little to nothing to do with the realities of nature. Notions of God must necessarily be vague, in the same sense our personal identity is ultimately vague. Love for earning money appears to be mutually exclusive to imaginative spending of money, because the real reward is not the results but rather the acts.
Through the Raja-Yoga text, breath-control demonstrates how there’s no distinction between inner and outer worlds. What we do and what happens to us is no different from each other. Thus, life is central to action, to doing.
One real secret: when writing by candlelight, when one gets stuck, simply push a piece of wax back into the flame, then new ideas will come. The secret is in the sequential placement of one’s attention and effortless focus. Through the struggle of trying to identify who we are, we can let go of our hang ups through the realization that all of life is an ongoing process. There’s ultimately nothing to hold on to. To become one with God is how determinism becomes freedom. The ways to authentic spiritual one conception are as many as the lives of humankind.
The ego is a construct of social conditioning. The difference between the gross and subtle bodies of oneself can be understood as the former being how others see you, and the latter, how you see yourself. Zen is spontaneous living, without calculating or abiding by rigid paradigms. Staying in the present moment is how we learn to feel as one process with the whole energy of the universe. The present is simply a constant flow. You can tell a true yogi by his laugh. The trick is to dig the non-sense.
The nervous system works much like technology. In all precepts and concepts, there works a binary system of intricate complexity. We see this one harmony when trying to bridge the spiritual world from the earthly. Do we feel the ego? Are we conscious purposefully?
Asking for meaning is like asking simply for another set of signs. What is meaning, and what has meaning, is an essential distinction for every philosopher. All religions approach the same point in a different way. An authentic religious and sexual experience cannot be put into words, but rather only experienced. There’s always as much above as there is below. Depending on where we look from, every failure is a success, and vise versa. We must look at human affairs in the same way we look at nature: naturally spontaneous.
The field of reality is represented by the tree of life. Words, concepts and meanings encircle the tree of life, but they are not the reality of the beings within that is the tree. Faith is the gamble and means of accepting some type of order to the flow of the universally unified field of energy. This faith is a love that has no other object than to share the joy of itself with others. Reality cannot be contained in words because we cannot classify that which is relative and relevant to all existing classes. This is what makes space and silence such essential constructed aspects of our true reality.
Language is illogical, thus we use the logic of symbols, illogically. Religious doctrines should specify which type of speech they’re using. Growth can never be forced. Emotional honesty is essential. We must never cling to one another. Beliefs could be the antithesis of faith. Self-improvement is a form of vanity. There’s often a lack of correspondence between what we feel and what we think we feel.
Responsiveness to inner feelings is an art, untaught in schools. It’s possible the intelligence of the entire nervous system is greater than the intelligence of the conscious mind. We must avoid thinking of history and past events as one-way, linear matters and models. Christianity’s worship of form, and Jesus’s words written in permanent form, are what spoil its theology. These forms do not want to be clung to. To cling to security is to cling to oneself. This is why whoever abandons oneself finds God. It isn’t emptiness, but rather awareness, that enables us to let go. We only find what we want by not trying to possess it. Holding up moral ideals often only increases fear. Love as stated by the church is more political/social than spiritual. Trying not to be oneself, and rather a version of oneself in an idealized form is simply the original selfishness in a different form. Where there’s no understanding, the vicious circle goes on. All effort to set things apart is further avoidance of an issue to be confronted.
Personality is fluid. It’s wore like clothing, to fit the relative circumstances. Upon close examination of oneself, we find that the ever-shifting scope of our awareness, internal and external, is the closest we can come to grasping some form of our own personality. It’s better to be sincere than serious. There’s much verbal similarity between cosmic and comic. Faith is nonsense and nonsense is faith. There’s a distinction between those who believe in salvation by faith alone, and those who believe in salvation through work and faith. The difference is often sexual intercourse. Who or what do you think you really are? I know what time is, but when you ask me about it, I can’t explain it.
Finding a practical way to spiritual liberation has more to do with a shift in common sense thinking, then an effort to overcome the ego; it’s like convincing one that the world is round rather than flat. The ego is a conceptual hallucination. The concept of self is beyond all conceptualization. Our challenge is penetrating the illusion. Meditation is effective insofar as it shows that the ego and its willing are unreal. There’s no external world because there’s nobody listening to you listen.
That which is not contrived demonstrates the fundamental energy undulations of the universe. Does it make sense to try to sever pleasure and leisure from one’s working professional life? The way of Zen is understanding the fundamental flow of life, by getting rid of fruitless quests and questions. When we stop trying to understand we then get the point. Being spontaneously natural is the simplest thing that needs prolonged practice.
“Nature, Man and Woman” was Watts’ best book from a literary perspective. Gentile academia is mock modesty, studied objectivity, cautious opinion, and a horror of enthusiasm. On reincarnation: reincarnation is found in the cycles of nature, only moves more slowly than our attention and comprehension can grasp.
We confuse symbols with reality in that life is not a linear and mechanical process, but rather organic. Intuition needs to be developed over intelligence at this point in modern society. Events don’t occur in isolation like letters and words. Instead, all aspects of life go with each other. This is why our socialization and social organizations are becoming increasingly less organic in nature. By trying to pin down natural events with numbers and words, reality becomes replaced with illusion. This is why we struggle with maintaining and managing social order and the natural environment. This also hinges on the faith that nature makes no mistakes. Every perception is an awareness of contrasts. A linear code can never accurately represent a multi-dimensional universe. All there is is this, energy, which is God, by no name. Regression is an important part of the maturation process.
Life is an unconscious process with conscious aspects. A double-bind is when two statements are in mutual contradiction, such as “I am lying,” which is false if true, and true if false.
July 31, 2025
THE "SPIRITUAL ENTERTAINER" TELLS (SPINS?) HIS OWN STORY
Alan Wilson Watts (1915-1973) was a British-born philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as a popularizer of Eastern philosophy. He and his then-wife left England for America in 1938 on the eve of WWII, and he became an Episcopal priest---but he left the priesthood in 1950 and moved to California, where he became a cult figure in the Beat movement of the 1950s and later.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1972 book, "I thought I had no business writing an autobiography, because I have been a sedentary and contemplative character... and also somewhat of a disreputable epicurean who has had three wives, seven children, and five grandchildren---and I cannot make up my mind whether I am confessing or boasting... It seemed to me, therefore, that I had no STORY to tell... But two women [his wife, and an editor] absolutely insisted that I write this tale..." (Pg. x)
He argues, "To take sides in a modern, technological war is to take sides in a lunatic asylum... Call me a physical coward, a sissy, a nervous Nellie, a traitor, a deserter, a chicken, a worm, a slug, a salamander, or anything you like, but I have always used my ingenuity to stay out of these ridiculous uproars. I would rather exercise my manhood in bed with the ladies..." (Pg. 23)
He admits, "I am an unrepentant sensualist. I am an immoderate lover of women and the delights of sexuality, of the greatest French, Chinese, and Japanese cuisine, of wines and spiritous drinks, of smoking cigars and pipes, of gardens, forests, and oceans, of jewels and paintings, of colorful clothes, and of finely bound and printed books." (Pg. 54-55)
He states, "I do not consider it intellectually respectable to be a partisan in matters of religion... Thus I am not formally a committed member of any creed or sect and hold no particular religious view or doctrine as absolute. I deplore missionary zeal... Yet my work and my life are fully concerned with religion, and the mystery of being is my supreme fascination, though, as a shameless mystic, I am more interested in religion as feeling and experience than as conception and theory." (Pg. 72)
He concludes, "If I would become more Christlike, I should remember that the Crusades and the Holy Inquisition were conducted in his name. If I would practice asceticism, I should bear it in mind that Hitler was quite an ascetic... If I would observe sobriety, I should recall that Bertrand Russell put down a fifth of whiskey daily, and if I would find it in myself to be chaste, I should ... twit myself that I once had the privilege of sharing a mistress with one of the holiest men in the land." (Pg. 423)
For anyone interested in Watts' spoken words and writings, this (somewhat elusive) book will be of great interest.
Alan Wilson Watts (1915-1973) was a British-born philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as a popularizer of Eastern philosophy. He and his then-wife left England for America in 1938 on the eve of WWII, and he became an Episcopal priest---but he left the priesthood in 1950 and moved to California, where he became a cult figure in the Beat movement of the 1950s and later.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1972 book, "I thought I had no business writing an autobiography, because I have been a sedentary and contemplative character... and also somewhat of a disreputable epicurean who has had three wives, seven children, and five grandchildren---and I cannot make up my mind whether I am confessing or boasting... It seemed to me, therefore, that I had no STORY to tell... But two women [his wife, and an editor] absolutely insisted that I write this tale..." (Pg. x)
He argues, "To take sides in a modern, technological war is to take sides in a lunatic asylum... Call me a physical coward, a sissy, a nervous Nellie, a traitor, a deserter, a chicken, a worm, a slug, a salamander, or anything you like, but I have always used my ingenuity to stay out of these ridiculous uproars. I would rather exercise my manhood in bed with the ladies..." (Pg. 23)
He admits, "I am an unrepentant sensualist. I am an immoderate lover of women and the delights of sexuality, of the greatest French, Chinese, and Japanese cuisine, of wines and spiritous drinks, of smoking cigars and pipes, of gardens, forests, and oceans, of jewels and paintings, of colorful clothes, and of finely bound and printed books." (Pg. 54-55)
He states, "I do not consider it intellectually respectable to be a partisan in matters of religion... Thus I am not formally a committed member of any creed or sect and hold no particular religious view or doctrine as absolute. I deplore missionary zeal... Yet my work and my life are fully concerned with religion, and the mystery of being is my supreme fascination, though, as a shameless mystic, I am more interested in religion as feeling and experience than as conception and theory." (Pg. 72)
He concludes, "If I would become more Christlike, I should remember that the Crusades and the Holy Inquisition were conducted in his name. If I would practice asceticism, I should bear it in mind that Hitler was quite an ascetic... If I would observe sobriety, I should recall that Bertrand Russell put down a fifth of whiskey daily, and if I would find it in myself to be chaste, I should ... twit myself that I once had the privilege of sharing a mistress with one of the holiest men in the land." (Pg. 423)
For anyone interested in Watts' spoken words and writings, this (somewhat elusive) book will be of great interest.
July 6, 2012
I really enjoyed this book. Alan Watts paints quite the colorful portrait of his life. The reading flows very nicely and it is absolutely amazing he retains so much of what he has experienced, especially the people in his life that had significance to him. It was a bit like reading a great fiction where you fall in love with all the different characters and their depths, except that these were real people. I found myself often in envy of what seemed like a life so much more exciting and exceptional in comparison to my own, but glad in my heart to know that at least some one lived it, this life that was so amazing and insightful.
A great book, about a great man, written by himself. It's good to know such a life was lived and that not only was it lived, but it touched the lives of many others in such a profound way.
I would suggest, that anyone considering reading this book, should first read at least 2 or 3 of his other books. It only seems fair to get to know where the author is coming from and decide if his life from his point of view, is something worthy of your interest. I myself have only read 1 of his other books and was just fascinated by the man before that, even.
A great book, about a great man, written by himself. It's good to know such a life was lived and that not only was it lived, but it touched the lives of many others in such a profound way.
I would suggest, that anyone considering reading this book, should first read at least 2 or 3 of his other books. It only seems fair to get to know where the author is coming from and decide if his life from his point of view, is something worthy of your interest. I myself have only read 1 of his other books and was just fascinated by the man before that, even.
April 4, 2020
2019.04.23–2019.04.26
Contents
Watts A (1972) (13:39) In My Own Way - An Autobiography
Foreword by Laurence W. Watts
Preface
Prologue
01. The Stoned Wood
02. Tantum Religio
03. I Go to the Buddha for Refuge
04. On Being Half-Miseducated
05. My Own University
06. Dawn in the Western Sky
07. The Sunwise Turn
08. Paradox Priest
09. Interlude
10. Journey to the Edge of the World
11. Beginning a Counterculture
12. Other Selves
13. Breakthrough
14. The Soul-Searchers
15. The Sound of Rain
Index
About the Author
Contents
Watts A (1972) (13:39) In My Own Way - An Autobiography
Foreword by Laurence W. Watts
Preface
Prologue
01. The Stoned Wood
02. Tantum Religio
03. I Go to the Buddha for Refuge
04. On Being Half-Miseducated
05. My Own University
06. Dawn in the Western Sky
07. The Sunwise Turn
08. Paradox Priest
09. Interlude
10. Journey to the Edge of the World
11. Beginning a Counterculture
12. Other Selves
13. Breakthrough
14. The Soul-Searchers
15. The Sound of Rain
Index
About the Author
July 18, 2019
I think every Watt's admirer should read this book after awhile. Watts clearly distills his primary philosophical and spiritual ideas in a concise and clear way throughout this autobiography. In addition, his true self and soul comes through in this: spiritual, clear-headed with an amazing intuitive sense for getting to the heart of the matter quickly; ego-maniacal, a bit of a scoundrel and philanderer, charming, and full of sensuality. To me, it perfectly instills his philosophy of combining the soul and body, and being oneself--accepting ones flaws, but not taking oneself too seriously.
April 16, 2009
O.K. He wasn't the intellectual heavyweight that some would portay him as, but he appears to have been a true 'seeker' and one of the earlier voices raised for the then-esoteric subject of Zen. His biography is comforting in respect to the message that if you follow your muse, you can't go wrong. A good book to pick up when you begin to doubt yourself.
March 22, 2017
In My Own Way was, to me, a long book. But, given the life that Alan Watts led, perhaps it is too short. It is fortunate that he left us many other books.
Such an interesting life. Such interesting insights into his life of the self. The nuggets of pure wisdom hit me in the deepest parts of my mind like a cool, gentle breeze on a summer’s day.
Such an interesting life. Such interesting insights into his life of the self. The nuggets of pure wisdom hit me in the deepest parts of my mind like a cool, gentle breeze on a summer’s day.
October 7, 2016
An interesting biography of a fascinating man. His writings have been important to me over the years, mainly in the exercise of shattering the illusions by which I lived. It's a bit self indulgent in parts but worth the read if his work has any interest.
August 18, 2008
Reading the fascinating autobiography of my favorite author/lecturer. Using this book to help write/produce a documentary on Alan Watts with AW's son, Mark
Want to read
November 6, 2009I really dig Alan Watts as a philosopher, perhaps his life might inspire a few revelation of my own.
May 17, 2014
A fascinating character. Looking forward to reading more of his books...
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