Customer Reviews

Out of Your Mind

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I don't mean to be irreligious with this title, obviously Alan Watts' CD's are not to be put on the same level as "The Bible" but as someone who has sought answers for most of my life, the set of CD's came as something of a godsend.

This collection does an excellent job of covering the essentials of Watt's philosphies. Most of his books (if you get them) are more detailed reiterations of his lectures here (or more correctly these lectures are synopsese of his books).

If you enjoy having "mondo" or enlightening dialogue - these CD's are for you. In them Watt's personality comes across clearly and his philosphy rolls from him naturally. If you're not already familiar with Watts its hard to describe what you're missing. What I can say is this collection is worth the cost. In it Watts speaks in a manner that is recognizably truthful and attempts to present a new 'mythology' by which we can see the world as it really is.

I can not recommend this too highly - I have listened to the entire 12 CD set more than 10 times. If nothing else it will help you sleep at night.

I don't think I could begin too put into words how wonderful these cd's are! If you are a fan of Alan Watts this collection is a must! His books are great, but to hear him speak puts his discourses on a whole new level. ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL!!!!

After reading the transcripts of his talks, I wanted to hear Watts' voice. There had to be more to what was being said than what could be seen in the page. With my assignments on Watts in college three decades ago, I had just given them a cursory reading for classes on Zen and Taoism. I never gave a lot of consideration about them until recently. Having listened to the CD's and my readings, I was surprised at how much my view points on life were either shaped by those writings or helped along.

Like him, I was raised a Protestant. I was felt comfortable about Zen Buddhism because of Watt views. His Buddhism, though, is his own form of Buddhism because down to his bones Watt really is quite the Anglican. You won't understand that until you hear him lecture, his inflections or his jokes.

Working through my third round of the CDs, I'm in awe of him. In these discussions he lays out the philosophical basis for the environmental movement. There is a discussion of Basho's poetry that makes me wonder how much impact he had in shaping Beat poetry then and our poetry now. There discourse on bits, bytes and nets that anticipated our digital world and information technology. He was much ahead of his philosophical contemporaries and spiritually unlike them he doesn't hide anything from his audience.
What a fine mind and spirit he was.

These CD's are worth the purchase.

Eric Otto
Cincinnati

Alan's lectures are at once charming, mind-blowing and gratifyingly substantial. A person like me, trained in Western thought and material objectivity, needs rational exposition on the subject of Zen rather than new age psychobabble. Perhaps it's the high british accent, but Alan delivers the Gospel of Nothingness with commanding intellectualism and endearing modesty. There is just as much bullsh** in Eastern religion as Western; Alan cuts to the chase and finds a Zen ethos that embraces both 'spiritualism' and modern psychology.
Basically, DNA biology and particle physics teach us that we are quite literally one and the same as everything else in the universe. Like waves are 'made of' ocean and 'are' the ocean and return to ocean, we are 'made of' the universe and 'are' the universe - now, before we were born, and after we die. Our apparent individuality is a counterproductive artificial construct. Peace, sartori, enlightenment, whatever you wish to call it, comes when we accidentally happen to see the Matrix - when we suddenly reach an understanding that nothing perceived by our senses is real - when, out of nowhere, we lose all fear of death and all desires and simply exist. The lessons of this state of being are to fully live every day as a grateful node of sentience belonging to the entire universe and to help others release themselves from desire and fear. There is no winning in life or defeating death; we are natural parts of the universe that arise, form, flourish and are recycled. Since we are the universe we do not perish - if we detached from desire there would be no sense of time and we would not fear anything, including death.
After listening to all of these lectures, I continue to look around for more from Alan Watts. He is jolly and cool and sparkling - he reminds me of a old-style British officer from India regaling us with tales of the Raj and the ways of the strange and wonderful subjects of the Empire!

In general, recordings of Alan Watts lectures, even more than his books, convey his playful approach to his teachings. The rare gift of being serious and yet not being too serious is a rare quality that makes his legacy enduring. This collection was mostly recorded on his houseboat, on his own turf so to speak. I have heard many hours of Alan Watts lectures from LP, tape, CD, and mp3 sources. In these "houseboat lectures" he is even more clear, lucid, candid, relaxed, and spontaneous than usual. Whether he is talking about cultural myths and approaches to how the universe was created to sex and a hundred other topics you just get the feeling you are in his living room talking to a bunch of friends and worrying even less than usual, if this is possible for him, about what the officials at a college lecture hall, ministers at a church, or a business conference center would think. This collection is superb in giving you the feeling of what it was like to hear Alan Watts in the most informal of settings. If you are a fan of Alan Watts this CD collection is highly worth the price. I do not know who dug up these recordings and edited them but they did a great job. Thank you.

I first heard "Big Al" listening to Roy of Hollywood play his talks on KPFK 90.7 the Something's Happening late night radio show down in Southern California. Alan Watts changed my life! It broke my heart when I moved away to go to school and could no longer receive the signal. Roy encouraged me to make tapes off the air and I still donate with gratitude! (KPFK is commercial free/listener sponsored.) I can stream the show over the web now and the local public radio station broadcasts Alan now, but finding this deal here blew my mind! Check the price if you were to buy the discs and get this.

Great to hear Alan Watts speak. He has a wonderful laugh. This is a collection of many of his talks. It is organized well and easy to follow. Each cd is about 1 hour; each segment about 5 minutes. The segments blend into each other to make a coherent hour. Very enjoyable and beneficial.

I feel in my opinion to find A. Watts as 'one of' the greatest philosophers of our time to be just as plausible to say Quine, Kripke, Russell, or even Ren? Descartes and Goethe to be 'one' of the greatest philosophers of our time (and I assure you I'm not a minority of one to think so).

I have been studying the subjects in which A. Watts has repeatedly referenced from C. G. Jung, Nagarjuna, Sigmund Freud, Descartes, Lao Tzu, and many more in fields such as General Semantics (Alfred Korzibski), Biology, Psychology, Neurology, and fields that are so intertwined that we don't have yet labels, or technical words to sollicite a field of study.

I feel Alan Watts would be regarded today as Carl Jung in his time, but only to discover him decades afterwards. Like Karl Popper for example maybe a few years down the road (though he died in 1994).

As for changing your own perspective of your social culture, Gandhi very rightly put it "As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves."

I am a fan of Alan Watts, the quintessential "spiritual entertainer." In fact, perhaps I can consider myself more of a student of his now.

He is not a charlatan "beat" Zen professor, nor a wannabe, pseudo Nietzsche.

For me he is the catalyst that gently leads me out of my crystallized, biased comfort zones of erroneous thinking.

When listening to Alan Watts you should allow his voice, his laughter, his total persona merge with your mind and heart. If you do this, you will be privileged to have known a rare, and special human being. Not a perfect human being, to be sure, but indeed someone who has contributed to the fonts of PRACTICAL esoteric knowledge and understanding.

In any event, I purchased the MP3 files instead of the physical CDs and the process worked flawlessly! Everything downloaded directly to my iTunes app (I use a Mac) and then I burned the full 12 CD equivalent to ONE DVD! to archive them. As a test, I dragged one of the mp3 files to my desktop from the DVD, opened it up in QuickTime and it played beautifully.

Definitely worth the effort to listen to all 12 CD's, just to listen to Alan Watt's brilliant laugh! He was certainly able to reduce fairly difficult concepts in eastern philosophy into easily understood ones while entertaining his audience. Everyone should listen to Alan's work at some stage in their lives and there is one thing for sure, if you burst out laughing when you are listening you have definitely got IT.