Alan Watts Biography and Interesting Topics - Jillian Gulledge 006 (FINAL)

Alan Watts (1915-1973) was a British philosopher that merged Eastern philosophies into a western culture. As a child, he showed a lot of interest in Asian culture and art, and his parents even encouraged him to start writing his ideas and appreciations down. By age 17, he managed to put together a small, informational booklet on Zen Buddhism and D. T. Suzuki’s writing. When Watts was 23, he moved to the United States and began teaching in different bookstores and other locations around New York. After speaking and teaching around New York City, Watts wrote and published The Meaning of Happiness, a book that focuses on getting in touch with yourself in order to have opportunities of enlightenment and a union with God. After that publication, he moved to Chicago and enrolled in a theology school. He shortly became an Episcopal priest after he was finished with school. Watts was only a priest for around 6 years before returning to New York and continuing to write. The first book he published after his move was The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, and it emphasizes that “by acknowledging what we do not—and cannot—know, [omit] we can learn anything truly worth knowing.” By this time (1950), Watts’s career began picking up a lot of momentum. He hadn’t been in New York long before receiving an invitation to teach a class on Buddhism in San Francisco, CA at the American Academy of Asian Studies. His classes became so popular and drew such large crowds, he began extending his discussions to more public settings and even received air time on the radio in the early 50s. His radio show aired on Saturdays and then replayed on Sundays. The replays of his podcasts went on for nearly 60 years- longer than Watts was even alive. By the 1960s, people began really picking up Watts’s ideas and integrating them into their lives, as well as other Eastern philosophies such as D. T. Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism and his followers such as Eric Fromm, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Philip Whalen. This rise in Eastern ideas in the US became known as the “Zen Boom” and aided what most known as the “hippie movement” or the counterculture of the 60s. Watts published his own book on Zen called The Way of Zen, which embodied Zen Buddhism as a way to liberate ones’ spiritual self from the Western world’s outlook on spirituality. Alan Watts relocated to live on a ferryboat in the late sixties, and then moved deeper into the mountains when his boat became an attraction. Watts loved living on the mountain, and wrote a lot of books there before he passed away of congestive heart failure in 1973. Watts firmly believed that Western culture could learn a thing or two from the Eastern perspective of an “organism-environment [identity]” rather than how Western culture promotes the ego and “lonely bag of skin.” Alan Watts mentions that the way we view ourselves, separate from the environment and mainly concerned with “I,” is part of the reason we feel so much tension and feel so alienated. Watts believed that we could make a better society for ourselves if we “go back to the way things were originally” where we value everyone and the environment in the same way we would view ourselves now. While Watts’s philosophies contained many Eastern ideas, he was also influenced by some notable Western philosophies, such as William James and Carl Jung. Watts often spoke on Western ideas and culture through the lens of Eastern thought, and made his lectures, speeches, and texts more like a conversation and much more fluid. He used his Western influences to fuel his beliefs about psychological issues like the unconscious and id, ego, and superego.



Watts was largely influenced by Eastern philosophies that focus on the unity between people and the rest of the universe.

Quiz Questions (From Text):

1. From a young age, Alan Watts was interested in what cultures?

2. How old was Alan Watts when he compiled his first “book?”

3. What career path did Watts pursue before teaching?

4. Why did Watts begin speaking publicly and on the radio after he began teaching in California?

5. How long did Watts’s radio show air?


Discussion Questions (From the videos):
1. What is your ego? Is it tangible? Can you change it? Do you embrace it, or try to hide it?
2. If you came upon a large amount of money, would you save it and live below your means, or do you think you would spend it and "treat yourself" (realistically speaking)?
3. Do you think that psychedelics should be used for healing (in any aspect)? Could hallucinating or "tripping" teach you anything, or are they just blinding you from seeing things how they "truly are?"






Links to my 2 peer comments:
http://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-philosophy-behind-show-veggietales.html#comment-form
https://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2019/04/evolution-of-motley-crue-final-draft.html?showComment=1556208850186#c6591136387094312781