Posted inAlan Watts Taoism/Tai Chi

Winter Olympics has a lesson for us: trying hard to succeed often leads to less success

Yesterday I wrote a post for my HinesSight blog about how an American ice skater fared in what was expected to be a gold medal performance. Here's some excerpts from "Ilia Malinin lost an Olympic ice skating medal, but he won the heart of people who also have screwed-up big time." For me the most tragic moment in this year’s Winter Olympics was Ilia Malinin, a hugely talented American figure skater, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory when he bungled a seemingly certain gold medal by falling twice in a performance where Malinin was so far ahead of his…
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Posted inAlan Watts Spiritual practice/meditation

This is It, by Alan Watts, is a compelling essay about how unordinary our ordinary life is

In my previous blog post, I shared a quotation from Anne Watts, one of Alan Watts' children, that included an excerpt from one of his books, This is It. Liking the excerpt, I turned to my collection of Alan Watts books so I could take another look at This is It. I was surprised to see that I'd never bought This is It. No problem, Amazon delivered a copy yesterday. I read the short 11 page essay this morning. The book also includes five other essays about Zen and how Watts views spirituality. Wikipedia says This is It was published…
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Posted inAlan Watts Spiritual practice/meditation

Why it doesn’t make sense to take the advice of spiritual gurus

"Guru" often is used in a way that goes against the original meaning of the word, a religious or spiritual guide. The literal translation apparently is dispeller of darkness. So I guess a lighthouse keeper would definitely be a guru. More broadly, guru can mean a skilled instructor. If a golfer benefits from some putting tips provided by the club pro, they might say "That guy is a real golf guru." We all need that sort of advice from someone knowledgeable about a particular area. When I contact my doctor's office about a health problem that has popped up, I…
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Posted inAlan Watts Free will

Freedom, says Alan Watts, isn’t personal but a quality of the world

I don't believe in free will. But I believe in freedom. This isn't a freedom of my personal will to do what I choose. It is the freedom of realizing that I'm part of the unified whole we call the universe.  This view is scientific. I much prefer it to unscientific notions of free will that basically say, "Because we humans feel that we have free will, it must be so." Unfortunately, feelings have little or nothing to do with truth. In his book, Determined, Robert Sapolsky laid out the reasons why free will is an illusion. An appealing illusion,…
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Posted inAlan Watts Christianity/Jesus

I ponder the new Pope and the present moment

This morning I turned our TV on, wanting to watch some news while I did my physical therapy exercises, to find that CNN's attention was focused on the Vatican following white smoke coming from a chimney -- the sign, along with bells, that a new Pope has been elected by the cardinals. I found this fascinating in a theatrical sense. Meaning, since I'm not at all religious and don't believe in God, who the Pope is only matters to me in a "political" fashion. I liked Pope Francis because he genuinely cared about the poor and downtrodden, a moral quality…
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Posted inAlan Watts Buddhism

Alan Watts on how we create an illusory problem, then want it solved

You Tube works in mysterious ways. After I started listening on my iPhone to a video of Robert Sapolsky talking with an interviewer about how the brain constructs emotions, I noticed that an Alan Watts talk had popped up in a list of supposedly related videos. Okay, I thought, I like Alan Watts, and the title sounds intriguing, "Alan Watts: Live Without Worry or Fear." Wow, all I have to do is spend 53 minutes listening to an Alan Watts talk, and I'll be worry and fear free.  Of course, that didn't happen, unless there's a delayed reaction after hearing…
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Posted inAlan Watts

Alan Watts on Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism

Though Alan Watts was an Anglican minister and served as chaplain at Northwestern University, in the book he wrote in 1940 when he was just 24, The Meaning of Happiness, three Eastern religions/philosophies garner the most attention and praise. That's because Watts correctly sees Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism as being transformational, rather than metaphysical, as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are. Just picture Christianity without Jesus, or Judaism without the history of the Jewish people, or Islam without the revelation of the Koran via Mohammed. Hard to do, if not impossible. But Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism do just fine without any…
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Posted inAlan Watts

True acceptance is the way out of the vicious circle of duality

I like to read books by Alan Watts. Other people don't like Watts. Some of them visit this blog. So when I write about how I enjoy what Watts has to say, probably they find those blog posts irritating. Such is the play of duality. It's how the world works, generally. Love is inconceivable without hate. Up is inconceivable without down. Absent dualities, we're simply left with what is, reality without a second. But the moment we ascribe human qualities, such as likes and dislikes, to aspects of reality, duality appears. (I'm not saying that reality is completely absent of…
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Posted inAlan Watts

Why I embrace the dark side of me and the world

Looking back, I don't think I ever was a full-on dualist, just a half-hearted one. This was during the 35 years I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization based in India whose core teaching was that this world in which we live and breathe isn't our true home but a temporary resting place -- since the purpose of life is to return to higher regions of reality and God through extensive meditation, devotion to a guru believed to be God in Human Form, a vegetarian diet, abstinence from alcohol and drugs, and morality, including…
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Posted inAlan Watts Free will

The whole universe is at work in every thought and action

I'd thought that I'd read, or at least heard about, every book by Alan Watts -- one of my favorite authors. But then I saw a comment on this blog where someone recommended The Meaning of Happiness: The Quest for Freedom of the Spirit in Modern Psychology and the Wisdom of the East. So I ordered it, as the commenter said that Watts had interesting observations about free will, one of my favorite subjects. Sweet! Favorite author plus favorite subject equals enjoyable reading. Watts wrote The Meaning of Happiness in 1940, when he was just 24 years old. Though I'm…
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Posted inAlan Watts Books

The profundity of “There are no black people in Africa”

As Alan Watts was fond of saying, echoing a basic tenet of Taoism, you can't have good without bad, virtue without vice, up without down -- or indeed any quality without its opposite.  Everything becomes what it is in relation to something that it isn't.  If everybody in the world had always believed in God, there would be no religious people. There would just be people. Ditto if everybody had always lived without any conception of God. Then there would be no atheists, just people. Before sentient creatures who can conceive of abstractions arrived on our planet, the natural world…
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Posted inAlan Watts Taoism/Tai Chi

Alan Watts: live life like a cat falling out of a tree

Recently on Facebook I saw this quote from a book by Alan Watts, What is Tao? Makes a lot of sense to live life like a falling cat. Not too tense. Not too rigid. Just the right amount of relaxation. The same attitude of relaxed gentleness [practiced in judo] is most beautifully seen when you watch cats climbing trees. When a cat falls out of a tree, it lets go of itself. The cat becomes completely relaxed, and lands lightly on the ground. But if a cat were about to fall out of a tree and suddenly made up its mind…
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Posted inAlan Watts Morality

Morality, like Alan Watts, is in the eye of the beholder

It's been interesting to see the various reactions of regular readers of this blog to my series of posts about Alan Watts, especially my recent post about how "Alan Watts was true to his moral philosophy."  Those like me who agree with how Watts viewed reality -- as a self-organizing whole without any top-down commander like God -- tended to view his personal life as irrelevant to his philosophizing, which leaned in his later years toward Chinese/Taoist perspectives. Not surprisingly, those who disagreed with how Watts saw things seized upon his three marriages, affairs with other women, drug use, and…
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Posted inAlan Watts Morality

Alan Watts was true to his moral philosophy

There's nothing that irks me more on this blog than commenters who are annoyingly sanctimonious, taking an I'm-holier-than-thou attitude to people they feel morally superior to. So when I saw this comment about Alan Watts by Spence Tepper yesterday, it irritated me. Allan Watts may appeal to drug addicts, alcoholics, sex addicts and fame addicts, but he would have done them greater good acknowldging his own struggles with these things. A man who fails, but struggles, openly acknowldging his struggle, and fights directly as best he can, that is a source of real inspiration. But a man who escapes his…
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Posted inAlan Watts

Alan Watts speaks about the Limits of Language

Here's another of the blog posts where I share notes I take while listening to audio recordings of talks by Alan Watts, thanks to Sam Harris making these available on his Waking Up app. I've now shared summaries of all of the talks in the Tao of Philosophy section. I'll be taking a break from my Alan Watts listening, then probably I'll jump around and sample the many other Watts talks on the Waking Up app. I enjoyed this one about the Limits of Language, just as I have the other talks. Watts is correct that the language we grow up…
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Posted inAlan Watts

Trust yourself and others, but not completely

Recently I've been writing blog posts where I share notes I take while listening to audio recordings of talks by Alan Watts, thanks to Sam Harris making these available on his Waking Up app. Those posts are similar to books I read in this fashion. Not long after I've been exposed to them, I can only remember a few things about them. Which brings to mind Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University, which was part of his appearances on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s. His brilliant notion was to offer university courses that only take a few minutes, because…
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Posted inAlan Watts Taoism/Tai Chi

Alan Watts talks about Man and Nature

Here's another installment in my sharing of notes I'm taking as I listen to audio recordings of Alan Watts that Sam Harris has put on his Waking Up app.  This talk is titled "Man and Nature." It presents the traditional Chinese view as being most in line with modern science, a view I agree with. There's a reason the classic book was called The Tao of Physics, rather than, say the Jesus of Physics or the Brahman of Physics.  Chinese philosophy is thoroughly naturalistic, leaving aside offshoots that are religious/supernatural. This helps explain why I'm enjoying the talks by Watts so…
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Posted inAlan Watts

Alan Watts speaks about the Myth of Myself

Here's another installment in my sharing of notes I'm taking as I listen to audio recordings of Alan Watts that Sam Harris has put on his Waking Up app.  This talk focuses on the fascinating subject of who the "I" is. Most of us believe that this refers to someone inside our head that we consider to be Me. But Watts disagrees, viewing us as basically being the same as the cosmos.  In a bit of synchronicity, a few minutes ago I checked my email and found a message from a local spiritual teacher, Jessica Amos. Echoing Watts, she wrote in…
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Posted inAlan Watts

Alan Watts on finding the balance between gooey and prickly worldviews

Here's another compilation of notes I'm taking from audio recordings of Alan Watts that Sam Harris has shared on his Waking Up app. This talk is called Seeing Through the Net. It's 47 minutes long, but you can get the gist of what Watts said by reading my summary in a much shorter time. "Who guards the gods?" In modern times many have the goal of rational control of everything inside and outside us. But things have gotten so complex, nobody knows what to do. If you try to run a hospital, or a business, there's so much red tape.…
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Posted inAlan Watts

How to sound like Alan Watts in two easy steps

As noted in a couple of recent posts (here and here), I've been enjoying listening to audio recordings of Alan Watts' talks that Sam Harris has shared on his Waking Up app. I'm pretty sure I've read all of Watts' books, some of them several times, notably The Wisdom of Insecurity, which I absolutely love. But the audio recordings have given me a fresh appreciation for how Watts viewed the world, or more broadly, reality. His spontaneous speech -- he spoke without notes -- offers a window into his mind that is clearer in some respects than his books provide.…
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