To this day, Alan Watts's impactful and wise words circulate through the culture. We find them in the many books he left behind, countless lectures and pop-culture references galore. Renowned scholar and teacher, Joseph Campbell once said of him:

"The pomposities of prodigious learning could be undone by him with a turn of phrase. One stood before him, disarmed and laughed at what had just been oneself."

While it is no easy feat to distill the many whimsical phrases and knowledge Watts left behind, these quotes attempt to paint a broad picture of the Eastern scholar and philosopher-entertainer.

Here are some of the best Alan Watts quotes.

What is Zen? Better to ask what isn't Zen. Watts was one of a kind when it came to articulating what cannot be said. The ineffable comes down to an Earthly speakable form when Watts wanted to probe into the peculiarities of paradox.

"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes."

"I prefer not to translate the word Tao at all because to us Tao is a sort of nonsense syllable, indicating the mystery that we can never understand the unity that underlies the opposites."

"A proper exposition of Zen should tease us out of thought, and leave the mind like an open window instead of a panel of stained glass."

Having obtained both a master's degree in theology and becoming an Episcopal priest, Watts had a thoroughly rounded Christian education on the concept of God. With his boundless knowledge of Eastern traditions, mysticism and ancient history Watts had a refreshingly comparative and unique take on the word and concept.

"So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you're all that, only you're pretending you're not. And it's perfectly O.K. to pretend you're not, to be perfectly convinced, because this is the whole notion of drama."

"How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god."

Watts wasn't afraid to tackle one of the great philosophical questions that has faced all of humankind since time immemorial. He answers it with irreverent wit and a life-affirming answer that'll swing the worst of nihilists among us.

"The physical universe is basically playful. There's no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn't going anywhere; that is to say, it doesn't have a destination that it ought to arrive at. But it is best understood by analogy to music, because music as an art form is essentially playful."

"What happens if you know that there is nothing you can do to be better? It's kind of a relief isn't it? You say 'Well, now what do I do?' When you are freed from being out to improve yourself, your own nature will begin to take over."

Love ranks up there with the other mysteries of life. There are many degrees of love that we float and flounder through each day. Whether it's the whirlwind romantic kind, the love of god, country or self Alan Watts sets the record straight.

"Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love."

"The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing."

"And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom."

Humans are an interesting and humorous species. Watts loved to riff and pick apart the hypocrisy and idiocy endemic to culture and mankind's perception of itself. Whether it was ripping apart the nonsensical education system or ersatz self-help meditation Watts was an expert in the takedown of such mendacity.

"When you tell a girl how beautiful she is, she will say, 'Now isn't that just like a man! All you men think about is bodies. O.K., so I'm beautiful, but I got my body from my parents and it was just luck. I prefer to be admired for myself, not my chassis.' Poor little chauffeur! All she is saying is that she has lost touch with her own astonishing wisdom and ingenuity, and wants to be admired for some trivial tricks that she can perform with her conscious attention. And we are all in the same situation, having dissociated ourselves from our bodies and from the whole network of forces in which bodies can come to birth and live."

"This is not a materialistic civilization at all. It is a civilization devoted to the hatred and destruction of material, its conversion into junk and poison gas. And therefore, one of the most sacred missions to be imposed upon those who would be liberated from this culture is that they shall love material, that they shall love color, that they shall dress beautifully, that they shall cook well, that they shall live in lovely houses, and that they shall preserve the face of nature."

"The word 'person' comes from the latin word 'persona' which referred to the masks worn by actors in which sound would come through. The 'person' is the mask the role you're playing. And all of your friends and relations and teachers are busy telling you who you are and what your role in life is."

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Alan Watts quotes that will change your perspective on life ...

Constipation

What's likely to happen when you cut out common sources of fiber from your diet? Constipation. A 2015 study involving children on the keto diet showed that regular constipation was extremely common among participants, affecting about 65 percent of them.

"Many of the richest sources of fiber, like beans, fruit, and whole grains are restricted on the ketogenic diet," registered dietician Edwina Clark told Everyday Health. "As a result, ketogenic eaters miss out on the benefits of fiber-rich diet such as regular laxation and microbiome support. The microbiome has been implicated in everything from immune function to mental health."

Still, the keto diet doesn't need to lead to fiber deficiency: avocados, flaxseed, almonds, pecans and chia seeds can all provide fiber while still keeping you in ketosis when consumed in the right amounts.

Vitamin deficiency

Any diet that prohibits you from eating many types of fruits, vegetables and other foods is bound to leave you vulnerable to vitamin and mineral deficiencies, and it's for this reason many doctors only advise going on the keto diet over the short term.

"Keto is not a great long-term diet, as it is not a balanced diet," says Nancy Rahnama, M.D., M.S., an internal medicine and bariatric specialist in Los Angeles. "A diet that is devoid of fruit and vegetables will result in long-term micronutrient deficiencies that can have other consequences. The keto diet can be used for short-term fat loss, as long as it is under medical supervision."

On the keto diet, your body begins to shed fat, water and glycogen, and as this happens you lose key electrolytes, such as sodium, potassium and magnesium. When you're running low on these electrolytes, you might experience headaches or extreme fatigue. These losses are most pronounced during the first few weeks after you enter ketosis, so if you're going to start the keto diet it's best to plan ahead to make sure you get healthy amounts of these electrolytes and other vitamins and minerals either through supplements or a thoughtfully-designed meal plan.

Muscle loss

Some research suggests that the keto diet can lead to the loss of lean body mass, which includes muscle protein.

"Muscle loss on the ketogenic diet is an ongoing area of research," Clark told Everyday Health. "Small studies suggest that people on the ketogenic diet lose muscle even when they continue resistance training. This may be related to the fact that protein alone is less effective for muscle building than protein and carbohydrates together after exercise."

The website sci-fit, which compiled a survey of the research on the keto diet, found:

"We generally see greater lean body mass (LBM) loss in ketogenic diet groups. Note that lean body mass contains water, glycogen, and muscle protein, by definition. It is hard to say with certainty that LBM loss implies greater "dry" muscle protein loss. "Wet" LBM can come and go quickly because it consists of water and glycogen."

In terms of gaining muscle, it seems protein alone doesn't do as well as it does when paired with complex carbs. These carbs don't become part of the muscle fiber, but they do help speed up the process, in part by helping cells regain glycogen a key source of fuel during exercise.

The 'keto flu'

One of the most immediate side effects of the keto diet is the "keto flu," a suite of symptoms that many experience in the first couple weeks after entering ketosis. Similar to the flu, these symptoms can include fatigue, brain fog, dizziness, vomiting, nausea and stomach pain.

"The keto flu is definitely real," registered dietician Scott Keatley told Everyday Health. "Your body functions really well on carbohydrates that's what it was designed for. When it switches to fat burning, it becomes less efficient at making energy."

The keto flu and the accompanying sugar cravings often leads people to give up the diet and begin scarfing down carbs, but those who stick it out usually report that the symptoms clear up after a few days or a couple weeks.

Kidney damage

Some people inflict damage on their kidneys when they switch to the kidney diet because they eat too much meat and don't drink enough water. This can lead to an increase in uric acid, which is known to cause kidney stones.

"If you're going to do keto, there's a better and a worse way to do it," registered dietician Kim Yawitz told Everyday Health. "Loading your plate with meats, and especially processed meats, may increase your risk for kidney stones and gout... High intake of animal proteins makes your urine more acidic and increases calcium and uric acid levels. This combination makes you more susceptible to kidney stones, while high uric acid can increase your risk for gout."

Of course, a responsible keto diet plan need not result in damage to the kidneys. In addition to monitoring meat consumption, a 2007 study on kidney stone development within young participants on the keto diet found that taking oral potassium citrate tablets seemed to be effective at preventing kidney stones.

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Alan Watts was an early proponent of basic income - Big Think

During the 1950s and 1960s, British philosopher and writer Alan Watts began popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, offering a wholly different perspective on inner wholeness in the age of anxiety and what it really means to live a life of purpose. We owe much of todays mainstream adoption of practices like yoga and meditation to Wattss influence. His 1966 masterwork The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (public library) builds upon his indispensable earlier work as Watts argues 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. He explores the cause and cure of that illusion in a way that flows from profound unease as we confront our cultural conditioning into a deep sense of lightness as we surrender to the comforting mystery and interconnectedness of the universe.

Envisioned as a packet of essential advice a parent might hand down to his child on the brink of adulthood as initiation into the central mystery of life, this existential manual is rooted in what Watts calls a cross-fertilization of Western science with an Eastern intuition.

Though strictly nonreligious, the book explores many of the core inquiries which religions have historically tried to address the problems of life and love, death and sorrow, the universe and our place in it, what it means to have an I at the center of our experience, and what the meaning of existence might be. In fact, Watts begins by pulling into question how well-equipped traditional religions might be to answer those questions:

The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are as now practiced like exhausted mines: very hard to dig. With some exceptions not too easily found, their ideas about man and the world, their imagery, their rites, and their notions of the good life dont seem to fit in with the universe as we now know it, or with a human world that is changing so rapidly that much of what one learns in school is already obsolete on graduation day.

Watts considers the singular anxiety of the age, perhaps even more resonant today, half a century and a manic increase of pace later:

There is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out.

He weighs how philosophy might alleviate this central concern by contributing a beautiful addition to the definitions of what philosophy is and recognizing the essential role of wonder in the human experience:

Most philosophical problems are to be solved by getting rid of them, by coming to the point where you see that such questions as Why this universe? are a kind of intellectual neurosis, a misuse of words in that the question sounds sensible but is actually as meaningless as asking Where is this universe? when the only things that are anywhere must be somewhere inside the universe. The task of philosophy is to cure people of such nonsense. . . . Nevertheless, wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.

At the heart of the human condition, Watts argues, is a core illusion that fuels our deep-seated sense of loneliness the more we subscribe to the myth of the sole ego, one reflected in the most basic language we use to make sense of the world:

We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that I myself is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body a center which confronts an external world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. I came into this world. You must face reality. The conquest of nature.

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not come into this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean waves, the universe peoples. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated egos inside bags of skin.

(A curious aside for music aficionados and fans of the show Weeds: Watts uses the phrase little boxes made of ticky-tacky to describe the homogenizing and perilous effect of the American quest for dominance over nature , space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, and insects instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious order. The following year, Malvina Reynolds used the phrase in the lyrics to her song Little Boxes, which satirizes suburbia and the development of the middle class. The song became a hit for Pete Seeger in 1963 and was used by Showtime as the opening credits score for the first three seasons of Jenji Kohans Weeds.)

Religions, Watts points out, work to reinforce rather than liberate us from this sense of separateness, for at their heart lies a basic intolerance for uncertainty the very state embracing which is fundamental to our happiness, as modern psychology has indicated, and crucial to the creative process, as Keats has eloquently articulated. Watts writes:

Religions are divisive and quarrelsome. They are a form of one-upmanship because they depend upon separating the saved from the damned, the true believers from the heretics, the in-group from the out-group. . . . All belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty.

In a sentiment that Alan Lightman would come to echo more than half a century later in his remarkable meditation on science and what faith really means, Watts adds:

Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness an act of trust in the unknown.

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No considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

Instead, Watts proposes that we need a new domain, not of ideas alone, but of experience and feeling, something that serves as a point of departure, not a perpetual point of reference and offers not a new Bible but a new way of understanding human experience, a new feeling of what it is to be an I.' In recognizing and fully inhabiting that feeling, he argues, lies the greatest taboo of human culture:

Our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

And yet, he argues, the sense of I and the illusion of its separateness from the rest of the universe is so pervasive and so deeply rooted in the infrastructure of our language, our institutions, and our cultural conventions that we find ourselves unable to experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. The antidote lies in recognizing not merely that we belong to and with the rest of universe, but that there is no rest in the first place we are the universe.

Still, Watts cautions that this is not to be confused with the idea of unselfishness promoted by many religions and ideologies, which is the effort to identify with others and their needs while still under the strong illusion of being no more than a skin-contained ego:

Such unselfishness is apt to be a highly refined egotism, comparable to the in-group which plays the game of were-more-tolerant-than-you.

Echoing C.S. Lewiss advice to children on duty and love, Watts writes:

Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.

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Our whole knowledge of the world is, in one sense, self-knowledge. For knowing is a translation of external events into bodily processes, and especially into states of the nervous system and the brain: we know the world in terms of the body, and in accordance with its structure.

One thing that reinforces our isolated sensation of self, Watts argues, is our biological wiring to err on always either side of the figure-ground illusion, only ever able to see one half of the whole and remaining blind to the rest. He illustrates this with a beautiful analogy:

All your five senses are differing forms of one basic sensesomething like touch. Seeing is highly sensitive touching. The eyes touch, or feel, light waves and so enable us to touch things out of reach of our hands. Similarly, the ears touch sound waves in the air, and the nose tiny particles of dust and gas. But the complex patterns and chains of neurons which constitute these senses are composed of neuron units which are capable of changing between just two states: on or off. To the central brain the individual neuron signals either yes or no thats all. But, as we know from computers which employ binary arithmetic in which the only figures are 0 and 1, these simple elements can be formed into the most complex and marvelous patterns.

In this respect our nervous system and 0/1 computers are much like everything else, for the physical world is basically vibration. Whether we think of this vibration in terms of waves or of particles, or perhaps wavicles, we never find the crest of a wave without a trough or a particle without an interval, or space, between itself and others. In other words, there is no such thing as a half wave, or a particle all by itself without any space around it. There is no on without off, no up without down.

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While eyes and ears actually register and respond to both the up-beat and the down-beat of these vibrations, the mind, that is to say our conscious attention, notices only the up-beat. The dark, silent, or off interval is ignored. It is almost a general principle that consciousness ignores intervals, and yet cannot notice any pulse of energy without them. If you put your hand on an attractive girls knee and just leave it there, she may cease to notice it. But if you keep patting her knee, she will know you are very much there and interested. But she notices and, you hope, values the on more than the off. Nevertheless, the very things that we believe to exist are always on/offs. Ons alone and offs alone do not exist.

Indeed, he argues that the general conditioning of consciousness is to ignore intervals. (Weve seen the everyday manifestation of this in Alexandra Horowitzs fascinating exploration of what we dont see.) We register the sound but not the silence that surrounds it. We think of space as nothingness in which certain somethings objects, planetary bodies, our own bodies hang. And yet:

Solids and spaces go together as inseparably as insides and outsides. Space is the relationship between bodies, and without it there can be neither energy nor motion.

What further fuels this half-sighted reliance on intervals is the way our attention which has been aptly called an intentional, unapologetic discriminator works by dividing the world up into processable parts, then stringing those together into a pixelated collage of separates which we then accept as a realistic representation of the whole that was there in the first place:

Attention is narrowed perception. It is a way of looking at life bit by bit, using memory to string the bits together as when examining a dark room with a flashlight having a very narrow beam. Perception thus narrowed has the advantage of being sharp and bright, but it has to focus on one area of the world after another, and one feature after another. And where there are no features, only space or uniform surfaces, it somehow gets bored and searches about for more features. Attention is therefore something like a scanning mechanism in radar or television. . . . But a scanning process that observes the world bit by bit soon persuades its user that the world is a great collection of bits, and these he calls separate things or events. We often say that you can only think of one thing at a time. The truth is that in looking at the world bit by bit we convince ourselves that it consists of separate things, and so give ourselves the problem of how these things are connected and how they cause and effect each other. The problem would never have arisen if we had been aware that it was just our way of looking at the world which had chopped it up into separate bits, things, events, causes, and effects.

Nature and nurture conspire in the architecture of this illusion of separateness, which Watts argues begins in childhood as our parents, our teachers, and our entire culture help us to be genuine fakes, which is precisely what is meant by being a real person.' He offers a fascinating etymology of the concept into which we anchor the separate ego:

The person, from the Latin persona, was originally the megaphone-mouthed mask used by actors in the open-air theaters of ancient Greece and Rome, the mask through (per) which the sound (sonus) came.

Indeed, this bisection is perhaps most powerful and painful not in our sense of separateness from the universe but in our sense of being divided within ourselves a feeling particularly pronounced among creative people, a kind of diamagnetic relationship between person and persona. While the oft-cited metaphor of the rider and the elephant might explain the dual processing of the brain, it is also a dangerous dichotomy that only perpetuates our sense of being separate from and within ourselves. Watts writes:

The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body a rational soul and an animal soul, a rider and a horse, a good guy with better instincts and finer feelings and a rascal with rapacious lusts and unruly passions. Hence the marvelously involved hypocrisies of guilt and penitence, and the frightful cruelties of punishment, warfare, and even self-torment in the name of taking the side of the good soul against the evil. The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its inseparable shadow, and the more it disowns its shadow, the more it becomes it.

Thus for thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white.

Returning to our inability to grasp intervals as the basic fabric of world and integrate foreground with background, content with context, Watts considers how the very language with which we name things and events our notation system for what our attention notices reflects this basic bias towards separateness:

Today, scientists are more and more aware that what things are, and what they are doing, depends on where and when they are doing it. If, then, the definition of a thing or event must include definition of its environment, we realize that any given thing goes with a given environment so intimately and inseparably that it is more difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings.

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Individual is the Latin form of the Greek atom that which cannot be cut or divided any further into separate parts. We cannot chop off a persons head or remove his heart without killing him. But we can kill him just as effectively by separating him from his proper environment. This implies that the only true atom is the universe that total system of interdependent thing-events which can be separated from each other only in name. For the human individual is not built as a car is built. He does not come into being by assembling parts, by screwing a head onto a neck, by wiring a brain to a set of lungs, or by welding veins to a heart. Head, neck, heart, lungs, brain, veins, muscles, and glands are separate names but not separate events, and these events grow into being simultaneously and interdependently. In precisely the same way, the individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is rather literally to be spellbound.

So how are we to wake up from the trance and dissolve the paradox of the ego? It all comes down to the fundamental anxiety of existence, our inability to embrace uncertainty and reconcile death. Watts writes:

The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!

And so we return to the core of Watts philosophy, the basis of his earlier work, extending an urgent invitation to begin living with presence a message all the timelier in our age of worshipping productivity, which is by definition aimed at some future reward and thus takes us out of the present moment. Watts writes:

Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, Now, Ive arrived!

Traditionally, humanity has handled this paradox in two ways, either by withdrawing into the depths of consciousness, as monks and hermits do in their attempt to honor the impermanence of the world, or servitude for the sake of some future reward, as many religions encourage. Both of these, Watts argues, are self-defeating strategies:

Just because it is a hoax from the beginning, the personal ego can make only a phony response to life. For the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it as if it were quite other than himself and then trying to grasp it. Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.

But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship on the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts based on the realization that the only real I is the whole endless process. This realization is already in us in the sense that our bodies know it, our bones and nerves and sense-organs. We do not know it only in the sense that the thin ray of conscious attention has been taught to ignore it, and taught so thoroughly that we are very genuine fakes indeed.

The failure to recognize this harmonious interplay, Watts argues, has triggered a lamentable amount of conflict between nations, individuals, humanity and nature, and with the individual. Again and again, he returns to the notion of figure and ground, of a cohesive whole that masquerades as separate parts under the lens of our conditioned eye for separateness:

Our practical projects have run into confusion again and again through failure to see that individual people, nations, animals, insects, and plants do not exist in or by themselves. This is not to say only that things exist in relation to one another, but that what we call things are no more than glimpses of a unified process. Certainly, this process has distinct features which catch our attention, but we must remember that distinction is not separation. Sharp and clear as the crest of the wave may be, it necessarily goes with the smooth and less featured curve of the trough. In the Gestalt theory of perception this is known as the figure/ground relationship.

Noting our difficulty in noticing both the presence and the action of the background, Watts illustrates this with an example, which Riccardo Manzotti reiterated almost verbatim half a century later. Watts writes:

A still more cogent example of existence as relationship is the production of a rainbow. For a rainbow appears only when there is a certain triangular relationship between three components: the sun, moisture in the atmosphere, and an observer. If all three are present, and if the angular relationship between them is correct, then, and then only, will there be the phenomenon rainbow. Diaphanous as it may be, a rainbow is no subjective hallucination. It can be verified by any number of observers, though each will see it in a slightly different position.

Like the rainbow, all phenomena are interactions of elements of the whole, and the relationship between them always implies and reinforces that wholeness:

The universe implies the organism, and each single organism implies the universe only the single glance of our spotlight, narrowed attention, which has been taught to confuse its glimpses with separate things, must somehow be opened to the full vision

In recognizing this lies the cure for the illusion of the separate ego but this recognition cant be willed into existence, since the will itself is part of the ego:

Just as science overcame its purely atomistic and mechanical view of the world through more science, the ego-trick must be overcome through intensified self-consciousness. For there is no way of getting rid of the feeling of separateness by a so-called act of will, by trying to forget yourself, or by getting absorbed in some other interest. This is why moralistic preaching is such a failure: it breeds only cunning hypocrites people sermonized into shame, guilt, or fear, who thereupon force themselves to behave as if they actually loved others, so that their virtues are often more destructive, and arouse more resentment, than their vices.

In considering how an organism might realize this sense of implying the universe and how we might shake the ego-illusion in favor of a deeper sense of belonging, Watts expresses a certain skepticism for practices like yoga and meditation when driven by striving rather than total acceptance a skepticism all the more poignant amidst our age of ubiquitous yoga studios and meditation retreats, brimming with competitive yogis and meditators:

An experience of this kind cannot be forced or made to happen by any act of your fictitious will, except insofar as repeated efforts to be one-up on the universe may eventually reveal their futility. Dont try to get rid of the ego-sensation. Take it, so long as it lasts, as a feature or play of the total process like a cloud or wave, or like feeling warm or cold, or anything else that happens of itself. Getting rid of ones ego is the last resort of invincible egoism! It simply confirms and strengthens the reality of the feeling. But when this feeling of separateness is approached and accepted like any other sensation, it evaporates like the mirage that it is.

This is why I am not overly enthusiastic about the various spiritual exercises in meditation or yoga which some consider essential for release from the ego. For when practiced in order to get some kind of spiritual illumination or awakening, they strengthen the fallacy that the ego can toss itself away by a tug at its own bootstraps.

In asserting that the ego is exactly what it pretends it isnt not the epicenter of who we are but a false construct conditioned since childhood by social convention Watts echoes Albert Camus on our self-imposed prisons and reminds us:

There is no fate unless there is someone or something to be fated. There is no trap without someone to be caught. There is, indeed, no compulsion unless there is also freedom of choice, for the sensation of behaving involuntarily is known only by contrast with that of behaving voluntarily. Thus when the line between myself and what happens to me is dissolved and there is no stronghold left for an ego even as a passive witness, I find myself not in a world but as a world which is neither compulsive nor capricious. What happens is neither automatic nor arbitrary: it just happens, and all happenings are mutually interdependent in a way that seems unbelievably harmonious. Every this goes with every that. Without others there is no self, and without somewhere else there is no here, so that in this sense self is other and here is there.

(Perhaps this is what Gertrude Stein really meant when she wrote there is no there there.)

And therein lies the essence of what Watts is proposing not a negation of who we are, but an embracing of our wholeness by awakening from the zombie-like trance of separateness; not in resignation, but in active surrender to what Diane Ackerman so memorably termed the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else, that immutable recognition of the sum that masquerades as parts:

In immediate contrast to the old feeling, there is indeed a certain passivity to the sensation, as if you were a leaf blown along by the wind, until you realize that you are both the leaf and the wind. The world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside: they move together inseparably, and at first you feel a little out of control because the world outside is so much vaster than the world inside. Yet you soon discover that you are able to go ahead with ordinary activitiesto work and make decisions as ever, though somehow this is less of a drag. Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own. Eyes see and ears hear as wind blows and water flows. All space becomes your mind. Time carries you along like a river, but never flows out of the present: the more it goes, the more it stays, and you no longer have to fight or kill it.

[]

Once you have seen this you can return to the world of practical affairs with a new spirit. You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate you to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real you is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For you is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.

You do not ask what is the value, or what is the use, of this feeling. Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies?

Watts ends with a wonderful verse by the infinitely inspiring James Broughton:

This is Itand I am Itand You are Itand so is Thatand He is Itand She is Itand It is Itand That is That

No words can describe just how profoundly perspective-shifting The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are is in its entirety, and with what exquisite stickiness it stays with you for a lifetime.

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The Ego and the Universe: Alan Watts on Becoming Who You ...

In a thought-provoking lecture Alan Watts once posed this great question: "What would you do if money was no object?"

This pointed and hyperbolic question asks us to dig into the deeper truth of what it is we really want and desire in life and also question the symbolic importance we place on the almighty abstraction of the dollar.

Watts urged his listeners to detach themselves from the notion of chasing money to satisfy our desires. Easier said than done of course but in typical koan fashion, Watts manages to show us that when we instead seek something less material and more spiritually fulfilling, the money part won't become an issue in the end.

The gist of Watt's speech is as follows:

"So I always ask the question, 'what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?' Well, it's so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say well, we'd like to be painters, we'd like to be poets, we'd like to be writers, but as everybody knows you can't earn any money that way

Let's go through with it. What do you want to do? When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time To structure your existence with an objective of monetary gain is to spend a lifetime chasing an abstraction.

... And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is, you can eventually turn it you could eventually become a master of it. It's the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don't worry too much..."

Now money is a fundamental fact of our current constructed reality, even Alan Watts understood that. Barter, exchange, value, currency and what have you there is absolutely no feasible way around it. So leave your pipe dreams and utopian visions at the door, just entertain the question at face value for now. It's probing for something much deeper than some cheap ideological economic fix.

Alan Watts on money, possessions and lifestyle http://www.youtube.com

Pontificating on this issue in any regard is risky business as inherent contradictory and seemingly hypocritical charges are bound to be directed at its speaker.

Watts rightfully so, silenced any criticism for any monetary gain he received for his work. After all, he knew that he was playing the society game and needed to make a living for himself. Watts was a philosopher and quite good at what he did.

This line of questioning would lead to Watts making an important distinction on the nature of differentiating between money and wealth. On a personal level, he understood what wealth was to him and the limits of a human's capacity to experience luxury and excess:

"There are limits to the real wealth that any individual can consume... We cannot drive four cars at once, live simultaneously in six homes, take three tours at the same time, or devour 12 roasts of beef at one meal."

Watts explored the issue deeper in his anthology Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality. In the essay "Wealth Versus Money," Watts remarked on the inability for humankind to distinguish between the merely symbolic and the true.

He looks into our simple confusion between money and wealth:

"Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself. A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft. He needs real wealth, in the form of a fishing rod, a compass, an outboard motor with gas, and a female companion.

But this ingrained and archaic confusion of money with wealth is now the main reason we are not going ahead full tilt with the development of our technological genius for the production of more than adequate food, clothing, housing, and utilities for every person on earth."

This type of symbolic thinking manifests itself in all outlets of the physical world. In his essay, Watts makes a point about the how the fundamental confusion between money and wealth leads us to preposterous positions. He used the Great Depression as an example.

"Remember the Great Depression of the '30s? One day there was a flourishing consumer economy, with everyone on the up-and-up; and the next, unemployment, poverty, and bread lines,

What happened? The physical resources of the country the brain, brawn, and raw materials were in no way depleted, but there was a sudden absence of money, a so-called financial slump

Complex reasons for this kind of disaster can be elaborated at length by experts on banking and high finance who cannot see the forest for the trees..."

Watts makes no claim of being an economic or financial expert. Those to him are mere surface roles muddying the waters at the core of this issue he's trying to broach. Watts likens the absurdity to a man coming to work on the building of a house, the morning of the Depression and the boss saying to him:

Watts realized that there was going to be and will always be harsh resistance to this type of idea or rather awareness of the symbolic:

"What wasn't understood then, and still isn't really understood today, is that the reality of money is of the same type as the reality of centimeters, grams, hours, or lines of longitude. Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself.

It is not going to be at all easy to explain this to the world at large, because mankind has existed for perhaps one million years with relative material scarcity, and it is now roughly a mere one hundred years since the beginning of the industrial revolution."

Now wait just a minute before flinging out those Communist manifestos and leading a riot down Billionaire's row. Regulation and taxation on this abstraction is not the answer.

"To try to correct this irresponsibility by passing laws would be wide of the point, for most of the law has as little relation to life as money to wealth. On the contrary, problems of this kind are aggravated rather than solved by the paperwork of politics and law.

What is necessary is at once simpler and more difficult: only that financiers, bankers, and stockholders must turn themselves into real people and ask themselves exactly what they want out of life in the realization that this strictly practical and hardnosed question might lead to far more delightful styles of living than those they now pursue. Quite simply and literally, they must come to their senses for their own personal profit and pleasure."

So then we're brought back to the original question: what do I desire?

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Philosopher Alan Watts on money - Big Think

As a philosopher, writer, and orator, Alan Watts is credited as one of the foremost scholars to bring Eastern philosophies to a Western audience. Born in rural England, his interest in Eastern art and culture began at a young age. As a teenager, his first written interpretation of Zen was published in London; he would eventually write over twenty-five books. After coming to America in the late 1930s, Alan studied theology in Chicago, and then relocated to upstate New York where he wrote his first pivotal book, The Wisdom of Insecurity. In 1950, Alan moved to San Francisco and began teaching Buddhism at the American Academy of Asian Studies. Shortly thereafter, he was given his own public radio talk show, which expanded nationwide and he toured the country, lecturing and growing his audience. Over the course of his life, Alan was married three times, and had seven children who continue their fathers legacy through promoting and protecting his books, videos, and lectures. Alan passed away in 1973 in his home on Mount Tamalpais. (Click here to read the full biography.)

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Alan Watts was a prominent British philosopher, writer and speaker, who is recognized for interpreting and promoting Eastern Philosophy by making it accessible to the Western audience. His services as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley made him a very famous figure in San Francisco Bay Area.

Alan was born as Alan Wilson Watts onJanuary 6, 1915 in Chislehurst, Kent, England. Alan belonged to a middle class family, his father was employed at the London office of Michelin Tyre Company, while his mother was a housewife. His mothers devout religiousness had a meaningful impact on his upbringing. Alan attended the Kings School in Canterbury and during his teen years, he was presented with the opportunity to travel to France along with wealthy Epicurean, Francis Croshaw. Croshaw also influenced Alan with his Buddhist beliefs and practices. After completing his secondary education, he briefly worked in a painting house, and later, at a bank. Watts interests were piqued by philosophy, he began extensively reading works of philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry and Eastern wisdom. He encountered influential spiritual authors who had a profound impact in shaping his ideologies, such as, Nicholas Roerich, Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan and theosophists like Alice Bailey.

Alan learned Chinese, and did significant research in Zen Buddhism and the fundamental beliefs and practices of religions and philosophies of India and East Asia. Alan was a prominent member of the London Buddhist Lodge, and in 1931, he was appointed the secretary of the organization. In 1936, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, where he heard D.T. Suzuki, a prominent scholar of Zen Buddhism, who had a strong influence on his thoughts. The same year, inspired by the works of Suzuki, Watts published his first book, The Spirit of Zen. In 1938, he moved to America and began training in Zen Buddhism, however, unsatisfied with the methods of the teacher, he left Zen training. Alan then enrolled himself in the Anglican school of Sea-bury Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, where he studied Christian scriptures, theology and Church history and he received his Masters degree in theology. His thesis was published under the title, Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion.

In 1951, Alan Watts settled in California upon accepting a position in the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. He was also on the administration board of the academy for several years. During his stay at the Academy, he instructed himself in written Chinese as well as, Chinese brush calligraphy. Watts left the Academy to embark on a freelance career, and in 1953, he began his career as a radio programmer for the Pacifica Radio Station KPFA in Berkeley.

In 1957, Watts published his highly acclaimed and much discussed book which rose to the status of international bestseller, titled The Way of Zen, which dealt with the philosophical fundamentals and history of Zen Buddhism. During his travels to Europe, Alan encountered eminent psychiatrist, Carl Jung, and on his return to America, Watts began exploring the subject matter of modern science and psychology, aiming to establish an alignment between mystical experiences and material theories of the universe. He also began taking psychedelic drugs. He published his famous book, Tao: The Watercourse Way, which firmly established him as a prominent Zennist. He also produced an audio series, Out of Our Mind, where he discussed diverse subjects such as arts, cuisine, child rearing, education, law and freedom, architecture and sexuality.

Alan Watts composed more than 25 books on diverse topics such as cybernetics, semantics, process philosophy, natural history, the anthropology of sexuality, and Eastern and Western religion. Some of his famous books include The Way of Zen (1957), Psychotherapy East and West (1961), The New Alchemy (1958) The Legacy of Asia and Western Man (1937), The Meaning of Happiness (1940) and The Joyous Cosmology (1962) among others.

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Alan Watts | Biography, Philosophy and Facts

Since the dawn of psychedelic trance and psychedelic downtempo music, there has been a prominent tool in artists repertoires that has captivated us, made us think, and transported us to the vast reaches of the cosmos or our deepest inner selves: sampling. Whether from movies, literature, scientists, visionaries, or philosophers, samples serve to help producers tell their stories and set the mood for the listener.

Watts avuncular joy and McKennas hallucinogenic machine elf explorations just seem to fit perfectly within the psychedelic music scene.

Two of the more popular sources of samples are ethnobotanist and visionary Terence McKenna, and Alan Watts, Zen practitioner and philosopher. Watts avuncular joy and McKennas hallucinogenic machine elf explorations just seem to fit perfectly within the psychedelic music scene.

Here are some of our favourite psychill songs with our favourite Terence McKenna and Alan Watts quotes. At the bottom you can find also a long playlist with many other tracks using their vocal sample:

And since youre all here and engaged in this sort of inquiry I assume youre all in the process of waking up.There is the central Self and its All of Us. Its playing all the parts of All Beings whatsoever everywhere and anywhere. And its playing the game of hide and seek with itself. It gets lost, it gets involved in the farthest-out adventures, but in the end it always wakes up and comes back to itself.

We are living beings were very sensitive and inside the human skin by an extraordinary fluke of nature, there has arisen something called reason, and there have also arisen values, such as love.

We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as we seem to be able to move through metamorphosis into our own imaginations a super civilization spread throughout space and time. Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination.

Every electron is the yawning mouth of a wormhole that leads to quadrillions of higher dimensional universes that are completely beyond rational apprehension matter is not lacking in magic matter is magic!

There are of course many many more. Click play on the playlist below and dive into a long long session of psychedelic electronic music with Terrence McKenna & Allan Watts samples. Including tracks from Shpongle, Entheogenic, Gnomes of Kush, Dhamika, Soulacybin, Ancient Core & more.

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Psytrance & Psychill with Terence McKenna & Alan Watts ...

From the description: "A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except faults, so he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions." Some commenters say that is a misquote and state that it should be "thoughts" instead of "faults". Referring to "mental chatter"

Either way, it demonstrates a choice of choosing not to control what you think about. Focus on something you think worthwhile. It is possible to direct your thoughts away from mulling things over and over again or other chatter and onto constructing something worthwhile. The choice is yours, to let yourself be controlled or to control yourself.

Some people decide they need meditation. Others, like Tesla, honed his mind to the point he didn't need paper to work out the details of constructing his inventions. Fortunately many of them were documented for the purpose of obtaining patents. His assistants stated that his motors and such worked the very first time being built.

Maybe meditation could be a path to honing one's mind rather than only a means to remove the mental chatter.

People choose to drown out their conscience and conscious via chemicals when they could direct their mind to very interesting journeys without the need or expense of such chemicals. The most beneficial observation of all is to observe one's ego at work and gently observe it back into its proper place of being a clear pane of glass through which which things are observed, rather than a pain or splinter of glass in everyone's ass. Being in control of your ego and emotions rather than them controlling you is the worthwhile journey.

Unfortunately the evil in control of the world do much to make that journey harder than ever; for you are the easiest to control and inspire to do the wrong things they desire when your ego and/or emotions are in control of you.

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Zen: The Best of Alan Watts - Top Documentary Films

Alan watts essays and Vikings homework help Critical thinking methods

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Brilliant Essay: Alan watts essays FREE Title!

3,123 words

Why . . . so . . . serious? The Joker[1]

Its all a joke. The Comedian[2]

All humane people should admit that they are jokers; that they are playing games and playing tricks. That I am doing it on youI am most ready to admit this. I hoaxed you all into coming here to tell you . . . what? [laughs loudly, crowd laughs] Alan Watts[3]

Alan Watts is remembered, if at all, as that hippie philosopher, meaning perhaps both a philosopher who was a hippie (or vice versa), or a philosopher for or of hippies.[4]

But Constant Readers of this website know that, whatever else, Watts was above all[5] a man of the Right.[6]

For example, Greg Johnson points out that

Watts tries to reach out to the 60s counter-culture in Does it Matter?, but at the same time he makes it clear that he accepts the Traditional idea of historical decline and rejects all cause-mongering and progressivism.

It seems odd to think of Watts as a rightist because although

To most readers, the theory of Wealth versus Money seems both amazingly original and astonishingly nave. . . . that is because Watts is concealing his sources. In fact, the foundation of his proposals is merely a version of C. H. Douglas Social Credit theory. Of course Watts had good reason not to mention Douglas in the pages of Playboy in 1968: Social Credit was the economic system favored by Anglophone fascists like Ezra Pound.[7]

As another example of what might be called strange not so new respect, a reader of WattsBeyond Theology (Pantheon, 1965) finds that the hip, Zen-meditated, LSD-expanded young intelligentsia of 1965 were applying their psychedelic insights against dreary old Dad by advocating . . . intelligent design:

A universe which grows human beings is as much a human, or humaning, universe as a tree which grows apples is an apple tree. . . . There is still much to be said for the old theistic argument that the materialist-mechanistic atheist is declaring his own intelligence to be no more than a special form of unintelligence. . . .

The real theological problem for today is that it is, first of all, utterly implausible to think of this Ground as having the monarchical and paternal character of the Biblical Lord God. But, secondly,there is the much more serious difficulty of freeing oneself from the insidious plausibility of the mythology of nineteenth-century scientism, from the notion that the universe isgyrating stupidityin which the mind of man is nothing but a chemical fantasy doomed to frustration. It is insufficiently recognized that this is a vision of the world inspired by the revolt against the Lord God of those who had formerly held the role of his slaves. This reductionist, nothing-but-ist view of the universe with its muscular claims to realism and facing-factuality is at root a proletarian and servile resentment against quality, genius, imagination, poetry, fantasy, inventiveness and gaiety.Within twenty or thirty years it will seem as superstitious as flat-earthism.

Well, he seems to have been a little off on that prediction; the argument is still valid, though.[8] Archeo-futurism: whos more old fashioned than a free-thinking atheist/materialist?[9]

Or their cousins, the political Liberals.

But before we look any further at Watts suspiciously non-PC attitudes, lets step back and look at their source.

Watts fundamental insight equal parts philosophy (Vedanta), psychology (Gestalt), and pharmacology (LSD-25)[10] was that fundamentally, there are no things. Our experience and hence any idea we can form of the universe is of processes or waves.

Now these processes or waves have a kind of duality: they seem to have two parts, or phases, or sides. Up and down, black and white, left and right, front and back, life and death. I say seem or kind of because we dont want to get into any idea of these phases being like the parts of a transmission, out of which we can build or into which we can disassemble the machine. Thats the problem Descartes wound up with, having dissected experience into two utterly different kinds of thing (mind and matter) and then was left wondering how or if they interacted.

No, all these processes have aspects that are so closely bound up with each other that one cant even imagine them separated, like front and back.[11] To convey this non-relational relationship Watts suggested we use his neologism goeswith, as in Front goeswith Back.

Watts own expositions of this are so clear, compelling, and above all entertaining (and he called himself not a philosopher but a philosophical entertainer) that one fears sounding like someone over-explaining a joke, or falling into endless quotations. At this point, you might be better off sampling some audio/video remixes an enterprising chap has set up on YouTube.[12]

But it does need a bit of explaining, since for some 2000 years we, in the West at least, have been operating under two very different fundamental understandings

First, the Jews bequeathed to us the idea of an omnipotent Creator who creates creatures like man from out of the dust, and the dust itself out of nothing at all. Watts calls this the Ceramic Model (with hints of Semite?), after St. Pauls denying the pot the right to question the work of the potter.

There are problems with the model,[13] especially in the underlying, inescapable sense of existential uncertainty it inculcates. But around 500 years ago people began to rethink it, asking in particular why we needed God at all. Deism, which postulated a watchmaker god who wound things up and then went on vacation, eventually became outright scientific Atheism. The Ceramic Model was replaced with the Machine Model; more particularly, what I call the Idiot Machine Model. Unfortunately, the existential unease, the damnable contingency and fragility of everything, ultimately ending in the death of ourselves and the universe, remained.

Now this may seem like, indeed, airy-fairy hippie nonsense, but as Watts liked to point out, like all metaphysics, it is rockily practical. At least, there are practical conclusions.

For one, as weve seen, it makes Intelligent Design, well, intelligible. Animals are not bags of meat shoved around by outside forces called Nature; they are processes, and they gowith their environment: if there are people, then the universes is a peopling universe; if there is intelligence, it is an intelligent universe. Neo-Darwinism, despite its neo prefix, is just the same old Idiot Machine model. Admittedly, theyre also right to suspect ID is smuggling in God; its the Ceramic Model rearing its head again.[14]

To see how all this plays out in the modern political scene, we need to back up a bit first. Both the Ceramic Model and the Idiot Machine Model assume a universe of things, one of which is us. Humans, in particular, are in a forever precarious position vis--vis the universe (all the other things). In the Ceramic Model we are the creatures of a supposedly loving but strict and rather unpredictable God; in the Idiot Machine Model we are a random fluke of the universe,[15] subject to the apparently eternal extinction of death at some unknown but inescapable point, followed by the universe itself.

While the Joyous Cosmology of Watts is a game between White and Black, the existential unease produced by both of the other models issue in a fight, pitting White against Black.

The game of White and Black, where White tries to win, and eventually will,[16] but not without many ups and downs, which lend interest and spice to the game, becomes not a game but a fight when White feels absolutely positively that he must win. A loss (e.g., ones physical death) would be catastrophic literally, as Joe Biden would say, apocalyptic.[17]

Life lived according to Watts Joyous Cosmology is quite different:

It comes, then, to this: that to be viable, livable, or merely practical, life must be lived as a gameand the must here expresses a condition, not a commandment. It must be lived in the spirit of play rather than work, and the conflicts which it involves must be carried on in the realization that no species, or party to a game, can survive without its natural antagonists, its beloved enemies, its indispensable opponents. For to love your enemies is to love them as enemies; it is not necessarily a clever device for winning them over to your own side. The lion lies down with the lamb in paradise, but not on earthparadise being the tacit, off-stage level where, behind the scenes, all conflicting parties recognize their interdependence, and, through this recognition, are able to keep their conflicts within bounds.[18]This recognition is the absolutely essential chivalry which must set the limits within all warfare, with human and non-human enemies alike, for chivalry is the debonair spirit of the knight who plays with his life in the knowledge that even mortal combat is a game.[19]

Chivalry is the last thing that comes to mind when considering Hillary, and the last thing on her mind as well.

Secretary of StateHillaryClinton shared a laugh with a television news reporter moments after hearing deposed Libyan leader MuammarQaddafihad been killed.We came, we saw, he died, she joked when told of news reports ofQaddafis death by an aide.[20]

In foreign policy, this is the mentality of The Good War, which is actually all wars, since America is always in the right[21] and always faces The New Hitler.

Of course, this is always portrayed as a sin of the Right first, the obsession with bombing our enemies not into surrender and crude material plundering (which at least would be understandable)[22] but back to the Stone Age,[23] then, turned suicidally on ourselves, smugly professing ourselves to believe it Better Dead than Red.[24]

But in reality, its equally the mindset of the Liberals possessed with the Orwellian-named Humanitarian Interventionism, from McKinleys helping the Philippines and just accidentally acquiring an empire, to Wilsons War to End All Wars, to Hillarys excellent adventures in North Africa. Its always a war not for plunder or honor, but until the enemy is annihilated: unconditional surrender![25]

And as Watts would point out, since White cant really win where win means total annihilation of Black,[26] it follows that war is endless. Theres always a New Hitler; Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia.[27]

On the domestic front, we see the White against Black mentality in the PC obsessions of modern Identity Politics. [28] The creatures of the PC universe are indeed helpless egos in bags of skin, facing a cruel world that constantly micro-aggresses them. And under such conditions, any accommodation to the Enemy is Treason.[29]

For Watts, though, things are entirely different:

The morality that goes with this understanding is, above all, the frank recognition of your dependence upon enemies, underlings, out-groups, and, indeed, upon all other forms of life whatsoever. Involved as you may be in the conflicts and competitive games of practical life, you will never again be able to indulge in the illusion that the offensive other is all in the wrong, and could or should be wiped out.[30] This will give you the priceless ability of being able to contain conflicts so that they do not get out-of-hand, of being willing to compromise and adapt, of playing, yes, but playing it cool. This is what is called honor among thieves, for the really dangerous people are those who do not recognize that they are thieves the unfortunates who play the role of the good guys with such blind zeal that they are unconscious of any indebtedness to the bad guys who support their status.

As Watts meditates on this, he just keeps digging himself deeper into the role of spokesman for hurtful bullies:

It is most important that this be understood by those concerned with civil rights, international peace, and the restraint of nuclear weapons. These are most undoubtedly causes to be backed with full vigor, but never in a spirit which fails to honor the opposition, or which regards it as entirely evil or insane. It is not without reason that the formal rules of boxing, judo, fencing, and even dueling require that the combatants salute each other before the engagement. In any foreseeable future there are going to be thousands and thousands of people who detest and abominate Negroes, communists, Russians, Chinese, Jews, Catholics, beatniks, homosexuals, and dope-fiends. These hatreds are not going to be healed, but only inflamed, by insulting those who feel them, and the abusive labels with which we plaster them squares, fascists, rightists, know-nothings may well become the proud badges and symbols around which they will rally and consolidate themselves. Nor will it do to confront the opposition in public with polite and nonviolent sit-ins and demonstrations, while boosting our collective ego by insulting them in private. If we want justice for minorities and cooled wars with our natural enemies, whether human or non-human, we must first come to terms with the minority and the enemy in ourselves and in our own hearts, for the rascal is there as much as anywhere in the external world especially when you realize that the world outside your skin is as much yourself as the world inside. For want of this awareness, no one can be more belligerent than a pacifist on the rampage, or more militantly nationalistic than an anti-imperialist.

Watts analyzes the moral crusader in terms straight from the work of that nasty anti-Semite, Kevin MacDonald:

I would never be able to know that I belong to the in-group of nice or saved people without the assistance of an out-group of nasty or damned people. How can any in-group maintain its collective ego without relishing dinnertable discussions about the ghastly conduct of outsiders? The very identity of racist Southerners depends upon contrasting themselves with those dirty black nigras. But, conversely, the out-groups feel that they are really and truly in, and nourish their collective ego with relishingly indignant conversation about squares, Ofays, WASPs, Philistines, and the blasted bourgeoisie.

Although Watts sees himself, and is, on the side of the Angels here, his refusal to turn this into a Battle in Heaven that the Angels must win against damnable devils marks him out, in contemporary terms, as a turncoat or a Fifth Columnist.[31] In the neo-Stalinist language of the SJWs, no matter what ones intentions, if one cuts the enemy some slack, or mildly critiques ones own side, one is objectively acting for the enemy. For example, whencomedian Patton Oswaltretweeted Steve Sailers remark that Political Correctness is a war on Noticing, he wasimmediately attackedby people saying that Sailer was objectively racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic.[32]

And note the use of the quasi-N word! Ban The Book!

Watts, like Kevin MacDonald, suggests this moral signaling is rooted in Protestantism:

[M]odern Protestantism in particular, in its liberal and progressive forms, is the religion most strongly influenced by the mythology of the world of objects, and of man as the separate ego. Man so defined and so experienced is, of course, incapable of pleasure and contentment, let alone creative power. Hoaxed into the illusion of being an independent, responsible source of actions, he cannot understand why what he does never comes up to what he should do, for a society which has defined him as separate cannot persuade him to behave as if he really belonged. Thus he feels chronic guilt and makes the most heroic efforts to placate his conscience.

From these efforts come social services, hospitals, peace movements, foreign-aid programs, free education, and the whole philosophy of the welfare state. Yet we are bedeviled by the fact that the more these heroic and admirable enterprises succeed, the more they provoke new and increasingly horrendous problems.[33] For one thing, few of us have ever thought through the problem of what good such enterprises are ultimately supposed to achieve. When we have fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and housed the homeless, what then? Is the object to enable unfortunate people to help those still more unfortunate? To convert Hindus and Africans into a huge bourgeoisie, where every Bengali and every Zulu has the privilege of joining our special rat-race, buying appliances on time and a television set to keep him running?[34]

And surely the Ultimate Methodist Scold is none other than Hillary.

To Hillary and all the SJWs who would call this a gospel of passivity or even (ironically) despair, Watts make a simple distinction. He asks, if a pretty girl says she loves you, do you say Are you serious? or do you say, Are you sincere?[35] To the suicidal Seriousness of the Fighter, Watts contrasts the Sincerity and Good Humor of the Player, the Good Sport.[36]

Be that as it may, Watts verdict on the morals and politics of the adult world, pursuing scorched Earth in the name of Morality, is dire:

The political and personal morality of the West, especially in the United States, is utterly schizophrenic. It is a monstrous combination of uncompromising idealism and unscrupulous gangsterism, and thus devoid of the humor and humaneness which enables confessed rascals to sit down together and work out reasonable deals.

A monstrous combination of uncompromising idealism and unscrupulous gangsterism is really the perfect description of the Clintons, who, to be fair, are only the ultimate and most characteristic product of the Liberal Elite.

And as for the humor and humaneness which enables confessed rascals to sit down together and work out reasonable deals, is this not The Donald himself, the master of The Art of the Deal?[37]

And those same foreign rascals sense this as well:

Russian President Vladimir Putin had kind words for his stablemate Donald Trump during an annual end-of-the-year Q&A session in Moscow.

[Donald Trump is] a really brilliant and talented person, without any doubt, [Vladimir] Putin told reporters, according to a translation by Interfax. Its not our job to judge his qualities, thats a job for American voters, but hes the absolute leader in the presidential race.

The GOP frontrunner has been blunt about his plans for defrosting U.S. relations with Russia should he be elected president.

He says he wants to move on to a new, more substantial relationship, a deeper relationship with Russia, how can we not welcome that? he said. Of course we welcome that.

For Hillary, though, foreign policy, like everything else, is Serious Business, and rascals like Putin are devils to be threatened with 50s style nuclear annihilation.[38] As Camile Paglia has pointed out with some urgency, Hillary is the New Nixon, the ultimate Brown-shoed Square:

But Hillary, consumed by her own restless bitterness, has no such tranquility. The wheels must grind! The future must be conquered! Past slights must be avenged! So its all planning and scheming and piling up loot, the material emblem of existential worth.[39]

What would The Joker say about planning and scheming, and piling up loot?[40] What would Watts say, or even, dare we think it, God Himself?[41] Is Trump the hero we deserve, or the hero we need? Perhaps, as an earlier Joker would say, hes the enema this town needs.[42]

So, get with it, kids; save the Earth, and piss off your parents and the all the other squares, too: vote for Trump!

Notes

1.The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2012).

2.Watchmen (Alan Moore, 1986; Zach Snyder, 2009).

3.Is it Serious?(audio lecture), here.

4.See the opening paragraphs of Joyce Carol Oates novel of madness in Grosse Pointe, Expensive People: I was a child murderer. I dont mean child-murderer, though thats an idea. I mean child murderer, that is, a murderer who happens to be a child, or a child who happens to be a murderer. You can take your choice. When Aristotle notes that man is a rational animal one strains forward, cupping his ear, to hear which of those words is emphasized rational animal, rational animal? Which am I? Child murderer, child murderer? It took me years to start writing this memoir, but now that Im started, now that those ugly words are typed out, I could keep on typing forever. A kind of quiet, blubbering hysteria has set in. You would be surprised, normal as you are, to learn how many years, how many months, and how many awful minutes it has taken me just to type that first line, which you read in less than a second: I was a child murderer. (Vanguard Press, 1968; Modern Library, 2006). For more on Vanguard Press, see my Anti-Mame: Communist Camp Classic Unmasked, here.

5.Or beneath it all as he might have preferred; as did my mentor, Dr. Deck, who, in his Canadian way, liked to speak of things au fond and of approfondising some helpless dead philosopher.

6.See Greg Johnsons The Spiritual Materialism of Alan Watts: A Review ofDoes it Matter? here. Watts was known to be a quiet man of the Right, but it is high time that scholars determine just how far to the Right he was.

7.Johnson, loc. cit. Watts is somewhat more forthcoming about Douglas in his autobiography, but probably thinks rightly that its just a name to his readers. See In My Own Way: An Autobiography, 19151965 (New York: Pantheon, 1972).

8.I also love how Watts could see, even back then, that the argument was indeed about intelligence, and the phony opposition between Judaic Creationist Priests and Judaic Materialist Scientists; and what wonderful phrases he comes up with: insidious plausibility, gyrating stupidity. I vote we start using these ourselves; what else is the opponent of ID but an advocate of gyrating stupidity; any guesses as to how many factuality-facing fashionable atheists will have the intellectual courage to grasp the term as indeed articulating their view, or give the reason why not?

9.Compare Thomas MannsDr. Faustus, where the combined futurist extremism and atavistic primitivism (as Mann sees it) that led to the rise of Hitler is explored through a series of grotesque figures in the Kridwiss Circle who alternatively shock and amuse the conservative nobility, such as Daniel zur Hohe (author of a single book, on hand-made paper; a lyrico-rhetorical outburst of voluptuous terrorism; Stefan George?), and the, in this case at least, rather Wattsian figure of the polymath private scholar Dr. Chaim Breisacher, a Jewish Evola, sneering at the very idea of progress in a world that has been declining since Solomon built his temple. Miles Mathis writes that Scientists will say that the current models are superior to Genesis, at any rate, since one who accepts Genesis doesnt continue to ask how the Earth evolved. This much is true. Good scientists continue to study, while religious people and bad scientists do not. But this paper is not about good scientists, it is about bloated atheists and bad scientists, the sort that think they already know how things are. They have barebones models of the early Earth, models less than a century old and ever-changing, and they think they can claim with certainty how things are, who exists and who does not, how things got here and where they are going. They think a theory of how things evolved is equivalent to a theory of how things were created. They think a model of a complex twisting molecule is the same as a blueprint for life or an explanation of self-locomotion or a proof of phylogeny. They think that four-vector fields and non-abelian gauge groups and statistical analysis explain existence, complexity, solidity, and change. The whole article is available here. Seth Macy writes in Shut Up, Nerd that Its really a delight to see people waking up to the lameness of scientists. Nerds belong in labs or basements, not as the subject of memes. Science is extraordinarily useful. Scientists are extraordinarily lame, but they make science, so they have worth to society. The entire skeptical movement is filled with the same boring people who love to shit on everything right and lovely. They cant shit on stuff that sucks, because then theyd need to shit all over themselves like some skeptic tubgirl. We need to stop listening to anything they say outside of the confines of laboratory settings. Its like your favorite comedian spewing politics on Twitter. Shut the fuck up.

10.See The Joyous Cosmology (1965; reprinted 2015 with an introduction by Daniel Pinchbeck). The Joyous Cosmologyis Alan Wattss exploration of the insight that the consciousness-changing drugs LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin can facilitate when accompanied with sustained philosophical reflection by a person who is in search, not of kicks, but of understanding. More than an artifact, it is both a riveting memoir of Wattss personal experiments and a profound meditation on our perennial questions about the nature of existence and the existence of the sacred.

11.Thus, Jesus says that we should not listen to someone who says of the kingdom of Heaven that lo! It is here or lo! It is there, for the Kingdom is within us. And indeed We have created man, and We know whatever thoughts his inner self develops, and We are closer to him than (his) jugular vein. (Quran 50:16).

12.Ironically enough, the company and channel is called Tragedy and Hope, which should again be a red flag for conspiracy hounds, as well as connecting Watts to Hillary through Bills college mentor (and CIA control?) Carroll Quigley. Indeed, Isaacs videos document his journey from conspiracy theory to spirituality, a path that many of us who have opened the conspiracy can of worms can personally relate to. If you look throughmy channelyou will see that it is basically a reflection of my awakening, starting out with conspiracies and politics and then moving into philosophy and spirituality, which I now believe to be the most important truth, he said.

13.Such as making sense out of creation ex nihilo. See John N. Decks epochal critique St. Thomas Aquinas and the Language of Total Dependence, first published in Dialogue: A Canadian Philosophical Review, Vol. 6, 1967, pp. 7488; anthologized in Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays, Anthony Kenny, ed. (Notre Dame University Press, 1976), pp. 237254, and online here. Deck later generalized his argument as The Itself: In-Another Pattern and Total Dependence, also on Tony Floods website devoted to debating the issue.

14.George Bernard Shaw, a proponent of vitalism, argued that the public acceptance of Darwinism was not motivated by the supposed evidence they not being scientists, after all but rather by weariness at the constant surveillance and intrusions of the Calvinist God, little realizing that the God-less model left them with a literally senseless and meaningless universe. See his Preface to Back to Methuselah.

15.You are a fluke of the Universe. You have no right to be here. And whether you know it or not, the Universe is laughing behind your back. From Deteriorata, the National Lampoon parody of the uplifting 70s LP/poster Desiderata. For my reflections on the poon, see here. Deteriorata addresses both the Ceramic Model as well as Watts Joyous Cosmology: Therefore, make peace with your god, whatever you perceive him to be: hairy thunderer or cosmic muffin. Oddly enough, Adlai Stevenson was apparently a fan, despite his mean-spirited attack on Norman Vincent Peale (see my The Secret of Trumps A Peale, here).

16.Dr. Deck would correct Watts, or approfondise him, here; White and Black are a dialectic couplet, but White is the senior partner. In this sense, and only in this sense, White must win; the necessity is logical, not willful. As Gunon would say, quality and quantity are only logical opposites, not real entities; and while the Whole can be described, as a facon de paler, as Quality, (though really transcending both), Quantity (matter, darkness, evil, emptiness, etc.) is only a shadow, a point approached asymtopically. Watts does sometimes notice this: The game doesnt work in reverse, just as the ocean doesnt work with wave-crests down and troughs up.

17.Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.

Mayor: What do you mean, biblical?

Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.

Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.

Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!

Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes . . .

Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!

Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together . . . mass hysteria!

Mayor: All right, all right! I get the point! (Ghostbusters, Ivan Reitman, 1984).

18.Another un-PC moment. This is the answer to all those Christians who smugly talk about we are all Gods children or In Heaven there is no Jew or Gentile as if this required us to throw open the borders, abolish all voting requirements, etc. They have confused (deliberately?) the levels of Heaven and Earth immanatized the Eschaton, as Voegelin liked to say.

19.This all and all the following otherwise unattributed quotes are from The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (Pantheon, 1967), available online here and elsewhere.

20.We came, we saw, he died. You can, if you want, watch it here.

21.And you can believe me. . . . Because I never lie, and Im always right. Campaign ad for George Leroy Tirebiters father, running for dog-killer, on the Firesign Theaters Dont Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers (Columbia, 1970). According to Wikipedia, the first late-night movie on the album,High School Madness, is a parody of theAldrich Familyradio show, theArchiecomic book and of 1950s youth culture in general. See my Welcome to the Club: The Rise & Fall of the Mnnerbund in Pre-War American Pop Culture, here. The second movie, Parallel Hell is awar filmset inKorea, where the soldiers (including Tirebiter) debate the seemingly endless war.

22.Like Chris Rock on OJ, Watts doesnt say traditional war is right, but he understands the need and the goals.

23.Or perhaps at least the Jazz Age. Leading to aCrowning Moment of Funnyas the pilots practice bombing the absolute shit out of the desert while muzak plays: Crow:Were gonna bomb em back to the Jazz Age! TV Tropes on Mystery Science Theater 3000, Episode 612, The Starfighters.

24.Christian conservatives like the Buckleyites would often smugly assert that this was a truly spiritual view, which is true in the sense that Christianity and other Ceramic Religions seem to lead to it; when it is actually merely the crackpot spirit vs. matter spirituality that Watts contrasts with a really thoroughgoing spiritual materialism.

25.Sir Fred Hoyles October the First is Too Late imagines that men of present England, dumped into a world where WWI is still raging in France, would immediately try to stop the slaughter. Perhaps, but would they have done the same if it were 1942? See my Worlds Enough & Times: The Unintentionally Weird Fiction of Fred Hoyle, here.

26.Again, in the phenomenal world. Ultimately, at the end of this Manvantara, Black wins but the wheel immediately flips, setting up first the sleep of Brahman, then a new Golden Age as the cycle begins again. See The Basic Myth in Does It Matter?

27.Needless to say, the global oligarchs are fully onboard this, like all other aspects of the Liberal agenda; permanent war means permanent profits.

28.Marxism might at first seem to be an alternative to the Social Darwinist individualism of the Right, what with its obsession with classes, but just like Darwin (another iconoclast beloved of skeptics and other nerdy asshats), Marxists do not see the people as natural products of the State, but as random individuals united only by superficial nominalism of class characteristics. Even Marx recognized that Religion is . . . the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.

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James J. O'Meara, "'PC is for Squares, Man': Alan Watts and ...