I've lived in the Bay Area three times, and always considered Watts to be a cross between a car salesman and a seducer. So this was fun pretty quickly.
He was a brilliant man who, in the beginning, was sincere, scholarly, and (to his credit as a writer and lecturer) not pedantic. His was also an addictive personality and, when turned on, his sexual appetites could verge on the rapacious. There are real insights to be found in his work, but I never read him without a sense of unease. His is a cautionary tale.
Yes. My heart always sinks a little when I meet someone who loves his works. They are brilliant in their way, but his lack of actual practicing the things he talks about is always there in the background. (To be fair, he could also be very funny: his calling himself a "stand-up philosopher" is memorable.)
Hmm, I'd say that whatever else you can say about Watts he certainly did practice what he preached.
He was explicitly against "serious" religion, for lack of a better term, and rejected the notion that religion was about becoming superior or achieving some kind of "superhuman" status - or any kind of striving at all, really.
His whole point was against "striving", or taking the world "seriously" and trying to "achieve" anything. Rather, one was to realize one was already "it", the world was fundamentally the play of Brahman and not serious, and there was "nothing to do". Life was simply joyous play. Watts also explicitly rejected anti-sex strains of religion so his own avid sex life was in no way hypocritical.
Now, one may disagree with this in the final analysis, but there is a significant amount of support for something like this view in much of tantric Buddhism and also in Chan and Zen.
And while I cannot fully accept this viewpoint as is, I think it's an important contribution to religious thought that has cognates in all traditions.
I recently read a book of Christian theology recommended by David Hart by Schemmann that basically describes man as "homo adorans" who was created by God originally simply to delight in the beauty and wonder of creation - it's hard not to see how this basically "unserious" view of reality and life echoes much of what Watts says, although with significant additions and modifications.
I've lived in the Bay Area three times, and always considered Watts to be a cross between a car salesman and a seducer. So this was fun pretty quickly.
He was a brilliant man who, in the beginning, was sincere, scholarly, and (to his credit as a writer and lecturer) not pedantic. His was also an addictive personality and, when turned on, his sexual appetites could verge on the rapacious. There are real insights to be found in his work, but I never read him without a sense of unease. His is a cautionary tale.
Yes. My heart always sinks a little when I meet someone who loves his works. They are brilliant in their way, but his lack of actual practicing the things he talks about is always there in the background. (To be fair, he could also be very funny: his calling himself a "stand-up philosopher" is memorable.)
Hmm, I'd say that whatever else you can say about Watts he certainly did practice what he preached.
He was explicitly against "serious" religion, for lack of a better term, and rejected the notion that religion was about becoming superior or achieving some kind of "superhuman" status - or any kind of striving at all, really.
His whole point was against "striving", or taking the world "seriously" and trying to "achieve" anything. Rather, one was to realize one was already "it", the world was fundamentally the play of Brahman and not serious, and there was "nothing to do". Life was simply joyous play. Watts also explicitly rejected anti-sex strains of religion so his own avid sex life was in no way hypocritical.
Now, one may disagree with this in the final analysis, but there is a significant amount of support for something like this view in much of tantric Buddhism and also in Chan and Zen.
And while I cannot fully accept this viewpoint as is, I think it's an important contribution to religious thought that has cognates in all traditions.
I recently read a book of Christian theology recommended by David Hart by Schemmann that basically describes man as "homo adorans" who was created by God originally simply to delight in the beauty and wonder of creation - it's hard not to see how this basically "unserious" view of reality and life echoes much of what Watts says, although with significant additions and modifications.
It's the significant additions and modifications that put Schmemann and Watts in entirely different camps, with few practical points of contact.
Thank you
Thanks for this! So much shared here.
Milliner inspires me to look again at Martin Palmer's "The Jesus Sutras" which Thích Nhất Hạnh praised so highly.
There is much food for thought in this presentation. Thank you!