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The Two Hands of God
THE TWO HANDS OF GOD IS A FASCINATING EXPLORATION AND EXPOSITION OF THE MYTHS OF POLARITY, THOSE CRUCIAL SYMBOLIC RELATIONSHIPS SUCH AS LIGHT AND DARKNESS, GOOD AND EVIL, WHICH ILLUSTRATE THE INNER UNITY OF OPPOSITES. IT IS A RICH SOURCE OF THE THEMES THAT HAVE MADE ALAN W. WATTS ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR OF CONTEMPORARY PHILOSPHERS. THOSE THEMES, CENTERING ON THE IDEA THAT EXPLICIT OPPOSITION CONCEALS IMPLICIT UNITY, ARE SUPERBLY ILLUSTRATED HERE BY A TREASURY OF STORIES AND MYTHS FROM CHINESE, INDIAN, EGYPTIAN, IRANIAN, AND EARLY CHRISTIAN SOURCES, AND BY TWENTY-THREE PHOTOGRAPHIC PLATES TO WHICH DETAILED EXPLICATIONS ARE SUPPLIED.
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First published January 1, 1963
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About the author
Alan W. Watts
255 books8,009 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 - 22 of 22 reviews
March 8, 2014
Alan Watts has put together a great book on how what seems like explicit dualism, is really implicit polarity/unity. He explores a range of historical and mythological information to find out how we have come to this modern Protestant idea of separating good and evil so exclusively. He shows through examples in myths and religious evolution, how the idea that bad can ever fall away with only good remaining is a very recent construct. In progression through the chapters, he begins with Chinese Taoist ideals, where good and bad are simply the ebb and flow of Life, to Indian religions where good and bad get different faces, but they are both the face of God/Life. He then moves through the Middle East, exploring Zorastorianism, Jainism, and others, where good and bad actually became separate entities, but with a more unification underlying. After that, he explains how the Abrahamic faiths have totally schism-ed the two forces. Leaving the idea, now running rampant, that somehow the foreground could exist without the background, namely that pleasure could exist without suffering. The last chapter, "Dismemberment Remembered" strikes more on finding a way to integrate these back together. Excellent read filled with lots of history and writings.
January 15, 2024
Very dense, very informative. For the first time I realize the unfortunate linear uniqueness of Christianity. Non Judeo religions, it seems, have a CYCLE of life-death-rebirth. Whole new way to look at life! NOT just Heaven and Hell as the ultimate end. Scary scenes of the latter and beautiful accounts of the former, though. Lots of Hindu, Dante. All religions are not created equal. Game changer.
December 17, 2025
By the midway point, Watts starts relying a LOT on massive quotes from his bibliography with little of his own thought in-between, which made it progressively more difficult to stay invested.
However the first half is filled with lovely prose and insight and I’m reminded why I return to Watts’ works.
However the first half is filled with lovely prose and insight and I’m reminded why I return to Watts’ works.
September 16, 2021
I don't know why I'm reading so much Alan Watts currently. I think I just really like his way of interconnective thinking, with a spirit of poetry and play and the beauty of polarity.
This book is about the fundamental dance of polarity - diversity - in all Creation, and our diverse human interpretations of it through myths and morals, mostly religious.
This book is about the fundamental unity that gives rise to polarity and all that follows, and how it is seen by different spiritual traditions on a spectrum of increasing levels of abstraction, curiously stretching from East to West.
This book is also about our fundamental fear of misery and death and how it is a fundamental illusion (part of the cosmic game) when recognized as the life-death polarity that it is and thus transcended in Oneness.
Fundamental Oneness playing the game of hide and seek, forgetting and remembering, both calm in its fundamental knowing of the game and agitated in its forgetful immersion.
The giggle and the calm.
The Dancer and the Ground.
World and God.
All One. But also two. And two makes three makes everything. A lot of drama. And in the end it is nothing. Back to the start, back to One.
1 = 2 = 0 = 1
Relativity.
One Being which unfolds itself as us, and into which we unfold ourselves again as we remember our true nature as It. On both levels, in both ways, it is an expansion.
That's what it's all about: Expansion of Being, both inside and outside, back and forth.
The Power of Myth is to point us towards an experiential understanding of this polarity within Unity.
It is about the "rememberment" of the original "dismemberment", of the two out of one. The beauty of it is that we have created so many different myths, so many different interpretations and meanings, different ways of understanding, different pointers. Some are more helpful, some less. Some are very confusing. But followed through to the very end of the pointing, the point is always the same: One.
So many different ways, all the same - isn't it beautiful? Isn't that the Point?
PS: I'm starting to see that Alan Watts really liked this theme of first looking at the whole picture of polarity and chaos from all angles and then uniting them all into One - a One that both transcends and pervades the whole pattern. And, finally, the image he likes to choose for this union of opposites, and an image that I also very much like in this context, is Sex. Taboo (in our society), yet omnipresent. This is the conclusion of it all, and he likes to explain it like this: "There is a state of consciousness in which the erotic no longer has to be sought or pursued, because it is always present in its totality. In this state all relationship and all experience is erotic, for the lover and the beloved, the male and the female, the self and the other, have become one body."
We all want it. Sex sells, even spiritually.
This book is about the fundamental dance of polarity - diversity - in all Creation, and our diverse human interpretations of it through myths and morals, mostly religious.
This book is about the fundamental unity that gives rise to polarity and all that follows, and how it is seen by different spiritual traditions on a spectrum of increasing levels of abstraction, curiously stretching from East to West.
This book is also about our fundamental fear of misery and death and how it is a fundamental illusion (part of the cosmic game) when recognized as the life-death polarity that it is and thus transcended in Oneness.
Fundamental Oneness playing the game of hide and seek, forgetting and remembering, both calm in its fundamental knowing of the game and agitated in its forgetful immersion.
The giggle and the calm.
The Dancer and the Ground.
World and God.
All One. But also two. And two makes three makes everything. A lot of drama. And in the end it is nothing. Back to the start, back to One.
1 = 2 = 0 = 1
Relativity.
One Being which unfolds itself as us, and into which we unfold ourselves again as we remember our true nature as It. On both levels, in both ways, it is an expansion.
That's what it's all about: Expansion of Being, both inside and outside, back and forth.
The Power of Myth is to point us towards an experiential understanding of this polarity within Unity.
It is about the "rememberment" of the original "dismemberment", of the two out of one. The beauty of it is that we have created so many different myths, so many different interpretations and meanings, different ways of understanding, different pointers. Some are more helpful, some less. Some are very confusing. But followed through to the very end of the pointing, the point is always the same: One.
So many different ways, all the same - isn't it beautiful? Isn't that the Point?
PS: I'm starting to see that Alan Watts really liked this theme of first looking at the whole picture of polarity and chaos from all angles and then uniting them all into One - a One that both transcends and pervades the whole pattern. And, finally, the image he likes to choose for this union of opposites, and an image that I also very much like in this context, is Sex. Taboo (in our society), yet omnipresent. This is the conclusion of it all, and he likes to explain it like this: "There is a state of consciousness in which the erotic no longer has to be sought or pursued, because it is always present in its totality. In this state all relationship and all experience is erotic, for the lover and the beloved, the male and the female, the self and the other, have become one body."
We all want it. Sex sells, even spiritually.
Read
September 13, 2020Alan's introduction is really where the meat of the book is. I appreciated the in-depth coverage of the various myths in the middle chapters, but Alan could have done better than quoting giant chunks and then saying only a few sentences about them. So it gets a bit tedious at times, reading through the uninteresting parts of the myths. His analysis of Christianity, however, is spot on, and I especially like how he looks for where "the veil is lifted" in Christianity. I also like his exploration of the representation of evil, something we all can learn from: "Inasmuch as man is unconscious of the Devil in his own image, he is the more apt to vent upon his fellows his fear of and fury at this disowned aspect of himself. This is why the acceptance of the Devil in and as oneself is a moral obligation."
These days I wish Alan could have met two of my other intellectual heroes: Harold Bloom and Jordan Peterson. Jordan for the obvious reasons: (1) they both accept the reality of the mythological worldview, that this view is indeed the more fundamental one than the 'scientific' one we believe to be solely true, and (2) Jordan is now undoing the 'damage' that Alan unleashed through his philosophy. In other words, Jordan's message is a reaction to the chaos and letting-go-ness unleashed by Alan and the counterculture in the 50s and 60s - it's the pendulum swinging the other way.
Now a meeting between Alan and Harold would have been equally as interesting. Alan was privy to Harold's most provocative claim that Shakespeare invented human personality as we know it. Check this out: "The formation of the image of the Christian devil as purely malicious and so sinister and so opposed to the universal design is perhaps a by-product of the growth of the peculiarly Western view of personality and its values, that is, of personality as grounded and centered upon consciousness and will, of man’s essence as the individual and immortal soul." This connects perfectly to Bloom's argument - in this example, Watts and Bloom suggest Shakespeare invented the devilish aspect of humanity through nihilists like Iago, Edmund, and Hamlet.
There's the usual that you'd expect from Watts, pointing to the unity of what we think to be independent facets of the world: "things are joined together by the boundaries we ordinarily take to separate them." I would say that this approach of exploring this unity throughout our mythologies is an interesting one.
One thing I would be interested in is a further discussion on the split between factual language and mythopoetic language, and how they could be reconciled in today's world. Alan's discussion on this is very intriguing and I'd like more. Overall, however, the parts I consider essential are the intro, the first chapter, the fourth chapter, and the fifth.
These days I wish Alan could have met two of my other intellectual heroes: Harold Bloom and Jordan Peterson. Jordan for the obvious reasons: (1) they both accept the reality of the mythological worldview, that this view is indeed the more fundamental one than the 'scientific' one we believe to be solely true, and (2) Jordan is now undoing the 'damage' that Alan unleashed through his philosophy. In other words, Jordan's message is a reaction to the chaos and letting-go-ness unleashed by Alan and the counterculture in the 50s and 60s - it's the pendulum swinging the other way.
Now a meeting between Alan and Harold would have been equally as interesting. Alan was privy to Harold's most provocative claim that Shakespeare invented human personality as we know it. Check this out: "The formation of the image of the Christian devil as purely malicious and so sinister and so opposed to the universal design is perhaps a by-product of the growth of the peculiarly Western view of personality and its values, that is, of personality as grounded and centered upon consciousness and will, of man’s essence as the individual and immortal soul." This connects perfectly to Bloom's argument - in this example, Watts and Bloom suggest Shakespeare invented the devilish aspect of humanity through nihilists like Iago, Edmund, and Hamlet.
There's the usual that you'd expect from Watts, pointing to the unity of what we think to be independent facets of the world: "things are joined together by the boundaries we ordinarily take to separate them." I would say that this approach of exploring this unity throughout our mythologies is an interesting one.
One thing I would be interested in is a further discussion on the split between factual language and mythopoetic language, and how they could be reconciled in today's world. Alan's discussion on this is very intriguing and I'd like more. Overall, however, the parts I consider essential are the intro, the first chapter, the fourth chapter, and the fifth.
May 4, 2011
Great message about the interconnectedness of all things, especially seeming opposites. However, the book would have been much more affective without the very heavy handed use of theological and mythological examples. That is not to say that the examples were not pertinent, just that they could have been pared down, or synopsized a little better. Anyone who is mildly intrigued, but does not think they will actually read this, should at least pick up the book and read the last paragraph, which is a well written truth, and really the essence of the book.
July 3, 2021
I think there are two big hangups that Western Religions have that are sort of foundational to their whole game, and they sort of share the same sinister root. Those two hang ups are the Devil (Evil) and God as Judge (versus God as Player or Actor). These observations are not mine alone, but the dissolution of that second hang-up was huge for me, and finally righted a wobbly world of madness for me. The Christian explanation of God as kid with magnifying glass who purposefully entraps you never sat right with me.
Alan Watts frequently expounds on those hangups throughout his body of work. This particular book focuses on the resolution of opposites, or the problem of "Evil". In it Watts states his opening hypothesis, and then shows the geographically bound interpretation of Evil as it travels westward. The Eastern Philosophies, he claims, see the game and interconnectedness of the whole thing. Western philosophy, or rather religion, seeks to deny evil any purchase (and in doing often creates the greatest acts of evil). Satan is special in that he really only exists in the West.
Ask a Christian the question, "Is not Satan yet another being and manifestation of God?" It all comes back to another idea of Western Religion, that God is a tinkerer who is apart (yet still omnipresent and omniscient) from his creation, rather than THE active bit of it.
This book is 75% annotated quotations illustrating Watts' central hypothesis. I'm talking long, multiple page quotations, the essential context of which is poorly drawn up by Watts before dropping you into another, loosely connected reference.
One might get the impression Watts had a book deal, and left it until the last minute to write.
There are gems within this. Alan Watts has a series of powerful religious and Spiritual observations that are worthy of consideration, but as I have said before, his audio collections are where the real magic is at. "Out of your mind" in particular. This is not a hard recommendation for me.
And now quotes.
"This does not mean that all ancient myths must be restored to the status of scientific fact, for the form of man, in the very act of making the universe intelligible, is changing. Man makes God in his own image, and as he comes to a clearer and more intelligible view of his own image -- changing it in the process -- he comes to more intelligible view of God."
"The Hebrew words for good and evil in this context mean precisely the useful and the useless, in other words, what is useful for survival and what is not. It would seem, then, the Fall comes about through an obsessive and continuous preoccupation with survival, and thus it is logical for the Regainer of paradise to say, "Whosoever would save his life shall lose it."
Alan Watts frequently expounds on those hangups throughout his body of work. This particular book focuses on the resolution of opposites, or the problem of "Evil". In it Watts states his opening hypothesis, and then shows the geographically bound interpretation of Evil as it travels westward. The Eastern Philosophies, he claims, see the game and interconnectedness of the whole thing. Western philosophy, or rather religion, seeks to deny evil any purchase (and in doing often creates the greatest acts of evil). Satan is special in that he really only exists in the West.
Ask a Christian the question, "Is not Satan yet another being and manifestation of God?" It all comes back to another idea of Western Religion, that God is a tinkerer who is apart (yet still omnipresent and omniscient) from his creation, rather than THE active bit of it.
This book is 75% annotated quotations illustrating Watts' central hypothesis. I'm talking long, multiple page quotations, the essential context of which is poorly drawn up by Watts before dropping you into another, loosely connected reference.
One might get the impression Watts had a book deal, and left it until the last minute to write.
There are gems within this. Alan Watts has a series of powerful religious and Spiritual observations that are worthy of consideration, but as I have said before, his audio collections are where the real magic is at. "Out of your mind" in particular. This is not a hard recommendation for me.
And now quotes.
"This does not mean that all ancient myths must be restored to the status of scientific fact, for the form of man, in the very act of making the universe intelligible, is changing. Man makes God in his own image, and as he comes to a clearer and more intelligible view of his own image -- changing it in the process -- he comes to more intelligible view of God."
"The Hebrew words for good and evil in this context mean precisely the useful and the useless, in other words, what is useful for survival and what is not. It would seem, then, the Fall comes about through an obsessive and continuous preoccupation with survival, and thus it is logical for the Regainer of paradise to say, "Whosoever would save his life shall lose it."
December 29, 2023
Six of one and half dozen of the other: this is the sense most cultures take for everything in their universe, based on a thorough understanding of sacred text, art and literature across the centuries. It mostly seems like a very Christian attitude, prevalent in the West, that something has to be done about the other, the darker side of our collective psyche, as if God were the store manager and all things evil and unacceptable are the unruly customers who should be asked to leave the establishment. Most of the ancient and Eastern philosophies seem to accept, with each passage quoted at length, that a dualism is present in all aspects of life, but why are still stuck in this all-or-nothing frame of mind. Someone should do something about those people, right?
August 23, 2024
First half was so good, but I got bored in the second half. Look, the ideas are absolutely amazing and I really had to read it slow to digest it. But the problem is that Watts uses too many references and quotations that go on and on and onnnnn for pages at a time. I am reading this to hear thoughts from Alan Watts, not just pretty indepth excerpts from classic mythologys. It needs less quotes, and more concrete ideas where I can take away after reading this.
November 17, 2021
Knowledgeable and lucid, Watts also, in this book, tends too much—for me at least—to lengthy quotations from the sources he is investigating. In most cases I want his summary, analysis and explication of traditional material rather than a multi-page quotation from a generally “flowery” and “mystical” document.
November 27, 2022
A dense but great read! Our shadow side isn’t exactly the horrific thing we’ve made it out to be. We can no more “put to death” our dark side than remove the shadow side of a mountain or the back side of a coin. Doing so destroys the whole thing.
February 1, 2020
Unlike many of Watt’s book, this is turgid and uncompromising.
Read
May 4, 2020Alan Watts' perspective is so very clear. For me he has helped to 'interpret' many ancient/mystical concepts for the modern world.
January 20, 2022
I've read perhaps a dozen books by Watts, but I didn't find this one nearly as engaging as his others. He quotes long passages from religious texts but offers minimal commentary.
November 27, 2023
There is a Hassidic saying: "If I am I because you are you, and if you are you because I am I, then I am not I, and you are not you."
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 16, 2025
ARE POLAR OPPOSITES TRULY "OPPOSITE"? OR RATHER, "MUTUALLY SUSTAINING"?
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 many popular books, such as 'The Spirit of Zen,' 'The Way of Zen,' 'Nature, Man and Woman,' 'This Is It,' 'Psychotherapy East & West,' 'Beyond Theology,' 'The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are,' 'Does It Matter?,' 'Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown,' and his autobiography, 'In My Own Way.'
He wrote in the Preface to this 1963 book, "This book is the by-product of many years' interest in types of relationship which are at once difficult to express in language and yet fundamental to the order of life itself. I speak of the polar, reciprocal, or mutually sustaining relationship of events and forces that are usually considered to be opposed to or basically separate from one another."
He states, "Whatever may be said against the psychological theories of Freud and, more particularly, of Jung, their work has the outstanding virtue of taking mythology seriously, of studying it as something still powerfully operative in the modern world, and... with all the respect due to a source of wisdom... My own approach will not be formally Jungian. I think the hypothesis of a 'collective unconscious,' of a storehouse of archaic images and memories somehow embedded in and inherited with the structure of the brain, is plausible but quite insufficiently proven." (Pg. 12)
He points out, "But the very fact that the name of the angel of evil is Lucifer, the light-bearer, suggests that there might be something formative and creative in becoming conscious of one's own evil principle, or dark side, or innate rascality. Is it entirely a question of coming in with a bright light and a scrubbing brush to clean the darkness out?" (Pg. 18)
Later, he adds, "the Christian Devil is unique. No other demonic figure has ever been conceived to be so purely malicious, so sinister, and so totally opposed to the universal design... This view gains an intense sharpening of consciousness at the price of ignoring a great deal that is ALSO human personality." (Pg. 38)
He observes, "Though Cain is described as the offspring of Satan... and is also a murderer and a deceiver, the Lord's treatment of him... is at once just and merciful. Also, Cain has the nerve to argue with the Lord, and the Lord is not yet so bereft of humor as to strike him dead or cast him forthwith into hell. For in his mythological form the Lord God is still human. It is only when the image of God becomes abstract, that is to say theological and ethical, that he begins to turn into a monster. From the human standpoint, the purely good is as monstrous as the purely evil. It is in this way that the human standpoint is the 'image' of the divine and transcendental standpoint, beyond the opposites." (Pg. 125-126)
He notes, "evil is profoundly problematic in a universe governed by a single God both beneficent and omnipotent... In a universe of ethical monotheism evil must be considered as an effective and highly dangerous rebellion of the creature against the Creator. But the energy... can of itself endow the rebel with godlike power. One has to be turned into a god to be eternally damned. And there is always the concurrent danger that, in such a battle, God himself may be turned into the Devil. This, then, is the paradox that the greater our ethical idealism, the darker is the shadow that we cast, and that ethical monotheism became... the world's most startling dualism." (Pg. 132-133)
This book will be of interest to those who enjoy Watts' other books.
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 many popular books, such as 'The Spirit of Zen,' 'The Way of Zen,' 'Nature, Man and Woman,' 'This Is It,' 'Psychotherapy East & West,' 'Beyond Theology,' 'The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are,' 'Does It Matter?,' 'Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown,' and his autobiography, 'In My Own Way.'
He wrote in the Preface to this 1963 book, "This book is the by-product of many years' interest in types of relationship which are at once difficult to express in language and yet fundamental to the order of life itself. I speak of the polar, reciprocal, or mutually sustaining relationship of events and forces that are usually considered to be opposed to or basically separate from one another."
He states, "Whatever may be said against the psychological theories of Freud and, more particularly, of Jung, their work has the outstanding virtue of taking mythology seriously, of studying it as something still powerfully operative in the modern world, and... with all the respect due to a source of wisdom... My own approach will not be formally Jungian. I think the hypothesis of a 'collective unconscious,' of a storehouse of archaic images and memories somehow embedded in and inherited with the structure of the brain, is plausible but quite insufficiently proven." (Pg. 12)
He points out, "But the very fact that the name of the angel of evil is Lucifer, the light-bearer, suggests that there might be something formative and creative in becoming conscious of one's own evil principle, or dark side, or innate rascality. Is it entirely a question of coming in with a bright light and a scrubbing brush to clean the darkness out?" (Pg. 18)
Later, he adds, "the Christian Devil is unique. No other demonic figure has ever been conceived to be so purely malicious, so sinister, and so totally opposed to the universal design... This view gains an intense sharpening of consciousness at the price of ignoring a great deal that is ALSO human personality." (Pg. 38)
He observes, "Though Cain is described as the offspring of Satan... and is also a murderer and a deceiver, the Lord's treatment of him... is at once just and merciful. Also, Cain has the nerve to argue with the Lord, and the Lord is not yet so bereft of humor as to strike him dead or cast him forthwith into hell. For in his mythological form the Lord God is still human. It is only when the image of God becomes abstract, that is to say theological and ethical, that he begins to turn into a monster. From the human standpoint, the purely good is as monstrous as the purely evil. It is in this way that the human standpoint is the 'image' of the divine and transcendental standpoint, beyond the opposites." (Pg. 125-126)
He notes, "evil is profoundly problematic in a universe governed by a single God both beneficent and omnipotent... In a universe of ethical monotheism evil must be considered as an effective and highly dangerous rebellion of the creature against the Creator. But the energy... can of itself endow the rebel with godlike power. One has to be turned into a god to be eternally damned. And there is always the concurrent danger that, in such a battle, God himself may be turned into the Devil. This, then, is the paradox that the greater our ethical idealism, the darker is the shadow that we cast, and that ethical monotheism became... the world's most startling dualism." (Pg. 132-133)
This book will be of interest to those who enjoy Watts' other books.
May 13, 2022
This is a review of the audiobook issued in 2022: I requested this audiobook because I spent many hours in my formative years reading and appreciating Watts's wisdom. The audio did not work for me, however. The narration is slow and ponderous in its discussion of polarized imagery in mythology throughout human history. But it was hard to follow when moving around and functioning as I often do while listening to audiobooks. Perhaps a female narrator would have worked better; the very introductory acknowledgments irked me in a way reading the author's printed work never did: I heard this pompous-sounding male voice thanking other (male) scholars and then naming two women who assisted in the typing of the work and screwed up my face in irritation.
Given how my attention wandered, I reached the end and thought about some of the beautiful imagery and ideas that had flitted through my mind while I listened, but I could not express any concrete ideas about God's two hands. This edition might be beneficial for anyone able to listen in quiet contemplation or as an adjunct to the written word, but I don't think it provides a good intro to Watts' work to a modern listener.
Given how my attention wandered, I reached the end and thought about some of the beautiful imagery and ideas that had flitted through my mind while I listened, but I could not express any concrete ideas about God's two hands. This edition might be beneficial for anyone able to listen in quiet contemplation or as an adjunct to the written word, but I don't think it provides a good intro to Watts' work to a modern listener.
June 28, 2025
I was recently exposed to a new-age-ish stream of Alan Watts quotes online, in which Watts comes across as a somewhat vapid expounder of quasi-wisdom. This book, as many other Watts' writings also do, shreds any misconception of his being light. This is not light reading.
The Two Hands of God considers dualism through several chapters. Watts focuses initially on dismemberment as a cosmological story of the creation of the world, but later moves to considering it as a break from an original unity. He moves between widely varying mythological systems for his fuel, including Vedic conceptions, and even some myths of the Hopi Indians. He also brings in Christian myths, and these considerations are likely to cause some readers discomfort.
One thing I did not like about the book is that some of the quotes from religious materials are quite long. Even with a lengthy quote, it is difficult to enter into a multi-page quote from Milton or Dante or the Gita, and somehow appreciate the contextual point Watts is trying to make.
The Two Hands of God considers dualism through several chapters. Watts focuses initially on dismemberment as a cosmological story of the creation of the world, but later moves to considering it as a break from an original unity. He moves between widely varying mythological systems for his fuel, including Vedic conceptions, and even some myths of the Hopi Indians. He also brings in Christian myths, and these considerations are likely to cause some readers discomfort.
One thing I did not like about the book is that some of the quotes from religious materials are quite long. Even with a lengthy quote, it is difficult to enter into a multi-page quote from Milton or Dante or the Gita, and somehow appreciate the contextual point Watts is trying to make.
May 10, 2014
My interest in this waxed and waned. Sometimes the excerpts went on too long without any context and I found myself losing the thread. But Watts would pull it all together pretty clearly and engagingly and overall this was an interesting read.
April 20, 2021
A major flaw I found in this book is stylistic, rather than content-related. Watts excerpts extensively from various traditional texts, excerpts going for pages at a time. I found that quite distracting from Watts' ideas, which I am reading the book for.
July 23, 2013
Read this when I was 15. Re/read it dutifully as it is a worthwhile treatise examining the notion of the polarity of opposites.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews