Zen Bones: The Life & Legacy of Alan Watts
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
Alan Watts was one of the most influential philosophers in modern history and a prolific writer — authoring more than 25 books and countless essays.
His ability to translate complex Eastern philosophical ideas for a Western audience made him a legend of his era — opening the minds of millions of people over the course of his life, and beyond.
Watts was also one of the primary figures of the 1960s counterculture movement and a major proponent of the use of psychedelics as a tool for self-discovery and enlightenment.
Alan Watts died in 1973, but he managed to attain digital immortality through his many essays and lectures scattered across the great expanse of the internet.
The Life of Alan Watts
Alan Watts was born in South London in 1915. He was raised in a Christian household but quickly came to the realization that Christianity couldn’t quite answer his burning desire to understand the real meaning of life.
Early on, Watts gained an interest in Asian culture through some art his mother had in their home. He once wrote, “I was aesthetically fascinated with certain clarity, transparency, and spaciousness in Chinese and Japanese art. It seemed to float…”
Watts spent his childhood at strict Christian boarding schools — the indoctrination of which he viewed as “grim and maudlin.”
In his teens, Watts visited France, where he was exposed to Buddhism through an eccentric and wealthy family friend. This exposure eventually drove him to pursue a more dedicated study in the ways of Buddhism and broader Eastern philosophy.
Watts was particularly interested in Zen Buddhism, which he considered to be the synthesis of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism.
He published his first book in 1936, titled The Spirit of Zen.
Since then, he’s published over 25 books on Zen, Taoism, and other philosophies. He wrote his first best-selling book on Buddhism, titled The Way of Zen (1957).
After getting married to his first wife, the duo moved to the United States. He spent several years studying Christian theology and other religious concepts in New York and later joined the faculty at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, California (1951–1957).
After leaving the academy, he became a weekly speaker on a radio program run by the Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley. This was an unpaid position, but by the time he left in 1962, he had garnered a large following of loyal listeners.
Watts continued to write books and give seminars for the duration of his life. He traveled often, lectured extensively, and engaged in numerous public speaking events.
The Human Side of Alan Watts
The primary criticism Alan Watts receives to this day is the fact that despite all the time he spent discussing morality, ego, and enlightenment — he was consistently unfaithful to his wives (of which he had three), absent to his children (he fathered seven children), and was a frequent and heavy smoker and drinker.
Despite many considering him to be enlightened (something he, himself, contested), Watts continued to suffer and cause suffering to others.
Watts has always been honest and open about his flaws, and his friends often referred to him as a kind, likable, and friendly man.
In some respect, none of these criticisms stand in the face of what Watts taught. Zen Buddhism, Watt’s most central theme throughout his life, is a philosophy in which imperfections are seen as essential aspects of the human experience. Enlightenment involves understanding and accepting one's true nature without judgment and without striving.
Watts died, exhausted, in 1973 at the age of 58 after returning home from a speaking tour in Europe.
The Philosophy of Alan Watts
Watts was considered a prophet of contemporary “pick n’ mix spirituality” and combined ideas from Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism, and various other philosophies and religions.
To distill his teachings into the fewest words possible, Watts believed that the true meaning of life was meaninglessness.
This isn’t to say that life isn’t worth living — just that there are no failures, no mistakes, no successes, and no good things or bad things. There are just things that happen that contrast with other things that happen.
Ultimately, his message was that we don’t need to take things quite so seriously.
Watts often talked about the philosophical concept that we’re all just “egos in bags of skin.” He believed this idea was a myth of modern philosophy. Instead, Watts believed there is no “self,” just IT, the Tao, the universe — and you, the individual is inescapably a part of it.
“We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.’” — Alan Watts.
This is very similar to the ideas of the legendary Zen master Dōgen (founder of the Sōtō of Zen Buddhism), who said that the ultimate reality (emptiness) and the phenomenal appearances (forms) are not two separate realms but are instead fundamentally intertwined.
Somewhat ironically, Watts believed that over-strenuous spiritual practice strengthened the ego. He suggested we just relax and let go. That we don’t need to change or do anything to become enlightened. This idea is prevalent in the ideas of Zen Buddhism, which suggests that we are perfect just as we are — but that we’ve merely forgotten our true nature.
Watts believed the problems that plagued most Westerners came from two products of modernity:
Our fear of meaninglessness — Our perpetual search for purpose deludes us into thinking life requires some sort of grand, overarching objective in order to be valuable.
Our need to think in terms of gains and losses — This fosters a mindset of constant evaluation and comparison which erodes our ability to appreciate the present moment and live fully.
He argued that the ideas of Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and other Eastern philosophies could be applied as a form of psychotherapy to solve these problems.
Alan Watts On Psychedelics
Watts’s book Nature, Man & Woman mentions some of his early work involving psychedelic substances for the sake of gaining mystical insight and exploration.
He had his first psychedelic experience with mescaline — which is a common initiating substance among many great thinkers in the psychedelic space around this time (Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Hunter S. Thompson, for example).
Watts also experimented with LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) and marijuana in 1958, which inspired his essay titled The New Alchemy.
The influence of his psychedelic use can be spotted throughout the books and essays he wrote in the 1960s. One of the most influential psychedelic-inspired writings was his book titled The Joyous Cosmology (1962).
Watts believed psychedelics were a valuable tool for mystical discovery and understanding, but that they required other, integrated approaches in order to be useful.
He once stated:
“I don’t think that LSD is an automatic psychotherapy at all. If you’re going to use it for that purpose, you need psychotherapy in the ordinary way along with it.”
He referred to LSD as an exploratory instrument, like a microscope, for exploring concepts inside the body rather than outside.
Watts was also known (somewhat controversially) for initiating each of his seven children into LSD on their 18th birthdays.
Where To Watch Alan Watts Lectures
Alan Watts gave hundreds of lectures over the course of his life. Many (but not all) of these lectures were recorded.
You can find his complete works hosted and recorded by his son, Mark Watts, on the Alan Watts Organization website. Many are free, but the full repository can be accessed for $50/year.
Here are my top 8 Alan Watts lectures of all time:
List of Alan Watts Books
The Spirit of Zen (1936)
The Meaning of Happiness (1940)
Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion (1947)
The Supreme Identity (1950)
The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)
Become What You Are (1955)
The Way of Zen (1957)
Nature, Man, and Woman (1958)
This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience (1960)
Psychotherapy East & West (1961)
The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (1962)
Does It Matter? Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality (1971)
Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal (1973)
Books Published After His Death
Tao: The Watercourse Way (1975)
Zen and the Beat Way (1997)
Out of Your Mind (1999)
Best Alan Watts Quotes
Watts is one of the most quotable figures in the psychedelics and spirituality space simply due to the prolific nature of his writings and public lectures.
Here are some of the most famous tidbits of wisdom he left behind:
Quotes On Suffering
“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
“What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.”
“The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we’re actually killing what we love.”
“Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.”
“We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”
Quotes On Presence & Mindfulness
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
“Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment, it’s infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever.”
“The art of living is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.”
“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
“The menu is not the meal.”
“Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.”
“The only Zen you’ll find on mountain tops is the Zen you bring up there with you.”
“If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.”
“Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.”
Quotes On the Meaning of Life
“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
“This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it’s play.”
“If you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation.”
“We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.”
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It’s so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.”
“Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
Quotes On Ego
“I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
“Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
“One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
Quotes On Death
“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.”
“If you’re afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over — fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don’t die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.”
“When you die, you don’t have to deal with everlasting nonexistence because that’s not an experience.”
Further Reading:
Alexander Shulgin: One of the Greatest Psychedelic Chemists to Ever Live
To Oblivion & Back: Exploring The Benefits of Psychedelic-Induced Ego Death
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