Alan Watts

When we are searching the Internet there are lot of junk; occasionally we can come across something interesting like a picture, quote, video, etc. This interesting thing can keep you awake because of the impact it may hit you each is greater than the other or lesser than the other but a man had touch my mind in seeing his quote, picture, video, etc. His name is Alan Wilson Watts he was a born philosopher, writer, and speaker and he was best known as an interpreter and Populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury - Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies. 

Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. He also explored human consciousness, in the essay "The New Alchemy" (1958), and in the book The Joyous Cosmology (1962). 

Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. His legacy has been kept alive by his son, Mark Watts, and many of his recorded talks and lectures are available on the Internet. According to the critic Erik Davis , his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity." 

In his early years he was born to middle class parents in the village of Chislehurst, Kent. His father was a representative for London office of the Michelin Tyre Company, His mother a housewife whose father had been a missionary. With modest financial means, they chose to live in pastoral surroundings and Alan, an only child, grew up playing at brookside, learning the names of wildflowers and butterflies. Probably because of the influence of his mother's religious family. The Bunchans, an interest in 'ultimate things' seeped in. But it mixed with Alan's own interests in storybook fables and romantic tales of the mysterious Far East.

Watts also wrote of a mystical vision he experienced while ill with a fever as a child. During this time he was influenced by Far Eastern landscape paintings and embroideries that had been given to his mother by missionaries returning from china. The few Chinese paintings Watts was able to see in England riveted him, and he wrote "I was aesthetically fascinated with a certain clarity, transparency, and spaciousness in Chinese and Japanese art. It seemed to float. These works of art emphasized the participative relationship of man in nature, a theme that stood fast throughout his life, and one that he often writes about.

In his Middle years after heading up the Academy for a few years, Watts left the faculty for a freelance career in the mid 1950s. In 1953, he began what became a long -running weekly radio program at Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley, which continued until his death in 1973. In 1957 when his age was 42, Watts published on of his best known books, The way of Zen, which focused on philosophical explication and history. Besides drawing on the lifestyle and philosophical background of Zen, in India and China, Watts introduced ideas drawn from general semantics. Watts offered analogies from cybernetic principles possibly applicable to the Zen life.

In 1958, Watts toured parts of Europe with his father, meeting the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung and the German psychotherapist Karlfried Graf Durckheim. Upon returning to the United States, Watts recorded two seasons of television series (1959-1960) for KQED public television in San Francisco, "Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life."

Finally In his Later years his writings of the 1950s. he conveyed his admiration for the practicality in the historical achievements of Chan (Zen) in the Far East, for it had fostered farmers, architects, builders and etc. he presents himself as "Zennist" in spirit as he wrote in his last book, Tao: The Watercourse Way.

But all people must have an end In October 1973, Watts returned from a European lecture tour to his cabin in Druid Heights. Friends of Watts had been concerned for him for some time over what they considered his excessive drinking of alcohol. On 16 November 1973, he died in his sleep. He was reported to have been under treatment for a heart condition. His body was cremated in a Buddhist ceremony shortly thereafter.

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.”

-Alan Watts