Alan Watts

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

God is no separate monarch: he is the whole playing at being each one

An impersonal AbsoluteStated explicitly

Alan Watts, an Episcopal priest until 1950 and afterwards a popular expositor of Asian traditions, rejected the image of God as a monarch separate from his work. In The Book he contrasts the ceramic model of the world, made by an outside craftsman, and the mechanical model with a dramatic model drawn from his reading of Vedānta: the ultimate hides from and finds itself in all beings, as in a game of hide-and-seek. Beyond Theology carries the idea into Christianity and reproaches it for having made God a jealous king. Already in The Supreme Identity, under the influence of Coomaraswamy and Guénon, he had presented the identity of the human ground with the Absolute as the common core of the great traditions.

Who am I? Is there a true self?

The skin-encapsulated ego is a hallucination: what you are is the whole

The Self is the AbsoluteStated explicitly

The Book, Watts's most personal work, is subtitled on the taboo against knowing who you are, and answers bluntly: the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination. For him that ego is a social convention, reinforced by language and upbringing. What one really is, is the whole process of the universe, which manifests as this person just as a wave is the ocean at one point. Watts takes this thesis from his reading of Vedānta, the identity of ātman and brahman, which he had already set out in The Supreme Identity, and combines it with Buddhism and Western psychology; in Psychotherapy East and West he presents those traditions as ways of undoing the feeling of an isolated self.

Why do we suffer?

Anxiety comes from seeking security in a future that does not exist

Thought and psychological timeStated explicitly

The Wisdom of Insecurity, one of Watts's most widely read books, states the problem clearly: modern man suffers because he seeks security in a world that is essentially changing, and seeks it in a future that exists only as an idea. Living for a tomorrow that never comes, he misses the only real moment. To this is added an inner split: the self that observes and tries to control experience separates itself from experience itself, and the harder it strives to secure itself the more anxious it becomes; Watts calls this the law of reversed effort. The only way to make sense out of change, he writes, is to plunge into it, move with it and join the dance. It is his own synthesis of Buddhism, Taoism and psychology.

What happens after death?

The ego dies, not what we are: the universe wakes up again as others

What I am is never born and never diesInferred from their doctrine

Watts did not uphold personal survival or a judgement after death. But, consistently with his reading of Vedānta, he held that what we really are is not the ego that dies. In The Book and in his lectures he proposes imagining death as the end of one waking and the beginning of another: if the ego is a function of the universe, when one dies the universe goes on waking up as every new being that is born, and each of them says «I» as we did. Death for him is the other side of life, as the valley is of the mountain. In Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown, his last book, written shortly before he died, he meditates on it with the same serenity.

How is liberation or salvation attained?

Wanting liberation is the trap: there is nothing to get, only something to see

No method: total attentionInferred from their doctrine

Watts held that seeking liberation as an achievement prevents it. In The Wisdom of Insecurity he calls this the law of reversed effort: the more one tries to secure oneself or to stop thinking, the more the striving self is reinforced. In Psychotherapy East and West he presents Buddhism, Vedānta and Taoism not as religions but as ways of liberation that undo the double binds by which society convinces us we are a separate self, and notes that Zen masters often use tricks to show the disciple there is nothing to attain. On psychedelics he wrote: if you get the message, hang up the phone. Liberation is sudden understanding, not the accumulation of merit.

Is a teacher necessary?

A philosophical entertainer, not a guru: there is nothing to transmit

No spiritual authorityInferred from their doctrine

Watts declined to present himself as a spiritual teacher; he preferred to describe himself as a philosopher and popular expositor, and in his memoir, In My Own Way, he portrays himself ironically as an intellectual, a mystic and a disreputable epicurean. He was not a formal disciple of any lineage, though he acknowledged his debt to D. T. Suzuki and to the texts. On the teacher's role, his thesis, set out in Psychotherapy East and West and in many lectures, is that the authentic teacher transmits nothing: with paradoxes and tricks he leads the disciple to discover that what he sought was not lacking, and then the disciple no longer needs him. He distrusted dependence on gurus and on religious organisations as a substitute for understanding.

Is the world real?

The world is a game in which the One hides and finds itself

Manifestation of the divineStated explicitly

For Watts, the world is not a machine nor a work made from outside, but a game. From his reading of Hinduism he takes the idea of līlā, divine play, and develops it in The Book and in his lectures: the ultimate hides from itself in the multitude of beings and finds itself again in them, with no purpose but play, just as music does not exist to reach the end of the piece. With the Buddhist image of Indra's net, which he sets out in The Diamond Web, he adds that each thing reflects all the others. Hence his critique of the Western contempt for matter in Does It Matter?: the concrete world is not something to overcome, but the place where the game is played.

What is love?

Love cannot be commanded: it springs up when the self stops watching itself

What appears when the self ceasesInferred from their doctrine

Watts applied his analysis of the double bind to love: the command to love, whether religious or social, demands something that cannot be produced at will, and generates a feigned and guilty love. Authentic love is spontaneous, like everything alive, and appears when the person stops seeing himself as a separate ego that calculates and watches itself. In Nature, Man and Woman he carries this idea into love between the sexes: against the Christian distrust of the body he proposes, drawing on Taoism and tantra, a relationship in which sexual love is a form of contemplation and neither a conquest nor an obligation. For Watts, love is not a virtue to be acquired but what flows when it is not forced.

Are we free, or is everything determined?

Neither free will nor determinism: both assume a separate self that does not exist

There is no doerStated explicitly

Watts considered the dilemma badly framed. Both free will and determinism assume a self separate from the world: one that controls it or one the world pushes around. If, as he holds in The Book, that skin-encapsulated self is a hallucination, the question loses its basis: what one is is not an agent facing the universe, but the universe acting here. That is why the distinction between voluntary and involuntary, as between the heart beating and the hand moving, is for him conventional. In his expositions of Taoism, from The Way of Zen to Tao: The Watercourse Way, he finds the same idea in wu wei, action that does not force and springs up spontaneously.

Why meditate or pray?

Meditating is attending to what is without purpose, like listening to music

Being presentStated explicitly

Watts understood meditation as purposeless attention to the present. In The Art of Contemplation, published in facsimile of his own handwriting, and in the lectures collected in Still the Mind, he describes it as ceasing to talk inwardly and listening to what is happening, the sounds, the breath, thoughts themselves as if they were noises, without trying to control anything. Meditating to obtain something, enlightenment or calm, would repeat the trap of goal-directed effort; true meditation has no goal, just as music is not played to reach the end. In The Wisdom of Insecurity he had already put it: the only real moment is this one, and full awareness of it dissolves anxiety.

Can reason know the ultimate?

The word is not the thing: reality slips through the net of concepts

The ultimate lies beyond the mindStated explicitly

Watts was a brilliant intellectual who devoted much of his work to explaining that what is essential is not grasped by the intellect. In The Way of Zen he shows how conventional thought divides the world into useful things and categories, but confuses that net of concepts with the reality it tries to catch; Zen, in his reading, seeks to return to direct experience, prior to words. In The Wisdom of Insecurity he insists that thinking about life is not living it, and in his lectures he repeated the image that the menu is not the meal. He does not reject reason, which he uses with relish, but its claim to encompass everything.

Withdraw from the world or transform it?

Neither flee nor reform from the ego: live the everyday without standing apart

Contemplation in actionInferred from their doctrine

Watts distrusted both ascetic flight and the reformism that springs from a separate self. He was drawn to the Zen and Taoist ideal of one who returns to the marketplace after awakening and lives the everyday without pose: in Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen he criticised both the use of Zen as an alibi for rebellion and its conversion into a rigid discipline. At the same time he took an interest in the problems of his time: in Does It Matter? he argued that the West is not too materialistic but not materialistic enough, because it despises the matter it consumes, and he wrote about money, technology and ecology. His proposal is not to withdraw, but to live in the world without feeling a stranger in it, and to care for it from there.