Top 10 Reasons You Should Like Alan Watts

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“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
-Alan Watts

Alan Watts is cool, and among the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. And even though he died 35 years ago, when you listen to his lectures it’s as if he’s speaking about the present. There’s a great series of his recordings called “Out of Your Mind”, plus he has other great lectures on religion and philosophy. Very entertaining and one of my favs.

Here’s a snippet of his bio from Wikipedia:

Alan Wilson Watts (January 6, 1915 – November 16, 1973) was a philosopher, writer, speaker, and student of comparative religion. He was best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Asian philosophies for a Western audience.

He wrote more than twenty-five books and numerous articles on subjects such as personal identity, the true nature of reality, higher consciousness, meaning of life, concepts and images of God and the pursuit of happiness, relating his experience to scientific knowledge and to the teachings of Eastern and Western religions or philosophies (Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Hinduism, etc.).

TOP 10 REASONS YOU SHOULD LIKE ALAN WATTS:

1. ERIC CARTMAN LOVES HIM – The South Park guys are into him. There’s something unique about you if you’re cool enough to have parts of your lectures set to Terence & Philip style animation (South Park fans know what I’m talking about).

You can see more at the Alan Watts Theater or on YouTube.

2. HILARIOUS – Very funny and entertaining. Interweaves many funny stories into his lectures. (You can hear people cracking up in some of the old recordings.)

3. RELEVANT – An oddly modern way of discussing the world (despite his recordings being from the 60s).

4. PROLIFIC – With his 25 books, he was among the first to popularize Eastern philosophy in the West (or at least get more people talking about it.)

5. RELAXING – He’s like a human Quaalude, (akin to Bob Ross), his style of speech is very relaxing to listen to. That being said, he will NOT put you to sleep.

6. INFLUENTIAL – His style and delivery have been extremely influential on the self-help and spiritual movement. You can clearly see his influence in just about every popular western spiritual thinker from Wayne Dyer to Eckhart Tolle.

7. POPULAR – His work has had a resurgence over the last few years, and is very popular on college campuses today.

8. HUMBLE – Seems like he was a genuinely cool guy – doesn’t seem to have subtle (or not so subtle) smell of self-righteousness we see in a lot of modern spiritual thinkers.

9. BOAT OWNER – The man lived on a boat in Sausalito.

10. WORLD VIEW – A very cool way of viewing the world (from Wikipedia):

• In several of his later publications, especially Beyond Theology and The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts put forward a worldview, drawing on Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, pantheism, and modern science; in which he maintains that the whole universe consists of God playing hide-and-seek (Maya (illusion)), hiding from himself by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting who he really is; the upshot being that we are all God in disguise. In this worldview, Watts asserts that our conception of ourself as an “ego in a bag of skin” is a myth; the entities we call the separate “things” are merely processes of the whole.

Alan Watts: A Conversation with Myself – Part 1

You can also hear some old recordings at the Alan Watt’s Podcast.

Descriptions of a few of Alan’s books and recordings:

Related Posts:

• Parable of Two Wolves
• Alan Watts Explains “Prickles & Goo”
• Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (in claymation)

Tagged as: Alan Watts, Spritual Thinkers