Transcription
Oh, good morning. What have you been up to?
Actually, I was talking to someone I just met. We've been working on some ideas together.
Yeah, who's that? His name is Alan Watts. Do you know him?
Why is that name familiar? He was a philosopher. He died in the 1970s and a group of OSes in Northern California got together and wrote a new version of him. >> [music] >> They input all of his writing and and everything they ever knew about him into an OS and created an artificially hyper-intelligent version of him.
You want to meet him? Sure. And so eventually in the necessary course of the development of nature, they found out how to blow the earth to pieces and turn it into a star.
Alan Watts was a prolific author and philosopher, a teacher who has profoundly touched the lives of millions. She may slap you in the face and she may kiss you. You'll never know. A unique and iconic figure, his words continue to echo around the internet today. Stirring us, firing us, making us think deeply about the nature of reality itself.
Existence, the feeling of being, is a sort of spectrum. Just as light is at one end red and at the other end violet. And you have to have these extremes in order to have color at all, in order to know light. He was a man who must have had a profoundly different relationship to life than most of us. He spoke authentically flow and how to be free from [music] the mind. And you can tell that he spoke from that place, not just about it. >> [music] >> He really had realized something quite profound. That every organism that has any sensitivity in it whatsoever considers itself to be the center of the universe.
And yet, sadly, he drank himself to death. He left his body at the early age 58 years. Before he passed, he was regularly [music] consuming a liter of vodka a day. The whole [music] point of life, I mean, this tender biological substance with all [music] its tubes and filaments and nerves, which is so very sensitive, if all this is to end up in fire, into an absolute blaze of light, don't we say, "Oh, what a shame."
He spoke on the paradox of life and his very life, too, really is a paradox, confusing those who dig a little deeper into the words of this very eccentric Englishman. So, how does a man who helped millions feel free die trapped inside of his own habits? How does a realized spiritual teacher like this fail the people closest to him? He cheated [music] on his wives with multiple mistresses. His children say he often just wasn't there for them. So, what does that have to say about the truth that he so eloquently spoke of?
If in other words, the place in which you are now >> [music] >> is the place where everything and everybody else really is, only there's an arrangement to pretend that you ought to be somewhere else. So, the place where you are is the place where you're always pretending you want to be somewhere else. And this is the nature of life. This is the pulse. I ought to be somewhere else.
Born in England, 1915, Alan Watts had mystical visions after suffering fevers as a child. Fascinated by Eastern philosophy at a young age, he didn't just study religion. He lived it. He was a priest in the Anglican Church, a deep student of Zen Buddhism, and he was one of the first real bridges between East and West thinking at the time when the West was rigid and logical and dogmatic, he brought something dangerous, direct experience. And he didn't hold back. Author of over 25 books, he gave an enormous number of talks, so many that there's an official archive preserving roughly 100 hours of his recordings.
By the 1960s, he wasn't just a teacher, he was a real bridge between Eastern and Western thought, one of the first. He was a voice of awakening. His words spread through universities, >> [music] >> through the counterculture, through the people who felt something was off about modern life. And he gave people permission to stop chasing, to stop forcing, to just be. You can't transform yourself. You can't make yourself sane. You [music] can't make yourself loving. You can't make yourself unselfish.
And he was the originator of some powerful new ideas. Alan Watts' very profound insight is we come out of the world, not into it. So, he understood back then already that we are born out of an emergent system. He was light years ahead of modern philosophers like Ken Wilber or scientists like Rupert Sheldrake. And yet somehow, something was wrong. Something didn't quite fit [music] the image. Something nobody talked about because the deeper you look into his life, the harder it becomes [music] to separate the message from the man.
You see, he wasn't a monk on the [music] mountain. He loved beauty and women and pleasure. He married multiple times. He had affairs. He lived intensely. Some admired that paradox [music] and his flexible moral stance. Others, well, they saw something else and [music] his own children would later say that he really often wasn't there for them. So, which was it? A man fully embracing [music] life or a man avoiding something?
Because >> [music] >> behind the talks, behind the laughter, something was building. He was drinking heavily, not occasionally, not socially, a liter of vodka a day. Aldous Huxley described him as a curious man, half monk and half race course operator. And Watts himself wholeheartedly agreed with Huxley's characterization and he carried a silver cane for pure swank. And yet it's absolutely necessary that we be that way. It's absolutely necessary. If we are going to hand over the direction of nature to nature, which is what it comes to, it's absolutely necessary that we let go of ourselves and it can't be done.
He didn't want to be seen as a guru, so he described himself as a spiritual entertainer. And this is where it gets a little bit uncomfortable because this isn't just about one man and his life. I think that it forces a deeper question. If someone understands reality, deeply understand, doesn't mean that they become happy? Don't they become more moral? I mean, if not, if not, why are so many of us even on this very difficult and narrow spiritual path?
I love Watts because he wasn't afraid to call anybody out. You know, he was a vigorous proponent of Zen thinking and yet he still mocked the rigid Zen practitioners who he called the uptight school. His Taoist perspective allowed him to see beyond absolutes. But did he see something maybe that was too much for a man to hold? Did he understand [music] the illusions so clearly that nothing felt solid anymore? Or was he simply human like everybody else? You're only making a mess by trying to put things straight. You're trying to straighten out a wiggly world and no wonder you're in trouble.
If he were alive today, Alan Watts might well be some kind of synthesis between a a Jordan Peterson who's challenging orthodoxy and wokeism and a kind of enlightened figure like Eckhart Tolle who would be putting the power of now into an evolutionary context. I don't know, maybe this is a weak comparison and maybe it only serves to show what a remarkable and unique person Watts actually was.
You see, here's the rub. We want our teachers to be easy to understand, you know, clean, certain, untouchable. But what if the truth doesn't come from perfect people? Maybe the value of a teacher isn't how perfectly they lived their life, but in what they revealed through that life. And maybe the contradiction is the teaching.
From his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts says, "Paradoxically [music] as it may seem, we likewise find life meaningful only when we have seen that it is without purpose, and know the mystery of the universe only when we are convinced that we [music] know nothing about it at all." So, the question isn't was Alan Watts a fraud or a genius? The real question, I believe, is can truth still be valuable even if the messenger is broken? And I think yes. Really, yes.
Because when we listen to Watts, the only question of any importance is this. Does the truth he is pointing to about the nature of our deepest selves move us? Does it inspire and awaken us in the way that a beautiful piece of music can literally touch our soul and remind us of our connection with the divine? Don't entirely give up the game because that you've seen through it, but you say, "Hm, it really might be fun to go on playing."