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The Incredible Times & Enlightening Life Of Alan Watts

His Spiritual Influence Is Still Felt To This Day

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It’s so plain and obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic, as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

Alan Watts

The Brief Yet Wondrous Life Of Alan Watts

Alan Watts, born in England and living most of his life in the United States, was a writer, speaker and philosopher.

Watts was best known for making Japanese, Chinese, and Indian spiritual traditions in the form of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism entertainingly accessible to a wide and popular audience throughout the world.

Alan Watts also played a pivotal and central role in the spiritual revolution that shook the religious status quo of the United States during the 1960s.

This change in the religious consciousness of the US brought to the American public ancient teachings from Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, Esoteric Christianity and other mystical religious traditions.

This spiritual revolution changed the United States in ways that are still felt today.

Yoga, meditation, vegetarian diets, chanting, nonviolent protests, therapies of all kinds, feminism, equal rights, herbal and alternative medicines and treatments, and much much more, were all first introduced to Americans in the 1960s and were products of that decade’s spiritual revolution.

For many spiritual seekers in the United States and other parts of the Western World, Alan Watts was their trusted guide through this incredible spiritual paradigm shift.

Watts introduced people to spiritual and religious practices which would help to improve and intensify the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

And, Watts treated these unfamiliar and sometimes extremely unfamiliar religious traditions, paths, and practices in a very readable and accessible writing style.

The LA Times Newspaper said of Alan Watts:

Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, Alan Watts had the rare gift of ‘writing beautifully the unwritable. Watts begins with scholarship and intellect and proceeds with art and eloquence to the frontiers of the spirit. A fascinating entry into the deepest ways of knowing.

From the beginning of the 2000s, Alan Watts was re-discovered as his lectures and talks became available on YouTube and across the Internet.

Today, his is, perhaps, more popular and well-known than ever.

Alan Watts, however, during his life struggled with demons that would eventually kill him.

Watts would die of alcoholism at the relatively young age of 58 years old in mysterious circumstances that remain unexplained fully to this day.

To really understand the spiritual revolution of the 1960s in the United States in which Alan Watts played such an important part, we need to go back to 1893.

America’s Spiritual Revolution Of 1893

1893 was the year that the first Parliament of World Religions was held in Chicago.

This first Parliament of World Religions was an attempt to create a dialogue between the different faiths throughout the world.

The speakers came from all over the globe.

They came from Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Sikhism, Christianity, and many other faiths.

Of those many speakers, two speakers stood out from the rest and when they spoke both fascinated and electrified the audience.

Those two speakers would not only lay the groundwork for the spiritual life and evolution of Alan Watts but also for the later spiritual revolution of the 1960s.

They were an Indian Hindu monk, Swami Vivekananda, and Soyen Shaku, a Zen Buddhist monk, now considered the founder of Zen Buddhism in America.

Swami Vivekananda in a powerful and commanding voice addressed the Parliament with the words: “Sisters and Brothers of America!” and the crowd burst into a standing ovation which lasted for two minutes.

Swami Vivekananda was sent to America by his spiritual master, the legendary Indian saint and sage, Ramakrishna, and it would be this speech that would initiate the American Vedanta Society of America and awaken an interest in Hinduism for many Americans.

From the turn of the century, numerous branches of the Vedanta Society opened across America, but the most well-known branch was probably the Vedanta Temple in Hollywood which was opened in 1938.

Alan Watts would visit the Vedanta Temple in Hollywood many times from the 1940s onwards.

On many occasions, getting into profound discussions on the nature of spiritual life and practice with the abbot of the temple Swami Prabhavananda.

During these discussions, they were often surrounded by regular visitors to the temple, everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World.

The other speaker who would be an indirect influence on Alan Watts was the Zen Buddhist monk, Soyen Shaku.

It was Soyen Shaku, who after returning to Japan from the US, would direct his student, the Zen Buddhist practitioner and scholar, D. T. Suzuki, to travel to America and teach Zen.

D. T. Suzuki lectured and wrote about Zen Buddhism for almost 70 years

He would influence, not only Alan Watts, but also the Beat poet Alan Ginsberg and many other Beats, including Jack Kerouac, and musicians and artists, such as John Cage and Merce Cunningham.

The Books Of Alan Watts

In the 1940s when Alan Watts first arrived in America from England, he was an Anglican priest with a master’s degree in theology who also had a passion for Asian thought and culture.

Alan Watt’s first book, The Spirit of Zen, was influenced by D. T. Suzuki when he met him in London just before Suzuki travelled to the United States.

Once in the US, Watts became a chaplain at Northwestern University near Chicago and stayed there all through World War II.

When the war ended, Watts moved to the West Coast and taught at the School of Asian Studies in San Francisco.

It was during this time that he also joined the Los Angeles Vedanta Society, visited the Hollywood Vedanta Temple, and met got began those deep dialogues with Swami Prabhavananda.

Watt’s kept writing too.

During this time he produced two important books: The Way of Zen & Psychotherapy East & West.

Easily available and circulating widely in inexpensive paperback editions, it was these two books that began to greatly expand Watt’s reputation.

The Way of Zen traces the origins of Zen Buddhism as a synthesis of Taoism and Buddhism.

It also argues that Western philosophy is severely limited by its adherence to logic, while Eastern philosophy transcends these logical boundaries, and thus can explore and interrogate the nature of Reality more comprehensively.

Psychotherapy East & West is still considered today one of the most important books about the differences between Western psychotherapy and Eastern spiritual practices.

These books had and continue to have a profound effect on their readers.

But it was in 1953 when Watts begin talks on a radio station in Berkeley, California that he began to attract large numbers of interested and regular listeners.

Fame & Demons

Watts’ popularity steadily grew from this point onwards until by the 1960s he was a central figure in the alternative culture movement of the times.

As Watts’ fame grew so did his drinking.

Watts had always been a heavy smoker but now he began to drink up to a quart of gin a day as well.

By the early 1970s, friends of Watts had become very concerned about his drinking and feared that it had developed into full-blown alcoholism.

On returning to his cabin in Northern California on 16 November 1973, Alan Watts was found deceased that morning.

Before any autopsy or even an examination by a doctor could be performed, Alan Watts’ body was taken to a nearby beach and cremated.

Alan Watts was discovered deceased at 6 am and by 8:30 am his body had been cremated with half his ashes already scattered on the beach and the other half buried underneath his nearby library.

The speed at which all this was done inspired many conspiracy theories.

However, Watts’ son, Mark Watts, explained that his father was aware of his impending death and had “meticulously” planned what was to happen after he died.

This Mark Watts said explained why everything went so quickly.

Many people were not convinced and theories surrounding Watts’ death and cremation continue to this day.

The Continuing Spiritual Legacy Of Alan Watts

Alan Watts left this planet a better place.

Watts’ central philosophy can be summed up thus:

Drawing on Hinduism, Taoism, pantheism, and modern science, Watts understood the universe as engaged in a cosmic play of hide-and-seek.

In other words, God or the Whole had split itself into many many parts and was in the process of rediscovering Itself.

The Godhead intentionally “forgets” itself so as to play the game of re-discovery.

Watts, therefore, believed that our egos are a myth and are in fact temporary and contingent expressions of the Whole.

In the many books that he wrote in his lifetime, Watts also expressed his keen interest in the patterns that occur in Nature and which are repeated at the micro and macro scales.

Watts believed that these patterns are also repeated and reflected in humankind’s history and civilizations.

Through his books and lectures, Watts influenced many writers, artists, intellectuals and others around the globe.

When the Zen Buddhist teacher, Shunryu Suzuki, students criticised Alan Watts by commenting that:

We used to think Alan Watts was profound until we found the real thing

Shunryu Suzuki turned to them and said forcefully:

You completely miss the point about Alan Watts! You should notice what he has done. He is a great bodhisattva!

Alan Watts said of himself in his autobiography, In My Own Way:

I am a sedentary and contemplative character, an intellectual, a Brahmin, a mystic and also somewhat of a disreputable epicurean who has three wives, seven children and five grandchildren.

Many readers and listeners of Alan Watts’ writing and talks, however, agree with the writer, Elsa Gidlow:

Alan Watts’ writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity.

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