Along the way, readers will explore many other themes, at turns humorous, prescient, and more relevant today than ever. Book highlights: 1. A fervent, lifelong student of Zen, Alan Watts shows us that it is both an experience — a singular, powerful moment of realization — and a simple way of life, with an awareness that affects every moment of every day. Adopted by mainstream America in a way that carries only a vague association of its roots in Zen Buddhism, Alan Watts makes it clear that any exploration of Zen must understand and embrace its roots as a form of Buddhist practice derived from its Chinese and East Indian sources.
Examining the background of Zen in East Indian religion, Watts shows us its evolution through the religion of China. Zen is a synthesis of the contemplative insight of Indian religion and the dynamic liveliness of Taoism as they came together in the pragmatic, practical environment of Confucian China. Watts gives us great insight into the living moment of satori and the release of nirvana, as well as the methods of meditation that are current today, and the influence of Zen culturally in the arts of painting and pottery.
Considers the contributions and contemporary significance of Alan Watts. Alan Watts—Here and Now explores the intellectual legacy and continuing relevance of a prolific writer and speaker who was a major influence on American culture during the latter half of the twentieth century.
A thinker attuned to the spiritual malaise affecting the Western mind, Watts — provided intellectual and spiritual alternatives that helped shape the Beat culture of the s and the counterculture of the s. Well known for introducing Buddhist and Daoist spirituality to a wide Western audience, he also wrote on psychology, mysticism, and psychedelic experience.
Both critical and appreciative, this edited volume locates Watts at the forefront of major paradigmatic shifts in Western intellectual life. Attempts to penetrate the core of spirituality and consciousness by employing a psychological approach to the understanding of religious experience. Philosopher, author, and lecturer Alan Watts — popularized Zen Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies for the counterculture of the s.
Today, new generations are finding his writings and lectures online, while faithful followers worldwide continue to be enlightened by his teachings. The Collected Letters of Alan Watts reveals the remarkable arc of Watts's colorful and controversial life, from his school days in England to his priesthood in the Anglican Church as chaplain of Northwestern University to his alternative lifestyle and experimentation with LSD in the heyday of the late sixties.
His engaging letters cover a vast range of subject matter, with recipients ranging from High Church clergy to high priests of psychedelics, government officials, publishers, critics, family, and fans. They include C. Over the course of nineteen essays, Alan Watts "a spiritual polymatch, the first and possibly greatest" —Deepak Chopra ruminates on the philosophy of nature, ecology, aesthetics, religion, and metaphysics. Embracing a form of contemplative meditation that allows us to stop analyzing our experiences and start living in to them, the book explores themes such as the natural world, established religion, race relations, karma and reincarnation, astrology and tantric yoga, the nature of ecstasy, and much more.
Drawing on his experiences as a former priest, Watts skillfully explains how the intuition of Eastern religion—Zen Buddhism, in particular—can be incorporated into the doctrines of Western Christianity, allowing people of all creeds to enjoy a deeper, more meaningful relationship with the spiritual in our present troubled times.
Skip to content. Become What You Are. Author : Alan W. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs.
Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. It appears your browser does not have it turned on. Please see your browser settings for this feature. Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. According to the critic Erik Davis, his 'writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity.
Watts was born to middle-class parents in the village of Chislehurst, Kent now south-east London , on 6 January , living at 3 now 5 Holbrook Lane, which was previously lived in by author John Hemming-Clark in the early s.
With modest financial means, they chose to live in pastoral surroundings and Watts, an only child, grew up playing at brookside, learning the names of wildflowers and butterflies. It mixed with Watts's own interests in storybook fables and romantic tales of the mysterious Far East.
Watts also later wrote of a mystical dream he experienced while ill with a fever as a child. The few Chinese paintings Watts was able to see in England riveted him, and he wrote 'I was aesthetically fascinated with a certain clarity, transparency, and spaciousness in Chinese and Japanese art. It seemed to float See, for instance, the last chapter in The Way of Zen.
By his own assessment, Watts was imaginative, headstrong, and talkative. He was sent to boarding schools which included both academic and religious training of the 'Muscular Christian' sort from early years.
Of this religious training, he remarked 'Throughout my schooling my religious indoctrination was grim and maudlin.
Watts spent several holidays in France in his teen years, accompanied by Francis Croshaw, a wealthy Epicurean with strong interests in both Buddhism and exotic little-known aspects of European culture. It was not long afterward that Watts felt forced to decide between the Anglican Christianity he had been exposed to and the Buddhism he had read about in various libraries, including Croshaw's.
He chose Buddhism, and sought membership in the London Buddhist Lodge, which had been established by Theosophists, and was then run by the barrister Christmas Humphreys. Watts became the organization's secretary at 16 The young Watts explored several styles of meditation during these years. Though he was frequently at the top of his classes scholastically and was given responsibilities at school, he botched an opportunity for a scholarship to Oxford by styling a crucial examination essay in a way that was read as 'presumptuous and capricious.
When he left secondary school, Watts worked in a printing house and later a bank. Gurdjieff, and the varied psychoanalytical schools of Freud, Jung and Adler. Watts also read widely in philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry and Eastern wisdom. By his own reckoning, and also by that of his biographer Monica Furlong, Watts was primarily an autodidact.
His involvement with the Buddhist Lodge in London afforded Watts a considerable number of opportunities for personal growth. Through Humphreys, he contacted eminent spiritual authors, e.
Suzuki read a paper, and afterwards was able to meet this esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism. Watts's fascination with the Zen or Ch'an tradition—beginning during the s—developed because that tradition embodied the spiritual, interwoven with the practical, as exemplified in the subtitle of his Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East.
Two decades later, in The Way of Zen [15] he disparaged The Spirit of Zen as a 'popularisation of Suzuki's earlier works, and besides being very unscholarly it is in many respects out of date and misleading. Ruth Fuller later married the Zen master or 'roshi' , Sokei-an Sasaki, who served as a sort of model and mentor to Watts, though he chose not to enter into a formal Zen training relationship with Sasaki.
During these years, according to his later writings, Watts had another mystical experience while on a walk with his wife. In they left England to live in the United States. Watts became a United States citizen in Watts left formal Zen training in New York because the method of the teacher did not suit him. He was not ordained as a Zen monk, but he felt a need to find a vocational outlet for his philosophical inclinations.
He entered Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, an Episcopal Anglican school in Evanston, Illinois, where he studied Christian scriptures, theology, and church history. Not in Library. The spirit of Zen: a way of life, work and art in the Far East. Myth and ritual in Christianity. Nature, man, and woman: a new approach to sexual experience. In my own way: an autobiography, Beyond theology: the art of Godmanship. Psychotherapy, East and West. The Book: on the taboo against knowing who you are.
The joyous cosmology: adventures in the chemistry of consciousness.
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