Alan watts biography book
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In My Own Way: An Autobiography
Author: Alan W. Watts
Brand: New World Library
Edition: 2nd
Features:
Binding: Paperback
Number Of Pages:
Release Date:
Details: Product Description In this new edition of his acclaimed autobiography long out of print and rare until now Alan Watts tracks his spiritual and philosophical evolution from a child of religious conservatives in rural England to a freewheeling spiritual teacher who challenged Westerners to defy convention and think for themselves. From early in this intellectual life, Watts shows himself to be a philosophical renegade and wide-ranging autodidact who came to Buddhism through the teachings of Christmas Humphreys and D. T. Suzuki. Told in a nonlinear style, In My Own Way wonderfully combines Watts’ own brand of unconventional philosophy and often hilarious accounts of gurus, celebrities, psychedelic drug experiences, and wry observations of Western culture. A charming foreword written by Watts’ fath
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Alan Watts
Monica Furlong’s biography of Watts seemed, at least in part, intended to "out" Watts’s closeted psychological difficulties and highlight his foibles and lamentable habits and dependencies. (In his autobiography Watts made rather vague reference to "my wayward spirit," and elsewhere he wrote "my philosophy has not saved me from vast amounts of human folly".) Watts admitted that he'd gained something of a disreputable image. Given that, in the 20th century, Zen was associated with Japan, I think he was consoled that alcoholism was quite common in post-war Japan (still a very male-dominated society condoning of a g
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( pp., New World Library, )
Alan Watts was a gloriously pixilated man, born in an era when pixilated meant “meddled with by elves” and no one could associate the term with dots on a screen. His autobiography, In My Own Way, recently reissued, hints at this trickster quality right from the title’s double entendre. The book is charming, delightful, mordantly witty, utterly clear. If you need a full rendering of Watts’s life, consult other sources, but read his autobiography anyway.
Few meditation instructions can top Watts’s attempt to meditate, at age seventeen:
I annihilated and bawled out every theory and concept of what should be my properly spiritual state of mind, or what should be meant by ME. And instantly my weight vanished. I owned nothing. All my hang-ups disappeared. I walked on air. Thereupon I composed a haiku.
He had a gift for conveying Buddhist ideas to a Western audience. With typical slyness, Watts called it a “big gift of the gab.” No reason to