Alan Watts—HERE and NOW by Columbus Peter J

Author:Columbus, Peter J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438442013
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2012-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

Alan hoped to let it be seen how the ancient, timeless Chinese wisdom was medicine for the ills of the West. Yet, paradoxically, it must not be taken as medicine, an intellectually swallowed “pill,” but allowed joyously to infuse our total being and so transform our individual lives and through them our society, (p. x)

Elsa Gidlow, Alan's long-time friend and neighbor, said that in the writing of his final book, the Way of the Tao “transformed him as he allowed it to permeate his being, so that the reserved, somewhat uptight young Englishman, living overmuch in his head, in his mature years became an outgoing, spontaneously playful, joyous world sage” (cited in Huang, 1975a, p. xi). Not that the joyousness and playfulness came to him without cost and without strain. “But I don't like myself when I am sober,” he confessed once to Huang, noting his penchant for drinking too much. Yet as Huang (1975b) wrote in his epilogue, Alan had “a rare and wonderful ability to be both Occidental and Oriental … when he allowed it, he could be both at once, easily bridging the gaps within his own learning and experience” (p. 126).

Alan Watts expressed the integration of Eastern and Western worldviews in his writings and embodied their synergy in the transformations of his life. He was “an old-fashioned sage. A lover of wisdom. A hard-working scholar who has mastered complex subject matters…. One who can see the wisdom of the ages in the ecstatic flicker of the next moment” (Metzner, 1968a, p. 92). Huang (1975a) called him a “philosophical entertainer … [whose] foremost concern was enjoyment for himself and for his audience” (p. xi). I am now reminded of a remark by Lin Yutang: “I call no man wise until he has made the progress from the wisdom of knowledge to the wisdom of foolishness, and become a laughing philosopher” (cited in Huang, 1991, p. 23). Nowadays, I like to think of Alan as the laughing philosopher, affirming both the highs and lows of existence, knowing the “wisdom of insecurity” (in one of his most inspired book titles), and like the “true men of old” that Chuang-Tzu (1974), Alan's favorite philosopher, wrote about, “when he entered death, there was no sorrow. Carefree he went. Carefree he came. That was all. He did not forget his beginning and did not seek his end. He accepted what he was given with delight” (p. 114). On the evening of his last day, Alan Watts reportedly was happily playing with balloons, and remarked that the weightless, floating sensation was “like my spirit leaving my body.”

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