Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Our mission here
is simple. We take the sack of source material
you've gathered, strip away the noise, and give
you the quickest, most thorough path to deep
understanding. And today, we are opening up the
files on a man whose voice I think has become
almost more famous than his ratings. It's achieved
this kind of digital immortality. Yeah. Decades
after he died. We're talking about Alan Watts.
That's right. Born in 1915, a British -American
writer and speaker who you could argue is the
single most influential popularizer of Eastern
thought for the modern West. I mean, his cultural
longevity is just staggering. He died in 1973,
but you hear his lectures everywhere. They're
sampled in. Indie music and heavy metal. STRFKR
architects. You hear him in the Marvel series
Loki, the movie Her, video games. He's this foundational
voice of the counterculture, for sure. But his
real legacy seems to be as this auditory philosopher.
His work just completely transcended the page.
And that's really what we're digging into today.
He called himself not a guru, not an academic,
but a philosophical entertainer. So the mission
is to unpack that. How did this man manage to
interpret and popularize Buddhist, Taoist and
Hindu philosophy for a massive Western audience?
Especially for that emerging beat generation
and the whole counterculture movement. And he
was doing it all while kind of operating on the
fringes of academia and formal religion. It's
an incredible story. Our sources track this journey
from. a very curious English childhood through
all these academic and even religious detours,
to his sudden fame on West Coast radio, his explorations
with psychedelics, and of course his notoriously
complex personal life. And what's so fascinating,
based on the materials, is that he wasn't just
translating old texts. You call him a master
synthesizer. He absolutely was. He understood
the Western mind. He took this ancient wisdom
and he connected it to the most cutting -edge
ideas of the 20th century. Things like general
semantics and, believe it or not... early cybernetics.
Cybernetics. Wow. Okay. So he was a bridge builder,
not just East and West, but spiritual and technological.
That's the perfect way to put it. Okay. Let's
unpack this. We have to start at the beginning,
right? Yeah. Understand the soil where this philosophical
seed was first planted. So Alan Wilson Watts,
he was born January 6, 1915, in a little village
called Chislehurst in Kent, just outside London.
And his parents were pretty firmly middle class,
right? Very. His dad, Lawrence, worked for the
Michelin tire company. And his mother, Emily
Mary, her family was deeply involved in missionary
work. And the sources really emphasize that their
finances, or lack thereof, meant they had to
live out in the countryside. That seems so crucial
to who he became. It's everything. He was an
only child, and that rural setting became his
first teacher, his first, you know, philosophical
laboratory. He wasn't just playing outside. He
was observing. Deeply. He talks about spending
hours just walking, observing wildflowers, identifying
butterflies, just paying this meticulous attention
to the patterns of the natural world. This wasn't
a hobby. It was the beginning of his entire non
-dualistic philosophy. Nature taught him interconnectedness.
And this spiritual curiosity, it started with
his mother's religious family, but it took a
sharp turn, didn't it, towards what he called
the mysterious Far East. It did. And it wasn't
just about books. For him, the entry point was
visual. It was the aesthetic. What do you mean
by that? He was completely captivated by Chinese
and Japanese art landscape paintings, woodblock
prints, embroideries that his mother had from
her family's missionary connections. Those were
the images that just unlocked his imagination.
And what was it about that art that grabbed him
so intensely? He used these wonderful words.
He said it had clarity, transparency, and spaciousness.
He felt that unlike a lot of Western art, these
landscapes conveyed a sense of endless space.
The subject and the empty space around it were
equally important. A visual metaphor for non
-duality, basically. Exactly. It's like the art
seemed to float, which implied this lack of rigid
definition. It was the opposite of the religion
he was being taught in his boarding school. Right.
It was this very specific brand of Anglican Christianity
that he found. And I love this quote. rim and
maudlin. I mean, could the contrast be any starker?
On one hand, you have this rigid, guilt -ridden,
dualistic religion, God versus man, soul versus
body. And on the other, you have this art from
the East that's offering expansive beauty and
unity. So the teenager, he had to make a choice.
A very definitive choice. He felt he had to choose
between the faith of his birth and this Eastern
wisdom he was just devouring. And, well. He chose
Buddhism. And he didn't just dip a toe in. He
dove right in. His incredible, zealous intensity.
At just 16 years old, this is around 1931, he
becomes the secretary of the London Buddhist
Lodge. 16! That's amazing! It just shows you
how headstrong and practical he was, but the
most important thing is that he was a relentless
autodidact. He never waited for a curriculum.
He was reading everything, philosophy, psychology,
history, and of course, these ancient Zen texts.
And we can already see the seeds of his later,
let's say, rascal nature in his choice of mentors.
Yes. The sources point to this guy, Dmitry Mitranovich,
who's described as a rascal guru. I love that
term. And he was influenced by these esoteric
Western thinkers, Gurdjieff and Uspensky. So
this is really important. It shows that Watts
wasn't just learning Buddhism. He was learning
how to synthesize. So he's already connecting
Eastern thought, not just to Western religion,
but to the kind of rogue, psychological, esoteric
fringes of the West. Exactly. He's learning to
see patterns across different traditions from
the very beginning. It kind of pre -programmed
him to not be loyal to any single dogma. Which
makes sense of what happened with his academic
career. Yeah. Or, lack thereof, he had this shot
at Oxford and completely fumbled it. He really
did. He won a scholarship to the King School
in Canterbury, a top tier school. But when he
sat the exam for a scholarship to Trinity College,
Oxford. He got too creative. That's a good way
of putting it. He admitted it himself. He wrote
an essay that was so unconventional it was just
seen as presumptuous and capricious. He was too
confident, too much himself to play the academic
game. So it cost him Oxford, but it preserved
his intellectual freedom. I think so. And despite
that, he publishes his first book, The Spirit
of Zen, in 1936. He's not even 21 yet. And what's
fascinating about that book is how he felt about
it later. Right. 20 years later, when he publishes
his masterpiece, The Way of Zen, he basically
throws that first book under the... bus, calls
it unscholarly and misleading. That's some serious
self -awareness. It is. He says it was just a
summary of the ideas of the man who would become
his mentor, D .T. Suzuki. Which brings us to
this huge turning point. The 1936 World Congress
of Faiths in London. This is where the 21 -year
-old Watts meets the man himself. D .T. Suzuki
was the academic voice of Zen in the West. Meeting
him, hearing him speak, it just solidified everything
for Watts. This wasn't just an interest anymore.
No, this was his calling. And two years later...
In 1938, he's on a boat to the United States.
The intellectual adventurer had found his new
continent. But the path he took next was not
at all what you'd expect. Right. So he gets to
New York. He's now surrounded by this traditional
Zen circle. His mother -in -law was deeply involved.
His mentor is a Zen master named Sokai and Sasaki.
The logical next step is, you know, go full monk.
It's the logical step. Yeah. But Watts, he was
rarely logical in that way. He found the formal
strict monastic training. It just didn't suit
him. He wasn't a joiner. Not in that way. The
sources say he didn't want to be a monk. He wanted
a vocational, a public and intellectual outlet
for all these ideas. So instead of the monastery,
he goes to the seminary. He enrolls in an Episcopal
seminary in Illinois. I mean, that feels like
such a hard pivot. Well, it wasn't really a pivot
for him. It was another attempt at synthesis.
He was convinced there was a mystical core to
Christianity that had just been lost. The part
that wasn't. Grim and maudlin. Exactly. He wanted
to use his Eastern knowledge to strip away the
dogma and find that universal truth he believed
was at the heart of the Christian tradition too.
And this becomes his master's thesis, which gets
published in 1947 as Behold the Spirit. And that
book gets him established as a serious intellectual.
He's ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1945.
He actually served as a chaplain for a while.
But the sources are clear. He was always a philosopher
first. He was never actually ordained as a Zen
monk. Never. And he keeps exploring this synthesis
idea. In 1953, he publishes Myth and Ritual in
Christianity, where he uses Eastern philosophy
to sort of decode medieval Catholic rituals.
What was his argument there? His thesis was that
those old rituals contained profound psychological
meaning, had just lost the key. It had become
too literal, too dualistic. He saw parallels
to Asian thought everywhere, but they were buried.
This detour as a priest, though, it was temporary.
He leaves the priesthood by 1950, and the next
big move is to California. Yes. In 1951, he joins
the faculty of the American Academy of Asian
Studies in San Francisco. And this. This was
his intellectual playground. It must have been
the perfect environment for him. It really was.
He was a professor and an administrator there
until 57. The faculty was just this incredible
mix of people and his own interests just exploded.
It goes way beyond Zen at this point. Oh, far
beyond. He's absorbing Vedanta, the new physics,
you know, quantum mechanics, relativity process,
philosophy, anthropology of sexuality. He's trying
to synthesize the entire intellectual world of
the 1950s. And there are two areas that you said
were absolutely critical. for what he does next.
Yeah. General semantics and cybernetics. Yes.
These are the tools that allow him to modernize
ancient wisdom for a new generation. He's reading
Alfred Korzybski, who's famous for the idea that
the map is not the territory. And Norbert Wiener,
the father of cybernetics. Exactly. Cybernetics
is the science of control and communication in
systems, whether they're machines or animals.
Okay, I have to stop you. Why is a spiritual
philosopher getting deep into cybernetics? That
just seems like such an odd turn. It was a stroke
of genius, really. Cybernetics, with its focus
on feedback loops, gave him a scientific non
-mystical language to talk about interdependence.
To talk about non -duality. Precisely. He saw
the human body, the nervous system, and the outside
world as one single, massive, interconnected
feedback system. It gave him the technical vocabulary
to dismantle the idea of the skin -encapsulated
ego. So he could say, look, science itself is
proving that the organism and its environment
are not separate things. Yes. It's one system.
That was a revolutionary intellectual leap. And
at the same time, he's deepening his artistic
side. He studies Chinese calligraphy with a scholar
named Saburo Hasegawa. Which wasn't just about
learning to write. No, no. Through calligraphy,
he learned about the Japanese perception of nature,
of spontaneity, of embracing accident in art.
It showed him that philosophy wasn't just an
idea in your head. It was an aesthetic. It was
an applied, holistic way of living. So this period
of the academy gives him all the tools he needs.
The philosophy, the aesthetics, and now these
scientific analogies to communicate it all to
the masses. And that's exactly what he does next.
He leaves the Academy in 1957, but he's already
found the medium that's going to make him famous.
Radio. In 1953, he starts this weekly, unpaid
volunteer radio program on KPFA in Berkeley,
a Pacifica station. And his voice was just perfect
for it. That warm, articulate, slightly British
conversational style. It was. And those broadcasts,
which ran until 1962, they attracted what the
sources call a legion of regular listeners. The
Bay Area was already this hotbed of new ideas,
and he became the voice of it. And the legacy
of those shows is just, it's monumental. They
were recorded, they're still broadcast today,
and now they're all over YouTube and streaming
services. That's what cemented him as an auditory
philosopher. Absolutely. And that radio fame
happens at the exact same time as his landmark
book. 1957, The Way of Zen. Which was so much
more than a book. It was a cultural event. Yeah.
One of the first ever bestsellers on Buddhism.
It was basically the instruction manual for the
beat generation. It really was. For Kerouac,
for Ginsburg, for Snyder. While they were exploring
spontaneity and freedom from social norms, Watts
gave them the philosophical framework. He validated
their rebellion as a genuine spiritual quest.
So what made the way of Zen so different? We
touched on it, but how did he use those modern
analogies you mentioned? this is the core of
his genius he knew that a western audience which
was becoming more and more scientific would be
wary of purely mystical language so he used their
language he used semantics and cybernetics so
with semantics he used that idea the map is not
the territory to explain zen yes he argued that
our language especially english forces us into
a dualistic view of the world we have to have
a subject and a verb I see the tree. That little
sentence grammatically separates the I from the
tree. But Zen would say that separation is just
a trick of the language. Exactly. Watts saw Zen
as a way to get beyond the mental traps of our
own grammar. It was a way to experience reality
directly before you slap a label or a category
on it. And then there's cybernetics. How did
he use the idea of a feedback loop to explain
enlightenment? He argued that our nervous system
is just this incredibly complex feedback loop.
When you think you're an ego inside your skin,
you're misidentifying where the control is. So
the feeling of I am controlling my body is an
illusion. It's a misplacing of the boundary.
He'd say, think of a thermostat. It gets data
from the room. It's cold and it acts. It turns
on the furnace. But that action changes the room,
which feeds back new data, which prompts a new
action. The thermostat and the room are one single
operating system. And he applied that to us.
He said, we are the same. We don't come into
the world, we come out of it, like a wave comes
out of the ocean. The wave and the ocean are
one system. Cybernetics was the modern technical
proof of that ancient idea. It's brilliant. It
made Zen feel cutting edge, not ancient. And
the establishment even started to recognize him,
even though he was an outsider. He got an honorary
doctor of divinity degree in 1958. Which is pretty
ironic for a guy who'd quit the priesthood and
was teaching a non -theistic philosophy. Very.
And he toured Europe. He met Carl Jung. He then
mastered television with two seasons of a show
for public TV called Eastern Wisdom and Modern
Life. He was everywhere. Yeah. And all this fame
forced him to define what he was. Not a guru,
not a professor. He chose philosophical entertainer.
and that term is so important he rejected the
seriousness and the moral baggage of a title
like guru He knew his own flaws, which we'll
get to. He saw his job as catalyzing thought,
not leading a flock of devotee. And the entertainer
part speaks to his style. It was witty. It was
accessible. It was full of marable analogies.
He knew you as an outsider to academia, and he
leaned into it. He knew that freedom from the
institution allowed him to speak directly to
you, the listener, and your own spiritual hunger.
And this is where he fully syncs up with the
counterculture he's helping to create. his exploration
of altered states of consciousness. Right. Starting
in the mid -50s, he gets very interested in using
psychedelic drugs for mystical insight. He wrote
about it in The New Alchemy and then, more famously,
in The Joyous Cosmology in 1962. He experimented
with mescaline, LSD. With research teams, yes,
and also cannabis. But he was much more cautious
than, say, Timothy Leary. He had that famous
analogy about psychedelics. If you get the message,
hang up the phone. That's the one. It's a perfect
summary of his view. He saw them as instruments,
like a microscope or a telephone. Use them to
get an insight, but you don't stay glued to them
forever. The insight is the point, not the drug.
Right. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently
glued to the microscope. He goes away and works
on what he has seen. They can show you reality,
but they are not reality itself. And all this
exploration, whether through drugs or meditation,
it leads him to articulate his complete worldview.
This is the core of his philosophy, which you
find in books like the book, on the taboo against
knowing who you are. This is where he weaves
it all together. Hinduism, Taoism, Western science
into this grand unified theory. And it starts
with a fundamental attack on the Western idea
of identity. The skin encapsulated ego. That
myth, as he called it. The idea that you are
a little isolated consciousness stuck behind
your eyes, constantly fighting to control your
body and the world around you. He thought this
idea was the source of all our anxiety. So what's
the alternative he offers? The alternative is
a grand cosmic game. He pulls from Hindu concepts
like Leela and Maya. Explain that. Okay. So he
posits that the universe is fundamentally one
single consciousness. He just called it IT. And
this IT is playing a massive game of hide and
seek with itself. So Leela is. the game hide
and seek and maya or illusion is the hiding the
cosmic self hides from itself by becoming everything
in the universe stars mountains butterflies you
me and then this is the key part deliberately
forgetting that it's all one so the point of
life then is to remember to wake up to realize
that your individual self your ego is just i
.t wearing a disguise the ultimate realization
is what the hindus call tatavam asi Thou art
that. You are not a separate part fighting the
universe. You are the universe experiencing itself.
And he connects this huge cosmic idea back to
those patterns he saw in nature as a kid. Yes,
the fractal patterns, the branching of a tree,
the shape of a galaxy, the coastline. He saw
those repeating patterns as the visual signature
of the cosmic self, proving that the smallest
part reflects the whole. Which means that all
those opposites we struggle with, life and death,
good and bad, they're not really opposites. They're
two sides of the same coin. They're the necessary
tension that makes the game possible. For Watts,
understanding that the contradiction of opposites
is the fundamental method of life. That's the
key to peace. And in his later years, he really
tried to make this practical. He did. He called
himself a Zenist in spirit. His last book was
Tao, The Watercourse Way. And he was focused
on how you apply these ideas to child rearing.
He was trying to bring the philosophy out of
the clouds and into the kitchen. Exactly. Dissolving
that boundary between the sacred and the everyday.
And if you really believe you're the universe,
then you have to treat the universe with respect.
which naturally led him to social ethics and
the environment. He was so ahead of his time
on that, talking about an ecological predicament
way back in the early 60s. Incredibly prescient.
He argued that our spiritual belief that man
is separate from nature is what allows us to
destroy it without feeling like we're harming
ourselves. He had that amazing quote about our
consumerism. about the ever -rising mountains
of ruin. Especially when the things we make and
build are beginning to look more and more like
rubbish even before they're thrown away. He saw
our industrial output becoming trash in real
time. Okay, so now we have to get into the complexity
of the man himself. Because for any honest deep
dive, you have to talk about the contradictions.
The entertainer who was also, as the sources
say, a bit of a rogue. A bit of a rogue is putting
it mildly. He was open about it in his autobiography.
in my own way he calls himself a sedentary and
contemplative character a mystic and also somewhat
of a disreputable epicurean who has three wives
seven children and five grandchildren that disreputable
epicurean part is doing a lot of work the sources
confirm he struggled three marriages seven kids
a lot of conflict and he had issues with substance
use He was a heavy smoker his whole life, and
after the mid -50s, he developed a serious problem
with alcohol. And people close to him called
him out on it. His lover, the poet Jean Burden,
she called him a rogue and pointed out his moral
hypocrisy. Right. And this is the central tension
of his legacy. How could the great philosopher
of non -duality live such a messy, dualistic
personal life? But his family defended him. His
daughter, Anne, admitted that people knocked
him off the pedestal when they learned about
the alcoholism and womanizing. But she insisted
the work stands on its own. And that's the big
question for you, for the listener. Can you separate
the message from the messenger? This played out
in the Zen community itself with a huge backlash
from formal practitioners. They felt he was all
talk, no walk. Pretty much. The core criticism
was his dismissal of Zazen, formal sitting meditation.
Masters like Philip Kaplow, even D .T. Suzuki
to some extent, they felt he was misinterpreting
key concepts. Just getting a superficial intellectual
understanding. Exactly. They hated his casual
approach. He famously said Zazen was just sitting
but not sitting. said he only understood half
a koan he was using it to justify not doing the
hard work and his most infamous quote about it
was a cat sits until it is tired of sitting then
gets up stretches and walks away which to a zen
master must have sounded like an endorsement
for just being lazy it was seen as offering an
easy way out a zen light for people who wanted
the philosophy without the discipline The prominent
Zen teacher Robert Aitken said that D .T. Suzuki
himself told him flat out, Mr. Watts did not
understand that story. Ouch. But he had his defenders,
too. And a very powerful one. A very powerful
one. Shunri Suzuki, the founder of the San Francisco
Zen Center, a man famous for his rigor. When
one of his students dismissed Watts, Suzuki apparently
got very serious and called Watts a great bodhisattva.
A bodhisattva, wow. Yeah, he insisted the student
was missing the point, that Watts' vital work
was opening the door for countless Westerners
who would have never found it otherwise. So his
mission was dissemination, not discipline. It
was about building that bridge. And his life
ended in 1973. He was only 58. And the circumstances
of his death are almost like a final Zen teaching.
He'd just gotten back from this grueling European
lecture tour. Right. He was exhausted. He died
in his cabin in Druid Heights, California. But
what happened next was unusual. His body was
cremated almost immediately on a woodpire on
Muir Beach by Buddhist monks before the authorities
could even get there. His son Mark later found
out that his father had planned the whole thing
meticulously. It was this deliberate, immediate
return to nature, a final act of letting go.
His wife, Mary Jane, said of him, the secret
of life is knowing when to stop. And he stopped
on his own terms. He's gone. But that cultural
echo is louder than ever. All the music sampling,
the movies. He provided the language for questioning
reality. And that's a quest more people are on
today than ever before. He was a philosopher
who mastered audio. He recorded these talks that
have become, in a way, a new kind of scripture
for people seeking accessible wisdom outside
of any institution. So wrapping this all up,
what's the final takeaway? Yeah. Alan Watts'
singular achievement was what? Taking Eastern
philosophy out of the temple and putting it on
the airwaves. I think so. Making the profound
accessible. Making non -duality understandable
to a profoundly dualistic and anxious Western
culture. He was that crucial bridge. And he did
it by trying to resolve that feeling of alienation,
by insisting that you aren't just this fragile
little ego, but an inseparable part of the whole
cosmic dance. Exactly. That understanding the
contradiction of opposites up and down life and
death. That's the key. That's the path to real
psychological peace. Which brings us right back
to the man himself, the entertainer and the rogue,
the mystic and the alcoholic. If Watts taught
that the contradiction of opposites is the fundamental
method of life. Then what does it mean for us
that his most profound, most liberating teachings
came directly from his own deeply flawed, contradictory
and troubled personal life? It makes you wonder,
was the rascal nature essential to his role as
the entertainer? Did it allow him to sidestep
the kind of spiritual arrogance that can come
with being a pure teacher? He delivered this
message of cosmic unity through a very messy,
very human vessel. So we'll leave you with that
provocative thought. Maybe the pursuit of this
kind of transcendental knowledge can't be separated
from the messy reality of the person pursuing
it. Maybe the contradictions in Watts' life weren't
a flaw in his teaching, but were actually the
final, human, complicated evidence of it. Something
to mull over until our next deep dive.