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The Essential Alan Watts

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From book's back cover:

"For more than twenty years [circa 1977] Alan Watts earned a reputation as one of the foremost interpreters of Eastern philosophies to the West. Beginning at the age of 20, when he wrote The Spirit of Zen, he developed an audience of millions who were enriched by his book, tape recordings, radio, television, and public lectures.

Just before his death he completed the project most dear to his heart. In the secluded and relaxed atmosphere aboard his ferryboat SS Vallejo and at his mountain retreat in Druid Heights he recorded the basic tenets of his philosophy.

Revised by his son Mark here is the last original work of Alan Watts now combined with several classic pieces previously not available in book form, including the favorites "Work As Play" and "The Trickster Guru."

This final volume is an outstanding introduction to Watts for those who do not know him and a valuable legacy for all."

The Essential Alan Watts is really not all that essential reading for anyone seeking to discover the heart of Watts' philosophy. While it does manage to gloss over many of his most important themes, the ideas mentioned are just not developed enough for the casual reader to gain much from this presentation. In other words, why settle for a Volkswagon Beetle when you can get a Mercedes Benz.

The Genuine Fake at Play (for those unfamiliar, Watts has referred to himself as a Genuine Fake) references the almost casual and breezy way the majority of this book is presented to the reader. In truth The Essential A.W. was not originally conceived of as a book by its author. The pieces here, masquerading as essays, were mostly derived from talks or lectures rather than well thought out written essays.

Five of the ten pieces were reworked from a video series recorded by Watts in 1971. Three others began their life as "public lectures delivered to general and professional audiences." Only the first two pieces were originally conceived of and written as essays, and of those two only the first, "The Trickster Guru," is worth reading in any serious way.

What is objectionable here is the intermingling of the spoken format with the written format. When one speaks, and especially when one speaks extemporaneously as Watts was abundantly want to do in his later years, one can lose, by the very nature of the format, a modicum of focus and development of the material at hand. In the case of a speech or talk having been transcribed to the written page, it is like trying to bring living fish out of a stream and attempting to have them survive on dry land. It just doesn't always work, especially when you don't have an aquarium to put them in. And even then they're out of their natural element.

For readers who are already familiar with Watts there may be some additional insights or different ways of stating what has been stated before that one might pick up from the transcribed pieces. And these may shed new light on one's appreciation of Watts general themes. But the converse is also true, and one may find these "essays" a bit sluggish and repetitive of information better stated elsewhere in Watts' oeuvre.

This having been said, there are some interesting moments in The Essential A.W., just as there are with anything he was involved with. The pieces that work the best as written pieces, out of which some bright pebbles of wisdom may be plucked, are the three public lectures: "The Individual as Man/World," "Oriental 'Omnipotence,'" and "Psychotherapy and Eastern Religion." A hearty runners up award goes to "The Trickster Guru" which may save a few unwary spiritual seekers from becoming involved with the wrong kind of spiritual teacher.

Where Watts excells is in de-mystifying the Eastern terminology and defining it in a way that Westerners can comprehend and apply. As he does in most of his other works, there is some of this going on here, too. And for the newly acquainted with Watts, this may be of some value. But the vast majority of this book is too light and carefree, too playful, for serious Watts enthusiasts to adequately appreciate.

The Essential Alan Watts is really not essential reading forany Watts enthusiast who is genuinely interested in getting at the meat of this man's philosophy. It is not even recommended as a good introduction to Watts, even though it manages to gloss over many of his most important themes. In other words, why settle for a Volkswagen Beetle when you can get a Mercedes Benz.

The genuine fake at play refers to the casual and breezy way the majority of this book is presented to the reader, and in truth it was not written perse as a book in the first instance. As the editor suggests in his introduction, the pieces here masquerading as essays were, in the most part, derived from talks or lectures.

Five of the ten pieces were reworked from a video series recorded by Watts in 1971. Three others began their life as "public lectures delivered to general and professional audiences." Only the first two pieces were originally concieved of and written as essays, and of these two only the first, "The Trickster Guru," is worth reading in any serious way.

What is objectionable here is the intermingling of the spoken format with the written format. When one speaks, and especially when one speaks extemporaneously as Watts was abundantly want to do in his latter years, one can lose, by the very nature of the format, a modicum of focus and development of the material at hand. In the case of a speech or talk having been transcribed to the written page, it is like trying to bring living fish out of a stream and attempting to have them survive on dry land. It just doesn't always work, especially when you don't have an aquarium to put them in. And even then they're out of their natural element.

This having been said, there are some interesting moments in the book, just as there are with anything Watts was involved with. The pieces that work the best as written pieces, out of which some bright pebbles can be plucked, are the three public lectures: "The Individual as Man/World," "Oriental 'Omnipotence,'" and "Psychotherapy and Eastern Religion." A hearty runners up award goes to "The Trickster Guru" which may save a few unwary spiritual seekers from becoming involved with the wrong kind of spritual teacher.

In "The Individual as Man/World" Watts explores the eastern concept of man, the individual, as being part and parcel with his environment. This is more than just a concept about interdependence, it involves a oneness of action and outcome as when Watts states: "...it is quite impossible to describe the movement of my arm except in relation to the rest of my body and to the background against which you perceive it."

The piece ends with an introduction of the idea of "reciprocal interaction" which he describes as an "interaction between everything inside the skin and everything outside it, neither one being prior to the other, but equals, like the front and back of a coin." What he doesn't say, but which is implied, is that within a situation of reciprocal interaction is where all true living, the feeling of aliveness, takes place. We only experience this feeling when we are interacting with another living entity such as a dog, another human being or even a plant. Or it could even be a landscape which stretches out before us by whose beauty we are taken in.

The next piece, "Oriental 'Omnipotence,'" provides Watts with a platform on which he distinguishes the difference between the Eastern idea of omnipotence and the Western, primarily the Christian theological, idea of omnipotence. Of the Western idea of omniscience he says "we tend to think of a knowledge which is infinitely encyclopedic and of power which is infinitely magical or 'technological.' We think of God as being...in conscious and voluntary control of absolutely everything which happens."

Whereas in the East a Chinese Buddhist poem expresses in a succinct manner the Oriental take on omniscience:

You may wish to ask where the flower comes from, But even the God of Spring does not know.

Watts comments: "A Westerner would expect that, of all people, the God of Spring would know exactly how flowers are made. But if he doesn't know, how can he possibly make them? A Buddhist would answer that the question itself is misleading since flowers are grown, not made. Things which are made are either assemblages of formerly separated parts (like houses) or constructed by cutting and shaping from without inwards (like pots of clay or images). But things which are grown formulate their own structure and differentiate their own parts from within outwards."

And therein lies the difference, in its essence.

In the final piece, "Psychotherapy and Eastern Religion," Watts delves into what he calls "a lack of metaphysical depth, a certain shallowness which results from having a philosophical unconsciousness which has not been examined," concerning what at the time consisted of being the present state of all schools of psychotherapy.

What he was trying to get at was that psychotherapy, at that moment, was "based on the world view of nineteenth-century scientific naturalism, which has as its fundamental assumption that the energy which we express is basically stupid - blind energy, libido - and it's called the unconscious. The assumption of this philosophy of nature was that the psychobiology of human nature was a stupid mechanism, a fluke that had arisen in a mechanical universe, and that if we were to maintain this fluke and its values, it would be necessary for us to enter into a serious fight with nature...