Alan Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and spiritual teacher who is largely responsible for popularizing ancient Eastern Zen philosophy in the modern West during the 1950s and 1960s. What made Watts' teachings so inviting was that he offered an entirely distinctive viewpoint on spirituality, energy, and inner wholeness in an age of anxiety and aptly expressed what it truly means to live a whole life of meaning and purpose.
ALAN WATTS' IMPACT ON EASTERN PHILOSOPHY
Much of what we take for granted or even simply as general knowledge in practices such as meditation and yoga have much of Watts' influences in them.
His best-written work would have to be his The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are from 1966, which acts as a bridge from his earlier writings as he debates with equal parts conviction and compassion that "the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East."
Watts investigates the source and the remedy of that mirage in a way that emanates from insightful apprehension as we challenge our social conditioning into a profound sense of lightness as we capitulate to the soothing mystery and interconnectedness of the universe.
EXPLORING "THE BOOK": WATTS' VISION OF SELFHOOD
In The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, Watts writes, "When we compare human with animal desire, we find many extraordinary differences."
Watts suggests a fascinating viewpoint on a longstanding argument - that our culture has its priorities muddled up, and that we need to live more in the present moment.
THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY: A MESSAGE FOR MODERN ANXIETY
The animal tends to eat with its stomach and the man with his brain. When the animal's stomach is full, he stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop. When he has eaten as much as his belly can take, he still feels empty, he still feels an urge for further gratification. This is largely due to anxiety, to the knowledge that a constant supply of food is uncertain.
Therefore eat as much as you can while you can. It is due, also, to the knowledge that, in an insecure world pleasure is uncertain. Therefore the immediate pleasure of eating must be exploited to the full, even though it does violence to the digestion.
THE VICIOUS CIRCLE OF HUMAN DESIRE IN MODERN CIVILIZATION
Human desire tends to be insatiable. We are so anxious for pleasure that we can never get enough of it. We stimulate our sense organs until they become insensitive so that if pleasure is to continue, they must have stronger and stronger stimulants. In self-defense, the body gets ill from the strain, but the body wants to go on and on. The brain is in pursuit of happiness, and because the brain is much more concerned about the future than the present it conceives happiness as the guarantee of an indefinitely long future of pleasures.
Yet the brain also knows that it does not have an indefinitely long future, so, to be happy, it must try to crowd all of the pleasures of paradise and eternity into the span of a few years.
WATTS' CRITIQUE: THE BRAIN'S PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
This is why modern civilization is in almost every respect a vicious circle. The source of this annoyance is that we live for the future. Yet the future never reaches us, as we move forward it becomes the present and the future continues to elude us.
BREAKING THE CYCLE: SLEEP, PLEASURE, AND REAL JOY
To pursue (the future) is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.
Thus the "brainy" economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle that must either manufacture more and more pleasures or provide constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions.
Watts contends that one of the evils of contemporary society is that we deem sleep to be a waste of our time, and that life is too short. Interestingly, we seem to have no issues with watching TV or chasing our pleasurable fantasies.
BEYOND THE CIRCULAR MAZE
Animals spend much of their time dozing and idling pleasantly, but, because life is short, human beings must cram into the years the highest possible amount of consciousness, alertness, and chronic insomnia to be sure not to miss the last fragment of startling pleasure.
Our pursuit of endless stimulus and gratification comes with a hefty price. We become "incapable of real pleasure, insensitive to the most acute and subtle joys of life." The more normal the pleasure, the less it fascinates us. We would rather watch TV.
When it comes to our desires and wants and what makes us question these, Watts is ruthless.
Generally speaking, the civilized man does not know what he wants. He works for success, fame, a happy marriage, fun, to help other people, or to become a "real person." But these are not real wants because they are not actual things. They are the by-products, the flavors, and atmospheres of real things-shadows which have no existence apart from some substance. Money is the perfect symbol of all such desires, being a mere symbol of real wealth, and to make it one's goal is the most blatant example of confusing measurements with reality.
Given the above commentary, Watts believes we cannot label ourselves as being materialistic. People today are in love and worship with not things, but "measures, not solids but surfaces."
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