OpenMindSpace: Alan Watts

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Alan Watts

Alan Watts is (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) is a well known British-born eastern philosopher who is known for his interpretation of eastern philosophy for western audiences.

Books

The B∞k: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1989)
This is It (1960)

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents… Society is our extended mind and body”

"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."
--Life magazine (21 April 1961)

"The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse; because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats that don't exist at all.
...
The rule for all terrors is head straight into them. When you are sailing in a storm, you don't let a wave hit your boat on the side. You go bow into the wave and ride it. So in the same way, old folklore says, whenever you meet a ghost don't run away, because the ghost will capture the substance of your fear and will materialize itself out of your own substance and will kill you eventually, because it will take over all your own vitality. So then, whenever confronted with a ghost, walk straight into it and it will disappear."

"What will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up? ... What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep?"

"So the world doesn't come thinged; it doesn't come evented. You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. The ocean waves, and the universe peoples. And as I wave and say to you 'Yoo-hoo!' the world is waving with me at you and saying 'Hi! I'm here!' But we are consciousness of the way we feel and sense our existence. Being based on a myth that we are made, that we are parts, that we are things, our consciousness has been influenced, so that each one of us does not feel that. We have been hypnotized, literally hypnotized by social convention into feeling and sensing that we exist only inside our skins. That we are not the original bang, just something out on the end of it. And therefore we are scared stiff. My wave is going to disappear, and I'm going to die! And that would be awful. We've got a mythology going now which is, as Father Maskell.?, put it, we are something that happens between the maternity ward and the crematorium. And that's it. And therefore everybody feels unhappy and miserable."
--The Nature of Consciousness

"Archimedes said, "Give me a fulcrum and I will move the Earth"; but there isn't one. It is like betting on the future of the human race — I might wish to lay a bet that the human race would destroy itself by the year 2000, but there is nowhere to place the bet. On the contrary, I am involved in the world and must try to see that it does not blow itself to pieces. I once had a terrible argument with Margaret Mead. She was holding forth one evening on the absolute horror of the atomic bomb, and how everybody should spring into action and abolish it, but she was getting so furious about it that I said to her: "You scare me because I think you are the kind of person who will push the button in order to get rid of the other people who were going to push it first." So she told me that I had no love for my future generations, that I had no responsibility for my children, and that I was a phony swami who believed in retreating from facts. But I maintained my position. As Robert Oppenheimer said a short while before he died, "It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so." You see, many of the troubles going on in the world right now are being supervised by people with very good intentions whose attempts are to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The more we try to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. Maybe that is the way it has got to be. Maybe I should not say anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right but simply, on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise."
--Play to Live : Lectures of Alan Watts (1982)

"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 is play."
--The essence of Alan Watts, by Alan Watts (1977)

"But what we've got going wrong is we've got a kind of bifurcation [in cultural development]:

You take your classified telephone directory, and open up "Churches", and have a ruler in your hand. And you will find that the longest space is occupied by authoritarian, Bible-banging churches. And these people are barbarians, who take the written word of the Bible literally. Because they need terribly, they have a personal need, for something to depend on. … The government realizes that there is a very large number of people like that; and therefore, to keep their votes, they have to pander to those kind of people. And these are the boys who never grew up; they always need Papa. … The trouble is that the boys who need Papa, are violent. They have the guns. And they are the types of people who like to be soldiers, policemen— tough guys. And therefore they have a great deal of power."
--Interviewed on Les Hixon's show "In The Spirit" on WBAI New York (November 1972)

"So then, this model of the world, based on the idea that we are all subject to the divine king, was, you might say, a political model, based on the organization of the great city states of the ancient near-east and that image, you see, has absolutely haunted western man throughout his whole development. Because he has felt that he is in this universe on probation, on sufferance, he doesn’t quite belong here, because there’s this great big giant spirit who’d say to him:

'Now you watch out
You’re just a miserable little worm
And I evoked you here out of nothing
Of course I love you, because I am love
I am a very good father
Everything I do, no matter how much it hurts
Is for your good
But you watch out

And don’t you DARE look me in the eye'

So everybody does this, see? All those customs where the ruler is: “face this way with head down and so, no looking at him directly”, is based on this mythology. And of course, its based too on political fact, because when a big man does attain to eminence, everybody is against him secretly, they hate him for it. So he has to be surrounded with guards and secret police. And people all lie with their faces on the floor, so that they’re in a position where they can’t attack. That’s the whole idea and that’s why, in the royal court, the throne has its back to the wall. There is nothing behind the throne. There’s just guards on either side to simply watch the people.

So in a church, when the altar or the episcopal throne, is right with its back to the wall. This really indicates the situation of fear.

But if I am not afraid of you, I shouldn’t really have my back to the wall here in this situation, only, rooms are designed, our whole architecture, following the design of original courthouses. After all, one should walk out into the middle of people and have people behind you, if you can trust them.

So this model, I call it a model of the universe, based on the kingly court, did some important things for us. It gave us the idea of universal law. It lies at the roots of many of our best ideas of justice. But, it bugged us, it really really bugged us, because you felt that you were never really free, from the penetrating glance of an all-seeing eye, that watched everything you do."

--Alan Watts - How to Make it Out of the Trap (8:30)

Biographies Metaphysics

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