Alan W. Watts
Alan Watts was born on January 6, 1915, in Kent, England, the starting point of a life that would eventually carry him across national boundaries and through a wide range of intellectual and professional pursuits. He received his early education at St Hugh's School and afterward at The King's School Canterbury, two institutions that marked the first stages of his formation as a thinker. He held citizenship in both the United Kingdom and the United States, a dual status that reflected the transatlantic character of his adult life.
Watts worked across several roles during his career: philosopher, writer, theologian, Anglican priest, and speaker. He also described himself as a philosophical entertainer, a term that sat alongside the more conventional designations without displacing them. The combination pointed to the breadth of his professional identity, which moved between the formal obligations of the priesthood and the less bounded work of writing and public address.
Among the works he produced as a writer, Watts authored The Way of Zen. The book stands as a concrete instance of his output and one of the named titles associated with his career. His occupations as Anglican priest and philosopher placed him across a range of disciplines, and his writing represented one of the primary forms through which he engaged with those disciplines over the course of his life.
Watts died on November 16, 1973, at the age of fifty-eight. He had been born a subject of the English county of Kent and died a citizen of two countries, having spent his career working as a philosopher, theologian, priest, writer, and speaker. The year of his death marked the end of a career that had encompassed ordained ministry, philosophical writing, and the activity he called philosophical entertainment.
Quotes by Alan W. Watts
Alan W. Watts's insights on:
At such times we are so aware of the moment that no attempt is made to compare its experience with other experiences.
However, when you say to yourself, “I must go on living,” you put yourself in a double bind because you submit to a process which is essentially spontaneous and then insist it must happen.
We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold to them with the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos.
Tools such as these, as well as the tools of language and thought, are of real use to men only if they are awake – not lost in the dreamland of past and future, but in the closest touch with that point of experience where reality can alone be discovered: this moment.
As a matter of fact, our age is no more insecure than any other. Poverty, disease, war, change, and death are nothing new. In the best of times “security” has never been more than temporary and apparent. But it has been possible to make the insecurity of human life supportable by belief in unchanging things beyond the reach of calamity – in God, in man’s immortal soul, and in the government of the universe by eternal laws of right.
There is, then, the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years so many long-established traditions have broken down – traditions of family and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time.
There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point.
However, until there is silence of the mind, it is almost impossible to understand eternal life, that is to say, eternal now.
To run away is the only defense of something rigid against an overwhelming force. Therefore the good shock absorber has not only “give,” but also stability or “weight.