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Psychotherapy East and West

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Vastly underrated and tragically out of print, _Psychotherapy East and West_ is Alan Watts' greatest work, and is one of the greatest works of psychology/philosophy of the twentieth century written in English. This book is also an ideal introductory course to the psychology of Carl G. Jung. Anyone who wants to read Jung should read this first (even though it came later) because it encompasses all of Jungs key concepts in an ultra-concentrated yet remarkably readable form. That is not to say that Jung is unreadable, because he most certainly is a great, easily translatable writer. But Alan Watts had the advantage of writing in English, and for this reason I believe _Psychotherapy East and West_ is THE ULTIMATE introduction to psychology for the Anglo-American reader. It represents the new wave of fusion psychology/philosophy/religious Asian cusine. No longer should all these fields be separated. Alan Watts and Carl Jung together have succeeded in combining the fields of psychology, philosophy, theology, and anthropological mythology. This is the new wave of generalized spiritual enlightenment which is also unbiased, critical, sceptical and truthful. It has spawned such other great authors as Julian Jaynes and Terrance McKenna. The best thing about this new kind of psychotherapy is that it is not cold and pretentious with regard to religion, but is tolerant and advocating of any type of belief system which enhances people's well being and mental health. Because it is nevertheless rigorous in uncovering the truth, it resembles Eastern Buddhism. Keep in mind that Buddhism makes no firm and unverifiable claims regarding the existence of God or an afterlife; it is simply a stategy for living one's life in the most enjoyable way possible, and _Psychotherapy East and West_ does an excellent job in making this way of life accessable to Americans. This book is the ultimate alliance of belief, spirtuality, psychotherapy, and mental well-being on the one hand, and truthful, critical philosophy on the other. It does not wish to insulate people from spiritual crises and keep them suspended in naive belief, but introduces us to a new wave of spiritualism that is hardened by scepticism and impervious to doubt. While some philosophy might pride itself on debunking unverifiable beliefs, it does not provide a solution to man's broken and neurotic psychological condition due to his lost spirituality. _Psychotherapy East and West_, on the other hand, is respective of truth, critical and sceptical, yet provides firm answers as to how we can avoid the neuroses and depression that might result from an upending of our spiritual beliefs. Unconditionally recommended. One of my top five books of all time, of any genre.

I have many books covering the eastern mental and behavioral teachings; taoist, buddhist, zen, meditation,including DT Suzuki, Watts, Trungpa, the Dhali Llama, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and have snaked through almost all of Castaneda's books. This particular book by Watts slams the topic down with intense clarity, with more power and direct, practical relevance than most books that cover eastern thought. It is intense, challenging, and Watts plows through relentlessly, viewing many cultural habits, and vindicating his central thesis with precision, humour and always good intentions. I have highlighted, re-read, dog-eared and referenced this book the most. Where Lao Tzu could seem overly refined and get vague, Watts turns the table and gets to the nitty gritty with powerful rewards, yet never losing the scope, the reflections, the principle and process that blend with the product. In addition to Edward De Bono and Carlos Castaneda arguing the same point, Watts here also gives intense support to the value and practical applications of HUMOUR in our lives. I love this freedom. If I died tomorrow, and someone wanted to know what my top 50 books list was, this one would be in the top 5.

The ultimate goal is freedom, self-expression, & authenticity in the world we occupy. Alan W. Watts compares the Chinese/Buddhist approach and modern Western psychological techniques for developing a clear consciousness and insight into behavior, life, and relationships. The psychological double-bind is examined via the roles and expectations of society. Buddhist techniques for liberation and Western psychological techniques are explored ... most telling is the discourse that one needs "to escape the therapist's trap" [p. 184, c.1961 Pantheon Books] plus, "social authority contains a contradiction from which natural authority is free, and self-contradiction so basic that its perpetuation must destroy society and drive men to madness". Yet, Watts acknowledges that separation from society, with emphasis on individual uniqueness, is to a great extent, a mistake. The more one explores human behavior, the discovery is made that the individual is connected with and part of the whole be it society, the world, or LIFE. The interconnectedness of everything becomes apparent. It is the relationship of patterns which makes a person a whole human being. This recognition of belonging, helps dissolve the boundaries of the ego and makes a person feel less trapped and free. The ultimate parodox is ... the individual obtains freedom, by the awakening that he/she belongs ... Classic Buddhist conundrums are viewed through the author's eyes. Emotional traps set by Western society are explored. Alan W. Watts provides an excellent discourse on the paths to liberation and the emotional ties which bind people into feeling limited, and unfulfilled as well as a methodology to escape the traps. Erika Borsos (erikab93)

Alan W. Watts' excellent looks into the world of psychotherapy, in particular those dealing with schizophrenia, and a world of Eastern religion; Hindu, Buddhist, Zen, Tao. The main topic of psychotherapy the author reaches is on the subject of the "double-bind" where one is forced to do two things at once. And the only way a human can do two things at once is to split into two people. Thus we have the psychological break. Discussing the writings of such known authors as Norman O. Brown, Wittgenstein, Freud as well as J. Haley, Erickson, Laing, Reich, Watzlawick, and Greagory Bateson. Noting mainly that the result of psychotherapy is that of the East in their liberation. Liberation and a successful therapeutic treatment are one in the same. The individual is free from binds, either double or singular, yet, now and again able to relate to the others world, as well as the world of the self. Watts "dances" about saying that to be therapeutic, one must also initate a double-bind so the patient can struggle to break it by "being himself." In which, as the subject refers to, to "be spontaneous" (which is in itself a paradox, as if someone were controlling you to do something without thinking). Watts concludes in his classic style discussing the liberation from the self in which words are constantly changing no matter where you are going or coming from. Vernaculars and lexicons are part of the moment, not something to be restricted in time; like all things to be - live in the moment. Reccomended for the theoretical psychologist as well as the Eastern frame of mind reader.

In Psychotherapy East and West, Alan Watts compares eastern methods of liberation, specifically Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, and Yoga, with modern western methods, in particular the psychotherapeutic models pioneered by Freud and Jung. In a complex, lucid philosophical book of 214 pages, he finds, among other things, that the very urge toward liberation is problematic, since it presumes the existence of someone (the ego) who is not already liberated.

Perhaps one of the most interesting claims Watts makes, and the ramifications that he develops from it, is the notion that enlightenment is not a metaphysical phenomenon but a social one; namely, the liberation experienced is freedom from a socially imposed fiction that each of us inherits: specifically, that our ego identity is our real identity, that we are an island of consciousness existing in a physical body separate from all other bodies, and identified with a personal history. Thus, for Watts, "cosmic consciousness" or enlightenment is not liberation from the bounds of physical existence, nor does it confer psychic powers and reward in a heavenly hereafter; it simply restores the individual to a state of Reality, wherein his own identity is felt as inseparable from everything previously taken as "Other."

What prompted me to re-read this book after having read it more than twenty years ago was a desire to review Watts's critique of Carl Jung's thought. That Watts had read Jung extensively is evident from this and other books, including The Meaning of Happiness, which has an extensive review of Jungian ideas.

In the chapter, "Society and Sanity" Watts asserts that human societies are consistent patterns of behavior. All societies involve consistent patterns of organization, traditions and customs. Yet this pattern of organization is rooted in nature, it is not separate and opposed to a nature which is chaotic. Human beings are part of nature, and all humans exist in societies: hence, societies too are part of nature. The first rule of society is that life must go on. Watts deconstructs such taken-for-granted notions as the "survival instinct," arguing that to say that an organism eats in order to survive is only to say that an organism is an expression of its environment, i.e., a transformation of air, sunlight, vegetation, water, etc.

There is no scientific reason to suppose that there are such things as instincts for survival or for pleasure. When we say that an organism likes to go on living, or that it goes on living because it likes it, what evidence is there for this "like" except that it does in fact go on living---until it doesn't? (36)

The assertion is astonishing. Don't we all "know" that all animals have a "survival instinct"? We do, but where do we get such knowledge, and is there any basis for it? Watts as always is brilliant at exposing the unconscious metaphysical assumptions which masquerade as scientific truth or "common sense." To say that animals possess a "survival instinct" is to say simply that animals prefer to go on living, except when they commit suicide. Watts' point is that organisms are expressions of environments, a point which field theory has long ago articulated. As such they are inseparable from their environments, and exist in a state of dynamic equilibrium, taking in nutrients and disposing of wastes in a manner consistent with the environment. To project necessity onto what happens as a matter of course is to create a gigantic problem out of life by making what is play into work, transforming a dance into drudgery. As Watts puts it: the first rule of the social game is that life is not a game, but something deadly serious. He calls this the "primordial repression," probably "our most deeply ingrained social attitude." As a result, human life becomes problematic, a predicament from which there appears to be no escape. One manifestation of life-as-dilemma is our relationship to time. One cannot enjoy the present moment because one worries about future events. If we cannot enjoy ourselves in the present due to worries about the future, we lose much of the joy available in life. While being able to remember the past and predict future events based on it allows us to reduce suffering, as for example with weather reports, the same time sense renders human beings all-too-frequently lost regretting past events or dreading future ones.

Man is thus the self-frustrating organism, and this self-frustrating activity Watts likens to the Buddhist concept of samsara. Samsara is the restlessness that is the inevitable consequence of our assumption that life is serious, and that we must go on living. Liberation depends upon becoming aware of this primordial repression, and seeing that the problem is absurd. Release does not come from seeing that there is no solution to the problem, for that would only result in a stoic resignation to life as inevitable tragedy. Rather, enlightenment comes from seeing that the problem itself is meaningless.

In sum, society is organized around a hallucination of a fictitious identity, and includes basic premises such as that one must go on living and that life must go on. In other words, the source of all our anxiety and suffering is to be found in society, not in the individual. Various things follow from this insight: for example, the "neurotic" suffers overtly from the same problem everyone is burdened with, being only a more extreme case of the same fundamental problem, which is alienation based on a false sense of identity inculcated by society. For psychotherapy to be effective, the therapist must not merely help patients adjust themselves to an insane social order, but he must himself have already seen through to the sickness of society.

In "The Ways of Liberation," Watts claims that moksha or nirvana means release not from the bonds of the physical organism or universe, but from society and the consensus trance it induces. He is not impressed by the tales of feats of magic and psychic phenomena attributed to people who become enlightened, and he claims that the testimony of friends and associates who have reached "the other shore" assure him that any changes in consciousness are far more humble, but in other ways more impressive. Accordingly, Watts does not believe in reincarnation, a doctrine he says is tied to the Hindu myth that liberation means freedom from the physical universe. He adds that Buddhists and Vedantists who are in fact liberated, do not take the doctrine of reincarnation literally. If they have not gone out of their way to disabuse others of this doctrine, it is because they are not revolutionaries, and furthermore, they realize that people must discover this for themselves, that telling them will do nothing.
However, Watts' assumption that, because enlightenment means awakening from consensus trance, and not transcendence of the physical world, therefore reincarnation as taught by the Buddha cannot be true, is questionable. This raises a host of issues, since Buddha explicitly taught a doctrine of reincarnation. Why did Buddha teach it if he didn't think it was true? It won't do to say that he was aware that Hindu society would not accept his teaching otherwise, for in other important respects he was a harsh critic of Hinduism; for example, he railed against the Hindu caste system as unnecessary and oppressive. It is conceivable that Buddha thought that many people, mired as the masses were in samsara and false, egoic consciousness, would not be able to follow his path of awakening without a sense that they would attain release from rebirth upon realizing nirvana, or, alternately, they would attain to a more auspicious rebirth upon becoming awakened bodhisattvas. Of course, this whole matter of "what the Buddha thought" begs the question, Who was the Buddha? Watts' critique of Western Buddhists' finding reincarnation "consoling, in flat contradiction of the avowed objective of obtaining release from rebirth" (67) may fairly apply to an Hinayana hermeneutic (and to Theravada, the only extant Hinayana school). However, that is ironic, since Watts's states in one of the footnotes that the form of Buddhism he is referencing throughout is the Madhyamika of Nagarjuna, i.e., a Mahayana teaching. (Mahayana does not teach an objective of release from rebirth, but embracing rebirth as a bodhisattva so as to relieve the suffering of others.)

Accordingly, since Siddhartha had been a bodhisattva for many lifetimes before becoming a Buddha (as related in the Jataka tales, which are accepted as canonical by both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhists), he had vowed not to enter final nirvana until all beings were liberated. Hence, the teaching of a nirvana that is an escape from rebirth, from life itself, cannot possibly be consistent with Buddha's teaching, unless one is to argue that his teaching is self-contradictory, in which case one can hardly argue he was genuinely enlightened. But since emptiness is form, nirvana is found nowhere else but in the midst of samsara, or earthly life. Nirvana is thus not an escape from life itself, in the sense of obviating future rebirths, but rather a mode of being in which life is fully embraced - lived as it is, rather than as seen through the distorting lens of ego.

It is thus quite possible simultaneously to assert that (1) enlightenment or nirvana is an awakening from a social fiction, not transcendence of the phenomenal world; and (2) though the ego self is a fiction, reincarnation of a subtle mind stream (or soul) does occur. The point here is not to assert that I know reincarnation is true, but simply to state that I don't know whether it is true or not, and neither did Alan Watts. Moreover, it is a logical fallacy to state that because liberation means liberation from a social fiction (ego), this necessarily means reincarnation is an illusion. In addition, it bears repeating that Buddha did teach the doctrine of reincarnation, and that while there are varying interpretations of it within Buddhist hermeneutical tradition, all schools of Buddhism accept the teaching of reincarnation in some form. This of course does not make it true. The point is rather that Watts' claim that enlightened Buddhists and Vedantists don't take reincarnation literally is debatable. Certainly Buddha was enlightened, and he clearly taught a doctrine of reincarnation. Indeed, he said that one of the powers gained upon realizing enlightenment was the ability to remember his many previous lifetimes.

Watts correctly asserts that the Madhyamika Buddhist concept of the world as maya does not mean the concrete world does not exist; rather, it means that "things are relative: they have no self-existence because no one thing can be designated without relation to others, and furthermore because 'thing' is a unit of description--not a natural entity." (64)

Some of Watts's strongest points come in his critique of the limitations of psychotherapy as a way of liberation, including the theories of Carl Jung. The weakness of psychotherapy is less in the theoretical distinctions between schools than in the dualistic nature they all impose upon humankind: ego and unconscious, subject and object, psyche and soma, reality principle and pleasure principle, reason and instinct. If therapy is healing, or making whole, then psychotherapy, by beginning from a premise of self-division, may be a medicine that simply perpetuates the disease. At best, it may help one achieve a "courageous despair." (117) He quotes Jung to the effect that Jung could not conceive of a state of consciousness without a subject, an ego.

Moreover, Jung viewed the accounts from the East of egoless states of mind as essentially regressive rather than transcendent. To Jung, it was nonetheless okay for Easterners to indulge in this "participation mystique" (of egoless states of consciousness), because they had social structures that somehow kept them in closer touch with instinctual forces. But Westerners, he felt, should avoid Eastern paths because Westerners had repressed the unconscious so much that they would be in danger "inflation" with the uprising of previously repressed instinctual forces.

If Eastern cultures were less ego-conscious than Western, Buddhist and Taoist texts would be relatively silent as to the illusory nature of he ego. Jung is therefore perfectly right in sounding a warning--but for the wrong reason. He assumes that a strong ego structure, a struggle against nature, is the necessary condition of civilization, and is thus in danger of reaching the same despair as Freud. But it is one thing to note that civilization as we know it has depended upon the ego concept; it is quite another to assert that it must, as if this convention were somehow in the nature of things. Freud and Jung are both fully alive to the interdependence of life's great opposites, but for both they constitute a finally insoluble problem. Freud fears that the tension between them must at last become unbearable; Jung seems prepared to walk the tightrope between them forever. (122)

For Jung there was no overcoming the problems of life; the meaning and purpose of life's problems was found in the incessant effort to overcome them. "This alone preserves us from stultification and petrifaction," he wrote. Watts called this attitude "the voice of the Protestant conscience," which assumes that "man is inherently lazy; by nature, by original sin, he will always slide back into dissolution unless there is something to goad him . . ." (123) I don't know if this is quite fair to Jung. Jung's quote may also be taken to mean that the path of transformation is endless, and thus the meaning is in the effort of the journey, not the destination. This is a sentiment that seems more characteristic of Eastern wisdom, and I'm not sure that stating the necessity of incessant effort is tantamount to stating that man is inherently lazy. Although, laziness does seem to be the mother of all vices. Call that Protestant conscience if you wish, but that is how it seems to this reviewer.

Watts' analysis of the problems of Jungian thought is nonetheless fair and balanced. He acknowledges that among Western psychotherapists, Jung's theories most closely approached the wisdom of the East, yet the Jungians didn't quite make it all the way. He rightly says that Jungian writings abound in accounts of the fearsome and primitive shadow, lurking just beneath the everyday consciousness, which, if left to function unchecked, would wreak havoc upon the world.

Jungians never allow us to forget, Watts maintains, that not only consciousness but also psychic integration, the goal of therapy, is precarious. This attitude echoes the Biblical warning, "Brethren, be sober, be vigilant, for your adversary the Devil walketh about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour!" The unconscious can be creative, it seems, only if skillfully pacified by the conscious, which must act all the while like the wary trainer of a performing lion.

Jung's view was that the ego was the historically necessary yet problematic evolution which raised humankind out of a more primitive animalistic state, and thus its loss posed the danger of the individual being overwhelmed by regressive psychic forces. But Watts theorizes instead that humankind's history of barbarity, its wars and genocidal impulses, stem not from insufficient or absent ego but from too much ego, i.e., they are a rebellion against "the double bind of a self-contradictory social institution." (127) Moreover, he questions the assumption whether development of an ego is the necessary basis for consciousness and intelligence by noting that the neural structures in the brain which are the basis of man's intelligence are certainly not the creation of any ego.

Moreover, Watts questions Jung's dictum that all experience is psychological, asserting that this makes "psychological" meaningless, just as any statement about everything is perfectly meaningless. Watts quotes the Zen master Nansen, who, pointing at flowers, said that "people of the world" look at them as if they were in a dream. Yet the content of cosmic consciousness is not primarily an "inner" experience, but consists in a new way of viewing the world. Nansen's flowers are not intended to be seen as an archetype in a dream. He is not pointing to them as if they were an archetype or visionary form seen in a dream or trance. He is simply pointing to the flowers. The confusion is due to the West's view of Taoism and Zen as religions, and its notion that religions are concerned primarily with "inner" experience. But while in the East aspirants to liberation are told to "look within" for truth, this is so they will realize there is no "inside" per se but only a seamless being-in-the-world, as the existentialists call it. Indeed, Watts believes the existential school comes closer than either Freud or Jung to the Eastern forms of liberation, inasmuch as existentialism seeks to overcome the artificial split between subject and object, while Freud and Jung's thought only reinforce this split via their dualistic concepts of the psyche. For example, Jung and Freud both wrote about the unconscious as though it were a spiritual entity or personality with a mind of its own, but Watts correctly observes that there is no such "thing" as "the unconscious"; it is more accurate to speak of unconsciousness, or, as L.L. Whyte wrote, that it would be more accurate to speak of man's life as "unconscious process with conscious aspects."

But Watts is not without criticism of the existentialists. They give him the impression that to live without anxiety is to somehow lack seriousness, which brings up the "ancient quarrel" between East and West, the latter always alleging that the East "does not take human personality seriously." "What amounts in Existentialism to an idealization of anxiety is surely no more than a survival of the Protestant notion that it is good to feel guilty, anxious, and serious." This is quite a different thing than accepting that one feels anxious, which breaks the vicious circle of being anxious about being anxious. At the other extreme, if all compound things, including human beings, are in anguish, without abiding self, and impermanent, isn't liberation tantamount to learning not to care? But this is only a stereotype of the Eastern attitude, and Watts wisely rejects it as a "parody of serenity." He suggests we may learn more by examining the great works of art of east and west, such as the faces of Christ and Madonna in Michelangelo's Pieta in St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, or the statue of Maitreya at Horyu-ji in Nara. Such faces reveal great sadness, resignation, serenity, compassion, and wisdom, all at the same time, yet without any trace of guilt or apprehension. He opines that such faces, far from representing divine and impossible-to-attain states, are similar to the faces of many people when they are dying. Watts then hypothesizes that in death many people experience "the curious sensation not only of accepting but of having willed everything that has happened to them." (134)

'Psychotherapy East and West' continues and expands on themes covered in 'The Book(On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)', which I read earlier. But I found PE&W to be more engaging, even though I greatly enjoyed 'The Book'.

'The Book' had presented us with the concept that our ego-self is for the most part a social construct-a hoax-which is super-imposed on our natural being by conditioning from the powers of authority and tradition which mold and govern our lives. Watts opposed the conventional idea of ourselves as separate egos enclosed in bags of skin. He advanced the view that the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta, which sees humans as focal points of an indivisible unity of everything which exists, is more compatible with the findings of modern science. Some great scientists, such as Erwin Schrodinger and David Bohm have explored similar ideas.

This theme of the artificiality of the ego is also central to 'Psychotherapy East and West'. According to Watts, our strong sense of personal selfhood gives us an illusion of being in control and prevents us from experiencing the spontaneity of living in the present moment. It is as though there were a little technician in a control room behind our eyes operating this incredibly complicated piece of machinery. Since we are taking on more responsibility than what is reasonable, we are continually living in the past from guilt or in the future through dread or anticipation.

Our mode of experiencing life puts us in what Watts calls a "double-bind", in which we feel we "must" do things which are impossible. In his view this accounts for the large number of neuroses and the periodic eruptions of wars and other violence.

In PE&W, Watts compares the Western way of dealing with the mental problems inherent in our artificial world-view, with that of some of the Eastern disciplines of "enlightenment", such as Taoism and Buddhism. The aim of this study was to promote and encourage an exploration of the most successful aspects of the separate methods with a view to a synthesis adapted to Western needs.

I found Watts' analysis and comparison of the methods of Western psychotherapy and Eastern disciplines, such as Zen Buddhism quite intriguing, even "enlightening". He reveals some of the inside tricks of both therapists and Zen masters to show how they each try to bring the patient or candidate for enlightenment around to a more sensible concept of the world and their place in it. I'm not going to go into detail, since I don't want to spoil this very interesting aspect of the book for others.

Watts wrote these challenges to Western orthodoxy in the early 1960's, but the message contained in them seems just as relevant, if not more so, today. Though his books were popular in the era of the beatniks and hippies, he was not just another new-age guru. His books are written in a very understandable and down-to-earth manner, but are very well-grounded by his extensive study in the areas of psycho-analysis and Eastern philosophy. He was not advocating anarchy or revolution, but rather that we see through our conditioning and achieve a saner and healthier way of living.

For his sources he drew on the obvious giants of psychotherapy, Freud and Jung, but also on figures less well known to the public - Trigant Burrow, Norman O. Brown and Jay Haley among others. The exposure to some of these lesser known writers is interesting in itself. He also quotes extensively from ancient Zen masters, such as Hakuin.

Though I'm not ready to embrace these books as a "gospel according to Watts", I found them very insightful, thought-provoking, and worthwhile.

As one of the 1st books relating psychotherapy (PT) & Eastern thought (after Fromm, Suzuki, & de Martino's "Zen Buddhism & Psychoanalysis" in 1960), it is a dated "classic." Thus, p. 107: "Unhappily, most Western devotees of the Eastern ways know little or nothing of what has happened in science during the last 50 years, & think of it still as the reduction of the world to the `objects' of Newtonian mechanics" is invalid today. He includes some Taoism & Vedanta with Zen Buddhism-but little from other Buddhist sects--understandable as Zen was the early Buddhist export to the West. His statements, therefore, are often inapplicable to Buddhism in general-especially not to Vajrayana Dzogchen & Mahamudra, now available in English. Still, p. xi: "The aim of this book is...to provide thought & experiment." His viewpoint is very unusual-taking a rather pessimistic sociological or social psychology perspective, p. 144: "The social psychologist is always in danger of being a determinist, seeing individual behavior as subordinate to social behavior, the organism as responding willy-nilly to the conditions of its environment." His perspective is highly theoretical & philosophical rather than empirical or scientific. He recognizes, for example, Jung's commitment to a scientific view, but he doesn't realize the great ramifications of such limitations--the nature of analysis per se. IMHO, the book is not only iconoclastic but highly critical & cynical to both Buddhism & PT (though there's very little PT except at the very end of the book). Watts condemns ego ("a social artifact"), history (maybe he'll be condemned to repeat it), reincarnation (he can repeat it in accordance with the Tibetan Book of the Dead), etc. & says that Buddhists don't really believe in them-this has not been my experience, & I think the Dalai Lama would take issue with many of Watts' (mostly unsupported) assertions. As he says, p. 205 "If there is anything to be learned from history, it is that scoldings, warnings, & preachings are a complete ethical failure," though these constitute the bulk of this book! But, he makes some very discerning statements in the book (e. g. on the religious life cycle)--p. 102: "The distance of excessive reverence. Whenever a tradition becomes venerable with the passage of time, the ancient masters & sages are elevated to pedestals of sanctity & wisdom which lift them far above the human level...& thus the ideal of liberation or Buddha-hood becomes ever more remote...In this manner, a way of liberation turns into just another social institution & dies of respectability." He also seems to extol the Trickster Archetype (though not by name) as well as the value of play & labels much as mind games. Thus, one wonders if this book, with its koan-like chapters, might be a mind game itself. He does state that p. 197: "This is not, of course, a balanced & considered opinion, it is an expression of feeling."

the book was in good shape, old but still readable, it had some notes in it, nothing which got in the way of reading it.
thank you

In this book Watts explores the common ground between Western psychiatry and Eastern philosophy in realizing the self-actualizing goals of freedom, self-expression, and authenticity.

If the words "philosphy" and "intellectual" have any negative conotations to you, you might not like this book.
Watts has no respect for the faith of the common man.