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Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British-born philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.
Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. He also explored human consciousness, in the essay "The New Alchemy" (1958), and in the book The Joyous Cosmology (1962).
Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. His legacy has been kept alive by his son, Mark Watts, and many of his recorded talks and lectures are available on the Internet. 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), in 1915, living at 3 (now 5) Holbrook Lane. His father was a representative for the London office of the Michelin Tyre Company, his mother a housewife whose father had been a missionary. With modest financial means, they chose to live in pastoral surroundings and Alan, an only child, grew up playing at brookside, learning the names of wildflowers and butterflies. Probably because of the influence of his mother's religious family the Buchans, an interest in "ultimate things" seeped in. But it mixed with Alan's own interests in storybook fables and romantic tales of the mysterious Far East.
Watts also later wrote of a mystical vision he experienced while ill with a fever as a child. During this time he was influenced by Far Eastern landscape paintings and embroideries that had been given to his mother by missionaries returning from China. 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...". These works of art emphasized the participative relationship of man in nature, a theme that stood fast throughout his life, and one that he often writes about. 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 Christianity 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 now run by the barrister Christmas Humphreys. Watts became the organization's secretary at 16 (1931). The young Watts explored several styles of meditation during these years.
Watts attended The King's School, Canterbury next door to Canterbury Cathedral. 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 high school, Watts worked in a printing house and later a bank. He spent his spare time involved with the Buddhist Lodge and also under the tutelage of a "rascal guru" named Dimitrije Mitrinovic. (Mitrinovic was himself influenced by Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, G. I. 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.g., Nicholas Roerich [an artist, scholar, and mystic], Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, and prominent theosophists like Alice Bailey). In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, heard D. T. Suzuki read a paper, and afterwards was able to meet this esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism. Beyond these discussions and personal encounters, Watts absorbed, by studying the available scholarly literature, the fundamental concepts and terminology of the main philosophies of India and East Asia.
In 1936, Watts's first book was published, The Spirit of Zen. In The Way of Zen 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."
In 1938 he and his bride left England to live in America. Watts would become an American citizen in 1943. He had married Eleanor Everett, whose mother Ruth Fuller Everett was involved with a traditional Zen Buddhist circle in New York. A few years later, Ruth Fuller 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.
Watts's fascination with the Zen (or Ch'an) tradition—beginning during the 1930s—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. "Work," "life," and "art" were not demoted due to a spiritual focus. In his writing, he referred to it as "the great Ch'an (or Zen) synthesis of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism after A.D. 700 in China."
After heading up the Academy for a few years, Watts left the faculty for a freelance career in the mid-1950s. In 1953, he began what became a long-running weekly radio program at Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley, which continued until his death in 1973. Like other volunteer programmers at the listener-sponsored station, Watts was not paid for his broadcasts; they did, however, gain him a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area. These programs were later carried by additional Pacifica stations, and were re-broadcast many times over in the decades following his death. The original tapes are currently held by the Pacifica Radio Archives, based at KPFK in Los Angeles, and at the Electronic University archive founded by his son, Mark Watts (alanwatts.org).
In 1957 when 42, Watts published one of his best known books, The Way of Zen, which focused on philosophical explication and history. Besides drawing on the lifestyle and philosophical background of Zen, in India and China, Watts introduced ideas drawn from general semantics (directly from the writings of Alfred Korzybski and also from Norbert Wiener's early work on cybernetics, which had recently been published). Watts offered analogies from cybernetic principles possibly applicable to the Zen life. The book sold well, eventually becoming a modern classic, and helped widen his lecture circuit.
In 1958, Watts toured parts of Europe with his father, meeting the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung and the German psychotherapist Karlfried Graf Dürckheim.
Upon returning to the United States, Watts recorded two seasons of a television series (1959–1960) for KQED public television in San Francisco, "Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life."
In his writings of the 1950s, he conveyed his admiration for the practicality in the historical achievements of Chán (Zen) in the Far East, for it had fostered farmers, architects, builders, folk physicians, artists, and administrators among the monks who had lived in the monasteries of its lineages. In his mature work, he presents himself as "Zennist" in spirit as he wrote in his last book, Tao: The Watercourse Way. Child rearing, the arts, cuisine, education, law and freedom, architecture, sexuality, and the uses and abuses of technology were all of great interest to him. Though known for his Zen teachings, he was also influenced by ancient Hindu scriptures, especially Vedanta, and spoke extensively about the nature of the divine Reality Man that Man misses, how the contradiction of opposites is the method of life and the means of cosmic and human evolution, how our fundamental Ignorance is rooted in the exclusive nature of mind and ego, how to come in touch with the Field of Consciousness and Light, and other cosmic principles. These are discussed in great detail in dozens of hours of audio that are in part captured in the 'Out of Your Mind' series.
Watts sought to resolve his feelings of alienation from the institutions of marriage and the values of American society, as revealed in his classic comments on love relationships in "Divine Madness" and on perception of the organism-environment in "The Philosophy of Nature". In looking at social issues he was quite concerned with the necessity for international peace, for tolerance and understanding among disparate cultures. He also came to feel acutely conscious of a growing ecological predicament; as one instance, in the early 1960s he wrote: "Can any melting or burning imaginable get rid of these ever-rising mountains of ruin—especially when the things we make and build are beginning to look more and more like rubbish even before they are thrown away?" These concerns were later expressed in a television pilot made for NET filmed at his mountain retreat in 1971 in which he noted that the single track of conscious attention was wholly inadequate for interactions with a multi-tracked world.
In October 1973, Watts returned from a European lecture tour to his cabin in Druid Heights. Friends of Watts had been concerned for him for some time over what they considered his excessive drinking of alcohol. On 16 November 1973, he died in his sleep. He was reported to have been under treatment for a heart condition. His body was cremated in a Buddhist ceremony shortly thereafter.
Watts married three times and had seven children (five daughters and two sons). Watts' eldest daughters, Joan Watts and Anne Watts own and manage most of the copyrights to his books. His son, Mark Watts, currently serves as curator of his father's audio, video and film and has published content of some of his spoken lectures in print format. Watts met Eleanor Everett in 1936, when her mother, Ruth Fuller Everett, brought her to London to study piano. They met at the Buddhist Lodge, were engaged the following year and married in April 1938. A daughter, Joan, was born November 1938 and another, Anne, was born in 1942. Their marriage ended eleven years later, but Watts continued to correspond with his former mother-in-law.
In 1950, Watts married Dorothy DeWitt and moved to San Francisco in early 1951 to teach. They began a family that grew to include five children: Tia, Mark, Richard, Lila, and Diane. The couple separated in the early sixties after Watts met Mary Jane Yates King while lecturing in New York. After a difficult divorce he married King in 1964. Watts lived with Mary Jane in Sausalito, California, in the mid-1960s. He divided his later years between a houseboat in Sausalito called the Vallejo, and a secluded cabin in Druid Heights, on the southwest flank of Mount Tamalpais north of San Francisco, California.
More information:
Code:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1501668.Alan_W_Watts |
Works
Alan W. Watts - Buddhism Religion Of No Religion
Alan W. Watts - Do You Do It Or Does It Do You
Alan W. Watts - Eastern And Western Zen
Alan W. Watts - Eastern And Western Zen II
Alan W. Watts - Eastern Religion Lectures
Alan W. Watts - Ecology And Religion
Alan W. Watts - Game Theory Of Ethics
Alan W. Watts - Meditation
Alan W. Watts - Myth And Religion
Alan W. Watts - Oriental Philosophy
Alan W. Watts - Out Of The Trap
Alan W. Watts - Out Of Your Mind
Alan W. Watts - Philosophies Of Asia
Alan W. Watts - Philosophy And Society
Alan W. Watts - Still The Mind
Alan W. Watts - Strange Prayers
Alan W. Watts - The Book
Alan W. Watts - The Joker
Alan W. Watts - The Summer Of Love
Alan W. Watts - The Tao Of Philosophy
Alan W. Watts - The Way Of Zen
Alan W. Watts - Who Is It That Knows There Is No Ego
Alan W. Watts - You're It
Alan W. Watts - Zen And The Controlled Accident
Alan W. Watts - Zen Clues
Alan W. Watts - Zen Mind Beginners Mind
Code:
Works
http://rapidgator.net/file/9c6cc3579b74a6cb662e55a9b1af8f5d/Buddhism_Religion_Of_No_Religion.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/9e783423c5ffa80ee5e7640b5147d037/Do_You_Do_It_Or_Does_It_Do_You.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/d4d50350c10834686ddfee286e167912/Eastern_And_Western_Zen.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/01b45fb9ae89015c6d46fb1c78022aa9/Eastern_And_Western_Zen_II.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/810b3914b2da9b0e7f2857e8ec04db22/Eastern_Religion_Lectures.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/5fb08c9d1ae30f47028dcd46de0b5344/Ecology_And_Religion.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/fe257ae8179931d5b2842bfe44e68a52/Game_Theory_Of_Ethics.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/9a83dfff09356636c01763f05b3b7695/Meditation.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/4809cc9ecf50ed41d33a326c34bed690/Myth_And_Religion.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/9b592d21d6b2a59a0d518b636535460d/Oriental_Philosophy.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/5af82e8dcbcc52340003b64281787a88/Out_Of_The_Trap.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/deab25108118b0a977aa09a3876824df/Out_Of_Your_Mind.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/177ca8a04b3d85a3773a9b2b9204dbac/Philosophies_Of_Asia.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/3b9978efde9bee425d179bea97e4d504/Philosophy_And_Society.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/9cef96920d09d73186cef3eb74f883aa/Still_The_Mind.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/4f840a4ee478227c3b444c47beafbc53/Strange_Prayers.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/e3598c66ee35e1bc5189ce7954dc0698/The_Book.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/d743ce43799bdd56c8257b6188acc4de/The_Joker.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/33d136a36c9eb7b54b68ed3401225dd8/The_Summer_Of_Love.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/ceb78afe949d80eb55845d6c6dd5e5f8/The_Tao_Of_Philosophy.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/64d448cf46ad59ab8bea104ded141c42/The_Way_Of_Zen.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/00fc326395616cb2c2ae4cd5102db10b/Who_Is_It_That_Knows_There_Is_No_Ego.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/529b042a456031dfd001381d49c25e64/Youre_It.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/4819f289ec50780787d70c1f7023499b/Zen_And_The_Contolled_Accident.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/44701cd3051c033cdfabeac158696a24/Zen_Clues.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/3d13543e44be834a7257c2d76804e76e/Zen_Mind_Beginners_Mind.rar.html |
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