The Relevance of Alan Watts in Contemporary Culture: Understanding Contributions and Controversies 100312187X, 9781003121879

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
About the Contributors
Acknowledgments
Editor’s Introduction: Alan Watts in the Twenty-first Century
Ubiquity and Salience
Problematics
New Perspectives
Part I: Humanistic Psychology
Part II: Comparative Religion and Philosophy
Part III: Arts and Humanities
Dead Reckoning
References
Part I: Humanistic Psychology
Chapter 1: Jung Watts: Notes on C. G. Jung’s Formative Influence on Alan Watts
“Difficulties Encountered by a European in Trying to Understand the East”
“Modern Psychology Offers a Possibility of Understanding”
The Shadow Side of Alan Watts
Conclusion
Acknowledgment
References
Chapter 2: Alan Watts and the Re-Visioning of Psychotherapy
Articulating the Ineffable
The Bateson Communication Project
Rollo May, Erich Fromm, and Sociocultural Critique
Social Construction and Eastern Philosophical Influences
Simplicity and a Not-Knowing Perspective
Conclusion
Acknowledgment
References
Chapter 3: Psychotherapy East and West: A Retrospective Review
Part I: 1961–1970
Criticism and Commentary
Part II: Subsequent Analyses
Academic and Literary Reviews: 1970s – 1980s
Orientalism and Postmodernism
Conclusion: Psychotherapy East and West in the 21 st Century
Acknowledgment
References
Chapter 4: Alan Watts and Neurophenomenology
Alan Watts and Humanistic Psychology
Francisco Varela and Neurophenomenology
Watts, Varela, and Radical Empiricism
Embodied Cognition
The Specious Present
Conclusion
Acknowledgment
References
Chapter 5: Alan Watts and the Infinite Game: Playing Everything
Watts as a Game: A Critique of Everything
Unfortunate Marriages in the Gameful World
Simulation, Games and the Turn of a Friendly Card
The Infinite Game: A Conclusion
References
Part II: Comparative Religion and Philosophy
Chapter 6: Alan Watts, Psychedelic Buddhism, and Religious Play in Postwar America
Responding to Estrangement
Enframing Psychedelic Buddhism
From Discord to Unity
Conclusion
Acknowledgment
References
Chapter 7: Alan Watts and the Occultism of Aquarian Religion: Square Gnosis, Beat Eros
Watts and the Enframing of Occultism
Watts and Gnostic Occultism
Deeper Gnosis: Flowering Eros
(Re)reading Watts in the Aquarian Bildung
Acknowledgment
References
Chapter 8: Alan Watts and Secular Competence in Religious Praxis
The Secular Watts
The Doing of Religion: The Pragmatic Watts
Moral Competence as Successful “Religioning”: The Art of Living with Alan Watts
Conclusion: The Complete Insecurity of Alan Watts
Acknowledgment
References
Chapter 9: The Holistic Negation of Alan Watts: Reclaiming Value in the Void
Buddhist and Existential Nothingness
Watts Contra Sartre: Anxiety and Temporality
Capitalist Realism and the Law of Reversed Effort
Watts and Industrial Modernity: Immersion in the Void
References
Chapter 10: Alan Watts’ “Dramatic Model” and the Pursuit of Peace
Three Models of the Universe
The Ceramic Model
The Fully-Automatic Model
The Dramatic Model
Implications for Peace
Inner and Global Peace
Social Justice and Ecological Harmony
Conclusion
Acknowledgment
References
Part III: Arts & Humanities
Chapter 11: Reminiscences of Alan Watts’ Last Summer: “You Can Tell a Yogi by His Laugh”
Beyond the Box
Cloud Hidden
This Dewdrop World
Acknowledgment
References and Relevant Reading
Chapter 12: Literary Nonsense as Enactment of Alan Watts’ Philosophy: “Not Just Blathering Balderdash”
Are You Experienced?
A World of Nonsense
How to Experience IT: Music, Poetry, and Finally, Nonsense
Closing Ditargument…
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Chapter 13: Alan Watts, Ali Akbar Khan, and Hindustani Music in the Psychedelic Sixties
Modes of Engagement
Psychedelic Counterculture and Indian Music
Indian Music and Psychedelic Experience
Conclusion
References
Chapter 14: Alan Watts and his Queer Readers: Not So Strange Bedfellows
Queer Remix in the Homophile Communication Network
Between Opposite and Different: Watts’ Writings on Sexuality and Gender
Unintentional Communities: The Circle of Sex Goes Mainstream
“Defining Yourself is Like Biting Your Own Teeth”: The Queer Remixing of Alan Watts
A Concluding Note on Alan Watts and Camp
References
Editor’s Conclusion
Alan Watts: A Revised Bibliographic Resource
Alan Watts’ Major Books
Posthumous Works
Writings on the Life, Work, and Influence of Alan Watts Books
Articles & Chapters
Dissertations and Theses
Doctoral Dissertations
Masters Theses
Undergraduate Theses
Acknowledgement
Index

Citation preview

The Relevance of Alan Watts in Contemporary Culture

While accounting for the present-day popularity and relevance of Alan Watts’ contributions to psychology, religion, arts, and humanities, this interdisciplinary collection grapples with the ongoing criticisms which surround Watts’ life and work. Offering rich examination of as yet underexplored aspects of Watts’ influence in 1960s counterculture, this volume offers unique application of Watts’ thinking to contemporary issues and critically engages with controversies surrounding the commodification of Watts’ ideas, his alleged misreading of Biblical texts, and his apparent distortion of Asian religions and spirituality. Featuring a broad range of international contributors and bringing Watts’ ideas squarely into the contemporary context, the text provides a comprehensive, yet nuanced exploration of Watts’ thinking on psychotherapy, Buddhism, language, music, and sexuality. This text will benefit researchers, doctoral students, and academics in the fields of psychotherapy, phenomenology, and the philosophy of psychology more broadly. Those interested in Jungian psychotherapy, spirituality, and the self and social identity will also enjoy this volume. Peter J. Columbus is administrator of Shantigar Foundation in Rowe, MA, USA, and formerly served on psychology faculties at Assumption College and Greenfield Community College, USA.

Routledge Research in Psychology This series offers an international forum for original and innovative research being conducted across the field of psychology. Titles in the series are empirically or theoretically informed and explore a range of dynamic and timely issues and emerging topics. The series is aimed at upper-level and post-graduate students, researchers, and research students, as well as academics and scholars. Recent titles in the series include:

Declarative Mapping Sentences in Qualitative Research Theoretical, Linguistic, and Applied Usages Paul M.W. Hackett Post-Capitalist Subjectivity in Literature and Anti-Psychiatry Reconceptualizing the Self Beyond Capitalism Hans Skott-Myhre A Scientific Assessment of the Validity of Mystical Experiences Understanding Altered Psychological and Neurophysiological States Andrew C. Papanicolaou The Relevance of Alan Watts in Contemporary Culture Understanding Contributions and Controversies Edited by Peter J. Columbus Eastern European Perspectives on Emotional Intelligence Current developments and research Edited by Lada Kaliská and John Pellitteri The Psychological Basis of Moral Judgement Philosophical and Empirical Approaches to Moral Relativism John J. Park For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Research-in-Psychology/book-series/RRIP

The Relevance of Alan Watts in Contemporary Culture Understanding Contributions and Controversies Edited by Peter J. Columbus

First published 2021 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Peter J. Columbus; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Peter J. Columbus to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Columbus, Peter J., editor. Title: The relevance of Alan Watts in contemporary culture : understanding contributions and controversies / edited by Peter J. Columbus. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge research in psychology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020052548 | ISBN 9780367640354 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003121879 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Watts, Alan, 1915-1973. | Philosophy. | Psychotherapy. | Religion. | Spirituality. | Culture. Classification: LCC B945.W324 R45 2021 | DDC 192--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052548 ISBN: 978-0-367-64035-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-64038-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-12187-9 (ebk) Typeset in Garamond by SPi Global, India

Contents

About the Contributors vii Acknowledgmentsxi

Editor’s Introduction: Alan Watts in the Twenty-first Century

xiii

PETER J. COLUMBUS

PART I

Humanistic Psychology

1

1 Jung Watts: Notes on C. G. Jung’s Formative Influence on Alan Watts

3

ELLEN F. FRANKLIN AND PETER J. COLUMBUS

2 Alan Watts and the Re-visioning of Psychotherapy

13

COLIN JAMES SANDERS

3 Psychotherapy East and West: A Retrospective Review

27

PETER J. COLUMBUS

4 Alan Watts and Neurophenomenology

44

SUSAN GORDON

5 Alan Watts and the Infinite Game: Playing Everything

57

NATHAN L. HULSEY

PART II

Comparative Religion and Philosophy

77

6 Alan Watts, Psychedelic Buddhism, and Religious Play in Postwar America

79

MORGAN SHIPLEY

vi Contents 7 Alan Watts and the Occultism of Aquarian Religion: Square Gnosis, Beat Eros

92

CHRISTOPHER W. CHASE

8 Alan Watts and Secular Competence in Religious Praxis

107

GERALD OSTDIEK

9 The Holistic Negation of Alan Watts: Reclaiming Value in the Void

119

ADRIAN MOORE

10 Alan Watts’ “Dramatic Model” and the Pursuit of Peace

135

JULIET BENNETT

PART III

Arts & Humanities

147

11 Reminiscences of Alan Watts’ Last Summer: “You Can Tell a Yogi by His Laugh”

149

KENNETH S. COHEN

12 Literary Nonsense as Enactment of Alan Watts’ Philosophy: “Not Just Blathering Balderdash”

159

MICHAEL HEYMAN

13 Alan Watts, Ali Akbar Khan, and Hindustani Music in the Psychedelic Sixties

184

SAMUEL B. CUSHMAN

14 Alan Watts and his Queer Readers: Not So Strange Bedfellows

198

PHILIP LONGO



Editor’s Conclusion

220

PETER J. COLUMBUS



Alan Watts: A Revised Bibliographic Resource

224

PETER J. COLUMBUS

Index

233

About the Contributors

Juliet Bennett recently submitted her PhD in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research Process Thinking and its Application for a Sustainable Future explores the contributions of process philosophy to mitigating the climate crisis. Juliet is currently a teaching fellow at the University of Sydney. She was a sessional lecturer at Lenoir Rhyne University, North Carolina, and worked for many years as the executive officer and acting director of the Sydney Peace Foundation. Juliet co-edited Regional Ecological Challenges for Peace in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia Pacific (Springer 2016) and Addressing Global Environmental Challenges from a Peace Ecology Perspective (Springer 2016), and has other academic publications available at: https://sydney.academia.edu/JulietBennett/ Christopher W. Chase currently serves as associate teaching professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University. An interdisciplinary scholar holding a PhD in American Studies from Michigan State University, he has published in the study of religion, ethnicity, and music, as well as emergent theologies. His current projects focus on the roles of religious music in the lives of American Hindus, African-American Adventists, countercultural Pagans, and Mormon Amerindians. In addition, he serves as review editor for Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies. Kenneth S. Cohen is a world-renowned Taoist scholar/practitioner. Winner of the lifetime achievement award in energy medicine, he taught Qigong as Body-Centered Psychotherapy at the Colorado Institute for Transpersonal Psychology, Union Institute, and other universities. Ken is the author of The Way of Qigong (1997) and more than 250 journal articles. Peter J. Columbus is administrator of the Shantigar Foundation and serves on the board of directors of Valley Zendo – a Soto Zen Buddhist temple in the lineage of Kodo Sawaki and Kosho Uchiyama. Co-editor (with Don Rice) of Alan Watts – Here and Now (SUNY, 2012), Alan

viii  About the Contributors Watts in the Academy (SUNY, 2017), and Psychology of the Martial Arts (Copley, 1988), he holds a PhD in experimental psychology from The University of Tennessee, and MA in Humanistic Psychology from the University of West Georgia. Samuel B. Cushman is a PhD candidate in Cross-Cultural Musicology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he has taught courses on the music of North India, American popular music, and music theory. His dissertation project explores the globalization of Hindustani music, including its intersections with American popular, experimental, and art music traditions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a 2020 Fulbright-Nehru Research Award recipient, Samuel expects to be conducting research on tabla drumming in North India by the time this volume is published. Ellen F. Franklin is CEO of the Acutonics Institute of Integrative Medicine where for the past twenty-five years she has been involved in the development and dissemination of educational programs in vibrational sound therapy rooted in Classical Chinese Medicine, Taoism, and depth psychology. She is co-author of Acutonics from Galaxies to Cells, Planetary Science, Harmony and Medicine, the author of numerous articles, and a frequent contributor to Oriental Medicine Journal. She received her PhD in Psychology and a Certificate in Jungian Studies from Saybrook University, where she was awarded the Alan Watts prize for her work on the relationship between Alan Watts and Carl Jung. Susan Gordon, PhD has a doctorate in the history and philosophy of psychology from Saybrook University. She is research director of the Southbury Clinic for Traditional Medicines and Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Psychology at National University. She was awarded scholarships for her work on Alan Watts by the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy. She is editor of Neurophenomenology and Its Applications to Psychology and author of “Psychoneurointracrinology: The Embodied Mind” (Springer, 2013),  co-author of “Humanistic Neuropsychology: The Implications of Neurophenomenology for Psychology” in The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology (Sage, 2015), and author of the forthcoming, Psychoneurointracrinology: The Mindbrain Continuum (Springer, 2021). Michael Heyman is a professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he teaches courses on Children’s Literature, Poetry, Monsters, and Arthropodiatry. His scholarship has appeared in the ChLA Quarterly, The Lion and the Unicorn, and IBBY’s Bookbird. He is the head editor of The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense (Penguin). His poems and stories for children can be found in The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories, The Moustache Maharishi and other

About the Contributors  ix unlikely stories, This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse (a volume which he also edited), and Poetry International. Nathan L. Hulsey  is an assistant professor of Communication at Nazarbayev University. He studies interactive media, game design, critical theory, and media history. Author of Games in Everyday Life: For Play (Emerald), his writings appear in various academic venues including Creative Technologies for Multidisciplinary Applications (IGI Global) and The Handbook of Research on Gamification (IGI Global). Hulsey holds a PhD in Digital Media from North Carolina State University. Philip Longo is a continuing lecturer in the Writing Program at University of California – Santa Cruz. His research focuses on the circulation of public discourse in 1960s America.  Recent writings are published in American Literature in Transition, 1960-1970 (D. Wyatt, Ed., Cambridge University Press) and Cultural Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Folklore and Popular Culture. Longo received his PhD in English from Rutgers University for a dissertation entitled An Army of Lovers: Eros as Attachment in Writing of the American Sexual Revolution. Adrian Moore is a philosopher and author based in Brisbane, Australia (formerly Turrbal and Yuggera land), and was conferred a PhD in philosophy by the University of Queensland in 2019. His thesis engaged the works of Nietzsche and Camus in terms of their engagement with Buddhist and Taoist metaphysics, and the role of these ideas in responding to the modern decline of political institutions. Adrian’s ongoing research focuses on the intersections between Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, decolonial studies, and environmental philosophy. Gerald Ostdiek is assistant professor at the Hussite Theological Faculty of Charles University in Prague. He grounds his philosophical efforts within the study of semiotics as biology and culture, and the all too real consequences of reciprocity, radical continuity, and reproduction with variation plus selection. Colin James Sanders has taught in the Master of Counseling program with City University of Seattle in Vancouver, Canada, since 1998, and currently is associate director of the British Columbia Master of Counselling Program. Colin taught with the Vancouver School of Narrative Therapy from 1993 to 2013. Author of several book chapters and journal articles on counseling theory and practice, in addition to articles and interviews concerning poetry and poetics, Colin holds a PhD from Taos Institute/Tilberg University, and an MA from the University of Manitoba.

x  About the Contributors Morgan Shipley holds a PhD in American Studies from Michigan State University, where he now serves as a continuing academic specialist of religious studies. He is co-editor of The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) and author of Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America (Lexington, 2015).

Acknowledgments

This book has its origins in two transdisciplinary symposia on Alan Watts that I editorially curated for Self & Society, the flagship journal of The Association for Humanistic Psychology in Britain (AHPB). Thanks to Self & Society editors Richard House, David Kalisch, and Gillian Proctor for authorizing the symposia, and offering excellent suggestions and guidance plus copy editing wizardry. Additional thanks to Richard House and AHPB for permission to reallocate the Watts symposia papers. The Self & Society Watts symposia plus an additional set of essays are now combined to form the present manuscript. The Self & Society papers are here published “as is,” save for small corrections of minor editorial oversights in the originals. The contributors to this volume were carefully chosen based on their ongoing research and writing activity in various fields of study interfacing with the life and work of Alan Watts. Much gratitude is owed to all, including Juliet Bennett, Christopher W. Chase, Kenneth S. Cohen, Samuel B. Cushman, Ellen F. Franklin, Susan Gordon, Michael Heyman, Nathan Hulsey, Philip Longo, Adrian Moore, Gerald Ostdiek, Colin James Sanders, and Morgan Shipley. A number of readers offered valuable and critical input to various essays considered for this collection. Here again, much gratitude is owed to all, including Christopher Aanstoos, Andrew Bland, Michael Brannigan, Rich Blundell, Erik Davis, Mark Hawkins, Andrew Monteith, Douglas Osto, Don Rice, plus an additional four reviewers whose names I do not know. Don Rice deserves another shout-out for his editorial collaboration on two previous books, Alan Watts – Here and Now and Alan Watts in the Academy – both serving as foundational resources for the present text. Jeff Berner generously allowed use of extensive quotations from the 1977 expanded edition of Alan Watts’ Nonsense book and shared stories of his friendship with Watts in 1960s San Francisco. Thanks Jeff! Thanks also to Mark Watts and the Alan Watts Organization for kindly granting access to unpublished archival recordings of Alan Watts.

xii Acknowledgments Cheers and appreciation to the Routledge editorial team, namely Ellie Wright and AnnaMary Goodall, and to the Routledge production team led by Justine Bottles for smoothing the way toward publication. Finally, a big thank you to Jean-Claude van Itallie and Shantigar Foundation for their beneficent support of my writing and editing. Peter J. Columbus Rowe, MA

Editor’s Introduction Alan Watts in the Twenty-first Century Peter J. Columbus

“For those who wish actually to accomplish the Way, Watts must be left behind – with fond memories, to be sure, but nonetheless with a certain residue of bewilderment as well” (p. 398). With the preceding sentence, Nordstrom and Pilgrim (1980) concluded their review essay on “The Wayward Mysticism of Alan Watts,” thereby consigning him to the dialogical periphery for the ensuing three decades. Touching a backdrop of emerging political and religious conservatism in America – the so-called Reagan Era – Nordstrom and Pilgrim contended that “most people want a clear and orthodox spiritual path to follow” (p. 397). Watts’ countercultural message was called “anachronistic; the time of going with the flow of Tao and dwelling in the Eternal Now has mostly – and mercifully – come and gone” (p. 398). Thereafter, Watts was viewed as lacking intellectual and spiritual depth ( Jackson, 1984), fashioning insalubrious lifestyle choices (Corless, 1989), and influencing “neo-orientalist” approaches to Asian peoples and cultures (Bartholomeusz, 1998). Philip Zalesky’s (1997) New York Times book review of Watts’ posthumously published Zen and the Beat Way noted the trend of “revisionists” re-assessing the 1960s, attacking countercultural progenitors for slack and dishonest work, and for diminishing established familial, educational, and religious structures in America. As for Zen and the Beat Way – a collection of Watts’ 1959–1965 radio transcripts – Zalesky (1997) advised: “Our knowledge of Asian religions has come a long way since the 60’s, and it’s obvious now that in many ways Watts got his facts about as wrong as is humanly possible. His gaffes make one gasp” (n.p.). David L. Smith (2010) rehabilitated Watts as a vital voice and subject in contemporary discourse with an essay entitled “The Authenticity of Alan Watts.” Smith showed that Watts is best understood, not as a flawed purveyor of traditional Buddhism as possibly practiced by various peoples and cultures of Asia, but rather as the source of a “remarkably fresh and cogent version of religious nondualism” that shapes and informs the

xiv  Peter J. Columbus emerging “modern Buddhism” in America (p. 13). Smith drew attention to the centrality and literary acumen of Watts’ intellectual endeavor in three ways. First, he outlined Watts’ life and career in association with other modern Buddhist thinkers, including Christmas Humphreys, D. T. Suzuki, Sokei-an Sasaki, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Frederic Spiegelberg, Gary Snyder, Lama Govinda, and Shunryu Suzuki. Second, key operational themes of Watts’ nondualist spirituality were summarized, including the “field” of reality, the “double-bind” problem of human consciousness, and the playful living afforded by its solution. Finally, having demonstrated the basic coherency of Watts’ philosophical outlook, Smith surveyed applications of Watts’ ideas to various projects and problems of individual and societal transformation, including materialism, death anxiety, psychedelic experience, and identity. Assessing Watts’ contemporary relevance as a religious and philosophical thinker, Smith concluded: As the authentic voice of an important option in modern Western spirituality, as a seminal figure in the development of a distinctively modern understanding of Buddhism, and as an authentic master of expository prose, Watts deserves and richly repays our attention. (p. 35) The present text continues the twenty-first century conversation with and about Alan Watts. Building upon a sturdy nexus of previous scholarship (Columbus & Rice, 2012, 2017a, 2017b), this book accounts for Watts’ ubiquity and salience in relation to the problematics of his life and work. On one hand, references to Watts are prevalent in a variety of contemporary discourses on modern Buddhism, secular mindfulness, spirituality, and psychedelics. On the other hand, Watts’ oeuvre has been commodified – subject to repressive desublimation – while Watts himself is charged with misreading Biblical texts, and flagrantly misappropriating the religious resources of various Asian peoples and cultures. The text in hand contains groundbreaking essays addressing the popularity and relevance of Alan Watts vis-à-vis the interpretive challenges posed by the nature of his writings and the era in which he lived. Authored by a cadre of innovative thinkers working at the progressive frontiers of their academic specialties, the chapters are clustered within three spheres of concern. Part I involves Watts’ interface with Humanistic Psychology – a field of study that Watts helped define and continues to influence in the present day. Part II concerns perspectives in comparative religion and philosophy, a scholarly genre best describing the predominant intention of Watts’ work from beginning to end. Part III is focused on special topics in the arts and humanities – highly attentive considerations of Watts’ thinking and influence beyond the usual categories of psychology and religion. Lastly is an editor’s conclusion and an up-to-date listing of Watts’ books plus scholarly writings pertaining to Watts’ life and work.

Editor’s Introduction  xv

Ubiquity and Salience Alan Watts projected a ubiquitous and salient countercultural presence in America from the 1950s into the 1970s. His efforts were ubiquitous through utilization of standard twentieth-century media formats, including books and essays, reviews and interviews, radio and television programs, lectures and seminars, plus documentary films. Enabled by technological advances in book and magazine printing as well as audio and visual recording, Watts’ writings and lectures were extraordinarily salient due to innovative publishing, marketing, and distribution strategies affecting conspicuous resonance among general and academic audiences alike. Aided by twenty-first century cyber-technologies, media platforms, and content venues intermixed with cultural trends and current events, interest in Watts’ thinking is growing among contemporary mainstream readers, listeners, and viewers. A three-minute audio excerpt of Watts – labeled “What if Money Didn’t Matter” – was released to the internet in 2012, going viral via various social networks including Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook alone, the excerpt reached 153, 935 likes and 405, 624 shares after just one year online (Yap, 2013). Similarly, the 2013 Academy Award-winning film, Her, included an artificial intelligence version of Watts, generating widespread commentary on its meaningful role in the movie’s plot structure (e.g., Saxena, 2020; Smith, 2014). Overall, Watts’ contemporary ubiquity and salience allows for chance encounters with his work often appropriated, excerpted, or interpreted in a variety of formats, including online blogs (Popova, 2017), essays (Bergman, 2016), dance performances (Cerruda, 2018), music recordings (Walton & Watts, 2015), documentaries (Harper, 2019), feature films (Darge, 2016), reality simulation games (O’Reilly, 2017), and art exhibitions (Katz & Sikma, 2017). Couching the manifest ubiquity and salience of Alan Watts in the twenty-first century are four intersecting constituencies. First is the aforesaid modern Buddhist community. Distinct from traditional Buddhist practices of various peoples and cultures in Asia, modern Buddhism places greater emphasis on lay practitioner meditation, reduced emphasis on liturgy, ritual, and magical beliefs, while supporting women’s ordination, social justice initiatives, scientific empiricism, individual prerogative, plus tolerance for diverging viewpoints. Watts is counted among the lineage of thinkers legitimating modern Buddhist sensibilities (Smith, 2010), with “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen” (Watts, 1958/2017a) being highly diagnostic of mid-twentieth century Buddhism in America (Lopez, 2002). In the academy, scholars are excavating implicit Western influences priming modern Buddhist thinkers such as Watts (Payne, 2018). Among the general public, modern Buddhist practitioners regularly encounter Watts and his contributions by way of profiles (Chadwick, 2016) and excerpts (Watts, 2018a) published in assorted Buddhist periodicals.

xvi  Peter J. Columbus Second, secularized versions of Buddhist mindfulness meditation for personal and psychotherapeutic practices are trending in America. Among the first thinkers exhorting Western psychologists and psychotherapists to consider their practices in light of Buddhist thinking, Watts now is considered an important antecedent influence on mindfulness-based methods for self-help (McCown & Micozzi, 2019), counseling (McCown, Reibel, & Micozzi, 2010), and psychotherapy (Giraldi, 2019). Watts’ precursory influence is somewhat ironic because mindfulness meditation (samma sati) is characteristic of Vipassana (insight) practice – an aspect of Theravada Buddhism – whereas Watts is commonly associated with Zen Buddhism, a school of thought and practice of zazen (samma samadhi) belonging to Mahayana Buddhism. Still, Watts established the present-day manner of thinking about Buddhism vis-à-vis psychology and psychotherapy upon publishing Psychotherapy East and West in 1961 (Harrington & Dunne, 2015). Third is the emerging “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) cohort in America (Parsons, 2018; see also, Lipka & Grecewicz, 2017). “Spirituality” – in contrast to “religiousness” – is linked to greater enthusiasm for mysticism, experimentation with unconventional values and customs, and negative attitudes toward churches and clergy. Accordingly, Fuller (2001) identified Alan Watts as a disaffected Anglican-Episcopal priest who successfully extracted from various world religions, philosophies, and belief systems “precisely those elements that could ignite spiritual idealism in those who were disenchanted with religion” (p. 83). Considered a forefather of the SBNR community (Marshall, 2019), Watts’ (1973) autobiography is a paradigmatic example of the popular turn toward spirituality. Woodhead (2001) observed: “Watts …left behind…a Christianity he believed to be snobbish, hierarchical, dualistic, dull, guilt-inducing, repressed, life-denying. What he embraced in its stead was a spirituality which was inclusive, egalitarian, light, joyful, free, sensuous, life-affirming” (p. 111). Today, the SBNR cohort, like modern Buddhist practitioners, frequently encounters Watts via various print and online sources such as Parabola (Watts, 2017b) and The Utne Reader (Watts, 2018b). He likewise is considered among the key mid-twentieth century thinkers anticipating present-day academic focus on spirituality versus religion (Hood, 2012). Finally comes the new legion of scientists and experiential explorers reviving curiosity and enthusiasm for psychedelic substances after many decades of dormancy and illegality (Pollan, 2018). Watts’ rhetorical excursions and phenomenological descriptions of chemically altered states of consciousness now serve as substantive archival data supporting contemporary medical and clinical theory and research (Krippner, 2012; Metzner, 2012). Most visible of Watts’ contributions is The Joyous Cosmology (2013), a manuscript offering first-person accounts of psychedelic experience and the ontological insights afforded therein. A 2013 review noted the book “was brilliant and piercingly relevant when

Editor’s Introduction  xvii it first appeared in 1962, and far from diminishing these qualities, the intervening half-century has only served to amplify them” (Cardin, 2013, n.p.). Kripal (2018), for example, identified the deep similarity between the “mystic naturalism” of Langlitz (2012) Neuropsychedelia and Watts’ (2013) “chemistry of consciousness.” Watts’ narrative serves as guidance for new spiritual explorers seeking enrichment of their entheogenic experiences (Fadiman, 2011; Osto, 2016). “Especially valuable,” Fadiman (2011) notes, “is the manner by which Watts suggests how the world might appear to someone who has felt the revelatory nature of these experiences” (chap. 3).

Problematics In Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver (1968) wrote: “There was something about Watts that reminded me of a slick advertisement for a labor-saving device, aimed at the American housewife, out of the center page of Life magazine” (p. 32). Watts clearly did not appeal to all tastes and temperaments during his lifetime, and this antipathy served its own expository function for various interlocutors. Cleaver’s criticism functioned as a contrapuntal backdrop for discussing esteemed San Quentin prison teacher and mentor Chris Lovdjieff who “seemed … more warm, more human and possessed of greater wisdom than Watts displayed either in his lectures or his books” (p. 32). Similarly, literary scholar Robert Martin Adams (1958) employed Watts as a foil in his criticisms of 1950s existentialism and Zen in America. The problem with Watts, Adams wrote, is that he is “a too-glib and too-persuasive writer …. It is clear that he could sell me snake-oil against the day I develop rheumatism; but I think I would know, even as I bought it, that this was an artist in snow” (p. 629). Likewise, K. A. Yonge’s (1970) presidential address to the Canadian Psychiatric Association used Watts as an antagonist while supporting psychiatrists as public arbitrators on matters of great social concern. Noting Watts’ provocative writings on psychedelics, Yonge (1970) asked: “Are we as psychiatrists to subscribe to such ‘gobbledegook’ by remaining silent as if it were an inconsequential matter” (p. 418)? Equally and despite – or perhaps due to – Smith’s (2010) rehabilitation of Watts, there are corresponding twenty-first century problematics to his life and work. The term “problematics” freely references Bachelard (2006) and, by extension, Foucault’s (2012) “problematization” – here meaning the process by which Alan Watts, as topic of inquiry, is branded, examined, and handled as a problem. Indeed, there are extant contemporary challenges to commonsense, taken-for-granted understandings of Watts as an emancipatory and healing influence in present-day discourse. Assorted contemporary thinkers cast doubt on Watts by calling into question his rationale and motivations – voicing ongoing concerns, conflicts, contradictions, and counterpoints, or by simply misappropriating his

xviii  Peter J. Columbus work. These thinkers thereby shape, influence, and inform contemporary perspectives on Watts in a problematic way. Huff (2017), for example, contends that Watts’ mid-twentieth century rhetorical style may compromise his message in the hearts and minds of twenty-first century audiences: “Watts’s penetrating insights into topics as various as linguistics and psychotropic drugs are unfortunately blunted by his consistent use of what is now recognized as non-inclusive language” (n.p.) Thus, for example, the practice of employing masculine pronouns to denote men, women, and various gender identities may grate on the pluralistic sensibilities of contemporary readers. “Though standard for mid-twentiethcentury discourse,” Huff ( 2017) points out, Watts’ “rhetorical practice today creates a barrier between text and reader that Watts never imagined or intended…. Readers once enthralled by Watts may now find him more an artifact than a living and provocative source of alternative wisdom” (n.p., italics added). Beyond Watts’ rhetorical style is his hermeneutical flair with Christianity. Christian apologists, particularly conservative fundamentalists, employ Watts as a critical nemesis in their defense of theology and faith. Most notably concerning his later works such as Beyond Theology (1964), Watts is charged with (1) pantheism (Geisler, 2013), (2) deliberately misreading biblical literature so as to assault long-established Christian theological teachings, and (3) reinterpreting Jesus of the Gospels to match his own idiosyncratic spiritual viewpoint (Sire, 2009). Moreover, Watts is accused of using self-contradictory reasoning against Christianity while advocating for Buddhism (Copan, 2009). Watts, it is argued, considered Christian rationality and Buddhist thinking as incompatible. In choosing the latter over the former, however, Watts employed the either/or distinction used in Western logic: the law of the excluded middle (“either something is A or non-A”). Watts, Copan argues, “had to use ‘Western logic’ in order to reject it” (p. 36). Watts’ reflexivity has likewise received censorious review in Virtual Orientalism, Iwamura’s (2011) critical history of Western media portrayals of Asian religions in American popular culture. Informed by Said (1979), Iwamura (2011) argues that religious and spiritual practices of Asian peoples and cultures are expropriated by the West, and commodified as homogenous stereotypes reflecting, in Said’s words, the “desires, repressions, investments and projections” of “Occidental subjectivity” (cited in Iwamura, 2011, p. 7). In this narrative, Watts fallaciously portrayed Japanese Zen as irredeemably weakened, thus requiring transplantation and cross-fertilization in America toward securing its long-term survival. Watts also undercut his so-called rivals Jack Kerouac and Ruth Fuller Sasaki by constructing palatable (but untrustworthy) understandings of Zen that solidified his presumed position as rightful heir to D. T. Suzuki’s iconic role as Buddhism’s chief popularizer in the West. His ascendance was facilitated by highly favorable media coverage showing him (accurately or not) as fitting the “conventional standards of the

Editor’s Introduction  xix time in terms of educational background, class standing, lifestyle, and image” (p. 50). Implicit to Iwamura (2011) and Said (1979) is that orientalism enables Western interests to dominate Asian peoples and cultures. Accordingly, Iwamura (2011) concludes that Watts’ “efforts would help secure the United States (and more specifically California) as Zen’s hegemonic center” (p. 51). Various thinkers contend that modern Buddhism (Prohl, 2014), secular mindfulness (Forbes, 2019; Purser, 2019), spirituality (Martin, 2014; Wilcox, 2018), and psychedelics (Peluso, 2017) are now mainstreamed and commodified within consumer capitalism. Instead of emancipation and transformation, these commodities allow consumers to manage life stress while leaving social/cultural/economic pressures unaffected and unchecked. Arguably, they have undergone a process of “repressive desublimation” – Marcuse’s (2013) phrase, coined from modified psychoanalytic terminology, referring to how capitalist systems usurp, neutralize and merge countercultural influences into consumer goods and services. Through repressive desublimation, transcending or oppositional capacities otherwise available for social protest, cultural critique, and personal liberation are pacified, thus operating as latent conventional influences under a guise of emancipation. Alan Watts is, to some degree, subsumed within this kind of consumer capitalism including, for example, his audio lecture excerpts in commercial advertisements selling Volvo V90 Cross Country vehicles ( Jardine, 2017), Valvoline motor oil (Gianatasio, 2017), biotechnology products (Gianatasio, 2016,), ocean cruises (Global Travel Media, 2019), groceries and household items (Dallaire, 2019), and Microsoft’s Xbox (Norton, 2019). When lecturing, Watts was “trying to get thinking people to be aware of the actual experience of living as they would listen to music” (1973, p. 5). Yet, under the sway of repressive desublimation, “the music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo” (Marcuse, 2013, p. 61). Conversely, Williams (2014) argues that a variation of repressive desublimation called techne-Zen is partly informed by Alan Watts’ work. Techne-Zen is a viewpoint grounded on the assumed correspondence and shared purpose of Zen Buddhism and an all-inclusive, spontaneous rationalist technocracy. Drawing on examples from “technologically saturated realms of network capitalism” plus corporate management theories governing present-day international business practices, Williams illustrates the vast influence of techne-Zen in the twenty-first century “when technological innovation … is offered by multinational corporations as yet another path toward enlightenment” (p. 175). Techne-Zen is understood as extending and quickening a “cybernetic Zen” rhetoric articulated by, among others, Alan Watts in The Way of Zen (1989) and on his KQED television program, Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life. There, it is argued, Watts voiced a confluence of Buddhist philosophy

xx  Peter J. Columbus and cybernetic science (focused on regulatory systems in humans and machines) in terms of “nonduality, natural flux, and the virtual spaces of networked consciousness” (Williams, 2014, p. 177). The gist, in Williams’ view, is that “one needs the holistic awareness of Zen in order to carefully balance” (p. 179) cybernetic computations in relation to their ecological referents. This techne-Zen argument follows Zizek’s (2008) contention that “Western Buddhism” is presently “the most efficient way … to participate fully in the capitalist dynamic,” manifesting an “attitude of total immersion in the selfless ‘now’ of instant Enlightenment” (p. xliii).

New Perspectives Part I: Humanistic Psychology The new perspectives offered in this manuscript inhabit the intersection of Watts’ popularity and the problematics of his life and work. Part I holds essays focusing on Watts’ interface with Humanistic Psychology. Heavily informed by Carl Jung, Watts is among the earliest twentieth century Western thinkers to seriously engage with Asian religions and spiritual practices. Fittingly, in chapter one, Ellen Franklin and Peter Columbus offer “Jung Watts: Notes on C. G. Jung’s Formative Influence on Alan Watts.” Three themes are addressed. First is the issue of reflexivity visà-vis peoples and cultures of Asia. In his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung substantively identified for Watts the importance of recognizing and examining one’s assumptions, preconceptions, and beliefs about scholarly subject matters, particularly the relations of Christianity to Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism as explored most notably in The Legacy of Asia and Western Man (Watts, 1937). Second is Watts’ early understanding of Jungian psychology as transcending scientific rationalism while avoiding wholesale appropriation of Eastern cultures, and thus serving as a portal to understanding Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism – evident most notably in The Meaning of Happiness (Watts, 1940). Third is the Jungian shadow, considered by Watts as the primary psychological insight contained in Jung’s body of work. Yet questions persist, expressed through various critics, concerning Watts’ self-reflexivity, that is to say, the extent to which Watts accepted and assimilated the shadow side of his own psyche. Franklin and Columbus briefly survey critical views of Watts’ self-reflexivity, while offering their own interpretation informed by his religious formation in the Anglican Catholic church. Watts did not meet Jung until 1958, upon delivering four lectures to the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. By this time, however, Watts had largely moved on from Jungian psychology, having studied the works of various influential figures in the emerging humanistic psychological zeitgeist. Yet, as Colin Sanders suggests in his essay entitled “Alan Watts and the Re-visioning of Psychotherapy,” “for Watts, liberation from attachment

Editor’s Introduction  xxi to theoretical and ideological orthodoxy of any kind was an important consideration in becoming aware, living in the moment with presence, acceptance, and joy.” Focusing on the liberatory quality of Psychotherapy East and West, Sanders notes Watts’ consultations for Gregory Bateson’s Communication Project, highlighting the emancipatory value placed by Watts upon the identification and transcendence of cultural and societal double binds. Also considered are Watts’ discussions of existential alienation and sociocultural criticism engendered by the works of Rollo May and Erich Fromm. Citing the influence of George Herbert Mead upon Watts, and Watts’ subsequent influence upon Kenneth Gergen, Sanders follows the flow of Psychotherapy East and West toward its importance for contemporary issues in social constructionism, including the manufacture individual identities and the fabrication of cultural “others.” Sanders concludes with discussion of Watts’ anticipation of issues in present-day “brief therapy” and “psychotherapeutic simplicity.” Psychotherapy East and West was reissued in 2017, fifty-six years after its original 1961 publication date. Tracking the book’s contributions and controversies into the twenty-first century, Peter Columbus offers a twopart “Retrospective Review.” Part I focuses on themes from academic book reviews, 1961–1970. Columbus shows that Watts’ text was simultaneously probative and indicative of foundational problems in 1960s psychotherapeutic practices. The text was probative in its exploration of Western psychotherapy’s “philosophical unconscious” – the hidden metaphysical assumptions preventing full recognition of an individual’s humanity. The book was indicative by its raising issues symptomatic of an ongoing crisis of approach in psychotherapy theory and practice. Whereas many psychotherapists understood their task as assisting clients’ adjustment to social roles, Watts suggested that dysfunctional social systems require critical examination. Additionally, Watts expanded the meaning of psychotherapy beyond narrow reference to psychopathology to include ontological issues affecting general populations, thus fueling the 1960s Human Potential Movement. Major criticisms and commentary on Psychotherapy East and West focused on Watts’ understanding of the ego and ego transcendence – including the ego’s role in capitalist economies. Part II extends these issues as they appear in academic and literary reviews circa 1970s–1980s, including the problematics of orientalism and postmodernism, plus the twenty-first century views of Bankart, Kripal, and Puhakka. The image of Alan Watts as a prime source of Buddhism and Taoism for the West is now a durable theme in contemporary consciousness. However, as Susan Gordon shows in her essay titled “Alan Watts and Neurophenomenology,” the “Buddhism popularizer” leitmotif does not fully encompass Watts’ contributions to Humanistic Psychology. Building on earlier work by Columbus (2012) and Rice (2012) demonstrating Watts’ adoption of European phenomenology as a didactic supplement

xxii  Peter J. Columbus to various non-Western epistemologies, Gordon outlines Watts’ discerning anticipation of issues subsequently considered by Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenological research agenda. Identifying the intersection of Watts and Varela as a radical empiricism in the spirit of William James, Gordon elaborates two topics of concern, (a) embodied cognition – particularly the problem of self-experience, and (b) consciousness of the specious present, that is to say, temporal awareness of the “here and now.” Gordon thus identifies Watts as a neuro-philosopher located among a lineage of holistic thinkers including Johann Wolfgang Goethe, William James, Jacob Von Uexkull, Kurt Goldstein, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. An emerging trend in contemporary living that is informed by Humanistic Psychology is the process of gamification – the insertion of game systems at work, in school, and other non-playful settings. In “Alan Watts and the Infinite Game,” Nathan Hulsey explores the interface between Watts’ philosophy of intrinsically motivated play and gamification technology via the reality simulation game Everything which employs audio narration by Watts. Drawing distinctions between the spontaneous and open-ended qualities of Watts’ play versus gamification processes applied toward increasing production and profit, Hulsey questions whether, and in what way, Watts’ version of play can exist in a culture that is increasingly obsessed with playing for finite outcomes such as points, rewards and status. Though gamification technologies are pushed as catholicons to an “always-on” societal pressure, and games are now inundating life and labor, Hulsey argues that Watts’ free play has become ensnared in exploitive power structures of consumer capitalism. At a manifest level, Everything employs Watts’ audio narration toward evoking lived experiences of spontaneous play. At the hidden level of technological process, however, Everything is a set of simulative exigencies that entail the instrumental manipulation of the player plus the player’s compliance to the game’s digital protocol. Examining the distributions of power in Everything, Hulsey shows that “technological enlightenment and Watts’ rendition of personal enlightenment are two incongruent occurrences of play.” Whereas the former is “a practice of instrumentalism,” the latter “urges us to discard the strictures of traditional gameplay.” Thus, Hulsey concludes, “in a world where numerous applications and games promise a sense of mindfulness and freedom, we should continue to dig up the differences between organic experience and instrumentalized experience.” Part II: Comparative Religion and Philosophy Morgan Shipley leads off discussion of comparative religion and philosophy with “Alan Watts, Psychedelic Buddhism, and Religious Play in Postwar America.” Shipley examines the impact of Alan Watts’

Editor’s Introduction  xxiii “psychedelic Buddhism” on cultural criticism in the 1960s, and its implications for the present day. Shipley demonstrates that Watts’ 1960s Buddhism, articulated within a psychedelic ethos, helped with diagnosing and responding to a problematic era when conservative Christian thinkers were allied with the technocratic aims of capitalist economies within a matrix of Cold War politics. Often touted as a time and place of economic affluence, post-World War II America also experienced spiritual and cultural crises of alienation. Within this milieu, psychedelics extended sacramental ways for circumventing the disaffecting mechanisms of postwar society by baring expressions of compassion and mutuality. Delineated within Alan Watts’ work, psychedelics revealed realities of Buddhist wisdom, identifying existence not as an operation of difference, but as an indication of comprehensive interconnection. As Shipley notes in his conclusion, the sacramental space of psychedelic exploration affords a therapeutic consciousness “in which stronger and more engaged understandings of self and other can help reorient the very means by which we relate to and participate in our social and political worlds.” Studies of Alan Watts’ contributions typically focus on his interpretation and purveyance of various Eastern religions for Western audiences. While these studies are needed, they are insufficient for gaining a full comprehension of Watts’ role and influence. In “Alan Watts and the Occultism of Aquarian Religion,” Christopher Chase contemplates Watts as a contributor of Western occult and hermetic tradition to Paganism in contemporary America. Drawing on the history of occultism, Watts’ body of work, and its later use by Pagans, Chase positions Watts as a “source for both gnostic realization and erotic transmutation through cosmic hierogamy.” Employing the hermeneutic theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Chase argues that Watts’ dedication to erotic and gnostic themes structured a “historically-effected consciousness” underlying American Paganism specifically and the modern Aquarian movement in general. Examining occult and Pagan periodicals such as Orion, Green Egg, and Gnostica, Chase clearly shows the ways in which contemporary American Pagans used Watts’ works as constructive units in the development of their own spiritual and religious sensibilities. Whether discussing religions East or West, Buddhism or Christianity, Gerald Ostdiek contends that Watts’ religious philosophy was not centrally focused on institutional dogma or blind obeisance to mandated rules of conduct. Nor was it focused on advocating for one religion over and against other religions. Instead, Ostdiek shows, Watts’ religious philosophy formulates an assertion for “secular competence in religious praxis.” The argument is twofold. First, concentrating mainly on The Wisdom of Insecurity and The Book in the light of William James and C. S. Peirce, Ostdiek establishes Watts’ emphasis on “religion” not as a steadfast clinging to compulsory beliefs, but as an adaptive process of

xxiv  Peter J. Columbus acting and choosing amidst the precarious and insecure foundations of life. Second, Ostdiek considers Watts’ pragmatic “religioning” as an art of moral competence. In contrast to Divine Command Theory which absurdly usurps moral agency from religious practitioners, the moral competence of Alan Watts is 1) independent of religiosity, 2) not bound to metaphysical presuppositions, but to the vicissitudes of living in the here and now, and thus 3) expresses a radical continuity of “organismin-relation-to-the-universe.” Ostdiek concludes: “Watts may be rightly read as having rejected any and all claims of metaphysical certitude, and accepted secular competence in religious praxis as the means and the measure of living successfully in this necessarily shared and insecure world.” The problem of successful living in an insecure world is further considered by Adrian Moore in “The Holistic Negation of Alan Watts: Reclaiming Value in the Void.” Moore addresses the significance of Watts’ philosophical thinking on Nothingness to present-day industrial and consumer capitalism. Considered alongside Jean-Paul Sartre and the existentialist movement, Watts’ work is viewed as a distinct philosophical discourse which ties together the requirements of “metaphysical formalism and popular utility.” Moore sees a compelling correspondence between the existentialists and Watts’ Buddhist-informed understanding of Nothingness, as both consider the phenomenon as a thing-in-itself that is intentionally apprehended in experience by a conscious mind. A key difference, however, is that existentialists emphasize Nothingness as a source of existential angst which motivates deleterious outcomes in capitalist society, whereas Watts ascertains the possibility for a beneficial Nothingness which, via holistic self-negation, is propagative of therapeutic meanings and actions beyond the taken-for-granted boundaries of consumer capitalism. Juliet Bennett explores the contributions of Alan Watts to the quest for peaceful living in the twenty-first century. She first identifies Watts’ critique of two dominant myths or models of the universe and their associated narratives – the “ceramic model (classic monotheism) and the “fully automatic-model” (atheism) – each having problematic impacts on Western worldviews and corresponding institutions. A major problem is that each of these models posits the “self” as limited to a “skinencapsulated ego” which, in Watts’ view, is at the core of humanity’s many troubles, tribulations, and conflicts – including pillaging of natural resources and exploitation of workers for economic profit. A more beneficial worldview is Watts’ ‘dramatic model” of the universe (panentheism) which contains an understanding of the self as a development conjoined to, and emergent from, ecological, evolutionary, and cosmological progressions. Though informed by Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, Watts’ “dramatic model” is consonant with the deep ecology of Arne Naess,

Editor’s Introduction  xxv the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and various contemporary peace theorists. The implications of Watts’ dramatic model for peace is grounded in the relations of inner peace and global peace, particularly people’s identification with cosmological processes embodying yet surpassing personal selves. Such grounding affords opportunities to recognize and remediate the structural violence pervading economic, political, and social systems presently serving to benefit a few privileged individuals at the expense of many peoples and cultures. Part III: Arts and Humanities Ken Cohen begins the discussion on arts and humanities with “Reminiscences of Alan Watts’ Last Summer.” During the Summer months of 1973, Cohen was among a group of six students on scholarship assisting Watts with research and translation of materials for his final book, Tao – The Watercourse Way, published posthumously in 1975. Adding new backstory to the development of The Watercourse Way, Cohen’s essay, laced with an original haiku and three translations of ancient Chinese poetry, first speaks to Watts’ capacity for creative thinking and acting “beyond the box” – that is to say, outside conventional and taken-for-granted ideas and concepts – in his lectures and guided meditations. Quoting Lancelot Law Whyte, Cohen’s intimation is that Watts’ wisdom was a unique combination of intellect and experience: “Thought is born of failure. Only when the human organism fails to achieve an adequate response to its situation is there material for the processes of thought, and the greater the failure the more searching they become” (Whyte, 1948, p. 1). Against this backdrop, Cohen reflects on Watts’ mentoring, likening it to Christmas Humphries’ guidance of Watts years earlier which emphasized learning and spiritual practice beyond traditional academic and religious settings. Cohen concludes with reflection on their final meeting at the famed houseboat SS Vallejo, and Watts’ death soon thereafter. A casual examination of Alan Watts’ oeuvre will show that “nonsense” as both subject and rhetorical strategy is central to his thinking, yet the topic is long neglected in the academic literature on Watts. Michael Heyman offers the first-ever scholarly analysis of the creative prose and playful poetry in Watts’ (1967) book Nonsense, a text first published in 1967 and followed by a posthumous, expanded edition in 1977. Nonsense is a little known, often-ignored manuscript resting equally in the Victorian nonsense tradition as it does in ancient Chinese, Japanese or medieval Indian literature. Watts’ blend of East-West literary nonsense uncovers flawed logic in mundane and philosophical language by exposing the mimetic, fickle, and ultimately tautological operations of linguistic processes. Enabling a manner of “divine performative play,” Heyman notes, Watts mirrors the “nonsense” of the world by using “a genre whose significance is not in what it means but in how it does not.”

xxvi  Peter J. Columbus In chapter thirteen, Samual B. Cushman reflects on “Alan Watts, Ali Akbar Khan, and Hindustani Music in the Psychedelic Sixties.” Since the 1960s, the connection of North Indian (Hindustani) music to countercultural sensibilities has congealed in the American mindset, with sounds and images of Indian musical instruments often used to denote or signify new age lifestyles or psychedelic experience. Renowned sitarist Ravi Shankar repeatedly denounced the association of Hindustani music with psychedelia, viewing North Indian music as profoundly mismatched with the American drug culture. Examining excerpts from Watts’ texts plus his personal association with sarodist Ali Akbar Khan, Cushman’s essay inhabits the space between negative associations of psychedelics with north Indian music and the more fruitful relations of the two via Alan Watts. Drawing on a phenomenology of sensation and perception, Cushman situates psychedelic substances and Indian music as two distinctive avenues toward possibly comparable subjective-experiential states of awareness. As a supporter of Indian Music with knowledge of the metamorphic potentials of psychedelics, Watts discerned “certain resonances in the affective possibilities provided by psychedelic drugs and Indian music insofar as both anchored sensory experience in what he calls the ‘intense contemplative watching of the eternal now’.” Watts’ encounters with Indian music confound repudiations of engagements between the psychedelic counterculture and Indian music as capricious, insubstantial, and trivial. In “Alan Watts and his Queer Readers,” Philip Longo reveals Watts’ significance to the rhetoric of sexual freedom within queer liberation movements. As early as 1958, long before such notions were thematic in mainstream thinking, Alan Watts in his writings, lectures, and radio broadcasts was arguing for radical sexual freedom and gender pluralism. Drawing on a methodology of queer rhetoric in situ together with a theory of rhetoric remix, Longo shows how Watts was informed by nascent homophile and transgender communication networks in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly Gavin Authur’s Circle of Sex schema. Watts in turn helped to inform and shape these communication networks through his challenging of sexual norms vis-à-vis discussions of the body and spiritual identity. Watts was often cited in gay/lesbian/transgender periodicals such as The Ladder and Turnabout, and engaged by activists, including in 1973’s The Gay Liberation Book. Through his work, Watts amplified homophile and transgender perspectives to both mainstream and queer audiences alike. Longo concludes with discussion of the contemporary remix of Watts’ thinking by camp/drag artist RuPaul, demonstrating that “fragments of Watts’ writings traveled long after his death in ways that he could have never anticipated, and yet, that furthered the aims of his life’s work.” The book closes with an Editor’s Conclusion plus an updated bibliographic resource listing (1) Watts’ major books, including posthumous publications, (2) books and biographies on Watts, (3) articles and

Editor’s Introduction  xxvii chapters addressing various aspects of Watts’ life and work, and (4) doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, and undergraduate honors theses.

Dead Reckoning The present discussion concludes by way of a “reckoning” with Alan Watts, meaning “to settle with” or “to square accounts with” the problematics of Watts’ life and work. This is a kind of “dead reckoning” because it requires navigational corrections for prevailing intellectual currents. It has been said, for example, that Watts’ mid-twentieth century rhetorical style is anachronistic – containing non-inclusive allusions that are temporally and linguistically distant from, and out of touch with, the meaningmaking sensibilities of contemporary readers. From this viewpoint, Watts is relegated to the status of a historical and cultural artifact that is worthy of remembrance, but having little or no bearing on contemporary life and thought. Yet this view, perhaps descriptive of readers prone to judging texts by their surface attributes, does not account for the sheer ubiquity and salience of Alan Watts within such twenty-first century domains as modern Buddhism, secular mindfulness, spirituality, and psychedelics. Neither does this view account for what Philip Longo (chap. 14) called the “remix” of Watts’ writings and lectures within queer rhetoric, and their contribution to legitimating queer identities. Nor does it apply to Watts’ influence on Pagan hermeneutics and emerging Pagan identities as outlined by Christopher Chase in chapter seven. The manifest mid-twentieth century rhetorical style of Watts thus appears incidental to deeper pedagogical strategies employed in his works, such as transcendental phenomenology and phenomenological hermeneutics (Columbus, 2012) plus poetry and nonsense literature used toward affording cognitive and perceptual experiences for readers (Heyman, chap. 12). To the degree that Watts’ rhetorical style does constitute a barrier between his works and present-day audiences, this calls not for sidelining Watts as a relic of the past, but rather for renewed scholarship on the interplay between his oeuvre and audience comprehension. See, for example, Dashti and Mehrpour’s (2017) comparative discourse analysis of public speeches by Watts and Krishnamurti. Contemporary Christian apologists, particularly conservative fundamentalists, critically “other” Watts’ religious leanings, chiefly in his later works such as Beyond Theology (Watts, 1964), as intrinsically different from and alien to their own “faithful” readings of biblical texts. One view is that Watts’ thinking in relation to Christianity leans toward pantheism (Geisler, 2013) – the notion that anything, everything, and everyone is God – thus disqualifying his inclusion as a viable Christian thinker. However, as Juliet Bennett elaborated in chapter 10, though Watts was critical of both classical monotheism and atheism, he adopted not pantheisim but rather a theology of panentheism in their stead. Panentheism does not reduce God to

xxviii  Peter J. Columbus this world, but adequately sustains the world’s significance and autonomy while highlighting its vibrant assimilation within a divine transcendence. Cooper (2006) notes that Geisler’s (2013) pantheism label on Watts is a misnomer informed by Clark’s (1978) conflation of panentheism with pantheism, which collapses the former into the latter. Given that panentheism, as Cooper further notes, is generally considered as the shared scaffold and footing for interreligious dialogue among diverse peoples, a conclusion drawn here is that the gross accidental or deliberate mislabeling of Watts as a pantheist by conservative Christian thinkers has the net effect of pushing him to the dialogical periphery. Another conservative Christian tack, exemplified by Sire (2009), is to challenge Watts’ interpretations of biblical literature. Critical examination of Watts’ understandings of Christian literature is, prima facie, a worthwhile endeavor. Yet Sire considers Watts’ (1964) biblical hermeneutics as an example of how “cults misread the Bible,” and is thus a polemical argument containing the a priori logical fallacy of a straw man argument – Watts was not a cultist or a Christian fundamentalist. Thus responding to Sire within his cultism-Christian fundamentalism binary is (if metaphors may be mixed) a fool’s errand. Another straw man argument is Copan’s (2009) contention, in a text concerning “overcoming objections to Christian Faith,” that Watts employed self-contradictory reasoning in rejecting Christianity. Unfortunately, Copan does not offer evidence from Watts’ texts of his rejection of Christianity or self-contradiction therein, instead suggesting readers see Clark’s (1978) flawed text which, as noted above, conflates pantheisim and panentheism. The net effect of Sire (2009) and Copan (2009) is to marginalize Watts’ religious leanings, particularly his later works, such as Beyond Theology (Watts, 1964), as intrinsically different from, and alien to, their own “correct” readings of biblical texts. The history of Christianity is rife with noticeable and subtle variations of interpretive correctness and hagiographic motivation, often oriented toward differentiating legitimate faith practitioners from illegitimate ones – separating sheep from goats, in-groups from out-groups, saints from sinners. Yet, as Chase (chap. 7), Ostdiek (chap. 8), and Cohen (chap. 11) exemplify, Watts’ thinking on religion was more inclusive than the “one-upmanship” of exclusivity. Ostdiek notes: The religious impulse commonly results in a rampant and virulent egoism – an expression of presumed and superior autonomy that tends to posit “God” in the image of whoever is doing the positing … For Watts, none of this has anything to do with any proper practice of religion. (chap. 8) Here, Watts’ radical thinking in Beyond Theology is worth noting. The book was published in 1964, amidst the ongoing Second Vatican Council

Editor’s Introduction  xxix of the Roman Catholic Church. Among the historic changes to Church policies and theology promulgated by Vatican II was Nostra Aetate, a “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions” first drafted in 1961 and published in 1965. Examining Buddhism and Hinduism in the light of Catholicism, Nostra Aetate declares the Catholic Church rejects nothing of the former religions to the extent they comport with Catholic teaching. In Beyond Theology, Watts turned the assessment on its head, examining Christianity in the light of Hinduism while observing that Hinduism more wholly accommodates Christianity than vice versa. Watts (1964) admittedly was acting as “the Fool at Court.” Historically, Watts noted, “the function of the Fool was to keep his monarch human and, with luck, even humane, by a judicious unstuffing of his pomposity and by keeping alive his sense of humor – the essence of which is laughter at oneself” (p. x). Watts is likewise subjected to critical “othering” by scholars studying the impact of colonialism and its repercussions in contemporary life. Prefacing this discussion, the point here is not to deny the historical ravages of colonialism and its contemporary aftermath on peoples and cultures of Asia, nor is the goal to justify problematic appropriations of their religious and spiritual traditions by Western interests including, perhaps, Watts himself. Rather, it is to suggest that the suspicious hermeneutic of orientalism often fails to effectively or fully understand Watts’ reflexivity in relation to Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. Instead, Watts is simply caricatured as emblematic of the pernicious misrepresentation of Asian cultures and misappropriation of their philosophical, spiritual, and religious texts and practices. He is, for example, summarily conjoined to D. T Suzuki without nuanced delineation of their significant differences regarding Zen Buddhism, or plainly assumed to idealize or demote “the East.” What may be called for is a hermeneutic of faith as a complement to hermeneutical suspicion which restores the fullness of Watts’ thinking about spiritual and religious matters – East and West. Watts’ early writings were not unconcerned with interpretive problems encountered by Christian persons of Western heritage trying to understand Buddhism or Taoism (see Franklin & Columbus, chap. 1). Similarly, Watts expressly challenged and bracketed idealized notions of “the East” in his Psychotherapy East and West (Columbus, chap. 3; Sanders, chap. 2). As for Western assumptions of negative differences between Eastern and Western peoples, that is to say, the construction of Asian peoples as “less than,” Watts (2017c) fully recognized the “unfounded” but “common assumption” embedded in the Western mindset that “peoples of Asia are more primitive” than Westerners. This fallacious “view of essential differences” Watts noted (many years before Said’s Orientalism), was coextensive with the “travesty” of colonialism: “It thus became an extraordinarily convenient doctrine, for purposes of colonization, to suppose this was not mere rapacity but bringing the benefits of a higher order of civilization and culture to

xxx  Peter J. Columbus less developed peoples” (p. 327). Correspondingly, as Cushman’s (chap. 13) study of Watts’ relations to Hindustani music in the 1960s shows, a faithful hermeneutic of his reflexivity vis-à-vis Asian peoples and cultures in conjunction with the 1960s California zeitgeist in which he was living and working may reveal a more intricate and complicated narrative than is afforded by the single lens of “orientalism.” The question of repressive desublimation can be addressed in two parts. Foremost, it is argued that Watts, through the rhetoric of 1950s cybernetics, informed and contributed to the emergence of a contemporary techne-Zen discourse. Based on a presumed goodness-of-fit and co-determination between Zen Buddhism and global capitalism, the idea is that a Zen Buddhist mindset of nonduality allows people to adapt without protest to the vicissitudes and vagaries of capitalist systems and processes. This techne-Zen outlook may be true for a circumscribed cohort of individuals and consumers in the fields of business and technology, but the view seems tenuous when applied to broader regiments. The techne-Zen version of nonduality is one-dimensional as it is dis-embedded from the larger context of Buddhist social theory, including the Three Poisons, Four Noble Truths, and various ethical/ moral precepts (see, e.g., Loy, 2006). It fails to account for modern Buddhism’s engagement with the repercussions of capitalism: social justice initiatives on poverty, human rights, criminal justice, ecology, war and peace (e.g., King, 2009). Also, Watts’ own version of nonduality was a radical skepticism undermining conventionality and affording cultural criticism rather than acquiescence to prevailing trends and contingencies, economic or otherwise. See, for example, the cultural critique afforded by Watts’ “psychedelic Buddhism” as elaborated by Shipley in chapter six (see also, Smith, 2010). Likewise, see Moore’s (chap. 9) assertion that Watts’ philosophy allows for moving beyond contemporary “capitalist realism” – “the fatalistic belief that the contemporary, industrialized and property-centered society that we currently occupy is the only possible way to manage the world.” A close reading of The Way of Zen shows that Watts (1989) was using the rhetoric of cybernetics in a figurative way. He employed the example of cybernetic feedback systems – an idea familiar to 1950s Western readers – as remedial scaffolding to convey an understanding of his lesser known variation on Buddhist nonduality. Furthermore, Watts wrote: I do not wish to press the analogy between the human mind and servo-mechanisms to the point of saying that the mind-body is “nothing but” an extremely complicated mechanical automaton. I only want to go so far as to show that feed-back involves some problems which are similar to the problems of self-consciousness and selfcontrol in man. Otherwise, mechanism and organism seem to me to

Editor’s Introduction  xxxi be different in principle – that is, in their actual functioning – since the one is made and the other grown. The fact that one can translate some organic processes into mechanical terms no more implies that organism is mechanism than the translation of commerce into arithmetical terms implies that commerce is arithmetic. (pp. 136n2-137n2) Suggesting that Watts equated cybernetics and Buddhism is to literalize his metaphor by reducing the latter to the former, and thereby repressing the radically transformational possibilities of Buddhism and the cultural criticisms of Watts’ own mystical philosophy. The literalized and, therefore, dead metaphor of cybernetic nonduality (and its techne-Zen corollary) is an artifact of subsequent analysis which is not intrinsic to The Way of Zen itself. Finally, there is the repressive desublimation of Alan Watts exemplified in commercial advertisements employing his audio excerpts toward selling various consumer products and services. This phenomenon is deeply ironic because he is usually understood as offering an antidote to capitalist technocratic culture (Rozak, 1969/ 1995). Watts’ (1961/ 1969) Psychotherapy East and West, for example, was geared toward undermining the “official psychotherapy” in the West which “lacks integrity and becomes the obedient tool of armies, bureaucracies, churches, corporations, and all agencies that require individual brainwashing” (p. 20). Nowadays, however, Watts’ audio lectures are excerpted for commercials and advertisements in ways that stifle his liberatory message while highlighting the desirability of consumer goods. Reviewing the value of Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation” for understanding contemporary consumer culture, Finn Bowring (2012) notes: While advertisers are lauded for their seductive images of uncongested roads, instant medical cures, sexual radiance and permanent youth, an act of sublimation which extends to the political plane – the consumer who imagines the possible well-being of the workers whose clothes she wears, who considers the interests of the future generations who must live on this soiled and depleted planet, and who dares to contemplate the possibility not of the perfect commodity but of a future far beyond capitalism – is routinely censored as a thought too far and a discreditable breach with reality. (p. 22) Bowring (2012) draws on the work of Hannah Arendt to identify three variations of consumer choice in the twenty-first century. Each, applied here, assists in illuminating the repressive desublimation of Alan Watts. First, “we can choose a desublimated pleasure based in ignorance” (pp. 23–24). This variation perhaps describes a cohort for whom Watts’

xxxii  Peter J. Columbus emancipatory message is unknown. He is simply the seductive voice on the commercial, enticing the desirous consumer to purchase an alluring product. Second, “we can choose a guilty pleasure that is tainted by knowledge” (p. 24). Here, perhaps, are various consumers locked into careers replete with developmental foreclosures and personal compromises accompanying the problematic complicities endemic to capitalism. These people are ripe for the Volvo V90 Cross Country vehicle sales pitch: Alan Watts exhorting them to “live fully now” as the advertisement “encourages listeners to reconnect with their youthful passions, showing business professionals escaping from the city and its daily grind by heading off to surf, fish and indulge in nature photography trips” ( Jardine, 2017, n.p.). If we remain stuck amidst options one and two, with Watts’ emancipatory message and cultural relevance reduced to that of a consumer capitalist pitchman pushing “snake oil” as Robert Martin Adams (1958, p. 629) suggested, then it is perhaps time to agree with Huff’s ( 2017) conjecture that Watts may now be “more an artifact than a living and provocative source of alternative wisdom” (n.p.), and thus conclude with Nordstrom and Pilgrim (1980) that “Watts must be left behind” (p. 398). Bowring (2012), however, identifies a third option: we can choose “an ethical pleasure that arises out of dialogue with and consideration for others” (p. 24). At least some people – astute readers and listeners of Watts and related works such as the present text – may recognize the disjunction between the “authentic” Alan Watts (Smith, 2010) and his repressive desublimation through twenty-first century commercialism. Arguably, this cohort holds the possibility of making liberated consumer and lifestyle choices without ignoring the full implications of Watts’ (1971) distinction between “wealth” and “money.” These people may recognize, for example, the space between – and extant paradox of – (a) Watts’ process philosophy which enlivens the deep ecology movement (Bennet, chap. 10) versus (b) Watts as the motor oil and automobile salesman; or as shown by Hulsey (chap. 5), Watts as the free-play Everything narrator versus Everything’s underlying instrumental contingencies. It is this third choice which sustains the vision of the present book – a vision of a “non-repressive sublimation” invoked by Marcuse, Arendt, and Watts alike (despite their differences in other ways), and which, Bowring (2012) believes, needs preservation: the image of the ethical consumer who refuses to be coerced by the sheer gratification of things themselves, the image of the genuine humanist who, in Arendt’s words, “debarbarises the world of the beautiful by not being overwhelmed by it.” (p. 24)

Editor’s Introduction  xxxiii

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xxxiv  Peter J. Columbus Dashti, L., & Mehrpour, S. (2017). Representations of social actors in J. Krishnamurti and Alan Watts’ philosophical speeches. Journal of Applied Psycholinguistics and Language Research, 4(4), 51–59. Fadiman, J. (2011). The psychedelic explorer’s guide: Safe, therapeutic, and sacred journeys. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. Forbes, D. (2019). Mindfulness and its discontents: Education, self, and social transformation. Halifax, Canada: Fernwood. Foucault, M. (2012). History of sexuality Vol.1: An introduction. New York: Vintage. (Original work published 1976) Fuller, R. C. (2001). Spiritual, but not religious: Understanding unchurched America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Geisler, N. (2013). Christian apologetics (2nd ed.). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Gianatasio, D. (2016, February 10). Can a biotech group change the conversation with an emotional ad about time? Ad Week. Retrieved 3/17/2020 from https://www.adweek.com/creativity/can-biotech-group-change-conversationemotional-ad-about-time-169583/ Gianatasio, D. (2017, March 7). Valvoline gets philosophical in gritty ads aimed at DIYers and car buffs. Ad Week. Retrieved April 2, 2020 from https://www. adweek.com/creativity/valvoline-gets-philosophical-in-gritty-ads-aimedat-diyers-and-car-buffs/ Giraldi, T. (2019). Psychotherapy, mindfulness, and Buddhist meditation. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan. Global Travel Media (2019, September 17). Cunard’s first cinema advert invites you to forget that you were dreaming. Retrieved April 2, 2020 from https:// www.eglobaltravelmedia.com.au/cunards-first-cinema-advert-invites-you-toforget-that-you-were-dreaming/ Harper, R. (Producer & Director). (2019). Journeys to the edge of consciousness (documentary film). UK: Hidden Depths Productions. Harrington, A., & Dunne, J. D. (2015). When mindfulness is therapy: Ethical qualms, historical perspectives. American Psychologist, 70(7), 621–631. Hood, R. W. Jr. (2012). Alan Watts’ anticipation of for major debates in the psychology of religion. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts – here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 25–41). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Huff, P. A. (2017, October 23). [Review of the book Alan Watts in the Academy]. Reading Religion. Retrieved April 2, 2020 from http://readingreligion.org/ books/alan-watts-academy Iwamura, J. N. (2011). Virtual orientalism: Asian religions and American popular culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Jackson, C. T. (1984). Zen, mysticism, and counter-culture. The pilgrimage of Alan Watts. Indian Journal of American Studies, 4(1), 89–101. Jardine, A. (2017, January 26). Volvo reminds us to be mindful in a spot referencing Alan Watts. Ad Age. Retrieved April 2, 2020 from https://adage.com/ creativity/work/get-away-car/50689 Katz, B., & Sikma, S. (2017). And we won’t give it a name & static activity. Centre [3] for Print & Media Arts. Retrieved April 4, 2018 from http://centre3.com/ exhibition/and-we-wont-give-it-a-name-static-activity/

Editor’s Introduction  xxxv King, S. B. (2009). Socially engaged Buddhism. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Kripal, J. J. (2018). “Comparison gets you nowhere!” The comparative study of religion and the spiritual but not religious. In W. B. Parsons (Ed.), Being Spiritual but not religious: Past, present, future(s) (chap. 15). New York, NY: Routledge. Krippner, S. (2012). The psychedelic adventures of Alan Watts. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts – here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 83–102). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Langlitz, N. (2012). Neuropsychedelia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lipka, M., & Grecewicz, C. (2017, September 6). More Americans now say they’re spiritual but not religious. Fact Tank: News in the Numbers. Pew Research Center. Retrieved February 12, 2018 from http://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2017/09/06/more-americans-now-say-they’re-spiritual-but-not-religious/ Lopez, D. (Ed.). (2002). A modern Buddhist bible: Essential readings from East and West. Boston, MA: Beacon. Loy, D. (2006). The great awakening: A Buddhist social theory. Boston, MA: Wisdom. Marcuse, H. (2013). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. New York, NY: Routledge. Marshall, J. C. (2019). Magic, alchemy, and the spiritual-but-not-religious community. The Hilltop Review, 12(1), Article 5. Martin, C. (2014). Capitalizing religion: Ideology and the opiate of the bourgeoisie. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. McCown, D., & Micozzi, M. S. (2019). Western foundations of mind-body, mindfulness, and meditation. In M. S. Micozzi (Ed.), Fundamentals of complementary, alternative, and integrative medicine (pp. 112–128). Saint Louis, MO: Elsevier. McCown, D., Reibel, D., & Micozzi, M. S. (2010). Teaching mindfulness: A practical guide for clinicians and educators. New York, NY: Springer. Metzner, R. (2012). From the Joyous cosmology to the watercourse way: An appreciation of Alan Watts. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts – here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 103–121). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Nordstrom, L, & Pilgrim, R. (1980). The wayward mysticism of Alan Watts. Philosophy East and West, 30(3), 381–401. Norton, S. (2019, December 26). Alan Watts: Sixties counterculture hero, dead Xbox salesman: How a lecture about personal divinity became Microsoft’s latest ad campaign. Retrieved March 17, 2020 from https://medium.com/excursus/ alan-watts-sixties-countercultural-hero-dead-xbox-salesman-94d076549d7b O’Reilly, D. (Designer). (2017). Everything (reality simulation game). San Francisco, CA: Double Fine Osto, D. (2016). Altered states: Buddhism and psychedelic spirituality in America. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Parsons, W. B. (Ed.). (2018). Being spiritual but not religious: Past, present, and future(s). New York, NY: Routledge. Payne, R. K. (2018). Intertwined sources of Buddhist modernist opposition to ritual: History, philosophy, culture. Religions, 9(11), 366. doi.org/10.3390/rel 9110366

xxxvi  Peter J. Columbus Peluso, D. A. (2017). Global ayahuasca: An entrepreneurial ecosystem. In B. C. Cabata, C. Cavnar, & A. K. Gearan (Eds.), The world ayahuasca diaspora: Reinventions and controversies (pp. 203–222). New York, NY: Routledge. Pollan, M. (2018). How to change your mind: What the new science of psychedelics is teaching us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence. New York, NY: Penguin. Popova, M. (2017, December 27). The human mosaic of beauty and madness: Young Alan Watts on inner sanity amid outer chaos. Brain Pickings. Retrieved April 4, 2018 from https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/12/27/ collected-letters-of-alan-watts/ Prohl, I. (2014). California “Zen”: Buddhist spirituality made in America. Amerikastudien/American Studies, 59(2), 193–206. Purser, R. (2019). McMindfulness: How mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality. London, UK: Repeater. Rice, D. L. (2012). Alan Watts and the neuroscience of transcendence. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts -here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 123–148). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Rozak, T. (1995). The making of a counter-culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Original work published 1969) Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage. Saxena, N. B. (2020). AI as awakened intelligence: Buddha, Kurweil, and the film Her. Theology and Science. DOI: 10.1080/14746700.2019.1710351 Sire, J. W. (2009). Scripture twisting: 20 ways the cults misread the bible. Downers Grove, IL: IPV. Smith, D. L. (2010). The authenticity of Alan Watts. In G. Storhoff & J. WhalenBridge (Eds.), American Buddhism as a way of life (pp. 13–38). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Smith, D. L. (2014). How to be a genuine fake: Her, Alan Watts, and the problem of the self. Journal of Religion & Film, 18(2), article 3. Available at: https:// digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol18/iss2/3 Walton, J, & Watts, A. W. (2015). Face the facts (sound recording). Brooklyn, NY: Figure & Ground. Watts, A. W. (1964). Beyond theology: The art of godmanship. New York, NY: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1937). The legacy of Asian and Western man. London: John Murray. Watts, A. W. (1940). The meaning of happiness. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Watts, A. W. (1967). Nonsense. San Francisco, CA: Stolen Papers. Watts, A. W. (1969). Psychotherapy east and west. New York, NY: Pantheon. (Original work published 1961) Watts, A. W. (1971). Wealth versus money. In Does it matter: Essays on man’s relation to materiality (pp. 3–24). New York, NY: Vintage. Watts, A. W. (1973). In my own Way: An autobiography. New York, NY: Vintage. Watts, A. W. (1989). The way of Zen. New York, NY: Vintage. Watts, A. W. (2013). The joyous cosmology: Adventures in the chemistry of consciousness. Novato, CA: New World Library. Watts, A. W. (2017a). Beat Zen, square Zen, and Zen. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts in the academy: Essays and lectures (pp. 143–149). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (original work published 1958).

Editor’s Introduction  xxxvii Watts, A. W. (2017b, January 31). How to reach where you already are. Parabola. Retrieved April 5, 2018 from https://parabola.org/2017/01/31/ how-to-reach-where-you-already-are-by-alan-watts/ Watts, A. W. (2017c). Oriental and occidental approaches to the nature of man. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts in the academy: Essays and lectures (pp. 327–330). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Watts, A. W. (2018a, September 14). Everything human is natural. Tricycle: A Buddhist Review. Retrieved August 8, 2019 from https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/ alan-watts-nature/ Watts, A. W. (2018b, Winter). The problem of opposites: Happiness via the way of acceptance. Unte Reader. Retrieved August 10, 2019 from https://www.utne. com/mind-and-body/problem-of-opposites-zm0z18wzgsch Whyte, L. L. (1948). The next development in man. New York: Henry Holt. Wilcox, M. (2018). Consuming spirituality: SBNR and neo-liberal logic in queer communities. In W. B. Parsons (Ed.), Being spiritual but not religious: Past, present, future(s) (chap. 8). New York: Routledge. Williams, (2014). Techne-Zen and the spirit of global capitalism. In The Buddha in the machine: Art, technology and the meeting of East and West (pp. 174–198). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Woodhead, L. (2001). The turn to life in contemporary spirituality. In U. King (Ed.), Spirituality and society in the new millennium (pp. 110–123). Sussex, UK: Sussex Academic Press. Yap, J. (2013, October 17). This video has 153, 935 likes and 405, 624 shares on Facebook after one year. Vulcan Post. Retrieved April 27, 2018 from https:// vulcanpost.com/971/video-153935-likes-405624-shares-facebook-1-year/ Yonge, K. A. (1970). Looking with the third eye. Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal, 15(5), 413–422. Zalesky, P. (1997, September 14). Farewell and far out! [Review of the books Zen and the Beat Way]. The New York Times. Retrieved April 20, 2018 from https://archive. nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/14/reviews/970914.14zaleskt. html Zizek, S. (2008). For they know not what they do; Enjoyment as a political factor. New York, NY: Verso.

Part I

Humanistic Psychology

1 Jung Watts Notes on C. G. Jung’s Formative Influence on Alan Watts Ellen F. Franklin and Peter J. Columbus

Looking back on his life and labor, Alan Watts (1973) observed: “Anyone who has read my books from The Legacy of Asia to Psychotherapy East and West will see what a vast influence Jung has had on my work” (p. 385). Watts acknowledged reading all of Jung’s writings immediately upon their translation into English and having access to many unpublished transcripts from private seminars in which Jung spoke freely about controversial topics such as “astrology, alchemy, and kundalini yoga” (p. 385) without fear for his reputation. Jung’s influence dates to the adolescent Watts’ studies of psychology and Eastern philosophy while in “rebellion against the sterile Christianity” of his childhood (Watts, 1961/1985, p. 133). “From the beginning,” notes Watts (1973), “I was interested in the work of C. G. Jung” (p. 380). As vast as Jung’s influence on Watts may have been, however, the present chapter modestly notes three themes, including (1) the problem of interpretation and reflexivity vis-à-vis “the East,” (2) the possibility of understanding Buddhism, Taoism, and Vedanta via modern psychology, and (3) the shadow side of Alan Watts.

“Difficulties Encountered by a European in Trying to Understand the East” Columbus and Rice (2017) note Watts’ transition from his 1940s–1950s perennial philosophy to hermeneutics in the 1960s, a shift reflecting larger trends in Western thinking as psychoanalytic theory, Marxist social theory, Indigenous peoples, and Asian cultures challenged the universality of Western religious and philosophical discourse. The present discussion notes Jung’s (1931/1975) interpretive influence on Watts’ early thinking about the Christian West vis-à-vis peoples and cultures of Asia, an influence preceding Watts’ perennial sensibilities but which, surviving as a kind of hermeneutic reflexivity, remained consequential throughout his life and work. (See Homans, 1969, for an early assessment of Jung’s contributions to hermeneutics, plus Barnaby & D’Acierno, 1990, and Gundry, 2006, for later considerations.)

4  Ellen F. Franklin and Peter J. Columbus Watts (1973) acknowledged that his “enthusiasm for Oriental wisdom has been disciplined” (p. 385) by Jung (1931/1975). There Jung laid out certain “difficulties encountered by a European in trying to understand the East” (pp. 77–82). The primary difficulty, wrote Jung, is that Europeans have overdeveloped since the Renaissance a one-sided, intellectual sensibility. A consequence of outsized Rationalism is scientism, the belief in science as the “one and only way of comprehending … and therefore we gladly dispose of Eastern ‘wisdom’ in quotation marks and push it away into the obscure territory of faith and superstition” (p. 78). An early, perhaps the earliest, reference to Jung (1931/1975) by Watts is in a 1935 essay concerning Britain’s relations to India. The 20-year-old Watts (1935/1997b) wrote: Serious interest in the philosophical and religious legacy of India is, for the most part, confined to academicians, to a certain species of scientist whose practice it is to kill everything he touches by dissecting, analyzing, and classifying it – and then putting it away on a shelf for the use of specialists only. (p. 151) Here Watts quoted Jung (1931/1975): This, in fact, is the Western way of hiding one’s own heart under the cloak of so-called scientific understanding. We do it partly because of the miserable vanite des savants which fears and rejects with horror any sign of living sympathy, and partly because an understanding that reaches the feelings might allow contact with the foreign spirit to become a serious experience. ( Jung, cited in Watts, 1935/1997b, p. 151) Watts subsequently developed the above theme in depth via The Legacy of Asia and Western Man (1937), exploring the problem of relations between Buddhism, Vedanta, Taoism, and Christianity, particularly Christian “ways of living” in light of the European Renaissance. The book’s intended audience was the “thoughtful [Western] person who feels uncertain of his roots, who has seen the replacement of Faith by Reason and has learnt the barrenness of Reason alone, whose head is satisfied but whose heart thirsts” (pp. xiii-xiv). Identifying Jung (1931/1975) as “one who has already begun to tackle this very problem,” The Legacy of Asia and Western Man, wrote Watts (1937), “owes its inspiration to his work” (p. xiv). Watts (1973) in later life called The Legacy of Asia and Western Man, published in his 22nd year, a “somewhat immature” text, suggesting “it is for the best that it is long since out of print” (pp. 142–143). Nevertheless, Jung, particularly his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower

Jung Watts  5 (1931/1975), served as an important interpretive influence on Watts (1937) and throughout his life by questioning the consciousness, subjectivity, and assumptions of interpreters in relation to their topics of study. Thus, in his 1961 tribute to Jung, Watts observed: I began to read Jung when I first began to study Eastern philosophy in my late adolescence, and I’m eternally grateful to him for what I would call a sort of balancing influence on the development of my thought…. It was Jung who helped me to remind myself that I was, by upbringing and by tradition, always a Westerner, and I couldn’t escape from my own cultural conditioning…. I feel it’s for this reason that I have always remained, for myself, in the position of a comparative philosopher, wanting to balance East and West rather than go overboard for exotic imports. (Watts, 1961/1985, pp. 133-134)

“Modern Psychology Offers a Possibility of Understanding” Jung (1931/1975) suggested that a one-sided, European rationalism results in the classification of “eastern ideas” as “philosophical and ethnological curiosities and nothing more” (p. 82). On the other hand, when faced with the challenge of comprehending ideas Indigenous to Eastern cultures, the common error of Western peoples is similar to “the student in Faust. Ill-advised by the devil, he contemptuously turns his back on science, and getting a whiff of eastern ecstatics, takes over their yoga practices quite literally, only to become a pitiable imitator” (p. 79). Alternatively, Jung stated, “my experience in my [psychotherapy] practice has been such as to reveal to me a quite new and unexpected approach to eastern wisdom” (p. 83) via the collective unconscious. As a heritage common to all humanity, the collective unconscious is not reducible to the Freudian unconscious, and pervades variations in culture and consciousness. Thus “by its means can be explained the analogy, going even as far as identity, between various myth-themes and symbols, and the possibility of human understanding in general” (p. 83). Jung added: “Taken purely psychologically, it means that we have common instincts of ideation (imagination), and of action” (p. 84). In this manner, as Watts (1937) explained in The Legacy of Asia and Western Man: Jung opens up a way to the understanding of the East which does not involve breaking away from our own roots. He keeps carefully to scientific method in so far as he is never led away by the mere glamour of words, symbols and exotic doctrines which capture the faith of so many who have lost confidence in Christianity. For by

6  Ellen F. Franklin and Peter J. Columbus approaching the Eastern wisdom neither as outworn superstition, nor as metaphysics, nor as a body of esoteric and inaccessible mysteries, but as psychology, he sees it as a natural growth of the soul which we of the West can develop out of our own roots without any resort to imitation. (Watts, 1937, pp. xiv-xv) Watts (1939/1997c) subsequently offered a paper entitled “Is there an ‘Unconscious’?” The essay was an apology for psychoanalysis writ large, that is to say, the systems of Freud, Adler, and Jung vis-à-vis students of religion and the occult. The particular importance of the unconscious, noted Watts, is that it reminds religious practitioners “of the forgotten gods [and demons] and of the place where they are to be found” (pp. 138–139). Watts further observed: “Too many would-be mystics and occultists try to follow the rationalist technique of imposing a discipline upon themselves without first understanding the nature of the thing to be disciplined” (p. 139). Watts’ early understanding of Jung’s Analytical Psychology is perhaps best identified by a 1937 paper in his “Mystics of Today” series written for The Modern Mystic and Monthly Science Review, an esoteric journal circulating from 1937 to 1940. Others profiled by Watts in these essays included J. Krishnamurti, D. T. Suzuki, and G. K. Chesterton (see M. Watts & Snelling, 1997, pp. 67–105). Watts (1937/ 1997a) located Jung’s psychology between science and religion. Noting that “the nineteenthcentury quarrel between science and religion has, generally speaking, been brought to an end by agreeing that the two are concerned with totally different things” (p. 72), Watts suggested that scientists and religionists view Jung as favoring opposite sides of the debate: “Scientists accuse him of turning psychology into mysticism” and religionists “suspect him as one who rejects their most cherished beliefs as mere phantasies of the unconscious mind” (p. 72). Watts further noted: “psychology extends into both science and religion. There are materialist psychologists … and there are religious psychologists … Yet if psychology as a whole stands between science and religion, Jung stands between these two groups of psychologists” (p. 73). Watts allowed that Jung’s psychological system can be termed “mystical if it can be said that mysticism does not necessarily involve belief in the supernatural, if it can be made to include the development of wisdom and peace of mind without any change of physical conditions” (p. 73). Four “main contributions” of Jung to psychology were considered by Watts, including his (1) “conception of the Unconscious Mind,” (2) psychological typologies, (3) study of symbols and myths, and (4) integrative methodology “achieving a certain mental poise which is similar to some forms of religious experience” (p. 73). Also, in 1939, Watts (1939/ 1994) offered a paper to the Analytical Psychology Club of New York City, entitled “The Psychology of

Jung Watts  7 Acceptance.” As the subtitle indicates, the paper concerned “The Reconciliation of the Opposites in Eastern Thought and in Analytical Psychology.” Discussing the psychological snares of acceptance, Watts drew heavily from Jung’s essay, “The Mana Personality” (see Jung, 1928), calling it “one of the most important chapters he has ever written” (p. 34). Watts wrote: Here he [Jung] explains that having mastered the animus or anima, by acceptance you have captured for yourself what primitive peoples would call its mana or magic power over you. But there is a danger that this mana may inflate you and make you imagine yourself as a “mana personality,” which is to say, a man of might, a magician or god. (p. 34) Themes from “The Psychology of Acceptance” (Watts, 1939/1994) were incorporated into The Meaning of Happiness (Watts, 1940/ 1968a). Watts, then aged 25, was attempting a reconciliation of “modern” (psycho) analytic psychologies and the “wisdom of the East” vis-à-vis “the realization of ‘happiness’ in the Aristotelian and Thomistic sense of man’s true end or destiny” (Watts, 1952/1968b, p. xvi). Happiness in this sense “means union with God, or, in Oriental terms, harmony with the Tao, or moksha, or nirvana” (p. xvi). In the preface to the first edition, Watts noted “the need for a rapprochement” between Asian wisdom traditions and Western psychology has “for some time been recognized by the foremost living practitioner of …[analytical] psychology – C. G. Jung of Zurich” (Watts, 1940/1968a, p. xvi). Drawing heavily on Jung (1928, 1931/ 1975, 1933a, 1933b, 1938, 1939), the thesis of The Meaning of Happiness is that “this special and supreme order of happiness is not a result to be attained through action, but a fact to be realized through knowledge [insight]. The sphere of action is to express it, not to gain it” (Watts, 1940/ 1968a, p. iv).

The Shadow Side of Alan Watts In Watts’ (1961/ 1985) view, Jung’s primary psychological insight was that “in order to admit, and really accept and understand the evil in oneself, one had to be able to do it without being an enemy to it … You had to accept your own dark side” (p. 136). Watts (1973) reiterated the point in his autobiography: “Impressive was Jung’s attitude to the yin (or dark aspect of the unconscious), his feeling that psychic integration was largely an acceptance and assimilation of the devil in ourselves by the power of love.” Watts further acknowledged: “Through Jung I understood that in repressing my devils and animals I would be cutting myself off from the manure” (p. 384) that fertilizes psychological health and creative spirituality (see also Watts, 1959, p. 85).

8  Ellen F. Franklin and Peter J. Columbus Opinions vary concerning the extent to which Watts consciously accepted the shadow side of his psychological life. Watts (1973) himself remembers critics of his early work contending that he was “too young” and “hadn’t suffered enough” to really know his subject matter, while others argued that he “showed no evidence of God-consciousness” because he “thoroughly enjoyed the pleasures of good food, of smoking, drinking and sex” (p.191). In Huang’s (2012) view, however, Watts indeed was deeply cognizant of his shadow side as reflected in The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (Watts, 1951), a book addressed manifestly to a 1950s Cold War audience in the wake of World War II. However, Huang continues: Alan’s pithy writing flowed out of his own personal crises at the time. His first marriage had collapsed, he resigned his positions in the Episcopal church and at Northwestern University, and had yet to secure his faculty position at the American Academy of Asian Studies. (p. 226) A moderate counterpoint to Huang (2012) is found in Krishna (1975). Gopi Krishna, a Kundalini yogi, reflected on Watts’ (1973) self-ascriptions – his “wayward spirit,” “addiction to nicotine and alcohol,” “occasional shudders of anxiety,” “interest in women,” “lack of enthusiasm for physical exercise” (see Watts, 1973, pp. 256–258). Though complementing Watts for his “candid admissions” and “his frank confession,” Krishna (1975) called Watts’ lifestyle a “commonly met traumatic condition of the modern, highly intelligent, or creative mind” resulting from “gross neglect,” ignorance, or apathy “toward the spiritual … requirements” (p. 97) of life. Stronger criticism is found in Corless (1989). Citing various “gory details” in Furlong’s (1986) biography of Watts, Corless (1989) conjectures that “Watts’ life went disastrously wrong” due possibly to the “spiritual disease” of alcoholism. “As William James and Carl Jung variously put it, the alcoholic is a failed mystic” (p. 304). Corless concedes: “without a medical diagnosis, which cannot of course now be given, it is impossible to say for certain whether Watts was an alcoholic.” Yet, the author suggests, assuming Watts actually was an alcoholic and failed mystic is “the key to the tragedy of his life.” Watts’ “vision was wonderful, ‘the joyous cosmology’ indeed, but he mistook the means of securing it. Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion (1947/ 1971) became, in time, the necessity to consume spirits” (p.304–305). Corless argues that Watts’ “failure” needs to be confronted and requires our mourning, adding: “It may serve as a warning to some of us still living” (p. 305). Here is offered a supplementary if not wholly alternative understanding informed by Watts’ religious formation as an Anglican Catholic. Watts was raised and educated in the Church of England, studied at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, and was ordained as an Episcopal priest. Arguably,

Jung Watts  9 he did not renege on the Sacrament of Holy Orders, saying upon his resignation from the Episcopal Church: “I know that I am a priest forever, and have no thought whatever of going back to a former state” (Watts, 1973, p. 246). Even his most critical take on Christianity (Watts, 1964) was written from the viewpoint of a loyal commentator. Perhaps Watts, particularly toward his life’s end, was less “failed mystic” than simply situated amidst the soul’s Dark Night, markedly while writing his final book, Tao – The Watercourse Way, with a view toward understanding “how these ancient writings reverberate on the harp of my own brain, which has, of course, been tuned to the scales of Western culture” (Watts, 1975, p. xvi). In Behold the Spirit, Watts (1947/ 1971) wrote of the “Dark Night” in Catholic mysticism “wherein one experiences bitter desolation and comes close to absolute despair” (p. 89). However, the desolation and despair are pregnant with possibility: “In the midst of the soul’s dark night of despair…there dawns the agape of God – the realization that although the soul is powerless to attain union with God, God out of unchangeable and infinite love has given union with himself to the soul” (p. 74). A quarter-century later, in the preface to Tao – The Watercourse Way, Watts (1975) wrote: “I shall try, in what follows, to show how the principle of the Tao reconciles sociability with individuality, order with spontaneity, and unity with diversity” (p. xiv). “On the plane of human history,” Watts (1947/ 1971) observed, God’s union with the soul is the Incarnation – “the sudden change from the old order of striving for redemption through obedience to the law, to the new order of redemption through divine grace” (p. 73). Note again Watts’ (1975) preface, concluding “although I will by no means despise precise and descriptive information – the Letter, I am obviously more interested in the Spirit – the actual experiencing and feeling of that attitude to life which is the following of the Tao” (p. xvi). Reviewing Watts (1975), Sadler (1976) wrote: “In many ways it is Watts at his best” (p. 303), closing: For all his well-advertised love of good food, rare wines, and the sweet life, Alan Watts sought and found the power to heal: a gift for persuading men [people] to release the curative forces within, and the wisdom to understand the Upanishadic dictum that what is without is also within, and what is within is also without. Or, as he says in this book: “In the Taoist view there really is no obdurately external world.” (304)

Conclusion In this chapter, three themes are noted concerning Jung’s formative influence on the life and work of Alan Watts, including (1) hermeneutic

10  Ellen F. Franklin and Peter J. Columbus reflexivity, (2) psychology as a mode of comprehending Eastern wisdom traditions, and (3) Watts’ acceptance of his shadow side. Three brief conclusions about Watts are now drawn in light of “prevailing disagreements concerning the developmental trajectory of his intellectual life. There are differing opinions concerning the degree of continuity versus change in comparison with his earlier and later works” (Columbus & Rice, 2017, p. 8). First, Jung’s early influence on Watts (1937, 1940/ 1968a) indicates a phase of thinking prior to his 1940s–1950s perennialist leanings. This earlier, Jungian-type thinking viewed Eastern wisdom as an avenue through which Western peoples may recover their own cultural and religious symbols. Yet Jung’s (1931/ 1975) emphasis on the interpreters’ reflexive relations to their subject matter remained within Watts’ sensibilities as he transitioned to perennial philosophy and, eventually, into his 1960s hermeneutical writing per se. Second, the trajectory of Watts’ thinking about psychology and psychotherapy shows a marked yet seldom considered transition away from Jung’s analytical psychology as considered in The Legacy of Asia and Western Man (1937) and The Meaning of Happiness (1940/ 1968a) toward social psychological emphases as exemplified by (1) his 1956 essay in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis (Watts, 1956/ 2017), (2) his 1950s consultations on Gregory Bateson’s communications research, and (3) Psychotherapy East and West (Watts, 1961/ 1969) in which analytical psychology is called (justifiably or not) a “backwater” and “out of touch” (p. xii) with contemporary trends in psychology and psychotherapy. Third is the thorny issue of Watts’ shadow side. As Columbus and Rice (2012) observed, “Watts is often discounted by pointing toward his lifestyle choices, such as his extramarital affairs and immoderate alcohol consumption, as contraindications of spiritual and philosophical insight.” Watts’ critics assume “that supposed sins of the flesh ought not afflict those perceived as operating on a higher (or deeper) spiritual plane” (p. 5). Perhaps Watts (1961/ 1985) himself, discussing Jung, offered an adequate reply to critics of his lifestyle: I think this was the most important thing in Jung – that he was able to point out that to the degree that you condemn others, and find evil in others, you are, to that degree unconscious of the same thing in yourself – or at least to the potentiality of it. (p. 135) The relationship between suffering and creativity is complex, and denying the personal, interpersonal, and societal ravages of alcoholism is not helpful. But when thinking about the shadow side of Alan Watts in relation to his life and work, B. D. McClay’s (2017) essay on the lives of poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop seems an insightful reference. McClay writes: “They drank too much, hurt the people they loved,

Jung Watts  11 succumbed to despair. Out of this, if not only this, came the poetry. One wishes them happier lives, but it’s hard to wish for other poems” (p. 25). As a young man Watts was clearly influenced by Jung and throughout his life he demonstrated respect for the depth of Jung’s work. Informed by Jung, Watts entertained, encouraged, and instilled hope in people struggling to understand what it means to be whole. The relevance of Watts’ teachings persists today as many of the issues he addressed remain front and center in contemporary life, including the loss of hope and demonization of “the other”.

Acknowledgment From Self & Society: An International Journal for Humanistic Psychology, 2017, 45(3-4), 267-275. Used by permission of The Association for Humanistic Psychology in Britain.

References Barnaby, K., & D’Acierno, P. (Eds.). (1990). C. G. Jung and the humanities: Toward a hermeneutics of culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Columbus, P. J., & Rice, D. L. (2012). A new look at Alan Watts. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts – Here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 1–24). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Columbus, P. J., & Rice, D. L. (2017). Alan Watts and the academic enterprise. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts – In the Academy: Essays and Lectures (pp. 1–41). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Corless, R. (1989). [Review of the book Zen effects: The life of Alan Watts]. Buddhist-Christian Studies, 9, 303–305. Furlong, M. (1986). Zen effects: The life of Alan Watts. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gundry, M. R. (2006). Beyond psyche: Symbol and transcendence in C. G. Jung. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Homans, P. (1969). Psychology and hermeneutics: Jung’s contributions. Zygon, 4(4), 333–355. Huang, C. (2012). Watercourse way: Still flowing with Alan Watts. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts – here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 212–232). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Jung, C. G. (1928). Two essays on analytical psychology. New York, NY: Dodd, Mead. Jung, C. G. (1933a). Modern man in search of a soul. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace. Jung, C. G. (1933b). Psychological types. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace. Jung, C. G. (1938). Psychology and religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jung, C. G. (1939). The integration of personality. New York, NY: Farrar & Rinehart. Jung, C. G. (1975). Commentary. In R. Wilhelm (Trans.), The secret of the golden flower (pp. 75–137). New York, NY: Causeway. (Original work published 1931)

12  Ellen F. Franklin and Peter J. Columbus Krishna, G. (1975). The dangers of partial awareness: Comments on Alan Watts’ autobiography. In The awakening of Kundalini (pp. 96–105). New York, NY: Dutton. McClay, B. D. (2017). “This suffering business”. Commonweal, 144(8), 23–25. Sadler, A. W. (1976). [Review of the book Tao – The Watercourse Way]. Horizons, 3, 301–304. Watts, A. W. (1937). The legacy of Asia and Western man: A study of the middle way. London, UK: John Murray. Watts, A. W. (1951). The wisdom of insecurity: A message for an age of anxiety. New York, NY: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1959). [Review of the book Psychology and religion: West and East]. Chicago Review, 13(1), 84–86. Watts, A. W. (1964). Beyond theology. New York, NY: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1968a). The Meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology and the wisdom of the East. New York, NY: Harper & Row. (Original work published 1940) Watts, A. W. (1968b). Preface to the second edition. In The Meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology and the wisdom of the East (pp. iii-vii). New York, NY: Harper & Row. (Original work published 1952) Watts, A. W. (1969). Psychotherapy East and West. New York, NY: Pantheon. (Original work published 1961) Watts, A. W. (1971). Behold the spirit: A study in the necessity of mystical religion. New York, NY: Vintage. (Original work published 1947) Watts, A. W. (1973). In my own way: An autobiography. New York, NY: Vintage. Watts, A. W. (1975). Tao – The Watercourse Way. New York, NY: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1985). A tribute to Carl Jung. In M. Watts (Ed.), Out of the trap: Selected lectures of Alan Watts (pp. 131–157). South Bend, IN: And Books. (Original work presented 1961) Watts, A. W. (1994). The psychology of acceptance: The reconciliation of the opposites in Eastern thought and in analytical psychology. In M. Watts (Ed.), Talking Zen: Written and spoken by Alan Watts (pp. 24–51). New York, NY: Weatherhill. (Original work presented 1939) Watts, A. W. (1997a). Carl Gustav Jung: Bridge between science and religion. In M. Watts & J. Snelling (Eds.), Seeds of genius: The early writings of Alan Watts (pp. 72–77). Rockport, MA: Element. (Original work published 1937) Watts, A. W. (1997b). On teaching one’s grandmother. In M. Watts & J. Snelling (Eds.), Seeds of genius: The early writings of Alan Watts (pp. 150–153). Rockport, MA: Element. (Original work published 1935) Watts, A. W. (1997c). Is there an “Unconscious”? In M. Watts & J. Snelling (Eds.), Seeds of genius: The early writings of Alan Watts (pp. 135–140). Rockport, MA: Element. (Original work published 1939) Watts, A. W. (2017). Convention, conflict, and liberation: Further thoughts on Asian psychology and modern psychiatry. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts – In the Academy: Essays and Lectures (pp. 311–317). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Original work published 1956) Watts, M., & Snelling, J. (Eds.). (1997). Seeds of genius: The early writings of Alan Watts. Rockport, MA: Element.

2 Alan Watts and the Re-Visioning of Psychotherapy Colin James Sanders

As a Master of Counseling program director and professor, I am often concerned about graduate students lacking coherent understandings of interconnections, similarities, and affinities shared among therapeutic perspectives, theories, concepts, and ideas. Context is everything, Bateson (1979) suggested, and I believe that sociocultural and sociopolitical landscapes need situating when discussing psychotherapy’s emergence and evolution. As collaborative therapist Harlene Anderson (2001) observed: “Ideas and practices do not spring forth in a vacuum but develop within a context, a history and an era, being influenced by the personalities and passions of their originators” (p. 340). Alan Watts authored Psychotherapy East and West (1961/ 1973) at a transformational, historical moment in Western psychotherapy’s development, and at Humanistic Psychology’s beginnings. Maslow (cited in Watts, 1961/ 1973) described prevailing American attitudes: “The United States … is dominated by the Puritan and pragmatic spirit which stresses work, struggle and striving, soberness and earnestness, and above all, purposefulness” (p. 123). Psychology itself was not immune to Puritanism; again, Watts cites Maslow: “American psychology… is overpragmatic, overPuritan, and overpurposeful” (p. 123). Such values ran counter to the ethos or spirit promoted by practitioners influencing the development of Humanistic Psychological perspectives. In this chapter, contributions by several thinkers discussed by Watts (1961/ 1973) are highlighted, particularly Gregory Bateson, Erich Fromm, Jay Haley, George Herbert Mead, Rollo May, and Carl Rogers. I am interested in the cultural context and zeitgeist informing Watts’ own thinking and writing. The historical context is important for understanding that contemporary perspectives and practices in the wide-ranging field of therapy are traceable to earlier times, particularly to courageous practitioners and researchers – those referenced by Watts (1961/ 1973) – who were rethinking and re-visioning post-war psychotherapy in North America.

14  Colin James Sanders

Articulating the Ineffable Educated in Western theological traditions, and ordained as an Anglican priest, Watts (1915–1973) adopted interests in Eastern philosophies and mystical traditions from an early age. Christmas and Aileen Humphreys hosted the London Buddhist Lodge, introducing the 15-year-old Watts to D. T. Suzuki’s works in 1930. However, Watts (1972) notes, “I didn’t meet the man himself until he came to London in 1936 for the World Congress of Faiths, at which time I had become the editor of Buddhism in England” (p. 90), having been secretary to the Buddhist Lodge since the age of 16. Watts observed that, by the age of 17, I was writing articles for the journal of the Buddhist Lodge, I had published a booklet on Zen, which is happily out of print … I was reading Suzuki … Lao-tzu, the Upanishads … the Bhagavad-Gita … the Diamond Sutra, Robert Graves, and Carl Jung – all the literature which was “oddball” and screened out of the curriculum. (p.121) Watts, in adulthood, lived for two decades in Marin County, California, residing in a cabin on Mount Tamalpais (in an enclave named Druid Heights by friend and neighbor, poet Elsa Gidlow, to whom his autobiography is dedicated), and on a retired ferry boat, the SS Vallejo in Sausalito. Together, Sausalito and Mount Tamalpais comprise Miwok Indigenous peoples’ territory, Mount Tamalpais being, for the Miwok, a sacred site. The southern Marin County region that Watts inhabited represented for him “a powerful spiritual center of the nation” (Watts, 1972, p. 297). This locale was a fitting environment for Watts, who wrote in his autobiography’s Prologue: My own work…is basically an attempt to describe mystical experience – not of formal visions and supernatural beings, but of reality as seen and felt directly in a silence of words and mindings. In this I set myself the same impossible task as the poet: to say what cannot be said. (p. 5) I read Watts (1961/ 1973) in light of Bachelard’s (1969) proposition: “Psychologists do not know everything. Poets have other insights into man [sic]” (p. 125). Watts counted numerous poets among his friends and acquaintances, Elsa Gidlow plus Kenneth Rexroth, James Broughton, Gary Snyder and others. Watts (1972) reflected: “All interesting descriptions of human character are poetic, imaginative, dramatic, and fantastic, whereas all attempts at valid descriptions are myopic, interminable, and dull” (p. 255). Watts (1957) likewise viewed Zen Buddhism as “a way and a view of life which does not belong to any of the formal categories of modern Western thought. It is not religion or philosophy; it is not a psychology or a type of science.” It is instead “an example of what is known in India and China as a ‘way of liberation’” (p. 3). For Watts, liberation from

Re-visioning of Psychotherapy  15 attachment to theoretical and ideological orthodoxy of any kind was an important consideration in becoming aware, living in the moment with presence, acceptance, and joy. Watts recognized, like others similarly creating alternative ways of being and living, that the way of life he envisaged and embodied ran counter to dominant cultural expectations. Reflecting on southern Marin, Watts (1972) noted: “We have succeeded, more than anywhere else in the United States, in curbing the oppressive White Anglo-Saxon Protestant subculture of the nation, though our slight margin of victory requires incessant vigilance” (p. 295). Indeed, these days, Watts would be appalled at the changes occurring in Marin and in San Francisco (see, e.g., Kloc, 2014). Watts, in many texts and talks, made lasting contributions to countercultural resistance to the Protestant work ethic, imperialism, invasions and wars, materialism, repression of sex and sexuality, and fears of psychedelic alchemy. For many people during Watts’ era, the demands of dominant culture created psychological distress. Likewise, experiences and fears leading to psychological distress today are no different than when Watts (1961/ 1973) composed Psychotherapy East and West. Human beings today experience anxiety, anguish, and depression, associated with ecological devastation and climate change, continual warfare, fear of nuclear annihilation, fear of “the other,” racism, homophobia, and estrangement and alienation. For too many persons, such experiences or fears may eventuate in substance abuse, anorexia/bulimia, debilitating anxiety, severe depression, interpersonal violence, and/or violation.

The Bateson Communication Project Psychotherapy East and West (Watts, 1961/ 1973) features substantive discussion of theory and research emanating from the Communication Project led by anthropologist Gregory Bateson from 1953 to 1963, thus marking a new direction in East–West psychology and psychotherapy. Bateson’s research team inspired innovative developments in the psychotherapy field, as noted by Anderson (1997): Through their study of schizophrenic communication – which focused not on past behaviors, historical events, individual characteristics, and psychic process, but on current observable interpersonal behaviors of individuals within their relationship context (the family) – … [they] were able to move beyond traditional individual behavioral descriptions to interactional processes and from linear to circular causality. (p.17) Watts, who considered Bateson “one of the most brilliant scientists in the world” (1972, p. 103), became a Communication Project consultant after Bateson’s colleagues, Jay Haley and John Weakland, attended a 1953

16  Colin James Sanders lecture by Watts at the American Academy of Asian Studies on “Eastern Philosophy and Western Psychology.” Watts’ consultation with Bateson’s research team may explain the brief reference to Zen Buddhism in their historically important introduction to the double bind concept (see Bateson, Jackson, Haley, Weakland, 1956). Indeed, Sluzki and Ransom (1976) note Watts’ contributions to double bind theory, in particular “his effort to correlate Zen mystical experience with double bind structures” (p. 184). Thus Watts’ (1955) preface to “The Way of Liberation in Zen Buddhism” – an analysis delineating how Zen practitioners resolve paradox – noted: “The present study is an attempt to clarify the experiential content of Zen Buddhism, in view of the growing interest in the subject among Western psychologists and philosophers” (n. p.). Bateson’s research team included several family therapy visionaries, including Haley and Weakland plus Don Jackson and Paul Watzlawick. Haley (1992), in particular, credited Watts’ Zen Buddhist thinking with inspiring his own work. Watts (1958), for example, published “Zen and the Problem of Control,” describing “the human predicament” as “caught in a paradox and involved in a double bind” (p. 103) of contradictory selfcontrol – the higher order, cognitive self tries controlling the lower order, bodily self, but how and by whom is the controller controlled? “The interest in Zen,” particularly teacher–student interaction, Watts noted, “is that it provides a … classic example of a way of recognizing and resolving the conflict or contradiction of self-consciousness” (p. 104). Thereafter, Jay Haley’s (1959) essay “Control in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy” was published, and subsequently discussed at length by Watts (1961/ 1973) in his chapter on “The Counter-Game” addressing client–therapist interactions. Watts writes: “Haley supposes …[that] the task of the therapist is to break the double binds imposed upon the patient and so stop him from imposing them on others” (p. 173). The double bind concept, noted Watts (1961/ 1973), “may well prove to be one of the very great ideas in the whole history of psychology” (p. 140). Watts himself drew upon double bind theory in developing his work on social norms. Sluzki and Ransom (1976) observe: From the late 1950s onward, Watts utilized the double bind concept in a number of his writings to describe the position in which society places its individual members. He thought of life as a master game with norms and rules that casts society’s participants into the role of players, each in an apparently impossible position. At base and at the most abstract and invisible level, life in society itself is double binding: the rules of the game are such that independence is conferred and taken away at the same time. Not only is that contradiction concealed, but what is more, the participants are rewarded for their failure to perceive it. (p. 185)

Re-visioning of Psychotherapy  17 As Watts (1966/ 1989) described, “the social double-bind game can be phrased in several ways” including (1) “The first rule of this game is that it is not a game,” (2) “Everyone must play,” (3) “You must love us,” (4) “You must go on living,” (5) “Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role,” (6) “Control yourself and be natural,” and (7) “Try to be sincere” (p. 73). Finally, note that Jay Haley was a practitioner alongside Don Jackson at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, California. Jackson, a psychiatrist who, from 1953 to 1962, worked with Bateson’s group, founded MRI in 1958, and it is from MRI that the early research into brief therapies would emerge. Jackson (1967/ 2010) questioned the psychiatric criterion by which a “normal” person was constructed, challenging practices of categorization and behavioral classification into pathological vs. non-pathological. Jackson, in an early paper coauthored with Paul Watzlawick (1964/ 2010) wrote: At the clinical end of the behavioral spectrum, “crazy” behavior is not necessarily the manifestation of a sick mind, but may be the only possible reaction to an absurd or untenable communicational context. Seen in this light the terms “sanity” and “insanity” practically lose their meanings as attributes of individuals. (pp. 56–57) These authors discussed the importance of paradox in their evolving psychotherapy and, perhaps as homage to Watts, ended their paper with a Zen poem.

Rollo May, Erich Fromm, and Sociocultural Critique Existential psychiatry and psychotherapy became widely known in America with May, Angel, and Ellenberger’s (1958) Existence, a text containing English language works of notable European existential psychiatrists. Writing in 1961, May noted: “There has not yet been time for the existential approach in psychiatry and psychology to find its particular American form, nor time yet for American writings in this area to be significant” (p. 31). It is within this paradigmatic instability that Watts (1961/ 1973) weaved concerns of existentialist psychotherapists such as Rollo May into his philosophical tapestry. Cognizant of peoples’ disconnection and alienation, and concerned with ecological problems and environmental degradation, Watts referenced May’s contention that both Eastern philosophies and existentialist-influenced psychotherapy “would insist that the Western absorption in conquering and gaining power over nature has resulted not only in the estrangement of man [sic] from nature but also indirectly in estrangement of man [sic] from himself” (May, cited in Watts, 1961/ 1973, p. 132).

18  Colin James Sanders Such estrangement and alienation, isolation and loneliness, is often encountered by therapists in their collaborations with suffering others. Watts (1961/ 1973) contends, in his exposition upon existentialism and Eastern philosophy, that the anxiety associated with being alive, “Kierkegaard’s angst” (p. 132), is not to be ignored or repressed, but rather is to be accepted and appreciated, writing, “not to be thus anxious, not to take one’s own and other people’s being-in-the-world seriously, is to disregard the whole dignity of being a person, to fail in being fully human” (p. 133). May (1950) had written a marvelous book tracing the Western philosophic (e.g., Spinoza, Pascal, Kierkegaard) traditions influencing Western psychoanalysis, existentialist psychotherapy, post-structural perspectives, and psychotherapeutic understandings of human anxiety and ontological dilemma. Watts (1961/ 1973) highlights May’s observation connecting existential psychotherapeutic perspectives and Eastern philosophic traditions, suggesting that “both are concerned with ontology, the study of being” (p. 132). Comprehending the meanings of human being was a principle concern of philosophy and psychotherapy then, as now. Watts (1961/ 1973) considered May “one of the very few representatives of the [existentialist] school whose writing begins to be readable” (p. 115n). May (1961) noted in turn: “I value greatly the serious interpretations of [Zen Buddhism] … of Alan Watts, despite my disagreement with some of his points” (p. 34). One disagreement – “an ancient quarrel between East and West” (Watts, 1961/ 1973, p. 133) – concerned the relations of anxiety, ego, and death. Watts (1961/ 1973) suggests: “the Existential school takes anxiety… and its concomitant guilt as inseparable from being,” since existing “necessarily involves the dread of not existing” (p. 132). In Watts’ view, “the existentialists give … the impression that to live without anxiety is to live without seriousness” (p. 133). He adds: “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” (p. 136). Writing from an Eastern philosophic position, Watts contends that death anxiety is symptomatic of attachment to an illusory and abstract ego, “and therefore liberation from the ego is synonymous with the full acceptance of death” (p. 139). Yet May (1961) warned of human tendencies “to by-pass and evade anxiety, tragedy, guilt and the reality of evil…The term ‘transcend’… is often used in the service of this by-passing; you can escape by transcending, but it is hardly therapeutic” (May, 1961, p. 35). Watts (1961/ 1973) briefly referenced Erich Fromm’s “deep interest in Zen Buddhism” (p. 142n). Originally associated with the Frankfurt School, and influenced by Marx and Freud, Fromm developed significant post-World War II critiques of human alienation in the West ( Jeffries, 2016). Fromm (1960) perceived a Western “spiritual crisis,” saying: “It is the crisis which has been described as ‘malaise,’ ‘ennui,’ ‘mal du siècle,’

Re-visioning of Psychotherapy  19 the deadening of life, the automatization of man [sic], his alienation from himself, from his fellow man and from nature” (p. 78). The North American proliferation of material goods and services following World War II resulted in more angst, more anguish, more despair, not less. Fromm (1960) observed: “Western man [sic] is in a state of schizoid inability to experience affect, hence he is anxious, depressed, and desperate” (p.79). As consumers, human beings have an appetite for more and more, not less and less; this appetite, this desire, leads not to satisfaction but rather to dis-satisfaction and despair. In Fromm’s Western world, even “Love had been poisoned like everything else in commodity capitalism, reified and neutered of its otherwise deranging power” ( Jeffries, 2016, p. 295). Fromm (1956) observed: “man’s [sic] happiness today consists in ‘having fun.’ Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and ‘taking in’ commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies…The world is one great object for our appetite” (p. 87), yet the emptiness, disconnection, and malaise continue.

Social Construction and Eastern Philosophical Influences Watts wrote in 1972: “the only real ‘you’ is the shifting and momentary totality of everything you see and feel, within and without” (p. 255). Questioning reified identity and self-knowledge is a theme running throughout Watts’ body of work (see Brannigan, 1988). Thus, discussing James Moffett’s (1962) review of Watts (1961/ 1973), particularly Watts’ elucidation of the fictive ego, Columbus (see chap. 3, this volume) suggests that Psychotherapy East and West “foreshadows certain postmodern, constructionist, and deconstructionist approaches to reading, writing, and living” (p. 33). An informative source for Watts and social constructionist approaches to psychology and psychotherapy is Buddhism. Gregory Bateson, considered a formative influence on social constructionist thinking (see Lock & Strong, 2010, pp. 170–186), and whose own thinking on Buddhism was, as noted above, informed by Watts, observed: The Buddhists claim that the self is a sort of fiction. If so, our task will be to identify the species of fiction. But for the moment, I shall accept the “self” as a heuristic concept, a ladder useful in climbing but perhaps to be thrown away or left behind at a later stage. (1979, p. 135) Dialoging about something requires the “something” to be named or personified. Bateson (1979) thus proposed that “mind is empty; it is nothing. It exists only in its ideas, and these again are no-things. Only

20  Colin James Sanders the ideas are immanent, embodied in their examples. And the examples are, again, no-things” (p.13). Psychotherapist William Lax (1996) likewise noted that “no concept of a bounded, masterful self, an ego, or even an unconscious exists in Buddhist thought” (p. 10). He proposed that upon closer examination, the … Buddhist view of and approach to life is very consistent with those of postmodernism…For both, multiple voices, stories, and views are to be valued, with one’s own experience given centrality, and allowing (even encouraging) contradictions. (p. 11) In light of the above, it makes sense that Kenneth Gergen, a principle theorist of social constructionist perspectives, remarked in conversation with Dian Marie Hosking (Gergen & Hosking, 2006), that Watts’ (1957) The Way of Zen “was most inspirational to me, and in significant ways … launched me toward a constructionist conception of psychology” (p. 303). Discussing similarities between social constructionism and Buddhism, Gergen and Hosking noted correspondences vis-à-vis selfcomprehension, and the co-creation and co-construction of knowledge and meaning. Another mutual source for Watts and social constructionist thinkers was George Herbert Mead’s philosophy positing the shared establishment of mind (see Mead, 1934). Appreciating Mead’s relational–interactional distinction between I and me, Watts (1961/ 1973) writes: “[Mead] goes on to show that the ‘I,’ the biological individual, can become conscious of itself only in terms of the ‘me,’ but that this latter is a view of itself given to it by other people” (p. 50, emphasis added). Mind, therefore, is co-created within relational interactions, “mind is socially constituted” (Mead, cited in Watts, 1961/ 1973, p. 51). In time, Mead’s influence was acknowledged by social constructionist thinkers (Lock & Strong, 2010). Sampson (1989) notes: “Social constructionism … amplified the earlier ideas of Mead (1934), arguing that selves, persons, psychological traits and so forth, including the very idea of individual psychological traits, are social and historical constructions, not naturally occurring objects” (p. 2). In conversation with Hoyt (1997), Gergen described his sense of what comprised a relational self, remarking that he was interested in “positing relatedness as the essential matrix, out of which a conception of self (or identity, emotion, etc.) is born, objectified, and embedded within action” (p. 349; see also Gergen, 2009). Beyond social constructions of individual identities is the manufacture of cultural “others.” Watts (1961/ 1973) himself thus noted the social construction of “the East” in the Western world: If it is true that psychotherapy has not been seen clearly in its social context, it is also true of the Eastern ways of liberation as they have

Re-visioning of Psychotherapy  21 been studied and explained in the West. Almost all the modern literature on Buddhism, Vedanta, and Taoism treats of these subjects in a void with the barest minimum of reference to the larger background of Indian or Chinese culture. (p. 60) No idea or perspective is immune from being co-opted, popularized, turned into a commodity, and mass marketed; Buddhism being no exception. Watts (1961/ 1973) cautioned: “One gathers, therefore, that these disciplines are exportable units like bales of rice or tea, and that Buddhism can be ‘taken up’ anywhere at any time like baseball” (p. 60). Thus, in contemporary psychological practices, Kwee and Taams (2006) write: “the Theravada inspired Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, pioneered by Kabat-Zinn in 1979 … in the beginning never mentioned its Buddhist origin so as not to scare people away. We object to the use of Buddhist meditation techniques without instructing its basic tenets” (p.473).

Simplicity and a Not-Knowing Perspective Watts (1961/ 1973) noted: “Successful psychotherapy is carried out by Freudian psychoanalysis, by Rogers’ nondirective counseling, and by Jung’s analytical psychology. The theories and methods differ and diverge, but there may be some hidden and essential factor in common” (p. 73). Persons seeking therapy inform us nowadays that effective and beneficial transformation and change are afforded when the person of the therapist is demonstrating presence (Sanders, 2016) within therapeutic engagement. Presence is not analogous to technique or trickery; presence, as such, is more an art, a craft not necessarily learned from a manual. Thus, Andersen (2012) speaks of therapeutic practice as a human art. In my view, the commonality between the psychologists and psychiatrists referenced by Watts was an interest in articulating a language of mind, or soul; i.e., giving voice to the soul’s suffering or the mind’s confusion, anguish, or torment. As James Hillman (1975) wrote, “out of psyche-pathos-logos came the meaning of suffering of the soul, or the soul’s suffering of meaning” (p. 71). Regarding realization of mutual solutions to difficulties and dilemmas, and dissolution of problematic and restraining interactional patterns within communities, Watts (1961/ 1973) suggests: The way of liberation is “the way down and out”; it is taking, like water, the course of least resistance; it is following the natural bent of one’s own feelings; it is by becoming stupid and rejecting the refinements of learning; it is by becoming inert and drifting like a leaf on the wind. (p. 90)

22  Colin James Sanders Again, Watts proposed: What is really being said is that intelligence solves problems by seeking the greatest simplicity and the least expenditure of effort, and it is thus that Taosim eventually inspired the Japanese to work out the technique of judo – the easy or gentle Tao (do). (p. 90) Watts (1961/ 1973) saw similarities between Eastern philosophic “simplicity” and Carl Rogers’ person-centered perspective “in which the therapist simply draws out the logical conclusions of his client’s thinking and feeling by doing no more than rephrasing it in what seems to be the clearest form” (p. 90; see Rogers, 1950). Rogers’ important text, On Becoming a Person (1961), was contemporaneous with Watts (1961/ 1973), contributing significantly to movements away from the pathologizing of persons. Rogers focused upon viewing consultees simply as human beings, as persons, with whom his presence was demonstrated by listening with patience, consideration, respect, humility, and compassion. Anderson (2001) offered a synthesis of Rogers’ philosophy and perspective in terms of a way of being: Emphasis is placed on the client’s expertise regarding his or her life, and the therapist’s expertise on how a client should live his or her life is de-emphasized. Said differently, a way of being does not equate skill or technique, contrived or interventive, but natural and authentic. (p. 348) Rogers’ practice, and its guiding thought, represented a shift toward simplicity, being present, listening attentively, and inherent belief in peoples’ capacities for discovering solutions to dilemmas afflicting them. Watts (1961/ 1973) again found similarities here with Eastern philosophy: The responses of the therapist are confined to expressions of his own understanding of what the client says to him. He trusts in the wisdom of the “positive growth potential” of every human being to work out the solution of the problem if only it can be clearly and consistently stated. The therapist is therefore “stupid” and “passive” like a Taoist in that he has no theory of what is wrong with his client or what he ought to become in order to be cured. (p. 90) Watts (1961/ 1973) presciently saw the benefit of simplification for psychotherapy practice. Not long after the publication of Psychotherapy East and West, there was a movement among family therapy practitioners

Re-visioning of Psychotherapy  23 engaging in more simplified ways, employing more common sense practices (Lomas, 1999) in their therapies. Likewise, an entire brief solution-focused perspective would evolve within the family therapy field, similarly embedded within ideas of simplicity and strength. Two innovative practitioners of brief therapy, John Weakland and Steve de Shazer, agreed that  the shift toward brief therapies was about “simplifying” (Hoyt, 1994, p. 12). For brief therapy practitioners such as Weakland and de Shazer, the requirement was a willingness to “live with uncertainty” (p. 14), engaging therapy from a position demonstrating “simplicity training,” “stupidity training,” “beginner’s mind” (p.28), and curiosity. Anderson and Goolishian’s (1988, 1992) practice of assuming a notknowing position within therapeutic conversation has correspondences with a “beginner’s mind” presence and curiosity. Anderson and Goolishian (1992) explain: To “not-know” is not to have an unfounded or unexperienced judgment, but refers more widely to the set of assumptions, the meanings, that the therapist brings to the clinical interview. The excitement for the therapist is in learning the uniqueness of each individual client’s narrative truth, the coherent truths in their storied lives. (p. 29) For Anderson and Goolishian (1992), a not-knowing way of being within therapy entails an understanding that therapists are always prejudiced by their experience, but that they must listen in such a way that their pre-experience does not close them to the full meaning of the client’s descriptions of their experience. This can only happen if the therapist approaches each clinical experience from the position of not-knowing. (p. 29)

Conclusion In this chapter, I have discussed post-World War II psychotherapy innovators interested in (1) comprehending people as meaning-making and meaning-sharing beings and in (2) communication patterns performed by human beings in pursuit of meaning and coexistence. Focusing primarily upon Watts’ (1961/ 1973) Psychotherapy East and West and the re-visioning of psychotherapy, I have identified affinities and correspondences between contemporary social constructionist practitioners and earlier practitioners of Humanistic Psychology. Psychotherapy East and West (1961/ 1973) positioned Watts, like Gregory Bateson, outside of and against the grain of established academic and psychological traditions in North America. In so doing, Watts

24  Colin James Sanders challenged psychotherapists to think and reflect upon their practice and their understandings of theory, moving them to experience “the loneliness of liberation, of no longer finding security by taking sides with the crowd, of no longer believing that the rules of the game are the rules of nature” (pp. 123–124). Accordingly, I will conclude by noting that Watts gave the first ever talk at the Esalen Institute in 1962. Early on, visionaries from multiple fields gathered there, including many radical and innovative thinkers associated with the countercultural and Humanistic Psychology movements: Gregory Bateson, Joseph Campbell, Stanislav Grof, R. D. Laing, Rollo May, Abraham Maslow, Fritz Perls, Carl Rogers, Virginia Satir, among others (see Kripal, 2007). Fittingly, as an illustration of correspondences, and as an example of Watts’ (and Bateson’s) continuing legacy, Gregory Bateson’s youngest daughter, Nora Bateson, and Alan Watts’ son Mark, co-presented a January 2015 workshop at the Esalen Institute on their respective fathers’ philosophies, entitled: “Mischief Makers in the Cultural Metaphor.”

Acknowledgment Reprinted from Self & Society: An International Journal for Humanistic Psychology, 2017, 45(3–4), 244–255. Used by permission of The Association for Humanistic Psychology in Britain.

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26  Colin James Sanders Moffett, J. (1962). Turning language upon itself [Review of the book Psychotherapy East and West]. ETC: A review of general semantics, 28, 486–490. Rogers, C. (1950). A way of being. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Rogers, C. (1961). On becoming a person: A therapist’s view of psychotherapy. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Sampson, E. E. (1989). The deconstruction of the self. In K. Gergen & J. Shotter (Eds.), Texts of identity (pp. 1–19). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sanders, C. J. (2016). Toward an aesthetics of engagement. In V. Dickerson (Ed.), Poststructural and narrative thinking in family therapy (pp. 61–81). Switzerland: Springer. Sluzki, C. E., & Ransom, D. C. (1976). Comment on Part Four. In C. E. Sluzki & D. C. Ransom (Eds.), Double bind: The foundation of the communicational approach to the family (pp. 183–196). New York, NY: Grune & Stratton. Watts, A. W. (1955). The way of liberation in Zen Buddhism. Asia Study Monographs, 1, 3–25. Watts, A.W. (1957). The way of Zen. New York, NY: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1958). Zen and the problem of control. Contact: The San Francisco Journal of New Writing, Art, and Ideas, 1(1), 99–110. Watts, A. W. (1972). In my own way. New York, NY: Random House. Watts, A. W. (1973). Psychotherapy East and West. New York: Ballantine. (Original work published 1961) Watts, A. W. (1989). The book on the taboo against knowing who you are. New York: Vintage. (Original work published 1966). Watzlawick, P., & Jackson, D. D. (2010). On human communication. Journal of Systemic Therapies, 29(2), 53–68. (Original work authored 1964)

3 Psychotherapy East and West A Retrospective Review Peter J. Columbus

When Alan Watts’ Psychotherapy East and West appeared in 1961, serious colloquies on connections between psychology, psychotherapy, and masteries of Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, and Yoga were extant for over thirty years. Jung’s landmark commentary on Wilhelm’s German translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower opened conversation in 1929 ( Jung, 1929). Early interlocutors on East-West psycho-spiritual interchange, including Watts (1937, 1939/ 1994, 1940), emphasized psychology and psychotherapy understood in Freudian, Jungian, and, eventually, neo-Freudian terms. In Psychotherapy East and West, Watts (1961/ 1969) guided conversation in a new direction by undergirding his text with (1) organismic and transactional perspectives informed by Alfred North Whitehead, Joseph Needham, Lancelot Law Whyte, Arthur F. Bentley, and the Gestalt psychologists, (2) “meta-Freudian” perspectives of Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, and (3) double-bind communication research of Gregory Bateson and Jay Haley. Psychotherapy East and West culminated a ten-year inquiry, beginning with Watts’ 1951 American Academy of Asian Studies (AAAS) faculty appointment, where he offered seminars on “The Application of Asian Psychology to Modern Psychiatry.” Watts subsequently consulted for Gregory Bateson’s research team while publishing papers (Watts, 1953, 1955, 1956), book reviews (Watts, 1959b, 1959c, 1960), and lectures (Watts, 1959a) propaedeutic to Psychotherapy East and West. Finally, the planning and writing of the book were informed by ongoing conversations with psychotherapy providers and consumers as Watts conducted seminars and guest-lectures at numerous medical schools and psychiatric clinics. Part I of this chapter considers 1961–1970 academic assessments of Psychotherapy East and West toward lending perspective on its role and impact in psychology and broader cultural grounds of 1960s America. Two preliminary notes: First, the 1970 cut-off date is not arbitrary, given a 1971 reissue of the book initiated conversations in Britain, continental Europe, Australia and New Zealand considered in Part II. Also, I am writing as a research psychologist interested in psychology’s history and

28  Peter J. Columbus intrigued by Watts’ life and work. My goal is description rather than interpretation (though they seem hardly separable), and clinical psychologists perhaps would take differing routes through the subject matter.

Part I: 1961–1970 Intending Psychotherapy East and West as an exploratory thesis, Watts aimed at stimulating professional conversations between religionists and psychotherapists. Though aside from Salzman’s (1963) review, the text garnered scant attention from religion and philosophy journals. Instead, distribution of appraisals among The Psychoanalytic Review (Curry, 1962), the Archives of General Psychiatry (Ruesch, 1962), the Journal of Analytical Psychology (Henderson, 1963), Psychiatry (Rioch, 1963), and the American Journal of Psychoanalysis (Levy, 1967) indicate an impact felt primarily within psychology and psychiatry. Still, assessments appeared also in Etc.: A Review of General Semantics (Moffett, 1962), MANAS (Review, 1963), and Teachers College Record (Eichler, 1963). Review content likewise suggests Watts’ (1961/ 1969) relevance to psychologically minded rather than religiously mined thinkers (e.g., Curry (1962, p. 128; Henderson, 1963, p. 187; Ruesch, 1962, p. 254). While Eichler (1963) expressed a diverging opinion, suggesting the book to be “fundamentally a philosophical essay, concerned only secondarily with psychotherapy per se” (p. 89), Rioch (1963) offered an expansive endorsement, saying that Watts (1961/ 1969) merits attention from not only psychotherapists, “but all who are concerned with the predicament of modern man” (p. 107; see also Salzman, 1963, p. 173). The literary acumen displayed in Psychotherapy East and West was lauded for Watts’ hermeneutical understanding (Moffett, 1962; Rioch, 1963; Ruesch, 1962) and capacity for expounding on various wisdom traditions of Asia (Eichler, 1963; Salzman, 1963). The text also had a “shock effect” (Rioch, 1963) on readers’ psychological and philosophical sensibilities due to (1) Watts’ exasperating-to-the-Western-mind coverage of Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, and Yoga per se (Eichler, 1963); (2) his innovative (problematic) interpretations of “Eastern” subject matter (Henderson, 1963, p. 186), and (3) his “illuminating and provocative” discussion of “Western” therapeutic processes (Rioch, 1963, pp. 108–109; see also Curry, 1962; Moffett, 1962; Levy, 1967). Watts’ challenging outlook spoke to the 1960s “crisis” in psychotherapy. As Weisskopf-Joelson (1968) observed: At the present time it is difficult to find many psychotherapists who agree on the interpretation of any case. Moreover, many therapists have, orally or in written documents, expressed doubts concerning

Psychotherapy East and West  29 the basic assumptions upon which their work rests, and have admitted they don’t quite know “what goes on” in therapy. (p. 107) Weisskopf-Joelson could have paraphrased Watts (1961/ 1969): I know of few reputable psychiatrists who will not admit, at least in private, that their profession is still far from being a science. To begin with, there is no generally accepted theory or even terminology of the science, but rather a multiplicity of conflicting theories and divergent techniques … To make things worse, there is still no clear evidence that psychotherapy is anything more than a hit-ormiss placebo, and, save in the case of psychotic symptoms that can be controlled by certain drugs, there is no sure way of distinguishing its “cures” from spontaneous remission. (p. 22–23) Psychotherapy East and West seemed inspective and symptomatic of the crisis in psychotherapy. The book was inspective by critiquing “theoretical confusion” enduring in the psychotherapeutic approaches of the day. It was symptomatic by raising issues indicative of the crisis itself. Regarding the former, Watts (1961/ 1969) referred to psychotherapists’ “philosophical unconscious,” – that is to say, their unwitting ignorance of “the contemporary philosophy of science” and “hidden metaphysical premises” underling psychological theory, including “discredited anthropological ideas of the nineteenth century” (p. 26), and “the social and ecological contexts of patient and therapist” which “tend to be ignored in a situation where two people are closeted together in private” (p. 27). Even Jung’s (1958) claim that his psychology is “a science of mere phenomena without any metaphysical implications” (p. 476) is itself, according to Watts (1961/ 1969), a “whopping metaphysical assumption” (p. 27). As Watts wrote: “unconscious metaphysics tend to be bad metaphysics” (p. 26). Watts (1961/ 1969) engaged transcultural comparisons toward uncovering the philosophical unconscious: “Cultural patterns come to light and hidden metaphysical assumptions become clear only to the degree that we can step outside the cultural or metaphysical systems in which we are involved by comparing them with others” (p. 28) – in this case Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. Recognizing potential paradigmatic tumult engendered by Psychotherapy East and West through exposition of unconscious material, Curry (1962) noted: “Watts, in writing this book (which is certainly a sticking-his-neck-out), has extended an invitation to all clinicians to examine thoughtfully what they are doing in relation to what their theories say they are doing” (p. 128; See also Salzman, 1963, p. 173). Watts’ transcultural comparisons now appear as early signals of

30  Peter J. Columbus his hermeneutical turn in the 1960s (see Columbus, 2012). Whereas his previous writings were often predicated on perennial philosophy, Watts (1961/ 1969) employed cultural/historical variations of philosophical– religious differences as points of exploration, resemblance, and contrast. Psychotherapy East and West was symptomatic of 1960s crises in psychotherapy via two conflicts regarding psychotherapeutic approach. Moreover, these conflicts resonated loudly in broader American cultural contexts. First, per Weisskopf-Joelson (1968), was “the conforming versus the socially critical approach” (p. 112) as Watts (1961/ 1969) contended therapists genuinely concerned with helping individuals must judiciously examine dysfunctional social systems: Disturbed individuals are points in the social field where contradictions in the field break out. It will not do at all to confirm the contradictions from which they are suffering, for a psychiatrist to be the official representative of a sick system of institutions (p. 58) Watts fully challenged the sensibilities of many psychotherapists who – Rioch’s (1963) words – “see their task as increasing adjustment rather than liberation from social roles” (p. 110). Yet critical examinations of problematic social-cultural institutions had wide appeal beyond psychotherapeutic milieux by pronounced opposition to technocratic social structures as described by Roszak (1969). Watts (along with Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Allen Ginsburg, and Paul Goodman) was identified as a key influence on countercultural thinking of 1960s American youth – with the attendant hippie “dropout” population, psychedelic ethos, progressive sexual mores, alternative lifestyles, and anti-war sentiments – due to “such very solid intellectual achievements as Psychotherapy East and West” (pp. 132–133). The second conflict of psychotherapeutic process identified by Weisskopf-Joelson (1968) reflected in Psychotherapy East and West is “the pathological versus the ontological approach” (p. 113) as Watts expanded psychotherapy beyond remediation of mental health disturbances localized to comparatively few people. He contended that psychotherapy is useful toward transforming psychological and spiritual states common in general populations. Elsewhere, Watts (1953) called it “a psychotherapy of the ‘normal’ person” (p. 26). The “ontological approach” to psychotherapy ties into the 1960s human potential movement aligned with academic Humanistic Psychology’s emphasis on personal and interpersonal growth, and self-actualization. As Elkins (2009) describes it: The human potential movement … took humanistic ideals into the streets of America in the form of thousands of workshops, encounter

Psychotherapy East and West  31 groups, sensitivity training labs, personal growth groups, and various kinds of individual therapeutic experiences … America became a “therapeutic culture” with literally millions of individuals participating in some form of therapeutic activities … The vast majority of those who took part in these activities did not view themselves as “participating in treatments for mental illness” … The focus of the human potential movement and the “therapeutic culture” was not on curing mental illness, but on personal growth, improved relationships, and more effective interpersonal skills. (p. 42) More is said in Part II of this chapter concerning Psychotherapy East and West vis-à-vis the human potential movement, but it suffices here to say, via Eugene Taylor, that within 1960s therapeutic culture-at-large, Watts’ books generally became “bibles of the consciousness movement” (Taylor, 2000, p. 275), with Psychotherapy East and West being “possibly one of the most influential texts of the American psychotherapeutic counterculture” (Taylor, 2003, p. 185). Criticism and Commentary The most notable and elaborate criticisms of Psychotherapy East and West were offered by Jungian psychologist and founder of the Jung Institute of San Francisco, Joseph L. Henderson (1963). His criticisms are especially noteworthy as Watts (1961/ 1969) commented that Freudian and Jungian depth psychologies were “becoming more and more of a backwater in the development of Western psychiatry” and “increasingly out of touch with all that has been going on in the science of human behavior during the last thirty years” (p. xii). Henderson’s (1963) criticisms were threefold. First, Watts automatically accepted a motivational consonance (transcendence of the ego) and methodological commensurability between psychotherapy, Taoism and Buddhism. Henderson wrote: [Watts] does not appear to know how much time we psychotherapists spend in unearthing the mixed motives of behavior and in re-educating our patients to fit them for their first real adaptation to family or community. This is not our choice, but represents the basic need for the undeveloped ego to find its place in society in a meaningful, not over-adapted way. True enough, for patients who are already over-adapted, we may seek to bring results similar to those of Taoism or Zen Buddhism. But similarity is not identity, and the way of liberation in the West cannot aim at dissolving the ego as unnecessary to an experience of the Self. (p. 186)

32  Peter J. Columbus .

Remarkably similar criticisms were offered twenty years earlier in Beatrice M. Hinkle’s (1940) review of The Meaning of Happiness (Watts, 1940). Hinkle, a distinguished Jungian analyst and translator of Jung, noted that Watts “fails to recognize that the theories [of analytical psychology] are not intellectual concepts into which the individual is fitted, but are formulations based on the psychological material brought forth by the analytical experience itself” (p. 48). Henderson’s (1963) second criticism concerned Watts’ portrayals of Freud and Jung as problematically assuming “that intelligence rests precariously on a biological and instinctual basis which is ‘animal in the worst sense’” (p. 187). Henderson rejoined: One wonders if Watts has forgotten some of his Eastern philosophy, which also emphasizes a struggle with the animal nature. The cowherding pictures of Zen Buddhism provide a striking example beside the superhuman efforts of Tibetan Yogis to overcome the effects of demonic possession. (p. 187) Here again, Hinkle (1940) similarly assessed Watts’ (1940) discussions of “psychological acceptance” and “escape” from vicissitudes of living. Hinkle criticized Watts’ insufficient notice of autonomic functions as he “fails to recognize the biological reactions of fight and flight in his discussion, and consequently he writes as though the primary attitudes of individuals were produced by his environment and were a matter of choice and will” (pp. 485–486). Henderson’s (1963) third criticism concerned Watts’ approach to ego transcendence. Henderson contended that the liberated ego in Watts’ theory is only the outward persona. “But,” suggested Henderson, the ego is not thus dissolved, it merely turns inward to observe and relate to … inner images. It is this inner aspect of the ego which provides an introverted continuity of consciousness, as the persona provides the outer continuity of behavior. (p. 187) Henderson added: “The awareness of this subject-object duality becomes the necessary condition for further individual development” (p. 187). Ruesch (1962) offered a variation on Henderson’s (1963) third criticism. Ruesch, like Henderson, doubted ego liberation as an adaptive solution to problems of living, but he directed attention to socio-technological environs rather than to inner experience. “Physical-scientific or socialsymbolic” creations of human culture, suggested Ruesch, surpass mundane standings of individuals such that people inevitably are aware of differences. Individuals are thus wary of extant technologies and

Psychotherapy East and West  33 cultural-social institutions, and “this split awareness may itself be protective” (italics added). Ruesch continued: Were it not for this awareness … [people] would feel as one with all the metallic and plastic trash that Madison Avenue so glowingly praises. No, perhaps it is necessary for modern man to be split and separated from the machines and institutions he produces if he wishes to survive … The stranger surroundings are, the more wary the human being fortunately becomes. The duality of existence is perhaps the best way in which man can counteract his exaggerated need for control. When he comes to feel sufficiently alienated, he might steer his maladapted evolution in a more creative direction. (p. 255, italics added) Note that Watts’ later offerings (e.g., 1966, 1971) served implicitly as replies to Ruesch’s criticism. Watts elaborated an ontological estrangement that is simultaneously source and symptom of problematic cultural and technological conditions, and discussed healing existential alienation without denying difference. However, I refer to Gordon’s (1970) criticisms as discussed below. Moffett (1962), a literary theorist of some renown, offered a third take on Watts’ (1961/ 1969) exposition and remediation of ontological estrangement. Moffett suggested: Watts is telling a kind of story. The protagonist is ‘I,’ the antagonist the ‘other.’ The action is comprised of games and counter-games (double-binds and therapeutic releases). More accurately, he is telling the story about the dissolution of a story, the fiction of the ego. (p. 486) Psychotherapy East and West is thus likened to an anti-novel, the genre of mid-twentieth century literature gaining its moniker from Sartre’s 1948 introduction to Sarraute’s Portrait of a Man Unknown. Anti-novels, anti-plays, and other anti-literatures undermine and destabilize character, personality, and plot. Moffett noted: “Watts’ discussion of the ego and ‘its’ actions persuades us that they don’t exist. Or rather exist only as a necessity of communication, not as a necessity of nature” (p. 486, italics added). It seems plausible to suggest that Psychotherapy East and West reflects not only the anti-novel genre, but, in “reaching a crisis of isomorphism between language and life” (Moffett, 1962, p. 490), it foreshadows certain postmodern, constructionist, and deconstructionist approaches to reading, writing, and living. Indeed, Psychotherapy East and West predates seminal publications of de Man, Derrida, and Berger and Luckmann by at least five years. The above reviews reflect bifurcated trajectories of opinion about Watts (1961/ 1969) continuing to the end of the 1960s. Two assessments

34  Peter J. Columbus exemplify the decade-ending Y-junction and foreshadowing of subsequent discussion in Part II of this chapter. Daniel J. Leary’s (1969) optimistic contention was that Watts, along with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ( Jesuit paleontologist), George Bernard Shaw (playwright), Buckminster Fuller (architect and systems theorist), David T. Brazelon (economist), Marshall McLuhan (communication theorist), theologians Harvey Cox, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Leslie Dewart, and philosophers Norman O. Brown and Martin Buber, are veritable “voices of convergence.” According to Leary, these thinkers constitute unanimous expression from numerous intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual perspectives which, when collectively joined, offer tangible support for the aspiration that people may access, through inspired creativity and humane technology, new heights of existential fulfillment. An important draw of Psychotherapy East and West was that “East and West in their theories of psychology and religion share three converging avenues of enlightenment” (Leary, 1969, pp. 114–115). The first “avenue” concerned the issue of embodied spirituality – that is to say, possible transformations of sexuality (Eros) into sacramental experience (Agape). Second was a shift from egocentric thinking to holistic awareness, where “life is most fully lived when we do not live it, but when it lives us; when the ego is experienced as a cell in an organic whole” (p. 116). Third was renewed emphasis on intuitively lived (phenomenological) time rather than rationalized “clock time” and the “necessity of a programmed day” (p. 117). Each of the avenues, in Leary’s view, leads to overcoming “maya” or illusory consciousness. Counterpoints were offered by Freudian psychoanalyst, Lilian Gordon (1970), who voiced skeptical views of countercultural psychotherapy in general and particularly Watts, whose formulation of Zen “has become an integral part of the style of life and therapy under discussion” (p. 166). Though not discussing Psychotherapy East and West specifically, Gordon considered Watts (1966, 1967) among other Esalan Institute workshop leaders and offerings, such as Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy, William Schutz’s Joy Workshops, and Elizabeth Minz’s “Time-Extended Marathon” group encounters. A “common denominator,” suggested Gordon, “seems to be the longing for regression to the time when words were not necessary for communication, where all experience was intimate, and all activity play and where delay of impulse discharge was not necessary” (p. 166). Gordon continued: “The experience of symbiotic merging with its concomitant feeling of sharing in omnipotence and immortality is well stated in Western terms by Watts.” Gordon quoted Watts (1966): The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. [Watts here uses the term ego to mean the sense of separate existence.] The death of the individual is

Psychotherapy East and West  35 not disconnection but simply withdrawal. Eternally and always there is only now, and one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end…Once you have seen this you have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate “you” to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. What we see as death, empty space or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. (As cited in Gordon, 1970, p. 167) Gordon (1970) interpreted Watts (and his cohorts) as expressing regressive symbiotic longings (rather than higher order transcendence) emerging from “separation anxiety and fears of annihilation” caused by 1960s breakdowns of religious, political, and scientific/technological institutions and social structures. She wondered “whether some of the regressive activity may prove serviceable to the ego and may result in new cultural symbols appropriate to the current state of civilization.” But seemingly anticipating the excesses of 1970s’ American counterculture, Gordon concluded: “And if these symbols take the form of the magical power of the unrepressed infantile psyche, as Freudians we should not be surprised” (p. 182).

Part II: Subsequent Analyses Part II of this chapter briefly notes three themes vis-à-vis Watts’ text. First concerns 1970s–1980s reviews in academic and literary venues worldwide. The second involves criticism in light of Said’s (1978) Orientalism, and commentary re postmodernism. Third, Part II concludes with three twenty-first century perspectives on Psychotherapy East and West, two of which point to its historical significance (Bankart, 2003; Kripal, 2007), and one toward its contemporary relevance (Puhakka, 2012). Note that several of the reviews cited herein were written in languages other than English. Translations (and any mistranslations) of these reviews, as quoted below, are my own. Academic and Literary Reviews: 1970s – 1980s In the 1970s extending to the 1980s, reissues of Psychotherapy East and West gained substantive attention in academic, literary and religious journals in Britain (Skynner, 1971; Zaehner, 1971) and Ireland (Clare, 1971); the European continent, including Spain ( Jover, 1973; Martinez, 1984), France (Bareau, 1976; Germain, 1975; Huard, 1975; Keller, 1974); Germany (Mann, 1983), and Sweden (Eneroth, 1973); and worldwide, including Brazil (Sigelmann, 1973), India (Thornton, 1971), Australia and New Zealand (Burton-Bradley, 1972). As with the original 1961 publication,

36  Peter J. Columbus the reissues received a range of evaluations from psychologically minded thinkers. Four reviews – those by Skynner (1971), Burton-Bradley (1972), Clare (1971), and Thornton (1971) – present a representative sample and will suffice for brief discussion. Offering an optimistic assessment in Group Analysis, Skynner (1971) suggested that group-analytic practitioners will appreciate Watts’ lucid case that “our contemporary focus on the isolated individual and his ego is the cause of many misunderstandings and unnecessary problems.” Skynner explained: “Watts sees the concept of the individual a misleading abstraction except when viewed as part of the total network of communication in which he has his being and from which he derives his meaning” (p. 192). Burton-Bradley (1972), writing in The Australia and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, noted that Watts used the word psychotherapy with broader implications than most thinkers would allow. However, “psychotherapy technicians, as such, … have indeed benefitted from contact with Eastern thought, and there is no doubt they could learn much from Watts himself” (p. 136). Still, Burton-Bradley offered a caveat concerning Watts’ general approach to egoic functions, saying it “could promote the morbid disease process of schizophrenia in predisposed persons through failure to establish clear ego boundaries between individual family members” (p. 136–137). Psychiatrist Anthony Clare (1971) reviewed Watts’ “fascinating and provocative” (p. 8) text in conjunction with Viktor Frankl’s The Will to Meaning. Writing in The Irish Times, Clare suggested that Frankl and Watts were emblematic of shifting views on neurosis, from drive repression to death anxiety and existential estrangement. Perhaps aware of budding British and European human potential movements (see Rowan, 2004; Weinraub, 1970), Clare (1971) anticipated the texts would resonate significantly for lay audiences: It is said that the good doctor is one who keeps the patient amused while nature works the cure. If, as I suspect, more patients than psychiatrists read Frankl and Watts, they will certainly be amused, and equally certainly they will find much to give them hope and succor when other, more orthodox treatments can only give them pause. (p. 8) Thornton’s (1971) highly critical evaluation of Psychotherapy East and West, published in an Anglo-Indian Theosophical journal based in Bombay, argued that Watts conflated psychotherapy and religion: “Western psychotherapeutic tradition has its origin in the Cult of Aesculapius, the God of medicine, and should not be confused with the spiritual systems contained in either Eastern or Western essentially religious traditions” (p. 362). A trained Jungian, Thornton criticized the Wattsian ego’s relations to death, arguing Watts should have known “that symbolic death

Psychotherapy East and West  37 is experienced throughout the whole Process of Individuation, and that Jung himself, as well as many of his pupils, even had to experience the reality of death in all its stark physical nakedness” (p. 361). Unlike the initial 1961 version, later reissues of Psychotherapy East and West received critical attention from religionists, particularly Christian thinkers. Keller (1974), in the Revue de Theologie et de Philosophie, wrote: We regret that the author did not push his investigation a little further, for example, to study Christian practice. He would have discovered that process of liberation as he understood it is actually present in the most basic Christian therapeutic: the Law is given to man so that he is aware of the impasse in which he’s entangled and accepts the Gospel that is liberation. (p. 292) Mann (1983), in Zeitschrift fur Katholische Theologie, concurred with Keller (1974), further noting interpretive flaws in Watts’ thinking: “The nearest significant parallels allowed in Christianity are ignored…He quite happily cites and interprets biblical sayings – against all rules of the art and usually quite inappropriately” (p. 353). Germain (1975) added: “He [Watts] goes on to draw a caricature of Christianity as a whole from an extreme puritanism” (p. 478). The eminent Oxford religionist R. C. Zaehner (1971) offered in The Spectator a highly critical take on Watts’ view of mystical experience: The trouble is that Alan Watts …refuses to face the fact that ‘mystical’ experiences are very far from being identical. Your reviewer has argued this so often [see e.g., Zaehner, 1957] that it would be pointless to repeat it here. (p. 179) Echoing Gordon’s (1970) psychoanalytic critique while foreshadowing conservative pushback against countercultural and human potential movements, Zaehner (1971) castigated Watts for the possible ethical and moral implications of mystical experience as “the felt realization of the physical world as a field” (Watts, cited in Zaehner, 1971, p. 179): Alan Watts, like Timothy Leary, has spent a great deal of time and energy assailing the Protestant ethic of hard work and the morality of “thou shalt not.” What he does not seem to realize is that he and his kind have succeeded so well that they have in fact destroyed morality of any kind. (p. 179; see also Burton-Bradley, 1972, p. 136)

38  Peter J. Columbus Orientalism and Postmodernism In 1978, Edward Said published his influential text, Orientalism, a critical appraisal of Western representations of Middle Eastern and Asian peoples and cultures. Orientalism, Said argued, is a way of seeing that fabricates, accentuates, embellishes, and misrepresents variances between “Oriental” and “Occidental” toward justifying Western self-importance and worldwide hegemony. Following Said, historian David Kopf (1986), in his “Macrohistoriographical Essay on the Idea of East and West from Herodotus to Edward Said,” showed that “the idea or myth of encounter between an Orient and an Occident has been a major theme in macrohistory” (p. 22). Psychotherapy East and West, Kopf suggested, represents a particular variation of that myth: the post-World War II era when “the East” was seen as offering “a positive ideology of salvation for a world continually on the brink of some ultimate disaster” (p. 32). Watts, asserted Kopf (1986), “viewed himself as the Columbus of the psyche who discovered in the sacred texts of the East a new world full of promise for liberating humanity from anxiety and neuroses” (p. 32). Watts thus transformed a pre-world War II vision of “the East” as passive and life negating into “a positive idea of social criticism and individual self-realization” for the West (p. 33). A full reply to Kopf’s (1986) assessment is beyond this chapter’s scope, save to note Watts’ strong circumspection about Eastern spiritual disciplines in relation to Western psychotherapy: Both are fumbling in the dark, though not without light. Wonderful as I have found them, I do not believe that the Eastern disciplines are the last word in sacrosanct and immemorial wisdom such that the world must come and sit humbly at the feet of their masters. Nor do I feel that there is a gospel according to Freud, or to Jung, in which the great psychological truths are forever fixed. (Watts, 1961/ 1969, p. x–xi) Part I of this review contains discussion of Moffett’s (1962) likening of Psychotherapy East and West to an anti-novel. Moffett noted: “Watts’ discussion of ego and ‘its’ actions persuades us that they don’t exist. Or rather exist only as a necessity of communication, not as necessity of nature” (p. 486, italics added). Part I further notes: It seems plausible to suggest that Psychotherapy East and West reflects not only the anti-novel genre, but, in reaching ‘a crisis of isomorphism between language and life’ (Moffett, 1962, p. 490), it foreshadows certain postmodern, constructionist, and deconstructionist approaches to reading, writing, and living. Indeed, Psychotherapy East and West predates seminal publications by de Man, Derrida, and Berger and Luckmann by at least five years.

Psychotherapy East and West  39 The above observations seem appropriate as far as they go. But they do not go far enough. A case can be made that Psychotherapy East and West, though intersecting with postmodernism, moved beyond the extreme relativism and radical constructionism of postmodern thought. Watts’ discussion of Buddhism in Psychotherapy East and West was informed primarily by the Madhyamika – Middle Way – school of Nagarjuna (see Watts, 1961/ 1969, p. 64n30). As Hiett (1995) noted, in citing Psychotherapy East and West in support of his cross-cultural perspective on postmodernism, the Madhyamika is a “liberative technique … showing the inconsistency of all philosophical positions … removing the ground upon which a person based his or her life” (p. 200), and this includes the relativism and contexualism of postmodern ideas. Puhakka (2012) likewise observed: The Middle Way teachings demonstrate again and again that there really is nothing that can be claimed as absolutely true. Watts understood that such a demonstration is the very essence of the Buddhist and Zen teachings and this understanding gave him the freedom to speak clearly and boldly without bowing before the sacred cow of cultural and social context but cutting right through it. (p. 211; Puhakka is further discussed below.)

Conclusion: Psychotherapy East and West in the 21st Century In January 2017, Psychotherapy East and West was again reissued, implying a sustained significance more than a half-century after its original 1961 publication date. Here, discussed succinctly, are three twentyfirst-century perspectives on Watts’ text. The initial two assessments, by Bankart (2003) and Kripal (2007, pp. 144–148) respectively, consider its historical significance. The third, by Puhakka, (2012), considers its contemporary relevance. In an essay entitled “Five Manifestations of the Buddha in the West,” Bankart (2003) offered brief historical accountings of Buddhism’s influence on five Western psychotherapeutic paradigms, including “Freudian Psychodynamics; Jungian Analytic Psychology; NeoFreudian Eclecticism; Behavioral Pragmatism; and New Age Consciousness” (p. 45). In this arrangement, Psychotherapy East and West is the first of three “foundational events” in the emergence of “New Age Consciousness.” (The other two events being the 1969 launch of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, and Wilbur, Engler, and Brown’s Transformations of Consciousness: Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development published in 1986.) “Taken together,” suggested Bankart, “these three primary sources created legitimate space for a serious extended academic discussion of consciousness, and its role in physical and psychological wellbeing” (p. 62). Two key features of Watts’ text, in Bankart’s view, are the

40  Peter J. Columbus “powerful” Buddhist critiques of Western culture, and the questioning of Western psychotherapy’s capacity to afford “reconciliation between individual feeling and social norms without sacrificing the integrity of the individual” (p. 62). Considering Psychotherapy East and West as a “vivid and heart-felt rejoinder” to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, Bankart concluded that “it was a far-reaching call for psychology and psychotherapy to facilitate the liberation of individual souls from the suffering resulting from the suffocating conformity of a joyless, sexless, over-analyzed and vastly controlling society” (p. 62). In his history of Esalen Institute and its formative influence on the Human Potential Movement, Jeffery Kripal (2007) highlighted Esalen’s emphasis on the body’s centrality for psychological and spiritual transformation. Kripal noted the development of a “Western Tantra” informed by (1) the Freudian Left who considered the id as “essentially good and wise” (p. 143) and by (2) the “Shakti (occult energy) of Asian Tantra” (p. 144). In Kripal’s view, “probably the earliest major Esalen figure to envision a deep synthesis of Western psychology and Asian Tantra was Alan Watts in his Psychotherapy East and West.” There, the id and libido are not merely energetic, but “literally cosmic” (p. 147): What our social institutions repress is not just the sexual love, the mutuality of man and woman, but also the still deeper love of organism and environment, of Yes and No, and of all those so-called opposites representing the Taoist symbol of the yang-yin, the black and white fishes in eternal intercourse. (Watts, as cited in Kripal, p. 147) “In this way,” concluded Kripal, “Watts transgresses the conditionings and norms of conservative culture, divinizes the entire cosmos as an erotic play of opposites, and imagines an eternity of unrepressed flesh” (p. 148). In a paper entitled “Buddhist Wisdom in the West: A Fifty-Year Perspective on the Contributions of Alan Watts,” Puhakka (2012) suggested that Watts’ view of Buddhism in Psychotherapy East and West as “first and foremost…a critique of culture and society” (p. 213; see Watts, 1961/ 1969, p. 19) offers a needed corrective to the contemporary, widespread inclination to condense Buddhist and Zen teachings into psychology, such that Buddhism and psychotherapy are viewed: either in a symmetrical relationship where the two are equivalent alternatives that can be “mixed and matched” depending on what the situation requires, or in an asymmetrical relationship where psychotherapy is the more encompassing term and Buddhism serves as an “adjunct” that can add to the arsenal of specific techniques in psychotherapy. (p. 213)

Psychotherapy East and West  41 Instead, Puhakka observes, and here Part II of this retrospective review concludes, Watts ascertained and rightly formulated an asymmetrical relationship between Buddhism and psychotherapy where Buddhism embraces and outspreads psychotherapy, thus affording critical appraisal of the culturally determined and limiting premises of psychotherapy, and an opportunity to broaden the parameters of psychology.

Acknowledgment Adapted from Self & Society: An International Journal for Humanistic Psychology, 2015, 43(4), 345–353 and 2017, 45(3–4), 276–282. Used by permission of The Association for Humanistic Psychology in Britain.

References Bankart, C. P. (2003). Five manifestations of the Buddha in the West: A brief history. In K. H. Dockett, G. R. Dudley-Grant, C. P. Bankart (Eds.), Psychology and Buddhism: From individual to global community (pp. 45–70). New York, NY: Kluwer Academic. Bareau, A. (1976). [Review of the book Psychotherapy East and West]. Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, 190(1), 98–99. Burton-Bradley, B. G. (1972). [Review of the book Psychotherapy East and West]. The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 8(2), 136–137. Clare, A. (1971). The new neurosis. [Review of the books The Will to Meaning and Psychotherapy East and West]. The Irish Times, August 14, 8. Columbus, P. J. (2012). Phenomenological exegeses of Alan Watts: Transcendental and hermeneutic strategies. In P. J. Columbus and D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts— Here and Now (pp. 59–82). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Curry, A. E. (1962). [Review of the book Psychotherapy East and West]. Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Review, 49(3), 128. Eichler, R. M. (1963). [Review of the book Psychotherapy, East and West]. Teachers College Record, 65(1), 89–90. Elkins, D. (2009). Humanistic psychology: A clinical manifesto. Colorado Springs, CO: University of the Rockies Press. Eneroth, B. (1973). [Review of the book Psychotherapy East and West]. Sociologisk Forskning, 10(2), 61–62. Germain, G. (1975). Alan Watts: Le livre de la Sagesse; Psychotherapie orientale etoccidentale. [Review of the books The Book and Psychotherapy East and West]. Esprit (Nouvelle serie), 444(3) 478–479. Gordon, L. (1970). Beyond the reality principle: Illusion or reality? American Imago, 27(2), 160–182. Henderson, J. L. (1963). [Review of the book Psychotherapy, East and West]. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 8(2), 186–187. Hiett, P. J. (1995). Postmodernism – A cross cultural perspective. Asian Philosophy, 5(2), 197–208. Hinkle, B. M. (1940). [Review of the book The meaning of happiness]. Review of Religion, 5, 484–487.

42  Peter J. Columbus Huard, P. (1975). [Review of the book Psychotherapie Orientale et Occidentale]. Revue de Synthese, 97(77), 114–116. Jover, F. B. (1973). La realidad es un unico atomo. [Review of the book Psychotherapy East and West]. El Ciervo, 22(237), 18. Jung, C. G. (1929). Kommentar. In R. Wilhelm (Trans.), Das geheimnis der goldenen blute (pp. 1–66). Munich: Dorn Jung, C. G. (1958). Psychology and religion: West and East (Collected works, Vol. 11). New York: Pantheon. Keller, C. A. (1974). A. W. Watts: Psychotherapie orientale et occidentale. Revue de Theologie et de Philosophie, 24(4), 292. Kopf, D. (1986). A macrohistoriographical essay on the idea of East and West from Herodotus to Edward Said. Comparative Civilizations Review, 15, 22–42. Kripal, J. J. (2007). Esalen: America and the religion of no-religion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Leary, D. J. (1969). Voices of convergence. Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing. Levy, N. J. (1967). [Review of the book Psychotherapy, East and West]. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 27(2), 211–212. Mann, F. (1983). Psychtherapie und osliche befreiungswege. [Review of the book Psychotherapy East and West]. Zeitschrift fur Katholische Theologie, 105(3), 353–354. Martinez, L. (1984). [Review of the book Psychotherape un die ostliche Beireiungswege]. Pensamiento, 40, 317. Moffett, J. (1962). Turning language upon itself. [Review of the book Psychotherapy, East and West]. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 28(4), 486–490. Puhakka, K. (2012). Buddhist wisdom in the west: A fifty-year perspective on the contributions of Alan Watts. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 203–217). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Review (1963). [Review of the book Psychotherapy, East and West.] MANAS, 41(28), 6–7. Rioch, M. J. (1963). [Review of the book Psychotherapy, East and West]. Psychiatry, 26(1), 107–110. Roszak, T. (1969). The Making of a Counter Culture. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Rowan, J. (2004). Some history of humanistic psychology. The Humanistic Psychologist, 32, 221–238. Ruesch, J. (1962). [Review of the book Psychotherapy, East and West]. Archives of General Psychology, 6(3), 254–255. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Pantheon. Salzman, L. (1963). [Review of the book Psychotherapy, East and West]. Journal of Pastoral Care, 17(3), 172–173. Sigelmann, E. (1973). [Review of the book Psychotherapy East and West]. Arquivos Brasileiros de Psicologia Aplicada, 25(3), 130–132. Skynner, A. C. R. (1971). [Review of the book Psychotherapy East and West]. Group Analysis, 4(3), 192–193. Taylor, E. (2000). Shadow culture: Psychology and spirituality in America. Washington, DC: Counterpoint.

Psychotherapy East and West  43 Taylor, E. (2003). Buddhism and Western psychology: An intellectual memoir. In R. S. Segall (Ed.), Encountering Buddhism: Western psychology and Buddhist teachings (pp. 179–196). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Thornton, E. (1971). [Review of the book Psychotherapy East and West]. The Aryan Path, 42(8), 361–362. Watts, A. W. (1937). The Legacy of Asia and Western Man: A Study of the Middle Way. London: John Murray. Watts, A. W. (1940). The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology and the wisdom of the east. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Watts, A. W. (1953). Asian psychology and modern psychiatry. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 13(1), 25–30. Watts, A. W. (1955). The way of liberation in Zen Buddhism. Asian Study Monographs, 1, 1–24. Watts, A. W. (1956). Convention, conflict, and liberation: Further observations on Asian psychology and modern psychiatry. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 16(1), 63–67. Watts, A. W. (Speaker). (1959a). The art of psychoanalysis (Audio recording, Parts 1–3). Berkeley, CA: Pacifica Radio Archives. Watts, A. W. (1959b). Eternity as the unrepressed body. Etc.: A Review of General Semantics, 41(4), 486–494. Watts, A. W. (1959c). [Review of the book Psychology and religion: West and East]. Chicago Review, 13(1), 84–86 Watts, A. W. (1960, October 16). The ways of the mind. New York Times Book Review, BR35. Watts, A. W. (1966). The Book: On the taboo against knowing who you are. New York, NY: Collier. Watts, A. W. (1967). This is It, and other essays on Zen and spiritual experience. New York, NY: Collier. Watts, A. W. (1969). Psychotherapy East and West. New York, NY: Ballantine. (Original work published 1961). Watts, A. W. (1971). Does It matter: Essays on man’s relations to materiality. New York, NY: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1994). The psychology of acceptance: The reconciliation of the opposites in eastern thought and in Analytical Psychology. In Talking Zen (M. Watts, Ed., pp. 2451). New York: Weatherhill. (Original work presented to the Analytical Psychology Club of New York City, 1939). Weinraub, B. (1970, June 15). Esalen encounter group finds British in touch. The New York Times, 4). Weisskopf-Joelson, E. (1968). The present crisis in psychotherapy. The Journal of Psychology, 69, 107–115. Zaehner, R. C. (1957). Mysticism, sacred and profane. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Zaehner, R. C. (1971). R. C. Zaehner on psychotherapy. [Review of the book Psychotherapy East and West]. The Spectator, July 31, 179.

4 Alan Watts and Neurophenomenology Susan Gordon

Alan Watts (1915–1973) helped pioneer humanistic-transpersonal psychology through contributions to East–West psychology, the human potential movement, and the American psychotherapeutic counterculture. Likening orthodox psychoanalysis to religious cults, and institutional psychiatry to systems of brainwashing, he assisted psychology’s liberation from tacit mind–body dualisms of nineteenth-century metaphysics (Watts, 1973a). The perceived “ego” – behind thought is a thinker and behind knowledge a controlling knower separated from experiential flux – was, in Watts’ view, a social fiction (Gordon, 2012; Watts, 1961). Nevertheless, Watts was intrigued by consciousness: does it emerge from the brain’s neural activities? Is “self” independent of the brain, or does the brain evoke a world which is simultaneously experienced? These epistemological and ontological questions thrive among philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. Nothing is known more intimately than conscious experience, yet nothing is harder to explain than consciousness itself. The “hard problem” of consciousness is the problem of experience (Chalmers, 1995). When thinking and perceiving, a whir of information-processing abounds along with subjectivity. Why are human visual and auditory processing systems accompanied by visual or auditory experience? Experience, it is widely agreed, arises from physical bases, but no conclusive explanation for experiential qualia exists. Why should physical processes give rise to rich inner lives? The problem of consciousness is a long-standing epistemological quandary. As Watts stated in (1973a): Put in metaphysical terms, psychological terms, physical terms, or neurological terms: it is always the same. How can we know what we know without knowing, knowing? This question must be answered, if it can ever be answered, before it can make any sense at all to say that reality is material, mental, electrical, and spiritual, a fact, a dream, or anything else. (p. 414)

Alan Watts and Neurophenomenology  45 Though writing as a religious philosopher, the extent to which Watts anticipated issues in neuroscience research, particularly, I suggest, Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology, seems remarkable. My chapter sketches intersections of Watts’ and Varela’s phenomenologically grounded radical empiricisms, chiefly (1) embodied cognition; and (2) the specious present. I begin by establishing Watts’ “phenomenological” place in Humanistic Psychology, following with a description of Varela’s neurophenomenological project. Note that I am not claiming that Varela drew directly from Watts, but simply that Watts expressed, and thereby presciently anticipated, issues subsequently considered in Varela’s neurophenomenological project.

Alan Watts and Humanistic Psychology Humanistic-transpersonal perspectives in psychology focus on significances of being fully, experientially human. They involve creating meaning, actualizing values, and achieving self-realization. Humanistic psychologists traditionally focus writings on the “self” directly experienced, on fulfilling potential, intrinsic human motivations toward health, and existential themes inherent to interior exploration. Humanistic Psychology ancestries span William James’ person-centered psychological science, macropersonality theories and social psychologies of Gordon Allport, Henry Murray, and Gardner Murphy, self-actualizing/ motivational psychologies of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, and European existential-phenomenological psychotherapeutic traditions united by Rollo May and Henri Ellenberger. Centered in transforming reductionist experimentalism, humanistic psychologists pioneered person-centered, growth-oriented, existential psychologies of the whole person, thus advancing dialogues between sciences and humanities as viable forms of academic discourse. Transpersonal psychology, emerging from humanistic movements after 1969, began through experiential studies of entheogens, meditation, altered states of consciousness, and non-Western epistemologies (Gordon, 2013a; Taylor, 2009). Alan Watts is identified historically among the principal purveyors of non-Western epistemologies for humanistic-transpersonal psychology. His twenty-first-century relevance is similarly located vis-à-vis pertinences of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism for humanistic theory, research, and practice (Columbus & Rice, 2012). Yet Columbus (2012) and Rice (2012) also offered alternative visions of Watts’ humanistic psychological bearing. They suggested that Watts adopted European phenomenological philosophy and psychology as pedagogical complements to various non-Western influences. Phenomenology concerns consciousness, including rational waking states and unconscious dynamics, as experienced from first-person viewpoints. Experience is understood holistically and relationally as

46  Susan Gordon when people engage objects of consciousness through their meaning. Classical approaches in phenomenology include reflective analyses of lived experience (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), contextual–interpretive hermeneutic phenomenology (Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur), radical empiricism ( James), and empirical–perceptual experiments (Gestalt psychology). Phenomenological methods exploring first-person subjectivity allow for observing internal states using a meditative focus to loosen presumptions, thus affording essential understandings of lived experience. Columbus (2012) outlined Watts’ (1951, 1966/ 1989) applications of two phenomenological scaffoldings. First, Watts (1951) applied a Husserlian transcendental phenomenological method to the study of insecurity. There, Watts described the natural attitude of insecurity, employed bracketing procedures elucidating the intentionality if insecure experience, and applied further bracketing procedures toward uncovering alternative modes of awareness. Secondly, Watts (1966/ 1989) applied a hermeneutical phenomenology toward understanding identity. “In The Book,” suggests Columbus (2012), “Alan Watts introduced a multidimensional consideration of identity, differentiated two distinct networks or meaning vis-à-vis identity, engaged these horizons of meaning in a dialectic process, and fused these horizons of identity toward greater intuitive comprehension” (p. 64). Rice (2012) examined four applications of Gestalt-phenomenological psychology by Watts to mystical experience per their isomorphic neuroscience implications: first, Watts’ (1960/ 1973c) application of organismic holism offering substantive alternatives to reductionist and supernaturalist languages about mystical experience; secondly, his (1963) personworld field theory correlating first-person subjective and third-person objective perspectives on mysticism; thirdly, Watts (1960/ 1973b) applied Gestalt understandings of “insight” – abrupt perceptual reorganization of part-whole relationships – to first-person accounts of sudden illumination in transcendent mysticism; and fourthly, Watts (1960/ 1973b) employed Gestalt “perceptual constancy” to understanding stabilities of transcendent insight after sudden illumination. Watts’ Gestalt approach, in Rice’s view, counterbalances neuroscience perspectives inordinately emphasizing biology and neurology to the detriment of subjective experience.

Francisco Varela and Neurophenomenology Watts’ discussions of subjective mystical experience via Gestaltphenomenology arguably presaged subsequent neuroscience work of biologist Francisco Varela (1946–2001). Varela was self-positioned in the general lineage of European phenomenology while emphasizing his own philosophical synthesis in light of modern cognitive science and

Alan Watts and Neurophenomenology  47 non-Western experiential traditions. However, as evidenced by Varela’s works (e.g., 1997, 1999; Varela & Shear, 1999), he was informed by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, James, and Heidegger. He was also influenced by philosopher/psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin’s focusing method and psychiatrist Daniel Stern’s work on pre-reflective experience in infants, expressions of meaning and self-constitution (Petitmengin, 2009). Moreover, Varela was a committed practitioner-scholar of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist meditation, psychology, and philosophy. The mutually informative qualities of Buddhism and Western cognitive science provided existential and spiritual dimensions to his work (Thompson, 2001b). “Neurophenomenology,” a word devised by Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili (1990), was discerned by Varela and colleagues in the mid-1990s as an innovative research agenda for the neuroscience of consciousness. Neurophenomenology connected systems theory, cognitive computationalism, and autopoiesis by joining first- and third-person methods in experimental research. First-person methods concern phenomenological experience and attention; present-time consciousness; body-image and volition; intentionality; perception, fringe and center; and subjective emotion. Third-person methods refer to neurophysiological measurements and analyses of large-scale sensorimotor brain processes, and cognitive testing. Note also, second-person perspectives, the interpersonal, intersubjective, and empathetic aspects of conscious experience are, like first-person experience, investigated via phenomenological strategies borrowed from non-Western epistemology and works by Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (Petitmengin, 2009; Thompson, 2001a; Varela & Shear, 1999). Varela pursued two main complementary research agendas: (1) experimental studies using multiple electron recordings and mathematical analysis of large-scale neuronal integration during cognitive processes and (2) philosophical–empirical studies of the “neurophenomenology” of human consciousness (Varela, 1996). Varela and colleagues showed that human perception of meaningful complex forms (high contrast or “Mooney figures”) were accompanied by phase-locked synchronous oscillations in distinct brain regions (Rodriguez, Lachaux, Martinerie, Renault, & Varela., 1999), and that the unified cognitive moment depends on large-scale neurological integration (Varela, Lachaux, Rodríguez, & Martinerie, 2001). Additionally, Varela published technical, experimental, and mathematical papers on nonlinear dynamical analyses of brain activity (Martinerie, Adam, Le van Quyen, Baulac, & Varela, 1998), phenomenological studies of human consciousness (Varela, 2001; Varela & Depraz, 2000), and co-edited texts on phenomenological approaches to consciousness and cognitive science (Petitot, Varela, Pachoud, & Roy, 1999; Varela & Shear, 1999). Thorough elaborations of neurophenomenology’s historical roots are set out in Gordon (2013a) and Robbins & Gordon, 2015).

48  Susan Gordon

Watts, Varela, and Radical Empiricism William James (1897) described his budding philosophical metaphysics as “radical empiricism.” By “empiricism,” James meant not sense data alone, but the full range of human experience. By “radical,” he meant that science must neither admit into its constructions any element not directly experienced, nor exclude any element directly experienced, including relations connecting thoughts, which are themselves objects of experience (Taylor, 1996). Radical empiricism was James’s solution to problematical aspects of materialistic and idealistic monisms. Whereas the former ignores or rationalizes mental realms, the latter intellectualizes physical realms. Thus, radical empiricism was James’s attempt at legitimating genuine experience-as-experienced, including “pure experience” – that is to say, awareness in the immediate moment before the differentiation of subject and object, as viable study topics in psychology and philosophy. Alan Watts, too, expressed radically empirical metaphysics. Three examples will suffice, all of which critically reference logical positivist philosophy and scientific empiricism. Watts (1953) rejoined the positivists’ conclusion that logical analyses of metaphysical statements reveal mere tautological gibberish. Their conclusion, in Watts’ view, does not eliminate the “common human feeling” that “existence, consciousness, or ‘Reality’” are metaphysically perplexing issues (p. 137). Watts (1956/ 1994) likewise suggested that positivist frames of reference, including operational definitions of movements and behaviors, result in a “vast net of abstractions” concealing as much as they reveal about empirical data. Watts contended that knowing phenomena only in terms of artificially limited frames such as operational definitions is a “hollow” comprehension “almost exactly like what Indian philosophy means by maya, the idea that all such knowledge is in some sense an illusion” (p. 18). Thus, suggested Watts (1975), philosophers entrapped in rationalism may renew their “basic wondering” or “wonder at being” by moving beyond language via what he variously called “interior empiricism,” “contemplative mysticism” (p. 194), and “idealess contemplation” (p. 197). Varela likewise adopted radically empirical departure points for neurophenomenological research, understanding that neither objectively derived neuro-correlates nor purely theoretical propositions effectively comprehend qualia or ineffable conscious experience. Rather, he focused scientific attention on exploring systematically the single link of mind and consciousness seemingly discernable and natural – the structure of human experience itself. For Varela, scientific research needed to be complemented with detailed phenomenological investigations of human experience as lived and articulated in the first person. Instead of positing extra ingredients accounting for emergences of consciousness from matter and the brain, Varela found meaningful bridges between these two irreducible phenomenal domains via applications of Husserl’s

Alan Watts and Neurophenomenology  49 phenomenological epoche to subjective experiences which, “at the same time, are sufficiently intersubjective to serve as constructive counterparts for external analysis” (Varela, 1996, p. 341). Embodied Cognition Watts’ writings on interplays of cognition and bodily processes span at least three domains of knowledge, including erotic experience (e.g., 1958a/ 1991), psychedelic experience (e.g., 1960/ 1973c), and self-experience (e.g., 1963, 1966/ 1989). The emphasis here is on the third domain, particularly Watts’ (1963) description of Gestalt-perceptual “selves” as greater than skin-encased egos; rather, people are organism–environment matrices. Watts further elaborated his description of the organism– environment matrix in The Book (1966/ 1989): Our knowledge of the world is, in one sense, self-knowledge. For knowing is a translation of external events into bodily processes, and especially into states of the nervous system and the brain; we know the world in terms of the body, and in accordance with its structure. (p. 100) Yet simultaneously: “the total environment evokes the organism. The total environment (or situation) is both spatial and temporal, both larger and longer than the organisms contain in its field” (p. 104). People are not only individual members of a biosphere, but also structures “of such fabulous ingenuity” calling “the whole universe into being” (p. 105). Subsequently drawing on Pribram’s holographic theory, Watts (1973a) suggested that brains are not merely reflecting external worlds, but instead create and select forms and patterns functioning as dissipative structures, decreasing uncertain visual perception. Thus the Jamesian stream of consciousness was, for Watts (1958a/ 1991), a Mobius strip, twisting back upon itself (pp. 20–21). While memory-stored sensory streams are means by which people perceive their egos, they only enable a feeling that behind thought there was a thinker and behind knowledge a knower. The individual standing aside a changing panorama of experience to order and control was, in Watts’ view, an imaginative fallacy. As Watts (1966/ 1989) wrote: In the act of putting everything at a distance so as to describe and control it, we have orphaned ourselves both from the surrounding world and from our own bodies – leaving “I” as a discontented and alienated spook, anxious, guilty, unrelated, and alone. (p. 105) Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) likewise argued that cognitive science did not distinguish ideas of “self” from actual bases of their

50  Susan Gordon representation, which involve individuals grasping after egos, nor did it take seriously its own findings of the lack of self, rooted in the absence of disciplined methods for examining human experience before neurophenomenology. Watts and Varela would certainly have concurred that knowledge resulted from ongoing subjective interpretations emerging from capacities of understanding rooted in structures of biological embodiment that are enacted within domains of consensual action and cultural history. “Embodiment” refers to bodily aspects of human subjectivity: the biological and physical presences of bodies as vital experiential perquisites for emotion, language, thought, and social interaction. It provides a systematic and dynamical framework for understanding how a cognitive self—a mind—can arise amidst an organism’s operational cycles of internal regulation and outgoing sensorimotor coupling (Rudrauf, Lutz, Cosmelli, Lachaux, & Le van Quyen, 2003). The term “enactivism,” initially proposed by Varela, et al. (1991), marks a cognitive science paradigm originating in Maturana’s (1975) biology research program (see also Maturana, Varela, & Uribe, 1974). Enactivism merged ideas that: (1) living beings are autonomous agents generating and maintaining identities, thereby enacting or bringing forth their own cognitive domains; (2) nervous systems, as autonomous systems, generate and maintain coherent and meaningful activity patterns according to their operation as circular and re-entrant sensorimotor networks of interacting neurons; (3) nervous systems do not process information in the computationalist sense, but create meaning; (4) cognitions are embodied actions (cognitive structures emerge from recurrent sensorimotor patterns of perception and action). Thus, the worlds of cognitive beings are not pre-specified, external realms, represented internally by brains, but relational enactments by autonomous agents and person–environment couplings (Thompson, 2005). Emergent self-making processes are grounded in fundamentally recursive activities characterizing lived experience: autopoiesis at the biological level, temporalization and self-reference at the level of conscious experience, and conceptual and narrative construction at the intersubjective level (Thompson, 2007). As Watts would likely agree (e.g., Watts, 1977a, 1977b), this Buddhist-enactive conception of “self” provides a middle path in which streams of experience become self-referential through structures of time-consciousness. Embodied beings are thus pre-reflectively aware of themselves in and through active bodily strivings, while embodied selfknowledge is ongoing and thus never completely grasps its totality. In other words, proprioceptive awareness of bodily aspects of internal human subjectivity makes cognition possible, but perceiving is a doing, rather than merely happening (Noë, 2004). As the enactive approach reveals, perception is not only a brain process, but a whole-person activity. Embodiment thus plays central roles in structuring human experience,

Alan Watts and Neurophenomenology  51 cognition, and action. Individuals are mindful of bodily sensations and have a sense of ownership built into pre-reflective experiential structures not requiring conscious perception or judgment to recognize in awareness or introspection (Gordon, 2013b). As Watts (1958) explored pre-reflectively in relation to Zen Buddhism: “Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life” (p. 18). Watts (1958/ 1991) likewise suggested: “to observe silently, openly, and without seeking any particular result … signifies a mode of direct observation and perception in which there is no duality of seer and seen; there is simply the seeing” (p. 74). This is not a mind empty of content, but a mind empty of mind, in other words, “Satori, the effortless, spontaneous dawning of a realization” (p. 77). Varela (1999) also described the mind as phenomenology in action. Via first-person and third-person perspectives, he situated behavior in a specific cycle of operation where the mind’s locus emerges through distributed processes within its organizational closure. Minds are fluxing patterns in which concrete biophysical beings live. As embodied selves in dynamic equilibrium, we continually emerge in interactions of constituents and interactions of interactions. Varela’s position, like Watts’, remained situated in the irreducible nature of conscious experience. He studied phenomenal experience or lived embodiment from the first-person viewpoints aligned with cognitive and mental events (e.g., attention, time consciousness, body image) representing an irreducible ontological level retaining qualities of immediacy because it played a role in the organism’s structural coherence. Consciousness was thus, for Varela (and Watts), a distributed phenomenon of whole active organisms, not just brains embedded in environments. Rejecting computational–logical views of mind in favor of concrete embodied lived descriptions of its processes, Varela (1992) (and likely Watts) saw the mind as a selfless or a virtual self— “a coherent whole that is nowhere to be found, and yet can provide an occasion for the coordinated activity of neural ensembles” (p. 60). The Specious Present The phrase “specious present” refers to temporal consciousness of the unified cognitive moment, or what James (1890) called “the only fact of our immediate experience” (p. 609). James diagramed the specious present in his chapter on “The Stream of Thought”: If we represent the actual time-stream of our thinking by a horizontal line, the thought of the stream of any segment of its length, past, present, or to come, might be figured in a perpendicular raised upon the horizontal at a certain point. The length of this perpendicular stands for a certain object or content, which in this case is the time

52  Susan Gordon thought of, and which is all thought of together at the actual moment of the stream upon which the perpendicular is raised. (p. 629) James called the specious present “the original paragon and prototype of all conceived time… the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible” (p. 631). Moreover, James found “awareness of change [as] the condition on which our perception of time’s flow depends” (p. 620), and posited relationships between bare phenomena or immediately known things, and changing brain states cognizant of objects. He argued that the entire brain process is the state of consciousness, the soul, a medium upon which these processes combine their effects, but how or why no mortal may ever know. Alan Watts writes of the specious present – the here-and-now – in theological, anthropological, and phenomenological terms. Theologically, Watts (1950/ 1965) writes of time and eternity vis-à-vis the Absolute (God) and relative (humanity). Anthropologically, Watts (1958/ 1991) writes of nonhistorical, traditional societies focusing not on futures or pasts, but the present-tense or, alluding to T. S. Elliot, “the still point of the turning world” (p. 16) of seasonal cycles and rotations (see Gordon, 2012). Phenomenologically, Watts (1958/ 1991; see also 1977b) identified psychological time as ungrasping, unhurrying interchanges of senses with their objects: deep inward consents to be and feel what we are at every moment; ordinary minds being the present given states of consciousness, whatever their nature. Through this sense that everything is Tao, “one is thereby initiated from the world of clock time to the world of real time, in which events come and go of themselves in unforced succession—timed by themselves, and not by the mind” (p. 205). Watts phenomenologically described the mystical here-and-now as an immersion of self in the world; the immediate present experience was IT – the entire reason for the existence of a universe (Watts, 1960/ 1973b, 1960/ 1973c). Like breath rising and falling or seasons coming and going, all things are constant processes arising, forming, and dissolving. Illusions and distortions, caused by belief in fictional egos bent on fortification and justification of selves, prevent recognizing the harmonious unity underlying and pervading all of life. Watts saw eternity as now, and in the light of unrepressed vision, individual and world constituted the divine realm. Thus, life was not going anywhere, because it was already there. As Watts (1958) so eloquently stated vis-à-vis Zen Buddhism by way of James’ stream of consciousness: Zen is an immediate contact with life, a joining of “self” and “life” into so close a unity and rhythm that the distinction between the two is forgotten. Here, the isolated “self” no longer wishes to grasp at the things which flow by in the stream of events, for it goes forward

Alan Watts and Neurophenomenology  53 with the stream and becomes one with it, realizing that all things are but waves in this stream and that to try to clutch hold of them is to make them disappear. (p. 121) Varela’s (1999) neurophenomenological study of time-consciousness recognized the value of Husserl’s phenomenological bracketing for elucidating the neurodynamics of temporal appearance using an enactive or embodied approach with two complimentary aspects: (1) ongoing person-world coupling and (2) autonomous activity based on emerging, endogenous configurations or self-organizing autopoietic patterns of neuronal activity. Varela found converging conclusions in Husserl and James (and as I suggest, Watts) regarding a paradox of human temporal experience: “on the one hand, there is the present as a unity, an aggregate, our abode in basic consciousness, and on the other hand, this moment of consciousness is inseparable from a flow, a stream…” (pp. 268–269). Varela (1999) illustrated how “lived time” is not physical-computational, but existential-phenomenological. He spoke of “remembrance” as an entree to time-flow via emotion, affect, and mood. While intended objects are centers of attention, there also are contextualizing peripheries (the Jamesian “margin”) of embodied experience. The fringe, although not intended (Husserl), was enlivened by remembrance (pp. 290–291). Through neurophenomenological analysis, Varela proposed a “fourfold structure of nowness” with a basic center/fringe structure: (1) static constitution (the past), (2) genetic constitution (immanent temporalization of self-motion and directed intentionality relative to position in phase space), and (3) spatial (the role of the center-periphery at the core of temporalization). The fringe (4) reappears in the preconscious, affective substrate and the conscious, embodied ego as awareness of emotional change in the other.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have placed Alan Watts within the phenomenological lineage of Humanistic Psychology, summarized Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenological research project, and suggested radically empirical intersections of Watts and Varela vis-à-vis embodied cognition and the specious present. The remaining space allows for only brief concluding remarks as follows: Watts’ expertise with non-Western epistemologies such as Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism is well known and needs no elaboration here. Yet the phenomenological quality of his work is only now being recognized (Columbus, 2012; Rice, 2012), including, as demonstrated above, Watts’ phenomenology-based neuro-philosophy anticipating and relating to Verela’s neurophenomenology. Neurophenomenology “represents the culmination and integration of a long line of alternative,

54  Susan Gordon nonreductive and holistic approaches to biology and cognitive neuroscience” (Robbins & Gordon, 2015, p. 207), including Goethe’s holistic biology, James’ functionalism, Von Uexkull’s phenomenological ethology, Goldstein’s holistic neuroscience, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological comportment. Watts’ own neuro-philosophy, I suggest, belongs to this ancestry. Speaking in the first person about contemporary neuroscience views of embodiment, Guy Claxton (2013) said: “Through the body I am deeply ecological, profoundly and ceaselessly in conversation with the physical and social milieu in which I am embedded (and from which I continuously arise)” (Puplis section, para. 1). That Watts himself was articulating this contemporary understanding more than a half-century ago reflects his neuro-philosophical prescience.

Acknowledgment Reprinted from Self & Society: An International Journal for Humanistic Psychology, 43(4), 311–321. Used by permission of The Association for Humanistic Psychology in Britain.

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5 Alan Watts and the Infinite Game Playing Everything Nathan L. Hulsey

This chapter deals with two different notions of a playful world. The first is a society where technology can make humanity happy and profitable via digital gameplay. The second, Alan Watts’ version, encourages a type of interplay with “the world” where humanity must convene with the present, as it reveals itself, without an attempt at an artificial division of what should have been and what should be. Rather, we should play along with the present as we would with an instrument, a hobby, or a good friend (Watts, 1995b). Watts’ vision of free play brings up ambiguous definitions of play, as the present can deal out good or bad hands – as the Alan Parson’s Project put it in their song “The Turn of a Friendly Card.” While Watts’ playful approach is to look at current situations, even bad ones, with a lusory attitude, digital gameplay is all about predicting contingencies and striving for optimal future outcomes. To help unravel these two forms of play, I will turn to the concepts of “ambiguous play” (SuttonSmith, 1997) and “infinite games” (Carse, 1987). Sutton-Smith (1997) notes that ambiguous play takes many forms and requires players to accept suffering and loss for the sake of gameplay (meaning play does not always produce positive outcomes). Carse (1987) notes that there are two types of games: finite games that focus on winning and losing, and infinite games that require players to acknowledge and accept constant change, as the only rules in an infinite game are ones that keep players playing. What is unique is that digital gameplay’s version of a playful world and Watts’ play cosmology both acknowledge play’s ambiguity and encourage players toward a type of infinite game. However, I argue that a playful technocracy differs greatly from Watts’ ludic cosmos. To examine both, we will look at Watts’ concept of “play” (difficult as it is to pin down) and “interplay” in some detail, and then I will rudely press both up against the humming black mirror of technology. The reason is simple: the world is becoming more game-like due to widespread technological applications – a process known as gamification (Burke, 2014; Chapin, 2011; Deterding, 2012; deWinter & Kocurek, 2014). Many of these purveyors of a gamified future endorse Watts’ (1995c) idea of

58  Nathan L. Hulsey “work as play” as an argument for a more ludic world (Coonradt, 2007; Hulsey, 2016; Suits, 1978). However, does the process of gamification, driven by technology, coincide with Watts’ conceptualization of play? In short, can play and technology exist in a nondualist format? What are the possibilities for humans to find a playful “center” in the present while using devices that are oriented around simulative models of possible futures? It should be noted early on that when I refer to “games” and “gameplay,” I am referring to the digital variety, exclusively reliant on digitally rendered or enhanced spaces to engage the player. These games exist in a simulative context, reliant on coded mechanics to produce ludic contingencies (Malaby, 2007; Voorhees, 2013). As such, they raise an interesting question: is digital gameplay part of Watts’ playful world, or does it disrupt the type of “free-play” Watts describes. The questions that arise bring technology, specifically simulative gameplay, into sharp relief with spiritual, lusory attitudes espoused by Watts. In short, both Watts and proponents of gamification are proposing two types of what Richard D. Williams (1972) describes as “playful theologies,” where ludic activities form a sort of psychological or spiritual wellspring of positivity. However, positivity itself is also ambiguous, and should be examined closely in light of the West’s nascent technocracy. Recently, scholars and industry leaders have noted that we are going through a “gameful” revolution (Deterding, 2014; Zimmerman, 2014). Games and game design are increasingly being integrated into workplaces and educational settings with the intent to improve engagement and reduce stress through the process of gamification (Fuchs, 2014; Kapp, 2012; McGonigal, 2011; Nicholson, 2012). On the surface, a gameful world seems like a good thing. Play should be an integral part of life, and play is integral to games. Watts (1966/ 1989, 1995c) noted that a playful cosmology was needed in order to survive rampant consumerism and the dehumanization of labor that began with the industrial revolution. The all-encompassing web of labor and consumption has only grown more intensive with the introduction of computational networks. We now live in an always-on society. Gamification is seen as a silver-bullet for the stress of living in the twenty-first century (McGonigal, 2011; Schell, 2014). On the surface, Watts’ philosophy supports this notion – we should treat life as a ludic activity. His unique vision of play in everyday life presents games and play as positive and productive forces. For Watts, play gives meaning to life, yet it is often discouraged and overlooked in favor of quotidian ideals of labor. For Watts (1966/ 1989), play (or perhaps “interplay”) holds the world together, with life as an ever-changing game of “hide-and-seek.” Indie game designer David O′Reilly’s recent simulation game Everything explores Watts’ conceptualization of life -through-play (Doublefine, 2017). However, Everything also introduces a problem: digital games, specifically, engender a certain type of technologized and simulative gameplay. As

Alan Watts and the Infinite Game  59 many critics and players note, Everything is playful, but it is not necessarily “a game.” It focuses on free-play, asking players to interact and inhabit the world, experiencing as many points-of-view as possible. There is no end-state, no points, and no progression in Everything. In Everything players are invited to be free and experience life’s diversity, from small to large, with no direct restraints or rules. The philosophy of James P. Carse (1987) would describe Everything as an “infinite game”: any enablement or constraint is designed to ensure that play can continue with no end. Upon completion of a smaller universe in Everything, larger ones continue to expand (Grayson, 2017). The concept of infinite games and a playful cosmology are clear, and Watts’ philosophy drives the design and mechanics of Everything. But, can digital games, which are necessarily simulative, truly coincide with Watts’ vision of a world at play? Problems abound, it seems. While Everything seeks to be a teaching tool for Watts’ playful cosmology, what about gamification, a process that also seeks non-playful ends for the gameful world, namely increased profit and production? This essay explores the possibility that the “gameful revolution” is, in fact, not playful at all. Free play, the kind that Watts sees as most beneficial, is being eclipsed in a culture that is obsessed with what Carse (1987) calls the “finite game”: a game where rules are in place to ensure that someone wins. These finite outcomes are driven by rewards, points, competition, and status. Using Watts’ and Carse’s work, I advance the idea that, while games are becoming everyday experiences, they are also drifting away from Watts’ vision of nondualist, joyful play and all of the benefits it can give. This chapter uses a combination of Watts’ work, scholarship on Watts, and work done by ludologists, media studies scholars, and technologists. In our opening act we will look at what happens to Watts’ work when turned into a “game,” or perhaps a “non-game” depending on the opinion. I also question Watts’ influence on those currently creating our gamified realities. Second, we will take a deep look at the difference between simulation and games as languages of conditionality, not languages of the here and now (Myers, 1999, 2006, 2017). As a result, we will compare these technical evaluations to Watts’ deconstruction of the modern ego via living and playing in a nondualist interpretation of “the present.” As Watts (1960/ 2011a) points out: The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention. It’s like the radar on a ship. The radar on a ship is a troubleshooter ... conscious attention is a designed function of the brain to scan the environment, like a radar does … But if you identify yourself with your troubleshooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety. (p. 40)

60  Nathan L. Hulsey This becomes important when we view digital gameplay (and simulation) as a constant process of navigating contingencies and outcomes. Finally, we will look at the unfortunate marriage taking place between Watts’ philosophy and the current philosophies dominating the gameful world. These are two spouses that are, like so many, destined for a troubled marriage. One looks to all possible conditions and futures, while another accepts, and loves, one unfolding reality. In conclusion we will return to the concept of an infinite game from both perspectives: Watts’ cosmic interplay and gamification’s infinite simulation.

Watts as a Game: A Critique of Everything David O’Reilly and the game publisher Doublefine describe Everything’s Watts-based adventure as both a “simulation” and a “game” (Doublefine, 2017). This distinction will be important later in this chapter, but for now it simply serves as a description of how Everything plays (pun intended). To keep some scholarly distance, I have chosen to use reviews of the Everything game rather than my own experiences. Primarily, I pull from a highly personal and emotional review of Everything written by Nathan Grayson (2017), a game journalist for Kotaku, a premier video-game culture website. He described Everything as a simulative game where the goal is simply to inhabit and explore different forms of “being” while forging or finding connections: You can take control of every object in the game world, from ants and buildings to solar systems and subatomic particles. You explore until you decide it’s time to pop into a different body. Then you explore some more. Initially, it comes off as aimless and repetitive. You wander infinitely-expanding maps, cataloging each new thing you leap into via a wide range of categories like “plant,” “animal,” and “space junk.” There’s not a ton to it, and it’s difficult to discern a goal beyond experiencing the objects the game lets you inhabit and listening to the thoughts of select NPCs [nonplayer characters]. (n.p.) Grayson (2017) decides to play Everything on a rainy night, caught in a deep depression from a failed romantic relationship; he is struggling with connecting with his friends, his family, his work, and the world: I thought about how my romantic life was in shambles, the world was in the toilet, and due to what I feared was a severe physical injury, I needed to isolate myself and heal. “Fuck everything” was basically where my head was at. (n.p.)

Alan Watts and the Infinite Game  61 Drunk, depressed, and alone he decides to escape into an adventure, and Everything was on his list of things to review. In short, Grayson wanted to opt out of his current ego, and opt out of the present state of the world. To begin with, this notion of “leaving” the world for another one is an important aspect of digital gaming – escaping the dreary quotidian realm for a ludic space where the rules are clearly expressed and self-contained with various types of reward mechanics (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003). However, this doesn’t mean that play and games don’t have meaning or exert a force in the quotidian realm. Recent game studies scholarship has rejected the idea that gameplay – the act of playing a (digital) game – is a restricted state of being or action. Currently, game scholars believe that Huizinga’s (1950) impenetrable “magic circle” that enshrines and contains gameplay to a bounded state is not entirely accurate. Games and play exert power in the greater social and cultural spheres, and this is especially true of digital gameplay (Consalvo, 2009). In the case of digital games, there is a transition of self-awareness toward a simulative, designed experience where player, technology, and game are ensconced in a set of power relations rotating around an “economy of desire that operates between the player and the game” (Taylor, Bergstrom, Jenson, & de Castell, 2015). These relations take form via elements such as narrative, visuals, technology, space, pleasure, and attention. The “economy” of gameplay is, in a sense, a transition to a mode of instrumentality for the player, a type of technologically enhanced gameplay inviting the player to be a willing instrument of the technology running the game (Dovey & Kennedy, 2006). Instrumental gameplay serves as a mode of control sitting at the “nexus of structures of domination and individual agency” (Voorhees, 2013, p. 17). Digital gameplay is a type of willing, seductive, but often contentious negotiation between humans and ludic technologies. Instrumentality entails a type of submission to the game’s mechanics its unique technical protocols of belief and behavior. In short, digital games often do not invite a type of free “interplay” between players and technology. This is not necessarily a dystopian state, as the players themselves enjoy competition, effort, and stress in “non-parodoxical” ways; Bernard Suits (1978) compares the struggle of gameplay as the race to a mutual orgasm between two well-matched sexual partners – a willing partnership to a mutually agreed-upon ending. Similarly, James P. Carse (1987) refers to control-oriented games, where challenges and completion are placed front-and-center, as finite games oriented around power, status, and a defined end-state of success or failure. Already, computational gameplay seems to hold a bit of dissonance with Watts’ interpretation of play and games. However, Everything, in keeping with Watts’ conception of free play (or complete engagement in the task at hand without regard to ego) attempts to avoid the control-centric design

62  Nathan L. Hulsey of most games – it doesn’t reward or punish in any traditional sense. As Grayson (2017) pointed out, “there’s not a lot to it.” However, as he continued exploring the simulative world of Everything, reward mechanics slowly revealed themselves: Over time, however, Everything peels back its simplistic trappings. Some of its layers are mechanical (via new skills you unlock), while others are philosophical. The game reveals itself to be an exuberant celebration of connections, of the ties that bind the universe together … I could be anything I wanted to, but I couldn’t tell what it was building to. I felt isolated, unsure what the point of it all was. Everything takes ideas that would normally make us feel small and insignificant and argues that we should be emboldened by them. (n.p.) However, Grayson (2017) notes that his initial dislike of the game was based in his own cynicism: The universe is massive and untamable, sprawling and intricate. By jumping from object to object, Everything shows how amazing it is that we exist at all given the sheer number of ways things could have turned out. Everything is essential … Here I was, with a front row seat to these artfully rendered miracles of existence … and I couldn’t turn away my impulse to detach. (n.p.) He states that he mostly ignored objects and creatures the he wasn’t in control of. His cynicism was based in the expectation of some type of reward, a finite rush, a state of agonistic power relations. Everything aims to disrupt the notion of gameplay as a power struggle, and its key mechanics of inhabiting everyday objects, living and non-living, provide the player with a loop of seemingly infinite connections. A key aspect of Watts’ playful cosmology is the concept of “nondualism,” the sense that everything is connected, or to be more precise: “the multiplicity of the universe is reducible to one essential reality” (Espín & Nickoloff, 2007, p. 963). For Watts, the cosmos is constantly at play with itself, evoking a “theology of play” that centers on the ludic nature of “the world” in which “play becomes a wandering purposelessness, a ‘letting-be’ and a ‘waiting-upon’ the future … Life is meant to be enjoyed as a game, as the earthly foreplay which brings into being … the utopian world of play in ‘the here and now’” (Williams, 1972, p.  105). Everything’s mechanics work to simulate this idea of “letting-be” and “waiting-upon” by allowing the player to give up agency in how the game plays. Grayson (2017) stumbled on this mechanic when “in real life” he “got up to use the bathroom” and when he returned he was “in hell.”

Alan Watts and the Infinite Game  63 He points that, “by default, Everything sort of plays itself if you leave it alone for long enough.” In his absence his perspective in the game had shifted to a bottle of wine, and all around him was “a neon nightmare.” All around, pieces of “junk” floated around the “acid-washed wasteland.” They were either stuck in the past or desperate and bitterly concerned for the future. The junk said things like “I hate this place and I hate you,” “I never called him, and now I’ll never get to,” and “I wish I’d been better to my parents.” All encouraging messages of connectedness were gone, replaced with a dialogue of “isolation, regret or hate” (Grayson, 2017). Grayson found he was trapped in this negative space, obsessed with past and future. “The worst part? I couldn’t leave. When I tried to ascend to a higher location, a text prompt told me I wasn’t going anywhere.” He had to carefully explore and navigate the negative space, forge connections and ascend again into the playful cosmos he had started in. This negative space is Watts’ version of the modern ego stuck in a double bind, which “arises when an agent encounters contradictory instructions for behavior, and at the same time is prevented from realizing or dealing with the paradox” (Smith, 2010, p. 24). The negative junk that Grayson couldn’t escape were caught in a situation where they felt called or compelled to do something, but were intentionally or unintentionally prevented by circumstance, leaving their ego bruised and bitter. Watts’ example of the double bind is the command “Thou shalt love” any number of things such as god, your neighbor, or your parents (Watts, 1969). David Smith (2010) points out that genuine love is spontaneous rather than coerced. “To act on the commandment, however, is to act unspontaneously. The paradox is thus clear and inescapable: to acknowledge that one is under a commandment to love is to be unable to fulfill it” (p. 24). Our unfulfilled needs and desires, in concert with the tenets of modern society, leave our egos bruised and alienated. Smith (2010) states: Uncomfortably aware of this alienation, we make efforts to complete ourselves, to bring the world closer. However, because of our objectifying habits of thought, the things and experiences with which we try to make up for our lack are themselves objectified, isolated, and unreal. We cannot cure our condition by means of a symptom of the disease. And so our pursuit of satisfaction is endless. (p. 29) Grayson’s (2017) trip out of hell is a gameplay puzzle demonstrating the double bind. He writes: Cutting yourself off from the outside world can seem like a good idea in the short term, but it’s rarely wise. The broken souls in

64  Nathan L. Hulsey Everything’s rendition of hell had trapped themselves in prisons of their own designs. They convinced themselves they’d solved their problems, or that they didn’t have problems at all, and then they paid for it. (n.p.) The way out of the double bind in Everything was to, once again, become immersed into the intricate dance of connection, exploration and spontaneity that Grayson experienced when he began the game. In order to get out of “hell,” Grayson (2017) had to play again. He had to regain a sense of immersion in the immediacy of gameplay. This immersive aspect of Everything reveals its direct connection to Watts’ playful cosmology and also reveals it as a sort of teaching simulation. Grayson’s (2017) road out of hell involved dancing between the consciousnesses of objects. The solution mirrors Watts’ (1951/ 2011b) notion of immersive play exactly: “[Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting anywhere. You go round and round, but not under the illusion that you are pursuing something, or fleeing from the jaws of hell” (p. 127). Or, as Smith (2010) put it: “life is an activity whose end is in itself, whose value is intrinsic rather than instrumental” (p. 27). The key word here is “instrument,” and it leads us to a key issue with Everything. Everything follows the same strictures of other digital games, the internal logics of the game, its mechanics, still compel the player to do something or learn something or find something. Everything, aspires to avoid the raw instrumentality of other games, but it cannot transcend completely. While the game may be a good teaching tool, Grayson (2017) had to, admittedly, become an instrument of the gameplay. Leaving it alone and unattended, it “played itself” into a negative situation, a mechanic aimed at keeping the player engaged in the economy of desire that digital games offer. Everything, as a “Watts simulator,” is an interesting case of gameplay. But it does not, and cannot escape the trappings of digital gameplay’s tangle of power relations and technologized instrumentality. This is an important point, considering the growing idea that introducing game mechanics and ludic protocol into applications serving labor and consumerism will lead to some sort of release from Watts’ account of the tortured ego trapped by modern life’s double bind. The next section explores why digital games, especially, are not the type of “life-as-play” Watts references, nor do they necessarily fall into the type of “play theology” proponents of gamification preach. Largely, this lies in the nature of computing, and the paradoxes of simulation and games. Increasingly, it seems that in our networked society the marriage of play and games is becoming increasingly fraught with issues linked to the current dominance of simulative technologies such as networked computing, mobile applications, and surveillance.

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Unfortunate Marriages in the Gameful World Digital Games are “dynamic and recursive,” meaning that they reproduce their visual and logical form over time and space, but they also are encoded with patterns for change, a branching set of ever-changing contingencies. So, digital gameplay embeds the desire for control of optimal contingencies and outcomes alongside the possibility for alternate paths. Finite gaming, for the most part, involves an intensive focus on forwardthinking and strategic backtracking. Malaby (2007) writes that games are a series of processes that constitute contrived contingencies. A series of outcomes that are guided and constructed through the mechanics and logics of the game. Contrived contingencies rely on a false sense of open-endedness generated through the player’s subjective interpretation. “Contingencies” represent “that which could have been otherwise” (Malaby, 2007, p. 106). Malaby states that the “fundamental quality of multilayered contingency … allows [games] both to mimic and constitute everyday experience” (p. 107). The “contrived” nature of contingency is based in the simulative nature of digital games. It suggests that games are sequentially ordered and disordered, prompting the player to be caught, simultaneously, in a state of planning and action. Contrived contingencies created through ludic processes are not aimed to “reduce unpredictability across cases” (Malaby, 2007, p. 105). Instead, the game mechanics that produce these manifold paths “are about contriving and calibrating multiple contingencies to produce a mix of predictable and unpredictable outcomes” (p. 106). This version of gameplay seems somewhat divorced from Watts’ “hide-and-seek” cosmology, in which the ego must become eclipsed by requirements and callings of past and future; for Watts, play is truly in the moment, not distributed across a matric of strategic, computationally generated contingencies. Watts (1995c) uses the example of shooting an arrow into the air as a mode of free play: What I like most of all is to set an arrow free like a bird. It climbs high into the sky, then suddenly turns and drops … We are delighted by it because it's not useful. It doesn't really achieve anything that we would call purposive work. It is simply what we call play. But in our culture we make an extremely rigid division between work and play ... This is a most ridiculous division. Everything that we do. However tough it is, however strenuous, can be turned into the same kind of play as shooting an arrow into the sky. (pp. 85–86) However, gameplay, in a computational sense, doesn’t hold the same set of open outcomes as “seeing where the arrow lands.” Malaby (2007)

66  Nathan L. Hulsey points out that “the contrivance of these sources of unpredictability is achieved through various modes of control” which include: the architectural (encompassing the gamut of relatively non-negotiable and concrete constraints, from physical layout and landscape to the implicit code of online games), the cultural (the set of practices and expectations that are often implicit and taken for granted), and the economic (the familiar constraints of the market in all its forms). (p. 106) Digital games are distinctive in that they generate sets of seemingly “new” events in a limited computational environment. Despite this clear nexus of closed-ended generativity, scholars and designers who support gamification and the creation of a gameful world assume that utilizing contrived contingency will somehow relieve the stress generated by labor and the need to support a consumer society (Burke, 2014; Coonradt, 2007; McGonigal, 2011; Ruffino, 2014; Zicherman & Cunningham, 2011). Jane McGonigal (2011) envisions a current society where “reality is broken” by the stressors of modern life, the increasing mental and emotional demands on laborers and the shallow rewards of consumerism. In short, proponents of gamification see a world more like the Wattsian vision, where tasks pleasantly seem to flow by and playfulness is encouraged, if not required. The concept of “flow,” proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly (1990), is a positive psychology concept reminiscent of (and most likely influenced by) Eastern philosophy that focuses on a psychological state where time and space fall away and the task at hand becomes fully and joyfully engrossing. It closely mirrors Alan Watts’ (1995b, 1995c) idea of removing one’s ego from the flow of causality and focusing on the present moment through playful experience. Play is also central to Csikszentmihaly’s (1990) idea of an “optimal experience” where one achieves a sense of being caught up in a playful immersion with the world-at-hand. McGonigal (2011) cites that playful flow-like experience is key in repairing a broken reality. Large-scale, positive social and psychological change requires a playful world, a ludic cosmology rendered through large-scale gamification. She states that networked games and gamification “optimize human experience” through staying connected and “feeling better about our best effort.” She continues: game designers help us “achieve a state of blissful productivity” by employing mechanics to provide “clear, actionable goals and vivid results” (chap. 2). Yet the gameful world is built on the back of a particular type of play, one that is simulative and digitally mediated. The issue here doesn’t necessarily lie with digital games, but with the type of gameplay they encourage. As we will see in the next section, these problems arise from, on one hand, the nature of simulation and

Alan Watts and the Infinite Game  67 the simulative, and on the other the way these are used to drive labor and consumption in a way that makes the double bind Watts warned about ever-present and more difficult to escape. Digital games, as Nick Yee (2006) points out, “train a player to work harder while still enjoying it. And most games …employ elaborate designs that derive from principles in behavioral conditioning” (p. 70). Games encourage instrumentalism, so that “the same way that TiVO trains us to become better TV watchers, video games train us to become more industrious game workers” through the “timing and layering of reward mechanisms” (p. 70). Not all games do this, of course. Physical games like Tag, Hide-and-Seek and Red Rover encourage physical and social play focusing on fluid, negotiated rules centered on the exploration of the self and environment. One could say that Everything also encourages exploration of the self and the environment, but that exploration is driven by simulative technology and instrumental gameplay. As Grayson (2017) noted, he got better at making in-game patterns and connections as the simulative environment pushed against him, training him to forge ahead through the vast, programed gameworld Everything provided. Miguel Sicart (2018) notes that the act of using computers engenders “quixotic play”: a type of playfulness where users experience play as either submission or resistance to computational protocol. Computation and simulation are processes of “transforming information” through “generative structures” of code-generated protocol (Denning & Martell, 2015). Generativity describes what computers do with information by creating, testing, and combining ontological categories. Sicart (2018) states that “computers can be understood as instruments for playful production and consumption. User interfaces, feedback systems, and entertainment forms based on play are taking over the computing machine to envelop its powers in a friendly, playful discourse” (p. 250). He continues that we increasingly “delegate tasks to computers, and the interfaces to these machines have become more and more interactively and aesthetically playful” (p. 250). Understanding how play embeds into computing can help us understand why the hybrid form of play and labor - playbor - exists, and why it is important as a simultaneous source of submission and resistance. So, computational play is “Quixotean play” – Don Quixote lived in a world of fantasy, but it is not “his world of fantasy, it is not his construction, his settings, his desires driving that world” (Sicart, 2018, p. 260). Quixote’s playful reontologization of the world is a response to the boredom of quotidian life, or perhaps his own escape from the ego’s double bind. His lusory madness “thrives in the clash between reality and the imaginative recreation of it” (Sicart, 2018, p. 260). So Quixotean play serves as a negotiation tactic: “play capable of engaging with and appropriating reality” even while reality “resists such appropriation” (Sicart, 2018, p. 260). This type of play is inherent in all digital games, players must negotiate

68  Nathan L. Hulsey with simulative environments and computational protocol. Willing submission lies at the heart of instrumental play. Instrumentality is simultaneously a surrender to protocol and a resistance to being controlled completely. Sicart (2018) states: To play with computers is to establish a relationship of submission and resistance—submission to the ontologizing process enforced by computation (the world created and upheld by the computer), and resistance to it (by developing new rules, interpretations, and contextual appropriations of that very reality allowed by the computer). (pp. 261–262) This concept of submission to computational protocol has been with computing since the early days of cybernetics and is ensconced within the philosophy of using digital devices to solve social problems. Far from a type of “letting-go” that Watts encourages, digital play takes hold through reward and punishment dealt out through the game’s mechanics and asks the player to appropriate this new world for doses of pain and pleasure, doled out by the design of the game itself. This is especially true of gamified applications, which thrive of using game mechanics associated with digital gambling games, or games of chance. For example, gamified rideshare applications like Lyft and Uber use gambling-based mechanics to drive increased production, or the amount of time a driver spends taking fares (Mason, 2018; Olyslager, 2017; Rosenblat & Stark, 2016; Scheiber, 2017). Dow Schull (2012) calls the fraught relationship between gambling and games a type of “asymmetric collusion” (p. 76), which oscillates between the digital games and their players. The lusory relationship is “forged not through coercion, but through a kind of collusion between the structures and functions of the machine and the cognitive, affective, and bodily capacities of the gambler.” The game’s mechanics require willing participation, and turning “from coercion to collusion” fits with Gilles Deleuze’s concept of a control society, “a ‘mutation of capitalism’ in which a logic of discipline and restriction has given way to a logic of control whose protocol is the regulation of continuous and flowing movement of bodies, affects, and capital” (as cited in Dow Schull, 2012, p. 76). Watts’ (1995a) view of technology also echoes Deleuze’ and Dow Schull’s concerns. He states: “The object of our technology is to control the world, to have a superelectronic pushbutton universe, where we can get anything we want, fulfill any desires simply by pushing a button” (p. 62). This type of fascination with Pavlovian tactics of control—tactics directly in conflict with Watts’ conceptualization of games and play – has fascinated cyberneticists since the beginnings of computation and simulation. I would be remiss if I did not note this playful theology that is highly dissonant with Watts’ version of a playful world.

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Simulation, Games and the Turn of a Friendly Card Watts (1995a) seems ambivalent about the ethos of science and technology; on one hand, he recognizes advances in certain types of knowledge. On the other, he also warns about the ambivalence of technology toward human love, spirituality, and the playfulness needed to actualize both. His key concerns with technology mirrored those of the continental philosopher Gilles Deleuze – who was writing in the same timeframe as Watts. Both were concerned with notions of control. Deleuze (1995) saw a control society as conditioned on computation, the world was shifting increasingly toward “control” of rendered possibilities via simulation, warning against “ultrarapid” and “free-floating” forms of control that impinge on all living and social processes. Watts also saw technology as a mode of procedural control, but one that impinged on individual experience and spiritual freedom. Both Watts and Deleuze saw all life as connected, living processes, although they used different terminology. Deleuze adapted monism to describe the world and its interactions as assemblages, constantly shifting sets of relations identified by their external agencies. For Watts, we live in a nondualist world (Smith, 2010). Watts (1960/ 2011a) states that the reality underneath physical existence, or which really is physical existence … there is no difference between the physical and the spiritual … It’s all process. It isn’t stuff on the one hand and form on the other. It’s just pattern — life is pattern. (p. 41) It is as this notion of “pattern” that we can see Watts’ (1995a) concern with technology as a mode of control – just as he viewed the ego as an internal radar bent on troubleshooting life, technology is also bent on identifying and troubleshooting the patterns of life-energy in the world. He states, rather sardonically, that So if our technology were to succeed completely, and everything were to be under our control, we should eventually say, “We need a new button.” With all these control buttons, we always have to have a button labeled SURPRISE, and just so it doesn't become too dangerous, we'll put a time limit on it—surprise for 15 minutes, for an hour, for a day, for a month, a year, a lifetime. Then, in the end, when the surprise circuit is finished, we'll be back in control and we'll all know where we are. And we'll heave a sigh of relief, but, after a while, we'll press the button labeled SURPRISE once more. (p. 62) So, technology becomes the accomplice to our ego, the troubleshooting tools to control and maintain the optimum amount of randomness,

70  Nathan L. Hulsey reward, and control. Essentially, as an extension of our ego, technology is a way of steering the “process” of life. This becomes important for our look at Watts’ vision of play versus the current movement to gamify our everyday lives with simulative, Quixotean play. Gamification’s central ideology that life-as-play can solve the widespread issues of a globalized consumer capitalism, increasingly focused surveillance, and behavioral prediction stems from an “instrumentarian” approach to social control, a type of “surveillance capitalism” that relies on gathering data to predict the “behavioral futures” of millions, or even billions, of people using networked, mobile, and gamified applications (Zuboff, 2019). Shoshana Zuboff (2019) states: “Instrumentarian power aims to organize, herd, and tune society to achieve a similar social confluence, in which group pressure and computational certainty replace politics and democracy, extinguishing the felt reality and social function of an individualized existence” (p. 21). She also points out that gamification, this notion of a gameful world, directly utilizes the instrumentality of digital gameplay to encourage populations to buy into the pre-conceived contingencies of a simulation-oriented society. What is unique is that while Watts (1995a) was writing and lecturing about a digital “pushbutton universe” (p. 62), cyberneticists were considering the same thing. For example, Claude Shannon and Allen Newell developed a theorem for simulating human problem-solving behavior (Simon & Newell, 1971. Cybeneticists working during the dawn of computational simulation, e.g., Alan Turning, Herbert Simon, Claude Shannon and Norbert Weiner worked to accelerate the beginnings of our current obsession with simulation and modeling. Oddly, Simon had no background in computation. His primary area of research was studying human behavior and decision-making (Heyck, 2008a, 2008b). His interest in machine cognition began with an interest in designing systems and institutions for optimal social control, while still respecting the need for “choices” and “freedoms” of subjects and citizens by designing for “bounded rationality” (Heyck, 2008b; Simon, 1947, 1969; Simon & Newell, 1971). To control and optimize decisions while maintaining multiple contingencies, game design provided a solution to create informational environments that simulated choices while still guiding the system to an optimal end-state (Erickson, 2015). Proper test design protocol for social behavior is to use a trial with actual subjects. However, this is impossible with large-scale social or economic institutions. The best way to ensure that the contingencies work, Simon determined, was to simulate the human subjects (Simon, 1969; Simon & Newell, 1971). That way, all design factors were known before the protocol “went live.” For that to occur, the computers needed to think and learn on a human level in order to steer and predict outcomes for large-scale social simulation and control. This connection between contingency, control, and modeling possible futures is what makes the “gameful world” so different from Watts’

Alan Watts and the Infinite Game  71 rendition of life-as-play. Gamification doesn’t fit with a hide-and-seek cosmology. Rather, it subscribes to the troubleshooting radar, the ego double-bind Watts was concerned with: a constant state of control and the anxiety that comes with it. The psychological and social anxiety that comes along with gamified applications like Facebook, Instagram, and others has been noted by scholars (Goldberg, 2018). As opposed to being fascinated and lost in a moment, gamified applications lock us into a state of anxious labor, an attempt to navigate simulative contingencies to achieve optimal future outcomes while, at the same time, using technology to record and alter past trajectories. I argue that it is the closeness of computational simulations and modeling with digital gameplay that drives a wedge between Watts’ play cosmology and the current state of gamified systems of control. The only thing truly separating games and simulations is the players own lusory experiences. David Myers (2017) points out that games and simulations are similar to two different-butconnected forms of communication, and both are “operating realities” in their own right. Myers states: In order to account … simulations as “operating realities in their own right” – references and referencing within simulations must be capable of reflexivity and, ultimately, self-reference. I have required self-reference to be characteristic of the semiotic system of games; and I would now require it not to be characteristic of the semiotic system of simulations. The simulation must reference something else much more definitively than does the game. (section 8.1, para. 10) Both game and simulation are, essentially, created and parsed through social systems and computational protocol, and both are also, to a degree, self-referential. This means that “games and simulations might function either distinctly or in concert, as the social and cultural occasion warrants and demands” (Myers, 2017, section 8.1, para. 11). Gamification and its gameful world exploit both self and external referentiality. The gameful world employs the simulative aspect of games to reference definitive processes in the quotidian world such as social networking, economic behavior, and labor. Even games like Everything, meant to evoke a playful cosmology, are caught up in forward progression of the player and, if left alone, the universe simply simulates itself (Grayson, 2017). While Everything, and the always-connected, always gameful world it evokes, can evoke a simulative “life-as-play,” it also stands as a testament to the fact that instrumentality and play rarely lead to the free-form fascination and ludic interplay that Watts describes. Rather, our technologically driven gameful world is aimed at predicting and ensuring the turn of a friendly card, not joyfully flipping cards over to see what one finds. Rather than an infinite game

72  Nathan L. Hulsey that takes joy in the subjective “present-ness” of the joyful cosmos and our personal place and experiences within it, gamification is an infinite game that strives to optimize and control through contrived contingency, data harvesting, and simulative modeling. Everything, in a way, illuminates two different play theologies, one that espouses free-form connection and interplay and another that aims to use gameplay as an opiate for social, behavioral, psychological, and economic optimization via digital protocol (Doublefine, 2017; Grayson, 2017). On one hand, Everything uses Watts’ thoughts and lectures as a mechanic to teach, or evoke, certain principles of a playful cosmos. On the other, it is a set of simulative contingencies that require the instrumentality of the player, a willing submission to the game’s protocol. It is a fitting example of the dissonance between two play theologies, one spiritual and the other technical. This is not to say that one ludic theology is utopian while another is dystopian, but it does call into question the ambiguities that arise when we look to play as a means to an end, either spiritual or social.

The Infinite Game: A Conclusion I find it necessary to give a full disclosure of my own “double-bind.” I own hundreds of digital games. I have dumped thousands of hours into them since I was seven years old and got my first gaming system. I custom-built the computer I am writing this chapter on, and it sucks up a large amount of power to render simulative gameworlds at the highest fidelity possible. Perhaps it is because I am so intimate with gaming that I am also aware that my ego is front and center while I am engaged in gameplay. I am proud of my computer and proud of my skills and competitive rankings. I experience what T. L. Taylor (2006) calls “the joys of instrumentality.” Becoming lost in and triumphing over contrived contingencies can, and often does, cause everything but the moment to drop away. However, that moment is often carefully planned, an intensive troubleshooting maneuver that pays off in a dopamine rush. Reading (and playing) Watts’ rendition of a ludic cosmos struck me, as it did Grayson (2017), as something truly different from what is espoused by proponents of gamification and the gameful world. If we look at the ways in which power is distributed in even the most free-form digital worlds, we can see that technological enlightenment and Watts’ rendition of personal enlightenment are two incongruent occurrences of play. Digital gameplay is a practice in instrumentalism while Watts’ playful world urges us to discard the strictures of traditional gameplay. This chapter has only begun to scratch the surface of how the politics and play of enlightenment converge with technology. However, in a world where numerous applications and games promise a sense of mindfulness and freedom, we should continue to dig up the differences between organic experience and instrumentalized experience.

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Part II

Comparative Religion and Philosophy

6 Alan Watts, Psychedelic Buddhism, and Religious Play in Postwar America Morgan Shipley

In 1951, Alan Watts arrived in San Francisco, California, to become professor of comparative philosophy at the American Academy of Asian Studies. Already an established author and often credited as “America’s foremost popularizer of Zen” (Roszak, 1968/ 1995, p. 132), the 1940s found Watts in Evanston, Illinois, serving as Northwestern University’s Episcopal chaplain. Although Watts resigned from the priesthood in 1950 (see Watts, 1972, pp. 193–199), his spiritual quest brought him to perennial philosophy, culminating in texts comparing Christian mysticism with the esoteric wisdom (gnosis) found in Eastern religious traditions. Watts’ journey from Zen student to Episcopalian priest and back captures a steadfast commitment to living religiously, a commitment whose apotheosis manifests broadly as “psychedelic mysticism” (Shipley, 2015) and specifically in what I am terming, borrowing from Davis (2002) and Osto (2016), psychedelic Buddhism. A committed perennialist, Watts draws often not only from Buddhism, but also from Taoism, Hinduism, and varied expressions of esoteric traditions, including his own Christian background. However, his consistent return to Buddhism as a mechanism to unpack the lessons unveiled through psychedelic exploration offers insight into what Davis (2002) identifies as “countercultural spirituality,” a method to bypass “a culture that had swept its mystical and ecstatic traditions under the moldering carpet of mainline Christianity” in order to realize “the simple, immanent ‘Zen’ of the ordinary world” (pp. 152–153). Osto (2016) furthers the significance of this “subculture within a subculture,” describing, in following Davis (2002), “psychedelic Buddhism … [as a] new psychedelically enhanced or augmented Buddhism” (pp. xx–xxi). Osto illustrates how psychedelic Buddhism “encapsulates a new religious ethos possessing cultural, sociological, philosophical, and theological aspects” (p. xxi). Important for Osto is to illustrate how American converts to Buddhism “use psychedelics as part of their religious practice,” pointing specifically to Watts as a central figure in explicating the nature of psychedelic Buddhism by emphasizing how

80  Morgan Shipley psychedelics are not a spiritual path in themselves, but can be used in conjunction with Buddhist practice … [Watts] suggests the practice of meditation, which he explains as a type of contemplation or “centering,” whereby one lets one’s attention rest in the present moment and allows the contents of consciousness to happen without interference. (p. 31) Concerned less with the orthopraxic overlay between Buddhism and psychedelic spirituality, this chapter concentrates on how psychedelic Buddhism offered Americans a means to diagnose and respond to the malaise, alienation, and conformity confronting post-World War II society. In this context, psychedelic Buddhism refers to the connection between psychedelic consciousness and Buddhist insight, what Osto (2016) develops as “tools or a technology to train the mind and develop insight into Buddhist truths…psychedelics can act as spiritual medicine … [by helping one] transcend the limits of rationality through altered states of consciousness” (pp. xxv–xxvi). Through his psychedelic experimentation in the late 1950s and beyond, Watts believed he experienced satori, the height of Buddhist awakening expressed not as a unique state, but rather a return to the natural condition of the human mind. Watts, in other words, believed he overcame the illusory differences that convince people that life is constructed out of serial antagonisms and division (see, e.g., Watts 1965a). As Watts (1965b) experienced, psychedelics (LSD and mescaline) “do not presuppose a universe divided into the spiritual and the material” and, like Zen Buddhism, “do not culminate in a state of consciousness where the physical world vanishes into some undifferentiated and bodiless luminescence” (p. 6). Although psychedelic mysticism is sometimes understood critically in scholarly, popular, and religious domains as empty of principled comportment and moral proportion (see, e.g., Lachman, 2001), I suggest herein that Watts’ Buddhism, informed by psychedelic experience, was compassionately responsive to problematic aspects of postwar American living by identifying and ameliorating certain alienating conditions of the post-World War II zeitgeist of neoliberal values, consumerism, and Christian narratives of cultural and individual revitalization. Indeed, my chapter’s title is inspired by Watts’ (1961) reflection on Buddhism as “a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or ‘loyal opposition’ to the culture in which it is involved” (p. 7). In this chapter, the spiritual parameters and emancipatory value of psychedelic Buddhism and Watts’ religious writings are explored and discussed.

Responding to Estrangement Accessing unitive understanding, Watts’ psychedelic writings respond to a postwar “personality which is independent, isolated, insular, and estranged from the cosmos that surrounds it” (Watts, 1965b, p. xviii). As Fromm (1960),

Psychedelic Buddhism and Religious Play  81 Marcuse (1964), Mumford (1967), and Whyte (1956/ 2002) attest, postwar American society’s intense economic growth, via capitalist modernization and technological advancement, produced subjective alienation from one’s self, other people, and nature. These social theorists unanimously lament the corresponding costs, highlighting profound dehumanization – the “deadening of life” (Fromm, 1960, p. 78) ensuing from adorations of material wealth, standardizations and merit-orientations inherent to work and employment, and attendant constructions of “selves” defined by conformity, competition, consumption, and communal disconnection. This spiritual crisis of estrangement developed from postwar conditions where, Fromm (1960) writes, “control by the intellect over nature, and the production of more and more things, became the paramount aims of life.” In this developmental course, people are “transformed” into things, and “life has become subordinated to property, ‘to be’ is dominated by ‘to have’” (pp. 78–79). Watts (1951) deftly describes the experiential correlates of these conditions: Our age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to “dope” …. This “dope” we call our high standard of living …. To keep this “standard” most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work. …. This is no caricature. It is the simple reality of millions of lives, so commonplace that we need hardly dwell upon the details, save to note the anxiety and frustration of those who put up with it, not knowing what else to do. (pp. 21–22) Concurrent with economic growth, postwar America saw upsurges in doomsday-centered Christian discourses coupled with bourgeoning Prosperity Gospels, illustrating an intertwining of consumerism and Christianity. In American Apocalypse, Sutton (2014) details how influential Protestant evangelical preachers – Charles Fuller (1887–1968) and Billy Graham (1918–2018) among others – legitimated biblical end-times prophecies as explanations for the postwar existential malaise. Americans, they argued, are drowning in cauldrons of Satanic secularism and Cold War politics, thereby facing the wrathful side of God’s final judgment, leaving only a turn to Christianity and an absolute rejection of communism as the means for religious and secular salvation. Likewise, Bowler (2013; see also Harrell, 1979) documents concurrent risings of Christian Prosperity Gospels rooted in 1950s Healing Revivals of preachers including Oral Roberts (1918–2009) and A. A. Allen (1911–1970). Validating postwar consumer-competition orientations, prosperity theology asserts that God wills financial and physical well-being, which is achieved

82  Morgan Shipley (purchased) through, among other self-interested strategies, one’s own monetary payments to Christian preachers and religious causes. For Watts, psychedelics accentuated the realness of postwar society’s alienating conditions while also offering playful solutions, paths to spiritual values and moral understandings antithetical to Western religious and cultural constructs that isolate self from other, and estrange human from divine. Reflecting Buddha’s Three Marks of Existence, Watts (1965b) understands everyday awareness as avidya (ignorance), noting how, “in paying exclusive attention to differences… [the contemporary individual] ignores relationships.” This “normal awareness,” writes Watts, “does not see, for example, that mind and form or shape and space are as inseparable as front and back, nor that the individual is so interwoven with the universe that he and it are one body” (pp. 6–7). Mired in dual narratives of apocalyptic Christianity and meritocratic consumption, postwar consciousness remained estranged from existential interdependence, resulting in obsessive but fleeting (anicca, or impermanence) attachments to material existence and consumerism, ultimately producing chronic suffering (dukkha). The gaps of alienation and isolation, wrote Watts, “somehow … must be closed, and among the varied means whereby the closure may be initiated or achieved are medicines which science itself has discovered, and which may prove to be the sacraments of its religion” (p. xviii). Watts (1965b) positions psychedelic rituals as religious practices propelling individuals beyond alienating illusions, illustrating clearly the Buddhist-inspired insight that “does not deny physical distinctions but sees them as the plain expression of unity” (p. 7). Importantly, notes Watts, such psychedelic perception is “not merely speculative” but represents “a discipline in awareness as a result of which the mutual interrelation of all things and all events becomes a constant sensation” (p. 6). This “constant sensation” expresses a moment of unitive consciousness in which the postwar limits of perception give way to “mutual interrelation,” of what Buddhism labels pratityasamutpada (dependent origination). As a new counter-religiosity vis-à-vis prevailing religious narratives and political ideologies of postwar America, psychedelic Buddhism adheres to Watts’ reflection regarding “the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen,” which “is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions” (pp. 8–9). In other words, psychedelic Buddhism captures a specific inflection of the perennialist perspective Watts locates at the heart of his experiences with psychedelics, a perspective that understands sacred wisdom as tethered to the attempt to actualize religious values of empathy, compassion, and responsibility. Challenging secularism’s coherency plus monotheistic absolutism, Watts’ psychedelic religious writings – particularly The Joyous Cosmology (1965b) – are neither burdened nor confined by these very structures.

Psychedelic Buddhism and Religious Play  83 Within webs of interconnection, Watts identifies sacramental approaches positioning psychedelic consciousness as a numinous entryway to mystical experience, expressing Buddhist-laden imperatives of compassion that reimagine and re-engage complex dialogues between self and other, between the always already and the never quite yet. Watts, in locating divinity outside of Western religious discourse and beyond the confines of postwar understandings, advances religious wisdom (gnosis) as a syncretic expression of perennial love and sacred interbeing. Neither dogmatic nor canonical, religious experience, as Watts ultimately concludes, asks us to see beyond division and to search out playful moments in which subjective selves become direct, altruistic expressions of the absolute “other.”

Enframing Psychedelic Buddhism Beyond understanding conceptually, Watts’ (1965b) psychedelic explorations offered experiential tools for self-knowledge as the knowing of “something other, something strange. The landscape I am watching is also a state of myself … and all knowledge of other knowledge of self” (p. 48). Expressing neither narcissism nor insanity, the unmediated mind – the mind that functions outside the differential boundaries of binaries and hierarchies – “is a perfectly normal state of mind” (Suzuki, 1949, p.  97). Just as Zen Buddhism unveils “not an escape, but a resolution of the conflict within the present age” (Watts, 1973a, p. 50), psychedelic Buddhism reclaims spiritual sanity amidst chaotic and eschatological concerns suffocating postwar culture. The most extraordinary aspect of psychedelic usage is thus found in its harmonizing and enriching of various domains of consciousness understood as fundamentally irreconcilable within the context of postwar awareness. Overcoming divides between thinking and feeling, spirit and body, sacred and profane, Watts’ Buddhist reading of psychedelics directs ways of living in which humanity “is no longer an embodied paradox of angel and animal, or reason fighting against nature, but a marvelous coincidence in whom Eros and Logos are one” (1973b, p. 153). Reflecting on Watts’ legacy, Krippner (2012) captures this sentiment, noting how “the beauty, the visions, the sense of mystical unity made him conclude that such chemicals were to be approached with much care and on the order of a religious sacrament” (p. 86). Psychedelic mysticism propelled Watts’ (1965b) rejoicing in others’ sacredness, seeing his companions as no longer the “harassed little personalities with names … the mortals we are all pretending to be … but rather as immortal archetypes of themselves” (p. 50). Notable Zen Buddhists, however, including Roshi Philip Kapleau (1967, pp. 21–22) and D. T. Suzuki (see Aitken, 1997, p. 30), criticized Watts’ cultural interpretations and psychedelic application of basic Zen principles.

84  Morgan Shipley Notable also were wider criticisms of psychedelic counterculture, including (1) the shift from structured laboratory experimentation to arguably less-safe and less-controlled public usage of psychedelics, and (2) the general misappropriation of various mystical traditions to legitimate psychedelic experience (see Shipley, 2015, pp. 3–22). Still, Watts represents a countercultural trend of searching for ways beyond internal and external divides pervasive to Western ideologies toward harmonious living with others. By seeing others as “immortal archetypes,” his connecting of psychedelics to Buddhism aimed at solving the alienation and anxiety associated with postwar civil life. Watts is not disparaging Western values through symbols of spiritual otherness; rather, his engagement with psychedelic Buddhism signals a cultural offset to neoliberal values (primarily, the postwar intertwining of American exceptionalism and consumerism), thus representing a spiritual alternative to the entrenchment of apocalyptic Christianity and prosperity theology. In turning away from 1950s Christian evangelicalism toward esoteric and non-Abrahamic religious traditions offering a world unburdened by illusory concerns of consumerism, materialism, and binary thinking, Watts’ psychedelic Buddhism signals – as do earlier movements of Transcendentalism, Theosophy, and neo-Advaita – an alternative to the established narratives driving America’s religious culture forward. The American countercultural turn eastward and inward represents the search for spiritual solutions to the isolating estrangement inhibiting full personal and communal potential – an opportunity, in other words, to “feel absolutely with the world, freed of that chronic resistance to experience which blocks the free flowing of life and makes us move like muscle-bound dancers” (Watts, 1965b, pp. 78–79). Psychedelic Buddhism exemplifies munificent postwar counter-religious awakenings defined by immediately-directed and mutually sustaining models of sacred understanding positioned as the means to reimagine the very nature of how we relate to and engage with others. Watts’ reliance on Buddhism to interpret psychedelic consciousness highlights a broader tradition within American religious life that engages Eastern religions and philosophies toward actualizing dual promises of pluralism and spiritual freedom by transcending a millenarian exceptionalism that discounts historical possibilities and religious alternatives. On a spiritual level, psychedelic Buddhism highlights a religious experience where the monotheistic hierarchy of sacred difference (e.g., between God and human) is replaced with unitive mutuality, displacing concerns about the hereafter-state of one’s soul with ultimate concern in the eternal now “by making it clear that the function of practical action is to serve the abiding present rather than the ever-receding future, and the living organism rather than the mechanical system of the state or the social order” (Watts, 1965b, p. 84). Psychedelics thus confirmed for Watts an essential insight of Buddhism, unveiling an absolute sense of moral

Psychedelic Buddhism and Religious Play  85 responsibility always already existing when all is seen as equally necessary in their co-dependency. For Watts, Buddhism’s value is its affordance of new religious worldviews, perspectives sanctified by non-divisive practices and non-antagonistic relationships. This is right mindfulness (sammā-sati), nonjudgmental awareness where one experiences reality as it is (yatha-bhuta), as a web of endless interconnection. Within postwar moments suffused with value hierarchies and corresponding social anxieties, right mindfulness proved essential in helping psychedelic practitioners chart shifts from conditions of suffering – and that which causes suffering (e.g., clinging or attaching to that which is impermanent) – to dharma, to the truth of the way things are. Experiencing reality as it is, one becomes aware of the absolute dependency structuring our material world and our spiritual interconnections, resulting in a sacred sense of “love which is distinctly eucharistic, an acceptance of each other’s natures from the heights to the depths” (Watts, 1965b, p. 51). Psychedelic consciousness mirrored this “cosmic dance,” helping Watts (1963) see how “the polar, reciprocal, or mutually sustaining relationship of events and forces that are usually considered to be opposed to or basically separate from one another … may [in fact] be a perceptual illusion based upon inadequate concepts of sensing and knowing” (p. xix; see also Metzner, 2012). And, exactly because such an illusion leads the individual to feel a “basic separation from his universe” (Watts, 1963, p. xix) – a separation overcome within psychedelic consciousness – Watts relied on Buddhism toward recognizing the artifice of opposites, restoring unitive experiences of internal and external interconnection. In other words, Buddhism empowers a sense of mutual responsibility by  disempowering the hierarchic divides (spirit vs. material; soul vs. body; intuition vs. reason; divinity vs. humanity; owners vs. workers) associated with the religious, political, and economic structures of postwar America. Set specifically against the postwar American motif in which “modern consumers … identify themselves [more and more] by the formula: I am = what I have and what I consume” (Fromm, 1976, p. 15), psychedelic Buddhism collapses this binary, offering alternatives to the “blind robot symbolic uncertainty” defining postwar life (Leary, 1966, n.p.). Mindfulness does not separate object from subject, or vice-versa, but instead illustrates how proper understanding unveils the “sacramental vision of reality” (p. 22), the “Is-ness” (p. 17) of things, as noted by Huxley (1954/ 2009) in his Buddhist-infused response to his first psychedelic encounter. The mind is not void of material connection, but represents a position beyond the very boundaries separating the material from the immaterial. “Beyond words, beyond space-time, beyond self,” Leary, Alpert, and Metzner (1964/ 2007) stress in their now classic psychedelic manual, “there are only pure awareness and ecstatic freedom from all game (and biological) involvements” (pp. 4–5). “Games,” the

86  Morgan Shipley authors note, “are behavioral sequences defined by roles, rules, rituals, goals, strategies, values, language, characteristic space-time locations and characteristic patterns of movement” (p. 5n). Psychedelics allowed those trapped by postwar understandings to locate this vision and to experience its effects. In The Joyous Cosmology, Watts (1965b, pp. 47–49) describes similarly how postwar modes of understanding spawned sensations of being “lost in a maze. I don’t know how I got here,” Watts continues, “for I have lost the thread and forgotten the intricately convoluted system of passages through which the game of hide-and-seek was pursued.” Illustrating “the linear, step-by-step, contrast-by-contrast procedure of attention,” psychedelics offer the opposite by making “the principle of the maze…clear.” In demonstrating how “all dualities and opposites are not disjointed but polar; they do not encounter and confront one another from afar; they exfoliate from a common center,” Watts’ psychedelic journey leads to the heart of Buddhist insight, to “the realization that at the deep center of a time perpendicular to ordinary time we are, and always have been, one.” Most importantly, however, in exposing this “marvelously hidden plot, the master illusion,” psychedelic gnosis leads not to religious isolation or philosophical withdrawal; nor does it fortify egotistical perspectives driving contemporary consumer culture and millenarian religions. Rather, whereas illusory living leads postwar individuals to “become a being centered in consciousness” and, as a direct result, “centered in clash, conflict, and discord,” in psychedelic consciousness, as Watts (1965b) emphasizes, “love, unity, harmony, and relationship … take precedence over war and division” (p. 56). The Buddhist-infused understandings unveiled by psychedelic consciousness called for new symbolic structures capable of mapping the mutuality of these experiences toward (1) helping others understand the nature of psychedelic exploration and the realities of Buddhist insight and (2) maintaining ethical imperatives implicated in the unitive interconnectivity defining everyday existence. In their reflection on Buddhism as a means for engaging and mapping psychedelic experiences, Leary, et al. (1964/ 2007) describe their shift to religion (from clinical psychology) was not merely an effort to understand what occurs during psychedelic sessions, but, in vastly more significant ways, to make “the consciousness-expansion experience endure in subsequent daily life” (p. 12). More than naïvely appropriating religious traditions (Zaehner, 1972), and against stereotypes of decadent withdrawals suffusing historical and popular records (Farber, 2002; Grinspoon & Bakalar, 1979), psychedelic exploration in postwar America affords a “religious demonstration” (Miller, 1950; see also, Hutchison, 1959), that is to say, a spiritual protest. The Joyous Cosmology (Watts, 1965b) and psychedelic Buddhism, more broadly, offer perfect examples, functioning as spiritual protests against moribund orthodoxies and instrumental fundamentalisms of

Psychedelic Buddhism and Religious Play  87 postwar America. Influencing both the 1950s religious conditions and the 1960s/1970s religious revolts, broader psychedelic movements toward spiritual liberation signaled rejections of Western monotheistic religion, of what Allen Ginsberg called “monotheistic hallucinations” of the “whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic mind-trap” (Brown & Novick, 1993, pp. 267–268).

From Discord to Unity Although preposterous, with the “exterminating angel of nuclear holocaust” hovering in Cold War America’s public imagination, those “who grew up after World War II in America could set little in store regarding the future” (Raschke, 1980, p. 207). With death seemingly around every corner, Raschke notes, instant gratifications presented by consumerism and materialism “made sense” (p. 207). Presented with competing images of material well-being, nuclear apocalypse, and atrocities wrought by global war, postwar happiness proved to be a thinly veiled “radical insecurity,” a religious catalepsy demanding “a total revaluation of the past and future” (Raschke, 1980, pp. 207–208). With slaughter and devastation echoing from past wars, and threats of nuclear annihilation moving one’s future beyond meaningful control, immediate moments emerged as infinitely more precious, brought uniquely into focus by psychedelic experimentation, perennial insight, and Buddhist interpretation. Unable to remain active participants in dramas of postwar American progress defined increasingly by organized society’s slow creep toward the mutual self-destruction promised by the nuclear arms race, psychedelic Buddhism offered people mystical “immediatism,” “spontaneous, direct, unmediated spiritual insight into reality (typically with little to no prior training)” (Versluis, 2014, p. 2). Dilating one’s senses and cultivating inner experiences, psychedelics supplied paths to rediscovering joyful immediacies. Yet, stresses Watts, psychedelics alone cannot provide sustained solutions to spiritual disaffection. Once psychedelic wisdom is received, the next move, as Osto (2016) accentuates in his discussion of Watts, is finding ways of actualizing the value of seeing the world as mutually interdependent. As Watts (1965b) advised, “psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight … when you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments” (pp. 25–26; see also Watts, 1971/ 2017). Emancipatory values of psychedelic substances, then, reside in their sacramental capacity to exceed habitual thinking modes, allowing for unsullied senses of reality. What one sees, Watts (1965b) details, is an ending of dualism between personality and cosmos, a perennial truth in which “there is simply no way of separating self from other, self-love from otherlove. All knowledge of self is knowledge of other, and all knowledge of other knowledge of self” (p. 48). Symbiotically, “self and other, the familiar and the strange, the internal and the external, the predictable and the

88  Morgan Shipley unpredictable imply each other” (Watts, 1973b, p. 151; see also Watts, 1963, pp. 49, 185). Psychedelics are thus resituated as entheogens, mystical elements affording transcendence of dualistic thinking toward divine awareness. A cross-cultural religious sacrament found, for example, in Hinduism’s soma myth, the Bwiti ritual use of ibogaine, ayahuasca among Amazonian Indigenous peoples, or Native American peyote ceremonies, entheogens act as “vision-producing drugs … something that causes the divine to reside within one” (Ruck, Bigwood, Staples, Ott, & Wasson, 1979, pp. 145–146). For psychedelic Buddhism, this suggests relational polarities in which immanent mutuality becomes the defining mark of religiosity. As Watts (1965b) ultimately highlights, “the more I become aware of [opposites] … implying each other, the more I feel them to be one with each other” (p. 46). Such awareness supplies a religious morality motivated not “from the love of rewards or the fear of punishments” (Watts, 1973b, p. 149), but from “the unmotivated play of love” (Watts, 1965b, p.  89) including, “a sense of social unity which civilized man has long since lost” (p. 97). Accordingly, after receiving the wisdom of unitive interconnection, “to choose not to play rather than to play is still to choose, and thus to remain in duality. Therefore,” reflects Watts (1963), “the most truly awakened sages are represented as coming back to participate in the life of the world out of ‘compassion for all sentient beings’” (p. 27). Thus, psychedelic consciousness, when framed through the ineffability of mysticism and Buddhist motifs, encourages altruistic spirituality modeled on the bodhisattva, the Buddhist figure who, out of compassion, helps all sentient beings achieve enlightenment. It is not an either/or proposition – neither artificial materialism (Nordstrom & Pilgrim, 1980) nor profane spirituality (Zaehner, 1972, pp. 66–135) – but rather both spiritual and material. “In the unitary, or nondualistic, view of the world,” psychedelics enable perspectives in which care for others becomes tantamount, a position Watts (1973b) interprets as resulting from understandings that “individual differences express the unity, as branches, leaves, and flowers from the same plant, and the love between the members is the realization of their basic interdependence” (p. 146). Psychedelic Buddhism, therefore, is neither rigid nor institutional. Rather, it functions experientially in the here-and-now, mutually concerned with reciprocal perceptions of reality recognizing the “Suchness” of all subjects and objects and a love for others that makes compassion the daily imperative of right living.

Conclusion Mystical interpretations and sacramental applications of psychedelics thus do more than merely profane orthodox religions. Archives left by psychedelic mystics reveal spiritual efficacies of psychedelic substances.

Psychedelic Buddhism and Religious Play  89 Engaging psychedelic Buddhism’s nuances, what clearly emerges is not only an understanding that situates psychedelic consciousness as a religious state allowing absolute love for all sentient beings, but also a recognition of the healing capacity of psychedelics, of a means for bridging gaps between self and other, between the isolation of subjectivity and the sublimity of community. Psychedelics, when coupled with Buddhist insights regarding the human condition, offer ways of transforming life and knowledge. Within sacramental spaces afforded by psychedelic exploration, we begin to uncover the therapeutic expression of psychedelic consciousness, the ways in which stronger and more engaged understandings of self and other can help reorient the very means by which we relate to and participate with our social and political worlds (Shipley, 2015). Rather than isolated sites of psychedelic exploration, engaging psychedelic Buddhism as a spark for reimagining the structure of personal and interpersonal relationships helps locate moments of intersection that might bridge the gaps that commonly divide the religious effects of psychedelics from contemporary studies that illustrate the profound impact of psychedelic therapy (see Goldsmith, 2011; Shroder, 2014). In the midst of trying to “keep up with the Jones’s,” psychedelic Buddhism in the 1960s offered healthy-mindedness through the frames of detaching from – and not merely adjusting to – one’s immediate phenomenal and spiritual settings. In this sense, Buddhism offered a direct alternative to postwar capitalists, evangelical millenarians, and Christian positive thinkers by challenging the coherency of the status quo. By removing the very categories that differentiate the saved from the fallen, the sacred from the profane, psychedelic Buddhism upends the basic narratives directing postwar American society, ultimately locating an understanding of the world that simultaneously substitutes top-down implementation and salvation for absolute openness, looks beyond the commoditization of ends, and embraces a religious experience of the world described in terms of selfless responsibility and expressed as a therapeutic balm for overcoming individual anxiety and communal disconnection.

Acknowledgment Reprinted from Self & Society: An International Journal for Humanistic Psychology, 2017, 45(3–4), 233–243. Used by permission of The Association for Humanistic Psychology in Britain.

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7 Alan Watts and the Occultism of Aquarian Religion Square Gnosis, Beat Eros Christopher W. Chase Studies of American religion often focus on eastern and southern geographical regions, while areas west of the Mississippi River receive far less attention. In particular, California’s contribution to religion is often limited to very specific frames of reference (e.g., Frankiel, 1988). However, scholars are now reassessing contributions to American religious history and culture from twentieth-century west coast religious experimentalists (Ashcraft, 2002; Davis & Taylor, 2015; Duntley, 2015). Of specific interest here is the role of Alan Watts. Emerging in the 1950s and 1960s, Watts is often credited with adapting and filtering South and East Asian religions in relation to institutional “Western” traditions such as Roman Catholicism. Watts also launched intense critiques of Western academic philosophy and psychology as they served Cold War capitalism and technocratic materialism. Alongside others including Michael Murphy, Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, and Timothy Leary, Watts developed a significant reputation as a public intellectual connected to countercultural impulses and sensibilities (Albanese, 2005). Just as California’s contribution to American religion is being reassessed, so do experimentalists such as Watts need their own reassessments. Watts is often credited with transmitting Buddhism (Zen in particular) to Western consciousness. I contend this is necessary but insufficient to understand his influence. Watts helped bring not just Eastern, but Western esoteric and occult traditions into the forefront of American countercultural religiosity. He proved himself open to recombinant and subterranean themes in American intellectual and religious history, valorizing what he and others saw as new awakenings of religious consciousness in American youth. This chapter is intended to demonstrate Watts’ instrumental influence in self-consciously setting particular parameters of modern Aquarianism. Through development of gnosis and eros as modes of transpersonal knowledge, Watts helped create an Aquarian/Pagan hermeneutic, a communal sense that a quantum-leap of humanity was at hand, at least in terms of spiritual (re)awakening. Coupled with this hermeneutic was a

Alan Watts and Occultism  93 process teleology, an unfolding arc of playfulness as both the path and the goal of the Cosmos with Eros as its sacramental expression. Such a sense formed an interpretive lens through which Aquarian community members filtered and integrated their experiences. Some explanation of terms is in order here. I use the terms “esoteric” or “occult” to describe a kind of religiosity that has bubbled to the surface periodically in Euro-American history. While Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have exoteric or “outward” forms of worship and development, each of these religions has absorbed specific ideas from ancient texts such as the Corpus Hermeticum, Greco-Egyptian documents dating to late antiquity. Often thought to be of even more ancient origin and authorship, these texts became central in not only the practice of ancient esoteric (or “secretive mystery”) traditions but crucial to developing nineteenth- and twentieth-century occult religious impulses (Copenhaver, 1995). A decades-old (and growing) body of scholarship shows that such Western esoteric concepts played important roles for mystics, kings, Renaissance magicians, authors, initiatory societies, musicians, and many others. Antoine Faivre (1994; see also Roszak, 1975, pp. 9–10, 205–208) outlined four essential characteristics of Western esoteric thought, especially as found in the Corpus Hermeticum. First are claims of hidden “correspondences” between material and spiritual realms, channels allowing human consciousness to be linked and expanded into divine power. Likewise, esoteric thought regards nature as “living,” vitalistically infused through structures of correspondence between material and spiritual realms, or what Emmanuel Swedenborg called a “ladder of order” between Heaven and Earth. In esoteric thought, imagination is considered an organ of perception, rather than deception, especially visà-vis these “ladders of order.” Indeed, “imagination” becomes a way of internalizing connectivities between material and spiritual realms. Lastly are possibilities of drawing upon these first three aspects practically in ways creating transmutations, or metamorphoses of being. I use the term “Aquarian” (sometimes referred to as “New Age”) in the sense used by Theodore Roszak in Unfinished Animal, referring to a religiosity that selfconsciously understands itself as both evolutionary and supersessionist to institutional Western religion, primarily Christianity. One ingredient of what Roszak identifies as the “Aquarian Frontier” has come to be called “contemporary Paganism (or Neo-Paganism)”, a self-conscious adaptation of ancient polytheisms and pantheism (especially Goddess-centered) as a form of modern religious expression (Roszak, 1975, pp. 3, 8, 9, 28). The other major concept I draw upon is the role of hermeneutics. Indeed, “hermeneutics” and “Hermeticism” as words share a common root – referring to Hermes, an ancient god of communication and understanding. In essence, hermeneutics is “understanding of understanding,” the humanistic endeavor to study processes by which consciousness apprehends and creates knowledge. In particular, I call upon hermeneutist

94  Christopher W. Chase Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (1994) term “Bildung.” Briefly, Bildung as articulated by Gadamer consists in the ever-expanding and inherently playful edification of consciousness for its own sake by engaging “Others.” Bildung in the humanistic sense of spiritual self-cultivation is mirrored in the conditioning of a moral sensus communis. Often translated as “common sense,” Gadamer understands this as the “sensibility that undergirds a community.” It may be described as a set of cultural presuppositions and predispositions generating fields of possible discourse in given cultures, fields with mutable but always finite intellectual horizons. Such a sensus communis grounds cultural rules, allowing some intellectual and moral judgments to come into view rather than others, or what Gadamer called “historically-effected consciousness.” Hermeneutics is not merely literary theory – rather, as the “understanding of understanding itself” it underpins language use (broadly conceived) as the medium of human experience. For Watts, challenging ossified dominant structures of science, philosophy, and religion (and the recovery of Eros) was crucial toward building this new sensus communis.

Watts and the Enframing of Occultism Watts became known as a comparative religionist through studies such as Behold the Spirit (1947) and The Supreme Identity (1950). Starting in 1953 Watts hosted a regular program on the Berkeley, CA, Pacificaowned KPFA radio station discussing various aspects of comparative religion. From 12 to 25 October 1958, Watts’ picture graced the cover of KPFA’s Folio (1958) program guide. The cover story sufficiently noted his seminary period and his published works up to that point, book titles speckled throughout the story in capital letters. Further in, past the radio offerings organized by date and hour, Folio lists a subscriber service, with tapes and transcripts. Alongside transcripts for “Redemption in Navajo Myth,” “How to Be Sane Though Negro,” and “Christian Pacifism” two scripts for Watts are offered, one on “The Proper Speech of Man” and one on “The Problem of Death,” a subject he turned to repeatedly in later recordings. KPFA even advertised a benefit lecture by Watts (“The Power of Non-Action: Contributions of Taoism and Zen to Western Society” for late October) on the back cover. Watts’ criticisms of canonical Western philosophy and religion were already central to his project, having been articulated in Behold the Spirit, and today have been canonized as quotes to represent him. Just four years later, Watts’ Zen teachings were noted on a back cover advertisement of Orion magazine (Back-page Advertisement, 1962), a theosophical periodical published from Lakemont, GA. Typical of occult journals of its time, Orion functioned as a clearinghouse of esoteric thought and practice. Articles about “Ascended Masters” and the “Astral Temple of Jesus and Mary” share space with listings for two of Watts’

Alan Watts and Occultism  95 books on Zen; D. T. Suzuki; G. I. Gurdjieff’s associates John Bennett and P. D. Ouspensky; Lewis Spence’s Encyclopedia of Occultism; as well as Thomas Sugrue’s famous biography of Edgar Cayce, There Is a River. In the early 1960s, Watts published two major works having lasting impact in the Pagan community: 1961’s Psychotherapy East and West and 1963’s The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity. The impact of these texts is discussed below, but note that decades before Watts’ own countercultural explorations, religious activities tied to Buddhism and Hinduism sparked both interest and condemnation in American intellectual culture. Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson brought Hindu and Buddhist philosophical ideas into nineteenth-century American literary consciousness. Concurrently, actual practices associated with Hinduism and Buddhism often drew sharp nativist pushback, especially as fears over immigration grew in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nativists such as Mabel Potter Daggett tied racial, religious, and class fears together with essays such as “The Heathen Invasion” (1911). Persons (especially Christian women) falling under predatory influences of rapacious teachers of yoga, tantrism, and “paganism” could expect nothing more than insanity, “domestic infelicity”, and death. But by the early 1960s, as magazines like Orion showed, occult and esoteric pursuits had become attractive topics for popular consumption. Although occasionally suspicious of things labeled “occult,” Watts nonetheless was published in twentieth-century mainstays of the British press devoted to such matters as The Modern Mystic (see Watts, 1997) and the Occult Review, mainly during Watts’ stay among the London spiritual underground of eclectic “rascal-mystics” in the 1930s. In The First Occult Review Reader, Watts’ (1968) essay focused on the paradox of attaining spiritual life through a kind of death to the ordinary consciousness of the Self. In this way Watts was juxtaposed alongside other essays on Spiritualism, Ghosts, “Voodoo” possession, and UFOlogy. Just a few years later, Watts’ identification with occultism became even stronger due to his inclusion in Freedland’s (1972) The Occult Explosion. Watts is quoted alongside sociologist Harvey Cox as a discerning interpreter and cultural broker: What is constructive and meaningful about the return of occultism is that for the first time, masses of young Americans are learning that life can have a goal … besides producing and consuming junk … [O]ccultism and mysticism are two different things. Occultism without mysticism simply deals with learning how to manipulate the future —it’s a power game. But the mystic seeks a basic understanding of the universe and identification with universal realities. This has to be achieved

96  Christopher W. Chase by full involvement with the eternal present. And I can only hope the kids will make this transition to a higher metaphysics. (Watts, quoted in Freedland, 1972, pp. 16–17) It is precisely this involvement with the “eternal present” as a basic element of human consciousness that Freedland (1972) identified as central to Watts’ thought. Freedland’s book was soon followed by a United Artists double-LP soundtrack called The Occult Explosion Album. Watts’ (1973a) audio presenting meditation in the context of occultism clocks in at nearly five and a half minutes. Compared to other tracks (Anton LaVey’s “Church of Satan,” for example), Watts’ calm, slightly accented distillation of Vedantic, Taoist and Zen insights strikes a rather conservative tone. The dignified earnestness with which Watts communicates his views places him in a position of anchored gravitas. Thus, it is not surprising that Watts comes to be regarded in manner and substance as a “canonical” intellectual of the counterculture, a builder of the new Aquarian moral sensus communis.

Watts and Gnostic Occultism Throughout the 1960’s numerous Aquarian religious currents began taking shape along a broad continuum. One current was a renaissance or resurgence in “nature religion,” the view that different portions of earthly and cosmic realms are interwoven with each other and to humanity. The most significant early institution within this current, the Church of All Worlds (CAW), was incorporated as a religious non-profit in the state of Missouri in 1968. It was soon granted 501c3 federal tax-exempt status as a religious organization, arguably becoming the first “Pagan church” in the United States. With growth came desire to build common intellectual benchmarks for promoting religious and cultural education as the CAW’s leaders understood it (Clifton, 2006, pp. 42–49, 145–148). In the early 1970’s, CAW’s journal, Green Egg, published a “Basic Bibliography” (Church of All Worlds, 1973) containing materials officially sanctioned for spiritual growth and development of church members. This bibliography was subdivided into categories such as “Planetary Ecology,” “Social Revolution,” “Transpersonal Psychology Applied” and “Comparative Religion.” The latter category included well-known sympathetic scholars of Aquarian religion Robert Ellwood and Jacob Needleman, as well as Watts’ Psychotherapy East and West. The choice of Psychotherapy East and West for this pagan religious community is particularly telling. In Psychotherapy, Watts claimed Eastern religions are keen to change the consciousness of ordinary individuals, while Western psychoanalysts are interested in the psychology of disturbed persons. Watts suggested both have common meeting in their attention or attunement to changing consciousness as a need in itself.

Alan Watts and Occultism  97 Moreover, Watts, invoking the Cold War, claimed that mainstream materialistic and political cultures were producing pathological consciousness as a rule, rather than an exception. By definition a radical critique, this was especially prescient for Pagans who were seeing technocratic materialism and sterile Christianity as ignoring or, in some cases, sanctioning wholesale destruction of natural resources and Indigenous cultures. Under influence of technocratic dualism, Pagans claimed the Cartesian Bildung, that separation of mind and matter (or culture and nature), was having disastrous and immoral effects upon all life on Earth. Likewise, the monotheistic view of God as transcendently separate from the world was viewed as giving a divine mandate for rapacious ecological exploitation (Zell, 1971/ 2009). Like fellow countercultural critic Theodore Roszak, CAW and its leader, Tim Zell (1971/ 2009), now Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, sought to provide moral/aesthetic/religious justifications of the Youth Movement against this technocracy. Watts (1947, pp. 49–51), too, was concerned with increasingly ossified institutionalism, as well as justifying the New Youth. Watts criticized what he called “the exhaustion of Humanism,” or the disappearance of individuality within a modern technocratic context. Perhaps more important than Watts’ overall critique here is his articulation of a mystical synthesis between Zen and European psychotherapy in the moment of “cure.” By using koans (insolvable riddles) to short-circuit ego-driven reasoning, Zen masters hope to produce a fault point where the sense of “self shifts from the independent observer to that which is observed … an identification of one’s life and being with the [totality of] the organism/environment field” Watts, 1961/ 2017, p. 141). In other words, Watts hopes to un-cover more genuine modes of being, spontaneous integrations instead of the “illusion of separateness.” None of this conflicts with Aquarian occult philosophy. In fact, Aquarians such as Pagans and the CAW actively sought that radical transformation, that “release of the individual from forms of conditioning imposed on him by social institutions” (Watts, 1961/ 2017, p. 11). This release is neither discursive nor symbolic. It cannot be encapsulated and taught through language but, rather, must be learned and grasped intuitively. This is not techne (skilled knowledge) or episteme (discursive knowledge) but gnosis, intuitive realization, grasping, or insight. Within Watts’ 1950s hermeneutic boundaries, he expresses tempered skepticism for what he defines as “paganism.” His explicit mentions of paganism are rather brief, and largely follow accepted cultural discourses of the time, long before witches and other Pagans like Sybil Leek entered public consciousness. For example, Watts (1960/ 1973b) occasionally equated Paganism with libertinism, an “enormously superficial” romanticism of nature and flesh characterized by deficiency of awe and curiosity over the “fact of simple is-ness” (p. 118). He called forth “those unashamedly earthbound souls…the perennial pagan, the delightfully

98  Christopher W. Chase animal human who is not ashamed of his body” (pp. 114–115). For Watts, this was one of two dialectical poles of cultural consciousness, a pole opposed to celestially minded impulses to escape the confines of material bodies and existence in an embrace of transcendental spirit. Yet as with other dialectics, Watts hoped for a convergence, a gnostic consciousness where the “thesis” of love of spirit and an “antithetical” love of nature embrace in a kind of sacred marriage, a hieros gamos. Watts sought a synthetic “animality of the mystic” grounded in deep sacramental relationship with power in its various manifestations (pp. 120–121). This process of synthetic reconciliation is fundamental for Watts. In other essays, Watts (1958) clearly associates “paganism” with the outdoors and the natural world, while “urbanism” is the province of the Christian tradition. But this too becomes a unity in process. For the synthetic reconciliation of these is again a deep sacramentalism placing divine power and presence pantheistically within all (pp. 28–46). Watts (1963) often referred to this apparent dualism as a game: a universal metonym of “hide and seek.” Watts’ (1960/1973b) “animality of the mystic” is in fact how many contemporary Pagans would describe their practice, even if Watts himself was not poised to equate “mystical animality” with “paganism.” CAW’s Green Egg was one of the two major media organs of 1970s Aquarian religion; the other was Llewellyn Publications’ monthly Gnostica newspaper, appealing to Pagans and the wider Aquarian movement. Anchored in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, Gnostica claimed a 1974 circulation of 30,000 copies nationwide, making Llewellyn Publications the most widely known trade publisher of Aquarian spirituality. Gnostica provided a vehicle for scholarly articles, occult fiction, personal columns, and mail-order sales of books and cassettes. Serving Eastern and Western esoteric interests, it became a clearing house of information and connection between like-minded individuals and groups. Underneath an article investigating an 1897 possible UFO crash in Austin, Texas, Gnostica printed an advertisement for The Knee of Listening, the autobiography of Franklin Jones (also known as Da Free John or Adi Da Samraj) with a foreword by Alan Watts. The foreword itself is classic Watts, cautioning against any one definitive process of spiritual illumination and yet locating himself amongst the signposts of both the practices of Theravada Buddhism and esotericist G. I. Gurdjieff. The Gnostica advertisement also includes an enthusiastic endorsement of Jones’ volume by Israel Regardie, perhaps best known for publishing the entire system of practice of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the famous late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Anglophone occult initiatory society. Likewise, Regardie was himself a star pupil of the Golden Dawn’s most (in)famous member, the British magus Aleister Crowley. (In the 2004 re-publication of the Knee of Listening, Watts’ foreword was replaced with one written by South Asian religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal. Yet Kripal locates both Jones

Alan Watts and Occultism  99 and Watts alongside Swami Vivekananda and Paramahamsa Yogananda as participants in a current of non-“dual gnosis.”) While the Gnostica audience was receptive to purchasing Watts’ works in an occultist context, larger trends in Pagan and other Aquarian literatures echo, magnify and popularize Watts’ concerns in the early 1970s – particularly the desacralization (or de-sacramentalization) of the world in the name of the Enlightenment project, modern scientism, and its progenitor, the aforementioned “exhausted humanism” (Berenda, 1973). Consistent with the poetic approach of late twentieth-century Aquarian Bildung, poetic/noetic incantations from activists Gary Snyder and Gwydion Pendderwen worked to “dis-cover” the underlying kinship that had retreated under the Enlightenment eye. For example, Snyder’s (1973) “Prayer for the Great Family” invoked and re-established kinship relations among humans and the natural world. Watts himself received an extended review by Michael Hurley (1972) in Green Egg. Hurley called Watts a “seminal thinker.” Hurley first frames Watts in familiar terms as a prime “first-rate” transplanter of Asian religious wisdom, but reserves his highest praise for Nature, Man and Woman, The Book, and The Two Hands of God, more so than even Psychotherapy East and West (Watts’s sole entry in the official CAW bibliography). Given relative emphases in these works on immediate problems in Euro-American culture, Hurley’s recommendation of them for an Aquarian readership is not surprising. Kinship relations in Pagan literature extend not only to the natural world but to conscious efforts of harmonialist pluralism and religious juxtaposition of the type favored by Watts. As mentioned before, Watts’ writings often are productive juxtapositions of apparent dualisms such as “Christianity” and “Hinduism,” “Self” and “environment,” or “psychotherapy” and “Buddhism.” Aquarians likewise engaged precisely the kinds of synthesis they saw in Watts and others. Green Egg, for example, featured selections from movements such as the Aquarian Family of our Lady, an organization based in Ontario worshipping the “Thrice-Crowned Creatrix” from a “Hindu-BuddhistChristian Grokking Witchfolk” point of view (Zotique, 1973). Gnostica, true to form as a mail-order catalog cum occult journal, advertised Watts’ The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are in its catalog section as Perhaps the most famous of all Watts works … [it] delves into the cause and cure of the illusion of the self is a separate ego … [A] ccording to Watts this illusion underlies the misuse of technology for a violent and hostile subjugation of man’s natural environment.” (Advertisement, 1975, p. 74) Indeed, The Book is probably Watts’ most succinct statement towards breaking down theological barriers between “Self” and “environment,” thus effecting a long-range transformation for cultural cosmic consciousness.

100  Christopher W. Chase Throughout the 1970s, the literature indicates the growing complexity and recursive sensibility of this Aquarian sensus communis, or what Roszak (1975) referred to as the “Aquarian Frontier” with its various maze entry points of “organicism,” “Eupsychian therapies,” “etherealized healing,” “neo-primitivism and paganism,” and popular culture (pp. 26–29). Watts’ influence in particular continued operating within iterative calls for visionary transformation of consciousness toward a new gnostic Telos. For example, the March/April 1979 issue of Gnostica saw publication of John White’s (1979) essay “Evolution and the Future of Humanity.” White suggested that in response to apocalyptic threats from human development, Nature was effecting a species transformation. Just as Cro-Magnon gave way to Neanderthal, so too was Homo Sapiens giving way to Homo Noeticus. White’s essay was essentially an extension of his ideas presented as the introduction to The Highest State of Consciousness. White (1972) edited this volume, which included contributions from Aldous Huxley, R.D. Laing, Richard M. Bucke (often cited by Watts over the years), Abraham Maslow (often cited in Green Egg), P. D. Ouspensky, Norman O. Brown, and Alan Watts himself. The very same issue of Gnostica included a review of White’s 1972 book. Occult ceremonial magicians Melita Denning and Osborne Phillips (1979), famous for their own fivevolume set called The Magical Philosophy, combining “ancient mystical methods of Gnosis” with the “archetypes of Carl Jung” (Advertisement, 1979) wrote the review of White’s book. Denning and Phillips singled out Watts and Ouspensky for their abilities in shedding light on the development of “cosmic consciousness.” Roszak’s “entry points” were engaging in mass cross-fertilization, with Watts as a key nexus point.

Deeper Gnosis: Flowering Eros Pigeonholing Watts into any specific practical mode of gnostic induction would be a grave misunderstanding, but Watts nonetheless reserved the greatest respect and understanding for the erotic as a mode of synthetic gnosis, a channel though which spontaneous enlargement of the “Self” (to include the totality of its environment) could be potentially actualized by all. (The term “synthetic” refers to the “synthesis,” or the product of the dialectical thesis/antithesis process, not to mean “artificiality). In particular, Watts used iterations of hieros gamos or hierogamy (sacred marriage) illuminating the gnostic core of mystical experience. In Nature, Man and Woman, Watts (1958) began his essay on “Spirituality and Sexuality” by discussing relationships between dyads of Spirit/Nature and Male/Female as emerging from ancient cosmology. Using the Hermetic Emerald Tablet demonstrating analogic works of occult correspondences between macrocosmic processes and microcosmic processes, Watts quoted the following lines: “Heaven above, Heaven below; Stars above, stars below. All that is over, under shall show; Happy who the riddle readeth!” But Watts

Alan Watts and Occultism  101 saw the “opposition of spirit to nature and sexuality” as a subcategory of the more general problem of defining “Self” as an ego-controlled will against the external environment, which includes forces beyond ego control (such as spontaneous sexual arousal). Thus, institutional Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism often called for sublimations of libido or Eros as prerequisites for advanced states of holiness. Repressive sublimation (or purely libertine embrace) of sexuality requires its abstract isolation, what Watts understood as a severing from its concrete relationship with all other aspects of life. As an abstraction, Watts called it an “idol” no less spiritually dangerous than any other synecdoche, a “failure to realize the mutuality and bodily unity of man and the world” (p. 187). For Watts, issues of spirituality and sexuality require no less than the same transformational attitude as other forms of therapy or religious practice, a pansexuality irradiating every aspect of the universal Self. This theme is boldly reinforced in Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship (Watts, 1964). Here, Watts posited that, properly understood, “Christianity is the religion about sex and in which sex plays a more important role even than in Priapism or Tantric Yoga” (p. 169). Thus, he understood sex as the universal Christian “taboo,” because of its power to connect God and humanity as expressed clearly in the Biblical book “Song of Songs” and by female Christian mystics. Sex remains theologically scandalous today, even though studies have begun exploring highly developed sexual cultures among evangelical Protestants (DeRogatis, 2015). Subsequent Aquarians and Pagans have not emphasized Nature, Man and Woman (1958) as much as Watts’ other writings, but in my view both this text and Beyond Theology (1964) support an understanding of Watts as a major figure in the historical Bildung of Western sexual mysticism, itself a major current in historical and contemporary esotericisms (Hanegraaf & Kripal, 2008). Watts (1964) inferred from the Church’s obsession with policing sexuality that sexuality is in fact the tacitly esoteric essence, the true meaning of the Church. “If Christianity truly means what it says about the union of the Word and the Flesh, the resolution of the problem must be the divinization of sexuality … in the mystical marriage of Christ and the Church” (p. 189). Yet instead of accepting Freud’s humbug condemnation of religion as sublimated libido, Watts suggested Christians celebrate this characteristic. “The church spire is, indeed a rampant penis; that vesical windows are vaginas; that the font is the womb” (p. 190). Far from a merely pornographic image born of obsessive disgust, Watts presents this issue no differently than juxtaposing cultural images of flowers (botanical sexual organs) as at the same time revealing a “world of innocence and joy.” As mentioned previously and recognized by other scholars of Western esotericism, this is an occult understanding of the hierogamy, or sacred sexuality, and its esoteric correspondence between “Heaven above” and “Heaven below” (Versluis, 2008, p. 128–131). Watts reclaims a sacramental

102  Christopher W. Chase and thus “cosmically” playful redemption of sexuality away from dualisms of “abstract lust and abstract disgust.” Sacramental sexuality, at the heart of Pagan rituals like the Wiccan “Great Rite,” is no less than Goethe’s “unity in process,” a process of iterative revealing and concealing, or what Watts calls the “eternal oscillation” (Roszak, 1972, p. 341). Apart from his own original contributions, Watts’ other works have been used to construct (and challenge) the role of sexualities in religion. In 1971, Watts and Elisofon collaborated on Erotic Spirituality: The Vision of Konarak. The temples at Konarak (also known as Konak) and a similar site, Khajuraho, are UNESCO World Heritage sites in India. They are popularly understood as architectural pinnacles for the development of the so-called Northern style of Hindu public temples (mandir) before the predominant rise of Islam in the northern subcontinent. Elisofon contributed fantastic black and white photographs of erotic icons on the temples, shikara towers, and practitioners. Watts’s commentary on the photographs challenged what he saw as rarified caricatures of Vedantic asceticism, as well as secular and Christian provincial declarations of such erotic iconography as merely some sort of “primitive porn.” Watts instead described these icons as “cosmic play” and genuine pansexual eros. This was, for Watts, ecstasy in the technical sense (“ek-stasis” or being “outside oneself”) exemplifying tantric cosmic consciousness (Elisofon & Watts, 1971). Erotic Spirituality was dedicated to the famous comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. Comparative religion (like Campbell’s) was a common trope in popular essays on 1970s Witchcraft and Paganism. Carl Jones, a frequent and provocative contributor to Gnostica, penned an essay series on religious sexuality and its relationship to “nature religion,” a crucial American ingredient in the American Paganism sensus communis. Jones (1978c) argued that conjugal union is the central root of all nature religion, and to be significant it must connect practitioners to the “Great Ocean” which Wicca serves. (“Ocean” is a prominent theological motif in American Pagan religiosity. See Chase, 2013). Wiccan sexuality, for Jones, required intuitive gnostic faculties working on different levels of correspondence to Cosmic power than the purely intellectual or emotional realms. Drawing on Wicca’s mythology as the “Old Religion,” ancient Greek, Tibetan, and Hindu worship were used as cross-cultural examples verifying valorization of sexual worship in the literary paganism of D. H. Lawrence and the matriarchal mythos of J. J. Bachofen. In the language of comparative religionist, Mircea Eliade, sex is the “eternal return,” whether in terms of “Tantric iconography or Wiccan epiphany.” It is here that Jones referred to Watts’ work on Konarak. For Jones had little patience for those “sexless Wiccans of today” performing the hieros gamos only metaphorically or worse, only mentally. Whereas such persons rob the nature religion of its pristine beauty, the genuine authenticity of the physical rite was validated by “Watts’s…lovely pictorial book.” Human social structure, according to Jones’ reading of Watts, is all but

Alan Watts and Occultism  103 overturned in sacred orgy as humans become “organism” rather than ego. Here perhaps, is a most literal expression of Watts’ commitment to Eros as sacramental Play. In subsequent essays, Jones (1978a, 1978b) extended criticisms of inauthenticity towards most Wiccan practices in general. Instead, he argued for radical embrace of Eros through which the self destabilizes and is reborn, using Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde as paradigmatic examples of unabashed sacred sexuality. Jones (19781979) elaborated at greater length on the physical character of the icons at Konarak and Khajuraho, as well as aniconic representations of relationships between phallus and yoni, Shiva and Shakti, all providing Watts and Elisofon’s (1971) work as the entry point for Aquarian investigation. In a contemporary vein, Watts’ (1963) work on theological polarity is used creatively by interpreters such as Mongo BearWolf (1993) in addressing heterosexism and gender essentialism in the present-day American Paganism. BearWolf challenged a common idea within Wicca on the need for a heterosocial framework for enacting ritual power, a framework where men and women must ritually work across genders. Such views, BearWolf says, are premised on assumptions that only men can fully identify with masculine divine power (God), women with feminine divine power (Goddess), and thus reciprocally gendered power has only dim understanding of neighboring genders. Limited space prevents full elaboration of this concept here, but debates and conversation on this topic are as old as the mid-century roots of Wicca itself. BearWolf argued that gay and lesbian Pagans have not been fully appreciated for their role as “keepers of the bridge between polarities,” or nexus points for the meeting and expression of Cosmic power. Watts’s synthesis of polarity in Two Hands of God comes to BearWolf’s rescue. Watts (1963) describes polarity as a unity in process. BearWolf follows Watts in claiming that “polarities are representative of an underlying unity of process,” and understands that “darkness is intrinsic to the nature of light rather than, essentially opposed to it” (BearWolf, 1993, p. 34, 50). BearWolf claims that Goddess and God are ways of mapping Watts’ teaching on the “coincidence of opposites.” BearWolf thus calls Wiccans toward a playful understanding of magical polarity structured in terms of Watts’ (1963) synthesis, a space which gay and lesbian Wiccans can safely inhabit as full practitioners. It is not difficult to see Jonse’ 1970s essays as among the targets for BearWolf’s critique, but this merely demonstrates the breadth of Watts’ work as a field for recombinant interpretation over decades within the Aquarian sensus communis.

(Re)reading Watts in the Aquarian Bildung The fourth edition of the Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology (Melton, 1996) contains an entry for “Alan (Wilson) Watts” occupying barely over two paragraphs (pp. 1391–1392). His significance is defined solely in

104  Christopher W. Chase terms of books popularizing his “personal appropriation” of Zen Buddhism, as well as his television series “Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life.” Watts’ influence on Americans’ reception and enframing of South and East Asian religions is undeniable. As Theodore Roszak made clear in 1975, and Tweed and Prothero (1999) make clear today, Watts stands as a significant contributor to Asian religion in the United States. Yet as scholars of psychology, religion, and intellectual history re-examine Watts’ role and legacy in twentieth- (and perhaps twenty-first) -century American religion, honest and full appraisals will include his contributions to Western occultism both on a personal level in his writings, as well as the ways others used his work as building blocks in their own intellectual and cultural production. It is this which is perhaps the most significant contribution of Watts to Aquarian religion in general and a Pagan sensus communis in particular. It has become trivial to signal Paganism’s debt to European Romanticism, for example, but it is significant to identify a specific dialectic for the formation of a Bildung – those twins of polarity and synthesis, (or William Blake’s struggle and reconciliation) moving rhapsodically towards a higher teleological synthesis, an organic “unity in process.” This is echoed in Watts’ personal tension between what he called the “mystic” and the “sensualist.” Both Watts and his contemporaries understood this Romantic revival as hermetically rooted, aiming toward a larger imminent and transpersonal reach for a Telos of Play. In the Aquarian Bildung, teleological and purposive play becomes a sacramental and sensory mechanism in and of itself. It is not some infantile liability of primitivism, but rather a grounding assumption of consciousness itself. Play, is not “mere diversion” but existentially necessary to find one’s relationship/process within the world. One must “play” as the world “plays.” In the same way that Watts contributed constructively towards positive progressive aspects within Aquarian and Pagan Bildung, this was also couched within profound skepticisms and critiques of institutional religion and mechanistic humanism. Hermeneutic bonds between Watts and the Aquarian Bildung are at least twofold. He criticized these other historically-situated consciousnesses (whether institutionally religious or materialistic) as dangerously unaware of their finitude – unable to see the long-term end results of abandoning sacramental perception in the world (materialism) and protean vitality extending beyond it (religion). Beyond simple criticism, he enacted a questing engagement to repair this problem based in the occult logic of Hermeticism, an opening toward occultism coupled with mysticism in a realization of the “eternal present” (Watts, 1968).

Acknowledgment Reprinted from Self & Society: An International Journal for Humanistic Psychology, 2015, 43(4), 322–34. Used by permission of The Association for Humanistic Psychology in Britain.

Alan Watts and Occultism  105

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8 Alan Watts and Secular Competence in Religious Praxis Gerald Ostdiek

The Secular Watts Over the course of these last few centuries, religion has rightly developed a rather frightening reputation: not just this religion or that, but religion itself, the practice wherein sets of ritual and practice – related to some set of metaphysical and historical truth claims – take on social significance and are institutionalized within some society. This seems a consequence of the notion, argued by folks on all sides of the issue, that religion is about Faith in X, wherein faith is commonly capitalized, even psychologized (even by those who reject the notion that religion has value) and where X stands for some presumed metaphysical absolute (generally but not necessarily psychologized as “God’”). And thus, the default position is that religion is about Faith in God. When expressed with little or no self-reflection, this readily becomes the common claim my God is bigger than your god (which is to say: I’m better than you). But even in its more sophisticated variants, the religious impulse commonly results in a rampant and virulent egoism – an expression of presumed and superior autonomy that tends to posit “God” in the image of whoever is doing the positing. By way of contrast, Alan Watts argues with striking regularity that all such “Gods” are simply absurd, as is all such “Faith” as well as every “I” that has ever clung either to its gods, its faith, or itself. Moreover, for Watts, none of this has anything to do with any proper practice of religion. Alan Watts can rightly be read as having made a single long argument that, however common all this may be, it represents religion poorly done, which can be contrasted with religion done well. The difference has nothing to do with technics of perfecting the reiteration of historically and socially contrived rituals and practices, nor has it to do with presumed metaphysical warrants of certitude; rather, religion is a matter of the real-world consequence of interpretation. A religion is a set of beliefs, attitude, and practice, yet doing religion well is not about these but about how well these serve in grasping life. Religion is the systematic and methodological study (i.e., rereading or relegere) so as to better bind

108  Gerald Ostdiek together (for the purpose of some action, or relegare) possibility, interaction, and consequence, into a functional whole. In this sense, competence at religion can be subjected to the rigors of falsification. Watts has shown us a clear path toward exactly this sense of doing religion well. My own argument builds on Watts, though I argue that the path Watts blazed is more readily distinguished by removing from consideration the entirety of metaphysics, and treating religion as a “merely” secular matter of a living thing interpreting the world of which it partakes so as to go on living (Ostdiek, 2015). From this view, one does religion well when believing is folded into biology (writ large) to become a matter of living well, when the process by which what we believe/perceive becomes how we behave and thus who we are, is subjected to the scrutiny of science and philosophy – and not merely captive to the vagaries of natural selection. In short, we can learn to do religion well by grasping the religious philosophy of Alan Watts purely as a secular affair, and a subset of biological semiotics. In this, I seek to reduce the man’s propositions to the compost of profundity, such that they may indeed “serve as a possible ferment of new growths or a nucleus of new crystallization” ( James, 2008, p. 41), that is, open possibility through interaction and consequence. Any competent reading of Alan Watts would demonstrate that Watts seemed to find not something more, but rather, some process greater – more whole – than just secular and semiotic transcending/believing/doing into being. But a closer reading may well find in that greater wholeness a natural process. From both the secular view of religion and Watts’s own arguments, the idea of some “transcendental world” is as absurd and dangerous as that of a transcendental self. It runs contrary to the value brought by doing religion well and contradicts the “know-how” Watts brings to issues of living together (not only with each other, but with the entirety of our environment which Watts identifies as our soul). I read in Watts both methodological and philosophical naturalism, that is, an epistemology grounded in recognition that unfalsifiable “proofs” are necessarily invalid as well as an anti-metaphysical ontology, which is the presumption that all that exists is natural. From this view, should evidence be found for the existence of ghosts, for example, we would not have discovered something supernatural but would have expanded our grasp of natural phenomena. Yet Watts does, on occasion, appear to succumb to the naturalist fallacy, which is the presumption that “nature” is, by the fact of its being, pleasant, desirable, and morally good. For example, the paean Watts (1951) paints in extolling the “wisdom of the body” (p. 56) of women giving birth in the fields and returning immediately to work blithely dismisses the harsh reality of unnecessarily high rates of maternal and infant mortality therein engendered. This sort of error fuels (what I perceive to be) a misreading of the larger argument that informs Watts’ secular/semiotic view of the function of religion, and his reasoning therefore.

Alan Watts and Secular Competence  109 I argue that the unique value Watts brings to the discussions of religion is commonly lost in the contemplation of Watts’ own believing, and that Watts knew that this was likely, and sought (with mixed success) to counter it within his weltanschauung. Think of how Watts (1966/ 1989) describes the relationship between body and soul. The existent self is the body, and the “essential Self” the soul; sounds familiar enough. And yet: “the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and processes which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing” (p. 69). Watts clearly saw that the soul that presumed transcendental “essence” of a person is semiotic artifice, a historically contrived habituation of relatedness, and a consequence of a body minding its situation, which includes the other minding bodies that it encounters therein. No god, no soul, no ego, or will is needed: to unite body and soul is to unite a self with the actual world, with as well as within an ecosystem. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a matter of biological selection: to fail to come to terms with and within one’s situation is to cease to exist. The likelihood of death increases (I would argue exponentially) with the degree of dislocation. As William James argued with respect to the so-called mind–body problem, nothing is needed to unite that which cannot be separated. And yet managing this union well does take doing, and skill, and self-reflection, for it is no NeoPlatonic romanticism: instruction can help, and this Watts offers.

The Doing of Religion: The Pragmatic Watts Religion, in my view, consists of a single function of a neo-Peircean triad (Ostdiek, 2015). As with all such triads, its existence is an aspect of two other functions: there is no doing of religion sans minding of the world – and of our mindings along with and within it. This forms an epistemic triad: religion depicts the channeling of interpretation via the propensity to action which is belief; philosophy, testing an interpretant (as an object of thought) against itself for readability and consistency in sign usage; and science, testing it against some actual circumstance. As with all such triads, each function can be/has been ideationally, methodologically, and socially distinguished, as each bears consequence independent of the others; thus we have religion as both process and object (of/as both social/epistemic and social/psychological phenomena). But each function remains an integral of the whole, and together they depict/are how what a living thing believes/becomes what it knows and how it behaves and thence what (or who) “it” “is” – in countless reiterations of novel believing, novel behaving, and novel selfing. The object of a Peircean triad is its consequence, the habit formation that both is and results from the intertwining function of the three-part whole. The object/consequence of this triad is the psychosomatic mapping that is the continuity/habituation of the process by which a living

110  Gerald Ostdiek organism finds food and shelter, avoids predation, generates knowledge necessary to its survival, and generally lives. Human religion is of the same kind as non-human religion, except that our speciesspecific knack of skeptical doubt has opened species-specific possibilities with equally species-specific complications. The loss of animal faith (Santayana, 1923/1955) opened a vast niche, range upon range of potential habituation – and peril. Should we, in this process, fail to succeed in our form of believing, should we retreat from the responsibility engendered by the freedom we have gained through our unique semiotic ability, we will lose our humanity. While all living things do religion – channel interpretation by acting on believed perception to thereby reconstruct both themselves and the world – we have seen no other species that can do religion as powerfully, or as badly, as we. And there is no going back; what we have lost is lost. The only question is whether or not we succeed. As I read Watts, I see not only a call for secular competence in religious praxis but also a highly useful (i.e., true) method by which this can be accomplished. In the simplest terms, we do religion well when we allow the believing we use to make sense in (and out of life) to work in concert with our philosophizing and sciencing – when what we believe into being is reconstructed by coherence and correspondence with and within our actual circumstances (which, of course, includes the virtual circumstances of past mappings). We do religion badly when we do not. Moreover, religion is useful (true) in furthering living only when done well, when bound successfully within its naturally existing triad. Here I presume upon two pragmatic notions, both well known to Watts. First, “truth” has not two, but three criteria: coherence, correspondence, and use: “A theory which is utilized receives the highest possible certificate of truth” (Wright, 2000. p. 51). Second, that “truth” is not to be confused with being – but consists of pointing (with varying degrees of success) at being (see e.g., James, 1911/ 1997, p. 44). And thus we (and Watts) are incapable of ontologically distinguishing religious “truths” from those of reality – as distinguished by science and philosophy. And yet, for the purpose of study, we can safely ignore both of the other two legs of this process, as well as its implications to biological evolution, so as to focus on the ongoing object of human religion, which is the human self. But Watts (1951), a critic may well contend, rejects the very idea of the self and finds a variety of ways to argue that “one has no self to love” (p. 133); thus, the idea that religion is that process by which a self is formed rightly appears to contradict Watts. A more astute reader would reject this critique. The seeming contradiction is resolved with further reference to James. Consciousness, James (1912/2008) tells us, “is the name of a nonentity.” By this, James means “only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function” (p. 2). With complete disregard to the degree of self-reflection

Alan Watts and Secular Competence  111 (self-awareness) it may or may not have achieved, the self is no simple assemblage of “stuff” – material/technical and/or psychological/spiritual. But it is a function, a turning of the function circle of biosemiotics (e.g., Kull, Emmeche, & Hoffmeyer, 2011), an “unjointed” union of self and non-self into a forever-incomplete (yet potentially coherent) whole ( James, 1890/ 2007, p. 239). This organic unity of the living thing and its surrounds infuses Watts’ notion of religion, shapes it, and gives purpose to all the various snakes and ladders commonly identified as “religious” phenomena. But, Watts warns us, clinging to some notional “transcendental” thing impedes this process, gums up the (semiosic) circle of life, and erodes the ability of the living thing to live. It is as James (1907/ 2003) argued: “Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest” that searches for a “power-bringing word or name” by which “the universe’s PRINCIPLE” can be safely corralled, controlled, and put to work (so you do not have to). Within this more traditional approach toward religion, “You can rest” once you possess such “solving names” – “God,” “Matter,” “Reason,” “the Absolute,” “Energy” (pp. 31, 32) are all such. And it is as Watts (1951) described: “Religion, as most of us have known it, has quite obviously tried to make sense out of life by fixation.” Both men describe a particular dysfunction of our species-specific means of binding the potential into being through moment upon moment of transaction, which consists of “confusing the intelligible with the fixed” (p. 43). James (1997) did not, as some have presumed, think that this sort of “rest” is valid; this sort of rest is no respite in the struggle for life, it is escapism from it. Moreover, it is an escapism that cannot end well. He differentiated the moral holiday allowed by pluralism and the rejection of the Absolute (as a solving-name or “PRINCIPLE” but also as an ontological fact) from one taken in the face of belief in it. The former “can only be provisional breathing-spells, intended to refresh us for the morrow’s fight” (p. 28, italics added). It represents “chilling” – a momentary enjoyment of the entangling of life without regard to the larger weight of the world. Absolutism (including that of the Self) has more capacity for generating moral holidays, it can even grant absolute moral holidays (e.g., by informing a rationalization for excusing one’s self from responsibility for harmful action, such as when the conditions of a slave “became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham” [Weinberg, 2003, p. 242]). But the latter is of use only to “an incurably sick soul” while the former, the necessarily provisional holiday, is of general use in finding the strength to live with the insecurity that life, and wisdom, demands. Watts treats the Self as the principle impediment to the movement that is the great stream that is life, while simultaneously rejoicing in the alchemy of the soul – which, as we have seen, is not a Self, but the “essence” of the fact/relating/process by which the living thing lives.

112  Gerald Ostdiek Watts sets the Self against the soul, and dismisses the former in favor of the later. The soul, in Watts’ terminology, cannot serve as a “solving name” as it represents/is a process (specifically, that process by which specifiable sets of relations exist). James and Watts agree that to treat the self (i.e., the “mind”) as a transcendental “thing” – as some metaphysical “stuff” with agency and consequence that informs and solves the riddles of my “I” is to “freeze” – to “fix” (to make unchanging) a process that cannot be stopped without ending. For Watts and James alike, to “fix” a self is to destroy it. The self cannot be “fixed” as a “Self” (nor, for that matter, can “Matter”!), and the attempt necessarily damages the living thing. It remains the case that James (1956) did write of religion “in the supernaturalist sense” as faith in X, where X is an “unseen order” which is sought as “the true significance of our present mundane life” and the causal agent of, and explanation for “riddles of the natural order” (p. 51) – that is, James analyzed “religion” in the sense of common usage. But James (2003) also argued: “Believe that life is worth living, and your very belief will help create the fact” (p. 240). This is the sense in which Watts (1970, p. 78) describes his concern with religion as following the tradition of William James – that of psychology. For myself, I believe/act on the notion/belief that Watts acted upon/believed in the truth/usefulness of the heritage of radical empiricism and pragmaticism. This informs my turn to James and Peirce to further Watts’ call for secular competence in religious praxis. For a pragmatist, however, the real test lies not in the sourcing, but the doing. Thus, we return to the notion of religion as a neo-Peircean triad: Peirce found many ways to argue that everything that is real – that reality itself – comes in threes. His cenopythagorean ontology presents the basic categories of existence, which can be summarized as: possibility, interaction, and consequence. The first is identified with sentience: living things generate possibility out of mere probability; the second is the means by which both possibilities and probabilities succeed or fail; the third is simultaneously all objects of existence and the means by which possibilities and probabilities come to be. Moreover, the generation of possibility is necessarily semiotic – it involves a “read” or interpretation of a situation: and the interpretation makes the interpretant, not the other way around. Finally, each of these processes cannot exist independently of the others, thus it is not a triangle of causation, but a three-legged stool of being. (This is an all too brief summary of Peirce’s cenopythagorean ontology, which I develop in the context of religion in Ostdiek [2015], and in terms of degeneracy in Firstness, i.e., the lack or loss of minding/possibility that is or trends toward non-life, in Ostdeik [2014].). In this way, the secular function of religion is necessarily ongoing; it results in the formation of “a” self that continues “selfing” (that continues its existence) only by furthering the reciprocation (transaction) between “not-I” and “I” by which both life and “I” exists. This can be impeded by

Alan Watts and Secular Competence  113 all sorts of nominally “religious” notions, not the least of which includes belief in the actual existence of a transcendental or supernatural Self. Religious success, in the sense of Watts, is a matter of kenotic praxis; it necessitates that we get over ourselves so as to allow the I to breathe in not-I. But this kenosis is understood in the light of Peirce’s cenopythagorean ontology, rather than Christian Neo-Platonism (built on the presumed existence of an “essence” of every person, or indivisible “soul”). Thus, I find there is no contradiction between speaking of religion as that process that both is and informs the existence of subjectivity, by which that human-specific form of subjectivity (or “I”) comes to be, and Watts’ argument that a “religious” (supernaturalist) belief in the “self” is an impediment to competence in religious praxis.

Moral Competence as Successful “Religioning”: The Art of Living with Alan Watts The argument that morality necessarily involves some supernatural instruction is as hoary as it is prevalent within contemporary society, and blatantly incoherent. As Watts (1951) amply demonstrates, Divine Command Theory (DCT; whether the blunt claim that morality is whatever this or that god says or does, or the more abstracted, circular, and equally absurd argument that morality is a necessary quality of, and exists through the presence of some presumed ens necessarium) cannot serve as morality because the very presence of such a command negates the need for (and thus the presence of) a competence in the “art of living together” (p. 119) – a competence which can only be established in the here and now. The extent to which DCT is allowed to define morality is the extent to which morality ceases to exist – no matter the validity of the command. The argument is compelling: invite a black man to dinner “to be unprejudiced” (p. 132) and you have shown the world (i.e., your own “soul”) that you do, in fact, see the man as “a black” rather than as a man (i.e., if you invited him to fulfill such a command, and thereby be “moral”). Not only is DCT antithetical to moral competence, it positively exemplifies religious incompetence. Although Watts’ concept of creative morality is structured on the first proposition, it also demonstrates the second (see Watts, 1951, pp. 119–133). Moreover, as with his notion of the soul and the self, Watts’ solution to moral dilemmas involves a turn to the secular. I extrapolate three propositions: First, Watts addresses morality independent of religion. Morality is a distinct phenomenon that neither depends on nor correlates with religiosity (in the traditional sense of metaphysically warranted ritual and practice, theology and apologetics). One need not join a church or believe in “God” to be moral – to the contrary, doing so commonly interferes with the maturation of one’s moral being. That morality evolves with society, that the “Commands” supposedly authored by “God” tend to mimic those that prevail within any

114  Gerald Ostdiek particular culture, and that a morality must creatively resist codification if it is to stand as a morality, all demonstrate that the only necessary basis of morality is a secular, as opposed to divine, society. However, this proposition can grant no validity to any particular set of moral behaviors; it presents a view of morality that is necessary but not sufficient to establish the validity of any particular moral system. That a society has settled on some particular morality is, by itself, no more authoritative than if some “god” had settled it. This proposition is not sufficient to establish that the behavior thereby engendered is moral (leads to well-being). Second, Watts (1951) holds to the notion that “objective” moral standards do exist – bound not to any metaphysical presupposition, but to the properties of a specific situation and definable in terms of possibility, interaction, and habit (object) discoverable therein. Presupposing only the most basic ontogenetic agreement (there exists a physical universe that contains living beings), Watts defines morality as “the art of living together” (p. 119). What is moral is that which leads toward greater success at resolving problems that arise when living things live together. This entails the existence of “rules, or rather techniques” (p. 119) that inform and are this or that method of living. In light of the previous discussion of religion, the moral is that set of techniques that best serves this ongoing process we call life. Morality, then, is a matter of shared well-being. In any given interaction, there exists a set of behaviors that better furthers the situation in terms of successfully binding the various constituents into a greater and more integral wholeness. This superior set of behaviors exists whether or not people agree on it, whether or not it is known or even knowable; and it exists bound to the situation. What is moral is behavior that furthers the entanglement of the bank of life and serves the integrity that is life (Darwin, 1859/ 1946, p. 429). Watts offers an expansion of Leopold’s (1949) land ethic (“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” [pp. 224–225]), cast in the language of traditional religion, the rhetoric of metaphysics and the realm of human psychosomatic experience and intentionality. Yet for all that, for Watts, the ground of morality remains secular, and the secular sufficient to establish “objective”/ true morality. I add the caveat that Watts might well have objected to my use of “objective” – but not, I contend, to the usage to which I attach this word/symbol. And depending on the exact nature of the objection, I may well agree with him. I say “objective” as a sop to Cerberus – may there come an age when such contortions no longer pertain. This points to how the second proposition lacks necessity. “Objects” are habits of interaction (distinctly perceived) that (with varying degrees of success) “lock” probability (in the case of non-living things) and/or possibility (plus probability in that of living things) into specifiable, potentially knowable “things” (Ostdiek, 2014).

Alan Watts and Secular Competence  115 Were these two propositions the sum of Watts’ view of morality – tied as it is to his view of religion – then we could rightfully assign the entire conversation to the category of “so what.” Neither proposition can, by itself, soundly claim both sufficiency and necessity. But the entanglement of life is no mere assemblage of parts; it is in the emergence (genesis) of an autonomous agent capable of assisting the living of the parts even as it lives by their living. It may be a biological organism – the ecosystem of  living things that is a living body. It may also be post-biological  – symbolic “life” such as a culture, an ideology, or a psychology, which are, similarly, ecosystems of interactions of habit and possibility (Ostdiek, 2016). This is the third proposition I extrapolate from Watts (1951): belief (acceptance of, and a willingness to act in accord with) that the “great stream” that is life represents a very real synechism (or radical continuity) of living things (see pp. 39–54). Within and between living things, there exists no sharp divide, thus “the real man, the organism-in-relation-tothe-universe is this unconscious motivation. And because he is it, he is not being moved by it” (p. 128). The first proposition is granted sufficiency, and the second necessity; combined they posit a view that is a “not determined but consistent” “flow” of events. Combined – not “placed” in relation to each other but grasped as relation each to each other within the “third” of synechism – these three propositions present a view of life that is selforganizing, self-generating, and self-defining. It defies the logic – even the possibility – of an appeal to a moral agent or cause outside this flow as a source of validation. As we have already seen, Watts positively demolishes this notion of Divine Command Theory of morality; what we now see is that this also serves to establish the validity of secular morality as well as secular meter for religious praxis. In practical terms, DCT justifies an artificial “freezing” of some specific interpretation of morality so that practitioners can then hold some particular set of customs and conventions sacrosanct, immune to challenge or adaptation and absolute in their being (Watts, 1951, p. 43). This presents three dangers: First, DCT necessarily results in deep moral indifference. With DCT, we are not moral agents, but dogs who avoid peeing on the carpet, sans comprehension or responsibility, in obedience to our master’s wishes. (It matters not whether this is out of anxiety over the loss of their master’s love, fear of punishment, or some incognizable doggie thought.) Second, DCT allows us to justify pretty much anything as “moral” – and for “just following orders” to become the standard by which we determine right and wrong (where following orders is always right, no matter the situation). And third, DCT eliminates any necessity for the process by which believing is channeled into being, that is, it ends the need for religion (as anything other than “just following orders”). With DCT, the shaping of the stream is magical, rather than geographical; that is to say, it is an ungraspable nothing. To accept DCT as descriptive

116  Gerald Ostdiek of the cause (shaper) of morality and the praxis of religion as worshipful recognition of the agent (being) of that morality is to leave nothing for either religion or morality to do. It is to leave them with no consequence. For a radical empiricist such as Watts, there is no difference between a thing with no consequence, and a thing with no existence. In contrast, by placing the source of religion and morality within the give and take of life, Watts subjects them to selection and change. The resulting insecurity is real, but so is the resulting consequence (actuality).

Conclusion: The Complete Insecurity of Alan Watts Unlike the general lot of animal life, humanity negotiates truth claims with the world. In so doing, humans devise all sorts of claims to fit all sorts of situations – generally for one’s own benefit, individually and en masse. This is lubricated with rituals and practices, obligatory actions, and formalized responses, which serve to tell us who we are, where we belong, and what we ought to do – again, individually and en masse. Moreover, these “things” exist only as we continue to reproduce them, thereby subjecting them to variation and selection. And so, all our belongings, our beings, and our doings necessarily begin to fail whenever a self begins to hold itself at odds with its other self (which is simultaneously the world in which that self has arisen and its “essence” or soul). This is to say, our negotiations of truth claims are less likely to succeed when, whether through fear, arrogance or any motive whatsoever, we fail to actually negotiate. (It is as Watts argued that a motivated self is a determined self – and thereby less likely to succeed as a self.) This is only exacerbated by our tendency to place “religion” apart from the world. To make a truth claim based solely upon the channeling of belief, with no recourse to testing that claim (for either coherence or correspondence), is to rely solely on usage to determine the claim. This animal faith consists of leaping willy-nilly into the crucible of natural selection. It is to cast one’s self into Darwin’s Jungle, with no means of defense (or offense) but prayer. The doing of religion in the traditional sense of the word can offer only the illusion of security; and life has a way of exposing such conceit. To the extent that it is done well, the doing of religion as binding interpretation within biotic and post-biotic phenomena necessarily suffers selective pressure. This religion – the religion that Watts espouses – exposes itself to falsification and consequence, not only in use but also coherence and correspondence (i.e., not only in terms of the magisterium of religion but also those of philosophy and science). No small part of the truth (usefulness) and beauty (blend of contrast and coherence) that Watts brings to any discussion of religion is found in his pragmatic and secular approach. His skill with words and ideas is such that even those who hold most closely to metaphysical sentimentalism can easily fail to notice just how thoroughly he disabuses them of their irrational and

Alan Watts and Secular Competence  117 emotionally self-serving truth claims. The gentleness of his method belies the steel of his logic. Even his direst warnings are informed by warm-hearted colloquialisms that sound endearingly familiar to all but the sickest of souls. This, I hold, is key to a successful critique (use) of the truth (pointing towards actual consequence) that Watts offers, however commonly it may be lost by those who seek in Watts an escape from the struggle for life. As a matter of course, Watts did find something more, some process greater than just all this transcending/believing/doing into being, but this more is no less and no more than recognition that “life only avails, not the having lived” (Emerson, 1841/ 1934). It is a call for secular competence in religious praxis, for believing to subordinate itself to the bindings that living demands of us – which very much include the doings of science and philosophy. It is a call for greater success at forming more viable habits through opening possibility and reciprocating transaction, which form novel habits, which open further possibilities. So long as life exists, the doing of religion never ends. Watts calls on each of us and all of us to do religion well, and thereby cease our absurd (unthinking, irrational, sentimental) habit of disjointing thee from me, and us from them, as well as of thee and me from us, and so on. In all this, Watts may rightly be read as having rejected any and all claims of metaphysical certitude, and accepted secular competence in religious praxis as the means and the measure of living successfully in this necessarily shared and insecure world.

Acknowledgment Reprinted from Self & Society: An International Journal for Humanistic Psychology, 2017, 45(3–4), 256–266. Used by permission of The Association for Humanistic Psychology in Britain. Author note. Research for this article has been supported by the University of Hradec Kralove, Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences. The author now works at Charles University in Prague.

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118  Gerald Ostdiek James, W. (2007). Principles of psychology, Vol. 1. New York, NY: Cosimo. (Original work published 1890) James, W. (2008). Essays in radical empiricism. New York, NY: Cosimo. (Original work published 1912) Kull, K., Emmeche, C., & Hoffmeyer, J. (2011). Why biosemiotics? An introduction to our view on the biology of life itself. In C. Emmeche & K. Kull (Eds.), Towards a semiotic biology (pp. 1–24). London, UK: Imperial College Press. Leopold, A. (1949). A sand county almanac. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Ostdiek, G. (2014). The manufacture of chance: Firstness as a fixture of life. Biosemiotics, 7(3), 361–376. Ostdiek, G. (2015). Signs, science and religion: A biosemiotic mediation. In D. Evers, M. Fuller, A. Jackelen, K-W Saether (Eds.), Issues in science and theology: What is life (pp. 169–177). New York, NY: Springer. Ostdiek, G. (2016). Towards a post-biotic anthropology. In K. Pauknerová, et al. (Eds.), Non-humans and after in Social Science (pp. 73–85). Červený Kostelec: Pavel Mervart. Santayana, G. (1955). Scepticism and animal faith. New York, NY: Dover. (Original work published 1923) Watts, A. (1951). The Wisdom of Insecurity. New York, NY: Vintage. Watts, A. (1970). Does it Matter? New York, NY: Vintage. Watts, A. (1989). The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. New York, NY: Vintage. (Original work published 1966) Weinberg, S. (2003). Facing up: Science and its cultural adversaries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wright, C. (2000). The evolutionary philosophy of Chauncey Wright, Vol. 1 (F. Ryan & E. Madden, Eds.). Bristol, UK: Thommes.

9 The Holistic Negation of Alan Watts Reclaiming Value in the Void Adrian Moore

Alan Watts has often been dismissed as being a popular, rather than academic author. However, if we consider Watts as having approached the study of Eastern metaphysics as a method of phenomenological inquiry, we can read his work in terms of his philosophical contemporaries in the existentialist tradition. In 1951 Watts published a book titled The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety. In the preface, he describes it as a kind of philosophical equivalent to Through the LookingGlass, by which we can understand Watts as offering a formal description of what Lewis Carrol presented in imagery. It is intended as a conscious philosophical assessment of the disjunction between socio-linguistic constructs and a Zen-informed position of metaphysical naturalism. Given that one of the core outcomes of this disconnection between the linguistic subject and the organism-in-motion is a persistent state of anxiety, the text is often included in the rather ambiguous category of “self-help” literature. If one were to read the text for “self-help” one would find little helpful advice beyond the assertion that “self” and “help” are disruptive categories that should be abandoned. The genre of self-help literature is often populated with pseudo-scientific, reductive pop-psychology and the categorization of Watts’ work in this genre serves to reinforce similar assessments from the perspective of academic philosophy. Some of this hostility arises from his relation to the formal institutions of Zen religion and the lineage and authenticity of his Buddhist knowledge from Daisetzu Teitaro Suzuki. Some of this criticism is of legitimate concern, if one is in the context of studying the history and formal philosophy of Buddhism, but it is doubtful that this was Watt’s intention in terms of this text. It is more accurate to say that he engaged and adopted metaphysical positions from Eastern philosophies in his attempts to grapple with the psychological and social context of his own lived situation. In this sense there is a strong correlation between the themes of Watts’ literary output and those of the contemporaneous existentialist movement. Arthur Schopenhauer, a nineteenth-century German philosopher, openly adopted aspects of Buddhist metaphysics which he encountered

120  Adrian Moore in the spoils of German expansion and is the earliest known European to have regarded himself as a “Buddha-ist” (Cooper, 2013, p. 267). While not a simple or straightforward journey, this imported style of reflexive philosophy motivated the Continental European turn toward phenomenological and existential analysis. This existential pivot is a useful discussion point given that, like Watts, the existentialists are often contrasted as a simplistic school of thought when compared to the rigorous positivism of Anglo-American philosophy. The movement is often discussed as having been popularly and culturally successful, but philosophically unimpressive. This may be nothing more than the tribalism of “analytic” and “continental” philosophy, but it should be noted that cultural success was really the end goal of existentialist philosophy in the first place. The core feature of the otherwise disparate movement was the attempt to present complex structures and relations of human experience as intelligible and meaningful discourse for the broader community. The conceptual underpinning of existential philosophy is the practice of phenomenology, intended as a philosophically rigorous account of human experience, independent of the overall truth or meaning of those experiences. Phenomenological inquiry broadly sees the competing narratives of empiricism and rationalism as merely experiences of knowledge and not in-themselves independent of our knowing them. Primary to the understanding of human experience is a conceptualization of consciousness itself, that is, an understanding of the knower who knows. In addressing this question, we will see that both existentialist and Buddhist philosophies gravitate toward an explanation that is grounded in a distinct focus on the philosophical significance of nothingness. Nothingness takes a central position in the early work of existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, marking his understanding of human consciousness as an ontological void which gives rise to the content of experience. It is this nothingness that allows the very possibility of choice, as being “nothing” makes the consciousness unbound by material conditions, even if our bodies are. In this sense, Sartre reverts to a kind of classical dualism, arguing that the functionality and substantiality of consciousness is radically different to that of material reality. This dualism gives rise to anxiety as our lives are a constant fluctuation between the awareness of choice and the limitations of material conditions. It might be helpful to note here that we do not see Being and Nothingness (1943/ 1992) listed as self-help literature or pop psychology. Watts encountered a similarly mature conception of nothingness in his study of classical Eastern religion and it became foundational to not only his interpretation of Indian Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen philosophy, but further to his understanding of our own cultural malaise in the modern industrial world. Far from being a source of existential angst, as in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Watts sees the potential for a positive void which is generative of value beyond the limitations of the material.

The Holistic Negation  121 This chapter will address the relevance of Watts’ philosophical discourse on the Void to contemporary industrialized society, while acknowledging the essentialist nature of his interpretation of Eastern traditions. By reading Watts in relation to the existentialist movement, his work will be positioned as a distinct philosophical discourse which engages with the psycho-social conditions of contemporary industrialized life.

Buddhist and Existential Nothingness In his 1942 essay, “L’Mythe de Sisyphe,” Albert Camus declares that when a person says they’re thinking of nothing, this could entail the possibility that they’re not thinking, or that the subject of their thought is non-specific. Alternatively, however, they may also be speaking more sincerely of that profound nothing which symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity. (Camus, 1942/ 1955, p. 10) The emergence of the experience of nothingness stands for Camus as a challenge and reckoning to the coherence of our modern psychological experience. Much of how we choose to respond to this nothingness, however, comes down to how we understand it. The role of nothingness, negations, void, and nihilism has undergone a tumultuous change in the journey of European philosophy. For example, Immanuel Kant posited that the lack or negation of beauty is itself ugliness, as the lack or negation of the moral is itself the immoral. This position began to undertake a change throughout the existential movement, particularly given the focus of phenomenological analysis on faithfully describing the structures of human experience and perception. This culminated in the work of JeanPaul Sartre (1943/ 1992) utilizing “nothingness” as the center point of the human condition in his book Being and Nothingness. By examining this culturally and historically proximate example of an ontology of negation, we can prepare the framework to more fruitfully engage with Watts’ attention to this phenomenon in Asian thought. The primacy of nothingness in Sartre’s existentialism is drawn from two predominant observations. The first of these is the conscious apprehension of a negation, which for Sartre, confirms the existence of negatives as an objective fact and not merely as judgments of perception and cognition (Leung, 2020, p. 479). This is an uncontroversial proposition, and with the illumination of Sartre’s examples, we can see the functionality of this phenomenon. Briefly explained, Sartre discusses meeting his friend Pierre at a café, knowing Pierre to be punctual and himself to be frequently late.

122  Adrian Moore Upon reaching the café, Sartre surveys the patrons in search of Pierre, but notices no details regarding the crowd other than their not being Pierre. Realizing that Pierre is not in the café, the entirety of Sartre’s existence is now oriented, or intended toward the absence of Pierre. The meaning of Sartre’s orientation to his environment is captured by explanations of Pierre’s absence – perhaps the friend has been and left already, or alternately he may have gone to a different café. Thought is typically regarded to be of something, either a practicable and perceivable sensory object or a symbolic representation of such. In this conception, one might be able to think of the concept of nothingness, but not to directly think of nothingness itself, as it has no properties which the mind can represent (Leung, 2020, p. 473). This is present in both dualist thinking (e.g., wherein the phenomenon is perceivable, while the noumena is non-perceivable and only theoretically or symbolically accessible) and in monist thinking, where negations are a lack of positive experience and not experiences in themselves. Sartre’s example of (not) meeting Pierre in the café provides an account of a direct experience of the negative, a total conscious inhabiting of lived nothingness. This construction of nothingness as a phenomenologically accessible property of the universe is merely a precursor to his more radical claim on the nature of the human mind. Sartre’s ontology, despite shifting in response to political developments throughout his career, maintains a distance from the notion of a fixed human nature. However, one can generally characterize his understanding of the human mind throughout these phases as being essentially a “nothingness” itself. He describes the mind, or consciousness, as “being what it is not, and not being what it is” (Sartre, 1943/ 1992, p. 28). The mind, in this sense, is always made up by the content it apprehends; if one is in a park, the mind comprises of the trees, the grass, the birds, the wind and all manner of sound, light, and color. If one is in the café waiting for Pierre, the whole of consciousness is arrested by the absence of Pierre, the images of the café that signify his negation. If the subject attempts to apprehend their consciousness in-itself, then one encounters nothing. The mind is being-for-itself, comprising only of its possibilities and projections, having no fixed phenomena. This is what allows humans to have control over their choices, to make plans into the future, and to plot our pathways intentionally through a living world. This isn’t to say that we have no fixed being: humankind lives in an imminent world of bodily, material conditions, which we are thrown into with all its existing relations and processes that Sartre describes as the world of being-in-itself. This is the foundation of Sartre’s (1946/ 2007) famous declaration in Existentialism is a Humanism that “existence precedes essence” (p. 20). A seed cannot choose what tree it grows into, and a chair has a conceived role or purpose prior to its construction. Conscious beings, however, are not born into their role as a doctor, thief, politician or butler; that is, we are born into rich or poor conditions, rather than

The Holistic Negation  123 with rich or poor souls. To reject the possibility that we could organize the conditions of the world in a different way than we do, to argue that the essence of human life is fixed, is to live in bad faith. Bad faith is a potentially problematic concept, as the material conditions that some people face are restrictive enough to fix their being, in which they are essentially reduced to the status of an object themselves. Sartre’s contemporaries such as Simone de Beauvoir and Franz Fanon demarcated these scenarios to allow a separation between bad faith and the conditions of oppression. Bad faith, then, is distinctly the act of fixing one’s own consciousness. It is a way of participating in self-deception, to take the contradictory choice of no-choice. Given that Sartre’s understandings of Buddhism were arguably more superficial than other twentieth-century thinkers, it is fairly remarkable that his phenomenology of psychological experience mirrors some Buddhist traditions so clearly. In particular, the psychology of Japanese Zen similarly revolves around the phenomenon of nothingness. Daisetzu Teitaro Suzuki was a Zen author who was roughly contemporaneous to Sartre’s work, and who was a personal and philosophical influence on the thought of Alan Watts. Suzuki presents the practice of Zen as a reconnection with the immanence of the lifeworld through the doctrine of no-mind. We can construct an understanding of this doctrine by reading it as a meditative exercise of eliminating one’s self-deceptions, and a nonattachment of the mind to the content which passes through it. Much like in Sartre’s formulation, to say what the mind is would be to say what it isn’t. The world of negations, non-distinction and Sam sāra is a world ˙ that defies definition. In his account of the life of Gautama Buddha, The Gospel of Buddha, Paul Carus indicates that the center point of the Buddha’s enlightenment sprang from his denial of the ego-mind. According to traditional stories, upon attaining Nirvana, the Buddha saw that “the existence of self is an illusion, and there is no wrong in this world, no vice, no evil, except what flows from the assertion of self” (Carus, 1895/ 1994, p. 41). This of course brings a moral dimension to the question of self-experience, but in the philosophical cultures of the ancient world, moral fault was often considered a function of metaphysical misunderstanding, rather than intentional evil. The ego-mind is, for Buddhism, the source of our attachments and our anxieties. We suffer because the mind thinks itself discreet from the world and mourns the loss of these content-attachments which populate and concretize it. In the context of contemporary Western philosophy, this raises a problem of agency: if the mind is the source of suffering, how can the mind apprehend enlightenment and attain Nirvana? The short answer is simply that it can’t. According to Thomas McEvilley (2002), HellenoBuddhist and Indian philosophies saw the force of enlightenment as the “reintegration of subject and object until they are once more completely infolded, until object is lost in subject and the appearance of any object

124  Adrian Moore has ended” (p. 575). Despite these Buddhist ideas of enlightenment having made their way into Greek thought through the Hellenistic expansion of Alexander’s empire, the political and religious forces of the ancient West provided little fertile ground and the theological proclivities of East Asia proved much more receptive. The Zen tradition of Buddhism is closely associated with Japanese culture, but its inception is commonly thought to have been the arrival in China of the Afghani Buddhist sage, Bodhidharma. Much like Gautama Buddha, the life of Bodhidharma is steeped in mythology. He is credited as having transformed the Shaolin monastery from a house of decadence into the symbol of Buddhist discipline it is today; in one particularly fanciful story, he was said to have been so upset at having fallen asleep while meditating that he cut off his own eyelids, which fell to the floor and grew into China’s first tea plants. However, the radical nature of Bodhidharma’s intervention came from his refusal to give concrete form to the nature of enlightenment. In a record of one of his declarations, written by a follower as the “Bloodstream Sermon,” Bodhidharma states: To find a buddha, you have to see your nature. Whoever sees his nature is a buddha. If you don’t see your nature, invoking buddhas, reciting sutras, making offerings and keeping precepts are all useless. Invoking buddhas results in good karma, reciting sutras results in a good memory; keeping precepts results in a good rebirth, and making offerings results in future blessings - but no buddha. (Bodhidharma, 1987/ 2009, pp. 11–13) The practice and knowledge of Buddhism can have good results, but the results are not in themselves enlightenment. But this description appears to contain a necessary contradiction with the Buddhist precept of no-self: if all self is an illusion, then how can we have a self nature to see into? What is seeing, and what is being seen? The answer, like Sartre’s being-in-itself, is that our self-nature is the nature of void. Suzuki (1927/ 2010) translates this experience into the more digestible concept of no-mind. The paradox that arises in this mind of no-mind is connected to the paradoxes that underwrite the Koans, the primary records of Zen transmission within monastic history. Zen is itself like the no-mind, a concept that defies conception, and has no dimensions, qualities, or attributes that can be expressed in the discretions of language. It is not possible to have a Zen approach to the world, or to encounter the world “through” Zen: to do so would be to introduce a mediating concept, to engage a division between Zen and not-Zen (Suzuki, 1927/ 2010, p. 176). Attempting to escape Zen is to run toward Zen, to flee from nowhere to nowhere. Suzuki reminds us that no one can be taught to live by the virtue of Zen, but rather that one must come to an awareness of the utter absurdity of doing otherwise (pp. 163–164).

The Holistic Negation  125 In this same way, one cannot be induced to eradicate the ego, as there is none to be eradicated. The contradiction between mind and no-mind only arises with the introduction of the concept of mind: paradoxes and attachments arise with the illusion of permanency that language imbues into the world. The world as it is in the breath, under the rain and in the flux of life, defies this permanency. The illusion of permanence is a mainstay of religious and political entities that seek to control the flow of life, but even as we live among our illusions, the world breathes on. The existential and Buddhist conceptions of consciousness are both broadly expressible in terms of negation, void, and emptiness. In the experience of ontology there is agreement, but once we turn to the metaphysics of the outside world and the Other, something different is encountered. The existentialist stands as a nothingness within a world of somethings, while the Buddhist immerses into nothingness and is dissolved within it. Alan Watts’ philosophy draws on these notions of nothingness and the immersion of the self into nature, and we can use this similar terminology to interrogate the role of Watts and Sartre’s respective ontologies in relation to the social condition of anxiety.

Watts Contra Sartre: Anxiety and Temporality A clearer picture can be drawn from applying these ideas to one of the prominent conditions which both the existentialists and Watts saw as central to the condition of the modern subject. Watts referred to our modern times as an “age of anxiety” which correlates to the existentialist condition of anxiety, or nausea, which arises when a modern subject is confronted with their own radical freedom. In contemporary Anglophone psychology, we conceive of anxiety as a medicalized, problematized phenomenon of the individual, often reduced to biological and behavioral markers, and it is thus resolved through the intensive therapeutic or pharmacological intervention on the level of the individual subject. The phenomenological approaches that we have been discussing thus far would not see anxiety as a medicalized problem, but a socialized one. In effect, the experience of anxiety in a profoundly hostile and alienating environment is not a sign that things are going wrong, but that things are working correctly. That anxiety is a natural, often necessary, response to environmental stressors does not, however, indicate that we should be complacent or accepting of anxiety as a pervasive condition. The following will discuss Sartre and Watts’ responses to the industrialization of anxious society, with particular attention paid to Watts’ more holistic resolution of this pervasive modern condition. In looking to nature, we of course see the signs of anxiety in wilderness. Upon detecting the threat of a predator, for example, animals will freeze, tense their muscles, become hyper aware of sensory data, move more cautiously, and seek shelter. This anxiety is alleviated when the

126  Adrian Moore danger passes, returning the organism to its spontaneous, life-focused behaviors. Humanity, in its campaign to subdue nature and civilize the world, attempts to control the wilderness and to conquer the threats within it. The steady march of history has pushed the dangers of the wild to the periphery and technology has allowed us to tame nature and direct it to our wants and needs. However, even in this illuminated, regulated world of security, anxiety has not only persisted but also developed into a kind of artificial permanence of modernity. For the existentialists, this is a clear result of modern, industrialized society being understood through the narrative of history, alienating us from our natural environment. The historical understanding of human existence rose to prominence in Europe through the philosopher Georg Hegel, whose “dialectical idealism” posited that the present moment is a necessary, scientific function of the progression of historical events. History inevitably moved from our primitive origins, through the brutality of feudalism and into the enlightenment and luxury of civilized modernity (Hegel, 1807/ 1977, pp. 111–119). The abject violence of European colonialism was clearly lost on Hegel, but the twentieth century would bear witness to a stark reminder for Europe that technological progress does not entail moral progress. The turn to phenomenology in European philosophy posited that we as historical subjects had mistaken history for reality, in the way one might mistake the map for the territory or, as in Rene Magritte’s famous painting, the image of a pipe for an actual pipe. If the subject tries to situate themselves within history, they are doing so by taking themselves out of the world. The historical understanding of the self is an attempt to derive meaning from interpreting our past actions and projecting our future actions; however, neither of these derivations are real in terms of the existing world. Any attempt to define oneself by the past or future encounters the circuit breaker of the conscious subject, which as we have discussed, is in-itself nothingness. Consciousness stands as a challenge to historical determinism in that the capacity to choose indicates the contingency of human action; each successive choice merely results in a new condition and a new choice to make, even if only to choose whether or not to stay the course. The tyranny of choice is a confrontation between our natural spontaneity as biological creatures and the historical environment as an illusory artifice of permanence. We are responsible for choosing our own meaning, and yet it is impossible to do so. Alan Watts is engaged in a similar social environment as the existentialist authors were, and to an extent, he agrees with their diagnosis. We have constructed a contradictory environment where our attempts at security have made us feel less secure. This paradox arises by our own making; however, it is not observed in the lives of animals, who prepare for the future through instinct rather than probability and prediction (Watts, 1951/2011, p.29). The animal, in its wild state, avoids pain in the moment it arises and chases pleasure when it’s immediately available.

The Holistic Negation  127 The animal experiences anxiety, periodically, but it does not suffer it, because the animal lives in the transience of nature and the immediacy of the now. The human being, in its attempt to make its securities and pleasures into a permanent fixture, has instead disconnected itself from the flux of the world (Watts, 1951/2011, p. 77). Our condition of metaphysical anxiety does not arise because we are a nothing in a world of things, but because we try to be things in a world of nothings. We have invented the “thingness” of the world in order to more easily understand it, communicate about it, and navigate through it (Watts, 1951/2011, p. 50). These illusory permanencies correspond to anthropologist Jean Baudrillard’s conception of “hyper-reality.” Hyper-reality describes the condition wherein our symbols, signs and measurements of the world have become so primary to our understanding of life that they have displaced the real, organic world entirely. A commonly cited example is the notion that Disney Land is more real than Wall Street, because Wall Street is still engaged in the self-deception that what they do is real, while the participants of the theme park understand that they’re enjoying a fiction. Sartre claims that we can escape our current conditions by projecting into the future, but Watts points to the futility of this motion, in that when we arrive, there will be a whole new set of conditions, the same agitation, the same feeling of being bound in one’s world (Watts, 1951/2011, p. 90). Our projections can only be meaningful insofar as the conditions upon which they are based continue to remain as consistent conditions. Our flight from permanency not only depends on but also reinforces the same permanencies we attempt to resist. The very motion of life is change and attempting to maintain a fixedness of the world to ensure one’s own success is much like holding one’s breath to ensure one always has oxygen. Eventually, the strain of the fixation will collapse into contradiction. This is not to say that all technology or forward planning is inherently destructive, but rather how we use it and what we use it for can be. The paradox is that when we attempt to build permanence, this implicitly involves the interruption of change. This is evident materially in attempts at water management, where infrastructure is built to guarantee the supply of water by diverting and capturing it. However, a river is the process of motion, not the water within it and there are many examples of water infrastructure causing ecological and economic catastrophe, from the Nile in East Africa to the Murry-Darling Basin in Australia. Guaranteeing food supply through high yield crops and fertilizer saturation has resulted in barren soil by interrupting the natural processes of soil ecology. Watts had observed that the most forceful example of symbolic permanence in our modern age is money, as it is representative of a static wealth and a guarantor of future goods. Money, while increasingly becoming less tangible, remains as one of the key institutions underwriting the longterm permanence of property rights. It is by its very nature dependent

128  Adrian Moore on historical conditions given that the promise of value that it entails is only exchangeable if the market remains. This puts advanced economies in the peculiar position of orienting labor toward maintaining the market, rather than to produce the goods to exchange within it. Advanced economies are typically service economies, being characterized by the shift from production and manufacturing to the sale of experiences and wealth itself. In this way, the primary task of the labor force is to maintain the illusion of the market. When consumption itself is what generates wealth, we become trapped in a cycle of consuming to guarantee the means to future consumption. In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts (1951/ 2011) explains: Generally speaking, the civilized man does not know what he wants. He works for success, fame, a happy marriage, fun, to help other people, or to be a “real person.” But these are not real wants because they are not actual things. They are the by-products, the flavors and atmospheres of real things – shadows which have no existence apart from some substance. Money is the perfect symbol of all such desires, being a mere symbol of real wealth, and to make it one’s goal is the most blatant example of confusing measurements with reality. (p. 63) This lays bare the contradiction inherent in changing our manner of living, on an individual or societal level, for the purpose of maintaining or promoting “the economy” (p.62). The economy, if properly considered, is a measure of means, rather than ends. The accumulation of wealth into the abstraction of the economy is the depopulation of wealth from the reality of the world. This raises a distinction between Sartre and Watts in terms of the trajectory of their understanding of metaphysical negation. Sartre, while recognizing the transience of consciousness, clings to the thingness of the world and invokes a tangibility of time. In Sartre’s ontology, we are thrown into the future and must determine our own existence through a constant reorientation of consciousness toward conditions to come, our experience of the present giving way to projects as projections. Every moment is marked by the anguish of necessarily being experienced as a choice and immediate responsibility for the moment to come. If we instead follow Watts’ logic, we can see this as an interpretive contradiction. Sartre may be correct in asserting that we feel anxiety at the responsibility we have toward the future, but his solution of adopting an authentic attitude to one’s projects is still a fixation of the indeterminate mind. Sartre intends to “bracket” the question of metaphysics by addressing purely how the human mind encounters the phenomena of the world, arguing that to understand the human condition we must understand human experience in its most primary form. Watts challenges

The Holistic Negation  129 the being-in-itself of the material world, arguing that the givenness and discreetness of external objects is merely an abstraction of the mind. But the world is not inert and unchanging; the universe is not devoid of consciousness. The being of a stone or a tree isn’t fixed in objectivity but is rather a localized project of the indeterminate universe. While the object itself is not an illusion, the conception of it as a fixed being-initself is. This illusory permanence is, of course, much more true of our built environment and socialized constructs. This now leads us to the value of Watts’ work in the context of a mono-cultural, industrialized, alienating society. It is only by breaking our relation of fixedness to this modern capitalist culture that we can return to the authenticity of natural and spontaneous being.

Capitalist Realism and the Law of Reversed Effort Capitalist realism is the fatalistic belief that the contemporary, industrialized and property-centered society that we currently occupy is the only possible way to manage the world. The concept was brought to prominence in 2009 by author and philosopher Mark Fischer but is also present in the writings of other anti-capitalist thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek and David Graeber. Fischer proposes that capitalist realism is the predominant mythology of the post-Soviet world and that it has subverted any political question as to the necessity of capitalist production (Fischer, 2009, p. 17). Part of this mythology is that the Soviet Union and associated communist regimes had collapsed due to their own inherent resistance to human nature and the iron laws of economics. Humans, capitalist realism argues, by their very nature tend toward the accumulation of property, and the only way to satisfy this predisposition without violence is through an open market of exchange. All other methods of arranging human society are counter to human nature and economic law and are thus materially impossible to implement. All remaining problems in human relations are then cast as problems with the efficiency of the market (Fischer, 2009, pp. 16–17). The real, living effect of this mythology is the marketization of essential services such as health and education, the privatization of utilities such as banks, water and power infrastructure, and even the looming existential threat of ecological breakdown is recast as a need for “greener markets.” The error in this manner of thinking was clearly identified by Watts prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and is merely a repetition of Stalinist “dialectical materialism” with the premise of private property reversed. As Watts would note, the primary political systems of the twentieth century were both preoccupied with attempting to arrest the fluctuations of a living world and fixate it in the permanence of social order. In the communist regime, an anxious and alienated worker-comrade is taken into re-education in order to bring them closer to the revolution. In the capitalist-realist regime, the anxious

130  Adrian Moore and alienated consumer-citizen is referred to a competitive market of mental health services. In both cases, the encounter of a contradiction between the world and the myth is resolved in terms of protecting the integrity of the myth. The more we seek to secure the permanence of the market, the more fragile it becomes and the more frequent are its crashes. The more we try to enforce the control of property relations, on the personal or national level, the closer we come to conflict. The insatiable work ethic of capitalism resulting in the violent self-consumption of nature and society is a direct demonstration, on a terrifying and global scale, of the effect Watts called “the law of reversed effort” or the “backwards law” (Watts, 1951/2011, p. 10). The law of reversed effort is a principle that Watts identifies as the outcome of our irrational attempts to make the transcendent and transient aspects of our world into eternal immanence. The theme is prominent in his writings but originates in some of the earliest philosophical cultures. The Tao Te Ching contains discussion how this effect is immediate even to the process of naming the things we propose to act upon: Thus ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ mutually sprout ‘Hard’ and ‘Easy’ mutually inform ‘Long’ and ‘Short’ are mutually gauged ‘High’ and ‘Low’ mutually incline ‘Sound’ and ‘Tone’ mutually blend ‘Before’ and ‘After’ mutually follow on. Using this: sages don’t act on constructs in addressing affairs. (Laozi, 2009, p. 38) The Tao Te Ching contains little, if anything, on living a good life or being a good person. It is rather a powerful critique on the contradictory outcomes of attempting to build permanent constructs or traditions against the background of an enigmatic and ever-changing universe. We might say here that “security” and “anxiety” mutually emerge. The ontology of both existentialism and consumer identity involves these metaphysical mutualisms. The self-division or two mindedness, which arises from immersion within a divided metaphysical construct, transforms anxiety from a momentary experience into an ongoing one. The consumer lives constantly between the constructs of desire and satisfaction, and the Sartrean between the constructs of determinism and authenticity. But only the unsatisfied can pursue satisfaction, and only the inauthentic can pursue authenticity. Each moment, each attempt, leaves an open future in which one must reaffirm the commitment and re-engage the pursuit. The only escape from this cyclical trap is to cease to regard these descriptive categories as mutually exclusive concepts and begin to regard them as mutually informing experiences. The sage, says Laozi, does not act on constructs.

The Holistic Negation  131 The flight to the future is one of the key instigators of our anxious world and all its apparent contradictions. The threat of tomorrow and the decay of the present into the past alarms the mind and spurs it to action. But if we act before understanding, we merely walk further into the darkness; that is, we first need to understand the world as it is, rather than the world as our mythologies would like it to be. What we have not understood is that the conquest of nature that we have pursued in the name of civilized security is in fact a campaign of sterilization. To want to be separate from the flow and flux of life is to want to be separate from life itself. A world without death is not a world of eternal life, but a world of silence and emptiness. This is the world we are hurtling toward as we fill the oceans with bio-persistent chemicals and burn the earth for reliable, dispatchable energy. What is needed now, more than ever in human history, is that we stop and think. Ending our frenetic activity of supporting the stillness of civilization will not cause the earth to stop turning or the sky to fall and yet, as Žižek has commented, it appears easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The myth will outlast the earth (Fischer, 2009, p. 2). It seems that we may actually pursue the accumulation of property and capital until all that property is burned and nothing remains but the balance sheets, for the absurd reason that there’s no environmentally sustainable alternative to keeping the current pace of economic growth. However practical our means of expanding economies, their success is bringing us to the contradictory conclusion of declining living standards. We have attempted to secure the world by consuming it, and likewise in laboring to secure our lives, we merely expend them. The impetus to action even when no action is needed is in itself the same problem as performing the wrong action when another action is needed. Our endless industrial activity is akin to a kind of hyperventilation in that it is a panic response which if maintained too long will harm the organism.

Watts and Industrial Modernity: Immersion in the Void One of the misunderstandings which modern people have in living on this side of the European Enlightenment is that we believe that we have moved on from the petty darkness of myth and superstition and that the modern world is a realist world. We refuse the supernatural and deal in facts; but what we seem to have missed is that facts themselves are apart from nature. They are an accounting of it, the coordinates and measurements which attempt to build a permanent understanding of an impermanent experience. The modern world relies on myths as forcefully as the Greeks and Romans. We fixate on the illusions of money, property, security, and law. Our modern Plato’s Cave is the mythology of capitalist realism, the neo-liberal thesis of “personal responsibility” where economy has replaced ecology as the

132  Adrian Moore field of existence. As globe temperatures rise and ecological systems collapse into tinder, it becomes less of a metaphor and more of a lived reality to say that these images are cast against a background of fire. Each year, as more of our natural world is consumed by the machinery of industrial production, we encounter the same justifications in repetition, which can only have meaning if we take the illusions of symbolic meaning and our desires for the future as more real than the tangible earth. How much money would it cost to save ecological systems from certain destruction? What forms of production will replace pollution intensive industries? How many shadows will save us from the darkness? It is imperative that we move beyond these symbolic constructs, and yet the more serious the contradiction between society and nature becomes, the more violently we cling to the problems. If we ask the counter question, arguably the more real one of what it will cost us to turn our world into the sterility of currency, we are met with knowing smiles from the money makers. Didn’t you hear? Nature is always changing. The market is forever. Like Plato, Watts (1951/2011) prefers to describe the process of philosophy through the imagery of illumination rather than creation (p. 75). When we make facts, we are acting in the realm of creating shadows. If we are to make shadows until our world is full of them, we are left in total darkness. The intelligibility of our vision comes not from the contrast of the shadows but from the illumination of our world. Watts (1951/2011) explains that “vision in this sense does not mean dreams and ideals for the future. It means understanding of life as it is, of what we are, and what we are doing. Without such understanding it is simply ridiculous to talk of being practical and getting results” (p.105). If we define what we want in terms of our symbols, conventions and constructs, then all we will produce is more of these symbols. It would of course be ridiculous to say we should abandon all language, all symbols, all signs, and constructs that mark our world: it is rather that we desperately need to cease treating them as our primary reality against the background of real life. And before it is possible to begin the long journey through the darkness and into the sunlight of philosophical wisdom, the first shadow that needs to be dispelled is the very construct of the self. This does not mean that we need to dispel an evil or sinful nature, but that we need to dispel the very notion of self at all. For Watts (1951/2011), the metaphysical division of the self is the primary source of our anxious lives and our irrational society (p. 39). So long as living people believe themselves to be internally divided, an organization of parts rather than an organism-in-environment, we will remain in our frenetic anxiety. If we are merely a center of awareness and a source of action contained within a membrane of skin, we will always be in contradistinction to the universe. If, as Sartre claims, we are thrown into the world, it is only after we have been ripped from it and

The Holistic Negation  133 situated in the field of ego and language. The seed is sewn into the soil, but only after it has grown out of the earth. Further to Sartre’s claim that the mind and consciousness are an ontological nothingness, we should not feel anxious at our personal responsibility as there is no person to be responsible. Watts (1951/2011) reminds us that “so long as there is the motive to become something, so long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at this moment, there can be no freedom” (pp. 129–130.) I do not have hands; I am hands. I do not see shadows; I am shadows. I do not breathe; I am breath. I do not live in my world; I am my world. The flight to the future and the security of the abstract self are concerns relating to concepts that stand apart from the real. This problem cannot be resolved by approaching a new pathway to the future or by generating a new mythology of the ego. To demand an alternate proposal for the future before abandoning our current one is to repeat the very mistake we are attempting to dissolve. The future must cease to determine us. We can of course still have our businesses, literature, roads, families, and loves, but we must reconceive the purpose of these activities toward the present rather than the future as well as situate them within ecology rather than the constructs of economy. Reorienting conscious experience to the present and collapsing the ego into unity can offer more than quelling ontological anxiety on the level of the personal organism. It can also transform the social anxieties that drive our ecologically destructive, frantic busy-work. To again return to Watts’ (1951/2011) Wisdom of Insecurity, So long as the mind is split, life is perpetual conflict, tension, frustration and disillusion. Suffering is piled on suffering, fear on fear, and boredom on boredom … But the undivided mind is free from this tension of trying always to stand outside oneself and to be elsewhere than here and now. Each moment is lived completely, and there is thus a sense of fulfillment and completeness. (p. 115) The light that Alan Watts leads us to, from the depths of the cave of ignorance, is the light of self-negation. This light may at first seem painful, blinding, and overwhelming, but we cannot see its beauty until we are immersed within it.

References Bodhidharma. (2009). The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma (R. Pine, Trans.). United States: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Original work published 1987) Camus, A. (1955). The myth of Sisyphus and other essays ( J. O’Brien, Trans.). London: Hamilton. (Original work published 1942) Carus, P. (1994). The gospel of Buddha. Oxford: One World Publications. (Original work published 1894)

134  Adrian Moore Cooper, D. E. E. (2013). Schopenhauer and Indian Philosophy. In B. Vandenabeele (Ed.), A companion to Schopenhauer, (pp. 266–279). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Fischer, M. (2009). Capitalist realism. Ropley, UK: Zero Books. Hegel, G.W.F. (1977). The phenomenology of spirit (A. Miller, Trans.). Oxford: Clarendon (Original work published 1807) Laozi. (2009). Tao Te Ching: On the art of harmony (C. Hansen, Trans.). London: Duncan Baird. (Original work published 6th Century BCE) Leung, K.-H. (2020). Transcendentality and nothingness in Sartre’s atheistic ontology. Philosophy, 95(4), 471–495). doi:10.1017/S0031819120000248 McEvilley, T. (2002). The shape of ancient thought: Comparative studies in Greek and Indian philosophies. New York, NY: Allworth. Sartre, J-P. (1992). Being and Nothingness. (H. Barnes, Trans). New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. (Original work published 1943) Sartre, J-P. (2007). Existentialism is a humanism (C. Macomber, Trans.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Suzuki, D.T. (2010). Essays in Zen Buddhism. London: Souvenir. (Original work published 1927) Watts, A. (2011). The Wisdom of Insecurity. New York, NY: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1951)

10 Alan Watts’ “Dramatic Model” and the Pursuit of Peace Juliet Bennett

This chapter explores the theoretical and practical contributions of Alan Watts’ “dramatic model of the universe” to the pursuit of peace. It begins by introducing two myths or images of the world that Watts sees as underpinning Western worldviews and institutions. He calls these the “ceramic” and the “fully-automatic” models of the universe (Watts, 1960/2004, Disc 1). Watts examines the ways in which these two models have facilitated an individualistic understanding of the self as separate from the “other” – other people, other life forms and the cosmos. He describes this illusory-yet-persuasive idea of the self as a “skin-encapsulated ego,” which he considers to be a root cause of a number of indirect or structural forms of violence such as vast inequality and the destruction of the planet. Watts proposes a third worldview, a “dramatic model of the universe,” that he believes reflects a more accurate understanding of the world and to foster a more satisfying experience of life. This chapter explores Watts’ three models, drawing also from the similar proposals of Charles Birch and Thomas Berry. Its purpose is to explore ways that the dramatic model can contribute to the pursuit of peace. In theological terms, Watts’ ceramic model reflects the theology of classic monotheism, the belief in one (mono) supernatural “God.” This theology is largely found within Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism). Watts’ fully-automatic model describes the theological category of atheism, the belief that there is no “God.” This is a worldview based on reductionistic, materialistic, and mechanistic forms of science. Watts’ dramatic model reflects the theology of panentheism, a belief that everything is inside “God”. This is a worldview found in Eastern philosophyreligions, Indigenous worldviews, within some liberal and mystic forms of the Abrahamic religions, and in more holistic approaches to science (see Clayton & Peacocke, 2004: Cooper 2006). Each of these theological categories contains a diversity of views within and between them, and Watts’ three models of the universe do not necessarily capture every worldview. Watts uses these generalized models and associated stories to explore deep cultural narratives and associated assumptions embedded in these three dominant ways in which humans see the world today. I start by introducing the stories and ontologies of these three worldviews.

136  Juliet Bennett

Three Models of the Universe The Ceramic Model “The ceramic model of the universe is based on the book of Genesis,” says Watts (1960/2004), “from which Judaism, Islam, and Christianity derive their basic picture of the world.” The ceramic model is based on a story in which a supernatural “God” creates life ex nihilio, like a potter molds clay or an architect designs buildings. “God” is imagined to create “stuff” from nothing and form it into a planet, animals and people, animated by “His” breath of life (Watts, 1969). In this view, “God” is “a technician, potter, carpenter, architect, who has in mind a plan, and who fashions the universe in accordance with that plan” (Watts, 1960/2004). “God” is thought to be a sort of king, a human-like supernatural being (generally a man) who rules over living things. “God” is outside and separate from humanity, as well as outside and separate from animals and Earth. In this view, each human being (and their individual soul) is considered to be separate from other humans, (and superior to) other animals and nature, seeking to rule and conquer over others under “God’s” command. The ceramic model is consistent with a worldview that biologist and process thinker Charles Birch (1993, pp. 57, 67) calls supernatural dualism. It separates the world into two distinct realms: the physical and the supernatural. Worldviews based on this model consider “God” to be something that one must “believe in” or “reject,” generally alongside a set of theological doctrines. Cultural historian and ordained Catholic priest, Thomas Berry (1988) discusses this worldview in terms of the “Old Story” of Western society. He defines the “Old Story” as based on the traditional Christian narratives of “God” creating the world, and Jesus Christ redeeming humanity. Berry (1988) observes that while this traditional story is still believed by people across the world, it is now “dysfunctional in its larger social dimensions” (p. 124). Berry gauges that human beings are destroying their planet because “we have not learned the new story” (p. 123). Informed by a degree in theology and a five-year stint as an Episcopalian priest, Watts (1969) clarifies that he is: not, of course, speaking of “God” as conceived by the most subtle Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologians, but of the popular image. For it is the vivid image rather than the tenuous concept which has the greater influence on common sense. (p. 65) This leads to an important point. The ceramic model is not the only worldview found within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The more “subtle” conceptions of “God” that Watts is referring to might be images of God as sexless, a cosmic force, or as Paul Tillich called it

Alan Watts’ “Dramatic Model”  137 “The ground of all being” (as cited in Watts 1969, p. 2). These subtle images might fit closer to or within the dramatic model of the universe. I will return to this shortly. Watts (1975, p. 13) goes on to criticize a deep cultural assumption found in Western societies, which has arisen from the ceramic model; that is, the feeling of being a “skin-encapsulated ego,” which Watts considers to be “one of the most important Christian conventions.” He draws out these connections in the Christian idea that a separate soul and its fleshly vehicle together constituting a personality which is unique and ultimately valuable in the sight of God. This view is undoubtedly the historical basis of the Western style of individuality, giving us the sensation of ourselves as isolated islands of consciousness confronted with objective experiences which are quite “other.” (p. 13) This central point, which Watts repeats throughout hundreds of his lectures and writings, is arguably at the crux of structural forms of violence caused by both the ceramic and fully-automatic models. The Fully-Automatic Model Watts describes the transition from the ceramic model to the fully-automatic model as dethroning one tyrant and replacing it with a worse one. The “game of God got embarrassing,” says Watts (1960/2004), and the “all-too-intelligent God” was replaced by a “Cosmic Idiot.” While the new model rejected the supernatural “God” of the ceramic model, it retained some of its “ceramic” building blocks – “the laws of nature were still there, but no lawmaker” (Watts 1969, p. 50). The assumption that humans were separate from nature was retained. Earth was still treated as an artifact, but now it was thought of as an automatic machine. The result is the idea of a “clockwork universe,” a Cartesian/Newtonian worldview that tells humans they are an accident, a fluke. This model depicts a view of the world without “God,” in which humanity sees itself as the ruler over Earth and other living beings. In the shift from the ceramic model, power over people, animals, and nature moves from “God” to humanity. Birch (1993, p. 57) describes this perspective as an “atheistic, materialistic” worldview. It is atheistic in its rejection of “God” and is materialistic in its conception of the world as comprised of matter or atoms that intersect like balls on a billiard table. This view is also reductionist in its tendency to try to understand a whole system by reducing it to its parts; and it is “mechanistic” in the way it imagines that the “universe is a gigantic machine made up of countless smaller machines” (Birch, 1990, p. 57).

138  Juliet Bennett Birch explains that while this worldview existed in ancient Greece, it has developed alongside science and technology, and has come to dominate the worldview of many people especially in the Western world over the last five hundred years. Berry (1988, p. 125) links the origins of this worldview to the Black Death (1347–1665) that killed “perhaps one third of the population” of Europe. Berry observes that as epidemic plagues spread across Europe, people started to doubt the religious explanation of an all-powerful and all-good “God” who would allow such a catastrophe to occur. One reaction was “an intensification of faith experience, an effort to activate supernatural forces with special powers of intervention in the phenomenal world now viewed as threatening to the human community” (p. 126). This reaction reflects a continuation of the ceramic model. The other response to the crisis of faith was an attempt to gain “control of the physical world to escape its pain and to increase its utility to human society” (p. 125). This is reflective of the fully-automatic model. Berry explains that “from these two tendencies the two dominant cultural communities of recent centuries were formed: the believing religious community and the secular community” (p. 125). Another way of putting it is that these two reactions have led to the development of the ceramic and fully-automatic models of the universe. While the fully-automatic model claims to be based on science, developments in contemporary science discredit this basis. Birch (1990, p. x) observes that this worldview is “challenged by modern physics, modern biology and by frontier thinking in theology and philosophy.” Theories of evolution, nonlinear mathematics, ecology, and phenomenology – which arose in the last century – reflect a shift away from the traditional mechanistic, materialist, and reductionist approaches to science. These more holistic scientific concepts point to the interconnection between subject and object, the inseparability of organism and environment, the unbroken lines between all species, and between relationships of process within systems and their emergent properties. An understanding of the world more consistent with these concepts is found in the worldview that Watts calls the dramatic model of the universe. The Dramatic Model “Consider the world as a drama,” declares Watts (1960/2004), “What’s the basis of all drama? The basis of all stories, of all plots, of all happenings — is the game of hide and seek.” In his dramatic model of the universe Watts draws from the Hindu Vedanta to describe a game in which the Atman (or “God,” or your Self with a capital “S”) hides from itself by manifesting in different forms (including your “self,” with a little “s,” in the particular mind–body you are today). In this view, “you” are not just what is inside your “bag of skin,” but you are the whole

Alan Watts’ “Dramatic Model”  139 cosmic process. Watts suggests that “God” manifests in different forms (e.g., as you and me) in order to experience life in new ways. In the dramatic model, “God” exists simultaneously in different forms and at different layers of existence. “God” is inside and expressed through humanity and other forms of life, which are nested inside and expressed through “God” as the Earth, which is nested inside “God” as the Universe, which is nested inside a wondrous boundless “ground of all being” that is also “God.” This model reflects a panentheistic ontology: everything is inside “God” and “God” is inside everything. Your “self” as your temporal mind–body is considered to be an expression of “God,” a manifestation of your bigger “Self” (or a manifestation of “God”). While “God,” the world, and humans may have their own distinguishable identities, they are simultaneously connected and inseparable from other layers. Due to this inseparability one can take a view that they are all, in a sense, “You.” As Watts (1969, p. 21) says, “the Ultimate Ground of Being is you.” He clarifies that with the “you,” he is not referring to the “everyday you” (which he sees “the Ground” pretending to be), but is referring to the “inmost Self which escapes inspection because it’s always the inspector.” This is “the taboo of taboos: you’re IT!” The image of nested connections stands in contrast with the ceramic model and the fully-automatic model, which perceive humanity as separate from Earth and separate from “God.” In the dramatic model, humanity is perceived as an emergent event within Earth, inseparable from Earth’s processes, both evolutionarily and ecologically. In this view, “God” is inside and experiencing all of these forms and non-forms. “God” is being and non-being, and in Watts’ understanding so are “You.” This model of the universe resonates with deep ecology, in which Arne Naess (1974, p. 34) identifies two notions of self: the “ego, the self with a small s, and then this great Self, the Self with a capital S, the atman.” This also resonates with ancient yogic principles, which Sri Aurobindo (1996, p. 414) describes as seeing “on one side the Infinite, the Formless, the One, the Peace” and “on the other it sees the finite, the world of forms, the jarring multiplicity, the strife…” These two identities – our self (inside our body) and our Self (as the cosmic event) – offer another way to make sense of panentheisim’s dipolar (encompassing two poles) understanding of “God.” This is to say that “God” has both a formless nature (beyond the universe, that which the universe is inside) and a nature in form (as the universe and within everything inside it). As seminal panentheist thinker Alfred North Whitehead (1929, p. 343) put it, “God is not before all creation but with all creation.” Watts’ dramatic model is inspired by the wisdom of Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, and Yoga in the East. Watts was also significantly influenced by panentheistic theology and process philosophy in the West, such as the work of Whitehead, Gregory Bateson, and Teilhard de Chardin (Watts, 1975, Preface). These traditions and thinkers share the basic assumptions of the dramatic model – that everything is connected and everything is

140  Juliet Bennett constantly in process. This view is based on the scientific theories of evolution and ecology that show there is no clear line of separation between organisms and environments in time or in space. As Whitehead (1933/1964, p. 226) observes, “we cannot determine with what molecules the brain begins and the rest of the body ends. Further, we cannot tell with what molecules the body ends and the external world begins.” As your heart and lungs are your internal organs, the sun, air, plants and insects are your external organs (Watts, 2007, p. 36). Your bag of skin is not a barrier or boundary but is a bridge between two aspects of your self. We are, therefore, a continuous process with everything and everyone else. Like actors on a stage, people are temporary players in the universe or multiverse’s drama. According to Watts, people get so caught up in their personas, the roles they play, that they often forget their identity beyond their masks. Watts reveals a liberating perspective in which behind the temporal mask, you are “The Universe” or “God,” coming on as “you” in order to experience Yourself. Whitehead (1933/1964, p. 293) spoke of this as the “adventure of the universe as one.” Put another way: “You are an aperture through which the universe [or “God”] is looking at and exploring itself” (Watts, 2000, p. 90). At this point I could get lost in many Wattsian metaphors of an earth that “peoples” and dots on the outer edges of a bottle of ink thrown at a wall (Watts, 1960/2004). I could consider the history of these philosophical ideas (e.g., see Cooper 2006) or the location of the worldview in different religions today (e.g., see Biernacki & Clayton 2014). Or I could delve into the contemporary developments in physics, ecology, evolution, complexity, and emergence that provide evidence to support a dramatic view of the universe (e.g., see Clayton & Peacocke 2004; Griffin 2014). With limited space I resist all such temptations in order to focus on the implications of the dramatic model for the pursuit of peace.

Implications for Peace Briefly, the thesis is that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which … underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man’s natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction. (Watts, 1969, p. 9) In his Preface to The Book, quoted above, Watts summarizes the essential contribution of the dramatic model to peace. As discussed above, Watts’ dramatic model of the universe encourages a new sense of existence as a process intimately connected to everything in the universe. In doing so, the dramatic model illuminates a way of addressing the violence that humanity is causing to their selves and to their environment. For Watts, the pursuit of peace starts in individuals’

Alan Watts’ “Dramatic Model”  141 experience in this present moment that, as he often emphasizes, is all there is. Watts connects a sense of inner peace to social justice and ecological harmony, as this section of the chapter will explore. He appeals to listeners’ desire for happiness and pleasure, connecting their self-interests with the interests of their greater Self: that is, for the common good of humanity and Earth. The basic premise for this connection is the dramatic model’s understanding that the “self” is also the “Self,” and therefore that global interests are in fact also our Self-interests. Watts convincingly argues that the benefits of each of us acting in the interests of all of humanity and Earth are experienced not only by our infinite Self but also by ourselves in our short temporal lives. Inner and Global Peace The dramatic model encourages a feeling of connectedness and empowerment through the realization and feeling that everything is you. “It is a new feeling of possession of and participation in the world,” says Birch (1993, p. 34). Watts (1975, p. 14) describes a “transformation of consciousness, of the inner feeling of one’s own existence,” following which one feels a “release of the individual from forms of conditioning imposed upon him by social institutions.” Both of these shifts are fundamental to the pursuit of peace: the former for the experience of peace within oneself; the latter as a starting point for questioning the social constructions and cultural habits that have (both positive and negative) implications for social and ecological peace. Inner peace can lead to global peace through people coming to know them “selves” as connected participants in the world, exposing the fallacy of social constructions that foster alienated experiences of the self as separate from the world, and in time empowering individuals to collectively work to change the political, economic, and social structures toward a vision of a more peaceful, just, and ecological harmonious way of being. Where does one start? From The Meaning of Happiness (1940/1968) through to The Book (1969), Watts directs his audience to be present, and to find happiness through acceptance. Watts encourages people to accept themselves, to seek greater understandings of their context, to accept the things they cannot change, and act within what they can. Watts enlightens listeners to a feeling of meaningfulness and life purpose. Like music, life is to be experienced. His philosophy has influenced counter-culture movements, the rejection of capitalistic values, and a realization of the true self that includes the other. Watts’ words resonate with positive psychology and the human potential movement. The realization that one is not separate and alone in the world, that one is deeply connected to everything that is, has significant implications both for one’s life, and for one’s death.

142  Juliet Bennett Death may be a more significant fear and driving factor for some people than others, impacting on their psychological peace and on their approach to issues of social and environmental justice in the world. Within the ceramic model, a fear of death is associated with respect to the “the dread Last Judgment, when sinners will be consigned to the temporary horrors of Purgatory or the everlasting agony of Hell” (Watts, 1969, p. 39). For believers, a great comfort is found in the “popular fantasies of Heaven.” Supernaturalism can have a dangerous side, if in the wrong hands. Watts (1971/2007, p. 75) contends, rather provocatively, that “only a supernaturalist would deliberately press the button to set off nuclear warfare, in the belief that his spiritual values are more important than material existence.” Within the fully-automatic model, on the other hand, a fear arises with a view to death taking “us into everlasting nothingness — as if that could be some sort of experience, like being buried alive forever” (Watts, 1969, p. 38). In contrast, under the dramatic model, death becomes a “great event.” Like birth, death is a “natural and necessary end of human life — as natural as leaves falling in autumn” (Watts, 1969, p. 40). Watts explains that in death, “the individual is released from his ego-prison … this is the golden opportunity for awakening into the knowledge that one’s actual self is the Self which plays the universe – an occasion for great rejoicing” (p. 40). Such an understanding lessens one’s fear of death, as one realizes that it is only a temporal aspect of one’s self that can die. You, the real you, the Self, lives on forever. According to Watts, you live eternally through all of the infinite adventures of the universe, seen in the life and times of everyone and everything that has ever inhabited our cosmos. With this vision of connectedness to life beyond one’s short life, one may be motivated to use the power they have to contribute to a better world. For example, they may put more effort into recycling, or walk rather than drive, encourage divestment from fossil fuels or campaign for carbon tax, make more socially and ecologically just decisions in organizations within which they work, or even change career – guided by a vision of care for the creative longevity of the whole cosmic process. Under the dramatic model, true self-interest is synonymous with true altruism – when one understands oneself to include the other. As deep ecologist Tim Hayward (1994, p. 71) puts it, “The bottom line is that I have a duty and interest to protect and preserve nature because I am one with it.” While such a vision may not be achieved in full, any movement in this direction is likely to help shift the current self-destructive trajectory of humanity’s collective actions toward a more peaceful future. In considering the relationship between inner peace and global peace, the final stage of this chapter considers the implications of Watts’ dramatic model on social justice and ecological harmony.

Alan Watts’ “Dramatic Model”  143 Social Justice and Ecological Harmony In his book Does it Matter? Watts (1971/2007, p. 74) observes that “civilization ‘works,’ temporarily, for the privileged individual, but in the notso-long run it could easily be a speeding up of consumption which dissolves all life on the planet.” Watts is capturing an essential dynamic of “world systems theory,” international relations and theories of structural violence in peace theory (Wallerstein, 1974; see also Galtung 1971). Current international political and economic institutions enable the exploitation of resources (including humans) in the “third world,” in order to provide cheap goods and services for the “first world,” and to offshore their environmental costs (see Jorgenson, 2006). Yet in the not-so-long run, this system of relationships threatens the future for all. This threat is seen in well-known issues of climate change, the depletion of topsoil, deforestation, and the rapid extinction of species – none of which are any more desirable for rich as for poor. Watts’ dramatic model aligns with the values promoted by most peace theorists. This includes the promotion of social and ecological justice, non-violent approaches to resolving conflict, and protection of the human rights of all peoples regardless of gender, sexual orientation, culture, or religion. In The Liberation of Life, Birch and John Cobb Jr. (1990) consider the practical contributions of the dramatic model (or their term, “process thought”) to a more socially just and ecologically sustainable world. Birch and Cobb apply process thinking to animal and human rights, to biospheric ethics, and to specific topics such as agriculture, energy, transportation, urban habitats, and the importance of equal rights and opportunities for women. They challenge the dominant economic model and the ideology of unlimited growth and suggest its replacement with an ecologically liberating model of development, a steady-state economy and a Genuine Progress Indicator to replace the cost-inclusive indicator of Gross Domestic Product (see also Daly & Cobb, 1994). Watts takes this understanding of our global situation a step further, pointing out that the exploitation of resources by people in Western society includes themselves! Watts (1971/2007, p. 27) observes the irony in that “the richest and most powerful civilization on earth is so preoccupied with saving time and making money that it has neither taste for life nor capacity for pleasure.” He relates this to a preoccupation with profit and efficiency. Rather than working to create wealth, people in the West work for money. The high rates of depression and suicide in Western society may be a symptom of this cultural illness. Almost all aspects of life have been commoditized, from nature to education. Personal wellbeing, community, and the environment are suffering. Why? Watts posits that at root of this structural violence is the illusion that our “self” is a “skin-encapsulated ego,” rather than the real understanding of the self as connected to the entire cosmic process. In feeding their

144  Juliet Bennett egos, many people in Western culture are perpetuating an ideology of consumption, capital accumulation, and free market growth economics. Arguably these practices are the biggest barriers to addressing global issues of equality and environment such as climate change (Clayton & Heinzekehr, 2014). Increases in global production (in its current ecologically and economically unjust form) exploit people, species, and the planet, and entice people to work more hours in order to continue to accumulate an increasing number of things. This feedback loop points to the way that deeply embedded cultural assumptions can indirectly work to maintain unjust and undesirable institutional arrangements. Pursuing a more socially just and ecological harmonious global society calls this feedback loop into question. Evolving the laws, policies, institutions, and societal values that maintain this loop, toward a culture of peace, requires the political will of citizens and actions of political actors to support the change (e.g., see Held & Hervey, 2009). How? Watts (1971/2007, p. 74) emphasizes that “what we really need is a technology managed by people who no longer experience “self” as something foreign to the body and its physical environment.” We need a transformation – a transformation in the nature of our leaders, as well as a transformation in ourselves. The question remains, how is one to bring about the dramatic model’s understanding and experience of the world? Watts points out that we cannot change ourselves or the world “by force”: “Trying to force a lock bends the key” (Watts, 1971/2007, p. 77). Instead of trying to force change, one should look inside. For Watts, “intelligence is … the alternative to violence” (77). He writes that “a new attitude to the physical world” calls for, “first, a profound respect for the intricate interconnections between all creatures … and second, a love for and delight in that world as an extension of your own body (p. 37). The process of peace starts with the realization that you are intimately connected to and inseparable from your environment. Exploring ways of bringing about such an ecological awareness, and ways of modifying institutions and life-ways to be based on the principles of process, remain exciting and important areas for future research.

Conclusion Watts’ dramatic model of the universe can be seen as a shift in deep cultural assumptions that underlie ways of understanding the world and living within it. The dramatic model presents an alternative to the outdated ceramic and fully-automatic models that underlie violent, unjust, and unsatisfying institutions and practices in the modern world. The dramatic model offers answers to many problems of human psychology and human society. Watts sums this up in three words: you are IT. You are an aspect of the whole cosmic process experiencing Yourself.

Alan Watts’ “Dramatic Model”  145 Watts identified many connections between humanity and nature, and observed a fundamental conflict between this intimate connection and the way that people in Western societies see and live in the world. He proposed a compelling panentheistic alternative, which is in greater accord with contemporary science and is a more satisfying and peacepromoting worldview than the more dominant supernatural and atheistic perspectives. Watts believed such a shift in the way we experience our lives is as rewarding for one’s personal experience of life as it is for contributing to peace in the world. Why? Because you are IT.

Acknowledgment Reprinted from Self & Society: An International Journal for Humanistic Psychology, 2015, 43(4), 335–344. Used by permission of The Association for Humanistic Psychology in Britain.

References Aurobindo, S. (1996). The synthesis of yoga. Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Press. Berry, T. (1988). The dream of the earth. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. Biernacki, L, & Clayton, P. (2014). Panentheism across the world's traditions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Birch, C. (1990). On purpose. Sydney, AU: New South Wales University Press. Birch, C. (1993). Regaining compassion for humanity and nature. Sydney, AU: New South Wales University Press. Birch, C, & Cobb, J. B., Jr. (1990). The liberation of life: From the cell to the community. Denton, TX: Environmental Ethics Books. Clayton, P., & Heinzekehr, J. (2014). Organic Marxism: An alternative to capitalism and ecological catastrophe. Claremont, CA: Process Century Press. Clayton, P, & Peacocke, A. (Eds.). (2004). In whom we live and move and have our being: Panentheistic reflections on God's presence in a scientific world. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Cooper, J. W. (2006). Panentheism: The other God of the philosophers. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Daly, H. E., & Cobb J. B., Jr. (1994). For the common good: Redirecting the economy toward community, the Environment, and a sustainable future. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Galtung, J. (1971). A structural theory of imperialism. Journal of Peace Research, 8(2), 81–117. Griffin, D. R. (2014). Panentheism and scientific naturalism: Rethinking evil, morality, religious experience, religious pluralism, and the academic study of religion. Claremont, CA: Process Century Press. Hayward, T. (1994). Ecological thought: An introduction. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Held, D., & Hervey. A. F. (2009). Democracy, climate change and global governance: Democratic agency and the policy menu ahead. London, UK: Policy Network.

146  Juliet Bennett Jorgenson, A. K. (2006). Unequal ecological exchange and environmental degradation: A theoretical proposition and cross-national study of deforestation, 1990–2000. Rural Sociology, 71(4), 685–712. doi: 10.1526/003601106781262016. Naess, A. (1974). The glass is on the table: An empiricist versus a total view. In F. Elders (Ed.), Reflexive water: The basic concerns of mankind (pp. 30–37). London, UK: Souvenir Press. Wallerstein, I. (1974). The rise and future demise of the world-capitalist system. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16(4), 387–414. Watts, A. W. (1968). The meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology and the wisdom of the east. London, UK: Village Press. (Original work published 1940) Watts, A. W. (1969). The book: On the taboo against knowing who you are. London, UK: Jonathan Cape. Watts, A. W. (1975). Psychotherapy, east and west. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Watts, A. W. (2000). Still the mind: An introduction to meditation. Novato CA: New World Library. Watts, A. W. (2004). Out of your mind: Essential listening from the Alan Watts archives. Louisville, CO: Sounds True. (Original work recorded 1960) Watts, A. W. (2007). Does it matter? San Francisco, CA: New World Library. (Original work published 1971) Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology; Gifford lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh during the session 1927–28. Cambridge, UK: University Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1964). Adventures of ideas. London, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1933)

Part III

Arts & Humanities

11 Reminiscences of Alan Watts’ Last Summer “You Can Tell a Yogi by His Laugh” Kenneth S. Cohen Beyond the Box During the summer of 1973 I joined Alan Watts in a waking dream, shared with several other students and a variety of brilliant and eccentric guests. We met every weekday in Druid Heights, a five-acre Bay Area Bohemia near Muir Woods, California, for meditation, Japanese tea ceremony, and to listen to Alan’s mind-altering lectures about Taoism and life. It was difficult then, as it is now, to characterize those sessions, as they were neither entirely academic nor experiential. Alan’s lectures, like his personality, defied categories. He not only thought and lived “outside of the box,” but encouraged others to do likewise, as he believed that intellectual boxes were the foundation of illusion. “Oh, the word is not the thing; the word is not the thing. Hi ho the merry-o, the word is not the thing.” (He borrowed the refrain from his favorite linguist, Alfred Korzybski.) And this is, perhaps, the paradox that all mystics face: how to use words to reveal where words cannot go, the experience of silence from which all words emerge and which gives definition to them, like the empty space that allows one to see the figures in a painting. Alan Watts was a Jnana Yogi, one whose skillful use of language strips away assumptions and preconceptions, leaving No-Thing in its place. Alan Watts called himself “a philosophical entertainer, a coincidence of opposites, a wild card in the pack, a rascal.” Even among the beats and hippies of the 1960s, he was unconventional, for it was his belief that convention – religious, social, and linguistic – keeps one in bondage. At our first meeting in California, he guided me on a walk through his garden. Stopping near a patch of irises, poppies, and hyacinths, Alan began to speak to a butterfly, in what I first thought was Japanese, but I soon realized he was using Japanese-sounding nonsense syllables. Alan then explained to me, matter-of-factly, “I asked the butterfly to alight on my hand, but he just refuses to do so!” At that point he exploded into one of his famous body-shaking, highly contagious belly laughs. Alan understood the deep connection between cosmic and comic, for both the

150  Kenneth S. Cohen philosopher and the humorist force one to question assumptions. If one can indeed, as Tibetans say, “tell a yogi by his laugh,” then Alan Watts was a great yogi. One of Alan’s favorite meditations was to talk his students into a state of spontaneous intoxication. “Now imagine that you have just inhabited your body and this place, as though a visitor from another planet. You are not quite sure what these tentacle-like arms are, nor how to move your legs. This is your first time seeing these golden hills, breathing the air, and using your senses to explore the grasses and trees.” In a mood of playful abandon, we walked, stumbled, rolled in the grass, knocked our heads against trees, tickled our skin with eucalyptus leaves, and became enchanted by the sounds of the birds. Alan’s “Mandala House,” designed by architect and musician Bob Somers, was archetypal California, round and quirky, shaded by tall and fragrant eucalyptus trees through which one could catch a glimpse of distant golden hills. Early each morning as fog drifted in from the Pacific, Alan would emerge from his home in an elegant silk kimono and ring the great cylindrical metal gong that hung from the rafters. He had never been to China, but had created his own.



In the clear dawn I enter the ancient temple, As early sunlight illuminates the great forest. Along winding paths to a place of seclusion: A Zen retreat, deep among flowering trees. Mountain brightness gladdens the birds. Pool shadows empty the mind. And the symphony of nature all silenced At sound of bell and gong. –Ch’ang Chien, eighth-century Chinese poet

Just down the trail from Alan’s home was a large wooden water tank, about 25 feet in diameter, that had been converted into a library: walls lined with bookshelves, a glass dome skylight, ringed by a redwood deck with a sweeping vista. There was a Japanese koto on the floor on which Alan loved to improvise. “It is tuned so you cannot make a mistake,” he loved to remind his guests, so they might also pluck some strings. In one corner of the room was a low table and round black zafu (Zen cushion) on which Alan would sit during meditation and discussion. And it was also here that Alan wrote his last book, Tao: The Watercourse Way. I am responsible for several of the Chinese translations in Tao: The Watercourse Way and contributed to various portions of the text. At the time of Alan’s passing, I was one of the few who knew his plans for the unfinished final two chapters: one on Taoism and Politics, examining themes of social justice and wise governance that are central to the Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu’s fourth-century BCE classic of Taoism; Feng),

Alan Watts’ Last Summer  151 and a final chapter on Taoism and Chinese poetry. The latter would include translations of ancient Chinese poetry, drawn exclusively from my manuscript Wind-Flow: The Art of Chinese Poetry. I had shown Alan the draft of Wind-Flow at the beginning of the summer, and he hoped that our two works would be published simultaneously. I was honored when Alan introduced me to his publisher and recommended me to both his book agent, John Brockman, and to Lorraine Ellis Harr (1912–2006) editor of Dragonfly: A Quarterly of Haiku. Dragonfly published my first articles and thus launched my literary career. One can see Alan’s love of the Chinese language, culture, and calligraphy – beautifully added to Tao: The Watercourse Way (1975) by Al Chung-liang Huang – throughout the book, though Alan was not, and would never claim to be, a Sinologist. He confided that his Chinese was largely “self-taught,” though he learned a great deal from colleagues at the American Academy of Asian Studies (which he co-founded in 1950), from friends such as Gary Snyder, and dictionaries, especially his favorite, the Arthur Rose-Innes 1944 publication of Chinese and Japanese Characters. I gave Alan a gift of the Ci Hai (Ocean of Words), the standard academic dictionary of classical Chinese. To my surprise he had never heard of the text, though he quickly and happily learned to use it as he continued his work on the book. It is interesting to note that throughout the writing of Tao: The Watercourse Way, Alan had Joseph Needham’s second volume of Science and Civilization in China close by. He considered it his academic bible, and once offered me this insight: “Needham is great because he is an orchestra leader. Rather than trying to do everything himself, he gathers and organizes information from a wide range of excellent scholars.” Alan, in spite of his extraordinary originality, often did the same. And so Needham joined the ranks of other academic models or sources of inspiration mentioned frequently by Alan during that last summer: D. T. Suzuki, Lin Yutang (especially his The Importance of Living), Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Theodor Schwenk, and Lancelot Law Whyte. The latter two are perhaps not as well known today. Schwenk’s (1965) Sensitive Chaos is a book of photos and text that explores archetypal patterns of flow in meandering streams, smoke, tree rings, clouds, bones, and throughout nature. Alan’s lectures, writings, and films (particularly the Alan Watts films produced by Elda Hartley such as Flow of Zen in 1969) frequently drew on these themes, which Alan saw as analogous to the Chinese term li, the fundamental “patterns” or “principles” discovered in nature. Lancelot Law Whyte, Scottish engineer, may have worked with Einstein on his Unified Field Theory and believed in a unified human being, in which the intellect worked in harmony with all other human faculties. One can see the similarity to Alan’s philosophy when Whyte (1948) writes: “Thought is born of failure. Only when the human organism fails to achieve an adequate response to its situation is

152  Kenneth S. Cohen there material for the processes of thought, and the greater the failure the more searching they become” (p. 1).

Cloud Hidden The Spring 1973 newsletter of the Alan Watts Society for Comparative Philosophy (SCP) announced the start of a summer scholarship program. The plan was to select five or six students each year to whom Alan would offer daily lectures on a particular subject or theme. Each student would be responsible for his or her own transportation and lodging, but there would be no fee for the program. The scholarship also included the option of being Alan’s guest at his Esalen Institute and Bay Area workshops. The program would launch in the summer of 1973 – which turned out to be Alan’s last, with lectures on Taoism matching topics he was writing about in a new book. (He planned to offer a similar program focusing on Vedanta in 1974.) Alan hoped that at least one of the students would have knowledge of classical Chinese and could assist in locating or translating original passages from Taoist writings, particularly the Chuang Tzu (the name of a book and a person, third century BCE; Watson, 1966). Alan described Chuang Tzu, one of the founders of Taoist philosophy, as “the greatest philosopher of all time.” Like Alan, Chuang Tzu used humor to tease people out of intellectual ruts. In many ways, they were alike. I applied to the program. I knew it was presumptuous and probably impossible for me to “assist” the great Alan Watts, but then again, since I was 20 years old I probably thought I could do absolutely anything! In my cover letter, I included my qualifications: I had already studied several years of both modern and classical Chinese, including training with an outstanding scholar of the Chuang Tzu, Dr. Bernard Solomon of Queens College, New York City. I was familiar with Alan’s writings, having first learned about him after reading his introduction to D. T. Suzuki’s Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism. I had first met Alan in 1968 when I took part in a three-day seminar at Bucks County Seminar House in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, followed by attendance at yearly lectures or workshops. But I wrote that my chief qualification was that I was one of four founding members of a club of young Buddhists (ages 18–22) devoted to humor, in which all members were required to read Don Quixote and the Pickwick Papers. We began our meetings by smoking cigars and then attempting to extinguish them by throwing them across a room into cups of espresso coffee. Yes, all true. I believe it was my membership in this esoteric mis-organization that clinched it. To my delight, Alan replied with a personal note: “You sound like what I am looking for.” We spoke on the phone, and he asked me to meet him for an interview backstage at Carnegie Hall, before an upcoming lecture. Alan was personable, warm, and unpretentious. Frankly, more than forty

Alan Watts’ Last Summer  153 years later, I can’t recollect the content of our conversation, only the excitement at hearing, “You are in!” (I found out later that I was one of more than 2,000 applicants.) I do remember asking him minutes before leaving to take my seat in the sold-out concert hall, “What will you be speaking about?” Alan replied: I haven’t the slightest idea. If I felt it necessary to read from lecture notes, I would rather say “Please read my book” and then leave the stage. I never prepare for these events because, after all, they are here to meet me. A rehearsed script does not allow interaction with the audience and is boring to them and to me! Alan’s words have served me well over the years, as I often lecture to large groups and have never delivered a prepared speech, a fact that is often disconcerting to prestigious institutional sponsors who generally do not like surprises! In preparation for the summer program, I rented a room in a rundown hotel on Geary Street in San Francisco. Each day I took the public bus to Mill Valley, then hitchhiked to the top of the mountain, and walked down the foggy back slope, finally hiking an additional mile along an unmarked dirt road through a forested canopy of live oak, madrone, eucalyptus, and cedar. It was a kind of preparation and pilgrimage. Alan’s home was reclusive, yet open to any that found the way. “I work on an old Chinese principle,” he told me, “if you can get here, you’re welcome to it.” Under the pine tree I questioned your disciple, He said, “The Master is off gathering herbs. He’s somewhere in these mountains, Cloud hidden, in a place beyond knowledge.”

–Chia Tao, 779–843

And what a cast of characters found their way! The scholarship students were “Douglas Bayley (Sausalito, garden expert), Ken Cohen (New York, Tai Chi teacher), Mark Goldenhersh (San Francisco, librarian), James Hayes (London, England, Zen student), John Stark (Los Angeles, student), Carol Sturcey (New York City, gardener)” (Society for Comparative Philosophy Bulletin, Autumn, 1973a). Among these, I have maintained contact with John Stark, professor of philosophy and religion from Georgia. In addition, there were frequent guests, including Alan’s neighbor and friend – poet, visionary, and lesbian/gay rights activist Elsa Gidlow (1898–1986; see Gidlow, 1986); Margo St. James (b. 1937), a pioneer feminist who organized a union for prostitutes; and anthropologist Maud Oakes (1903–1990), known for her writings about the Navajo. Others who joined us for a day to listen and share included the great

154  Kenneth S. Cohen scholar of Madhyamika Buddhism, Frederick Streng (1933–1993); Tai Chi Master and Dancer Al Huang; a Korean Zen master and calligrapher (he must have been nameless as the Tao as no one seems to remember his name, though his 24-inch writing brush was unforgettable); Zen priest (now Roshi) Reb Anderson, and Hiroyuki Aoki (b. 1936) founder of the Japanese martial art Shintaido. The days were long, beginning with about 20 minutes of zazen (quiet sitting) during which Alan advised us to listen to the sounds, whether of the forest or of his own voice, without attaching image or meaning. “Listen as though listening to the sound of flowing water. It doesn’t mean anything; it doesn’t refer to anything beyond itself. Just let the sound play upon your ears.” Often, the silence was broken by the cry of Alan’s favorite bird, which he named “Mickpeehyou” because of the sound it made. I composed a haiku in its honor, “Mickpeehyou, mickpeehyou” The cry of an unseen bird Deepens the forest. If Alan belonged to a school of Zen Buddhism it was, he readily admitted, the Bankei School. Japanese Zen master Bankei Yotaku (1622–1693) preached “The Unborn Buddha Mind,” a state of realization that arose naturally and spontaneously — “unborn” — not produced by deliberate effort such as reading sutras (religious texts) or even sitting in meditation. One sits as an expression of who one is, the way a bird sings in the morning, not in order to become something. After all, if all beings inherently have Buddha Nature, what is there to seek? After 20  minutes of sitting, Alan sometimes performed his own version of the Japanese Tea Ceremony. He had learned basic elements of it from his friends, Japanese artist Saburo Hasegawa and Tea Master Milly Johnstone. Though the ritual choreography may have been lacking, the whisked tea was always delicious. The Taoism lectures started at about 10 in the morning, a brief lunch break, then more discussion until the late afternoon. At the end of each day, I invited the group to join me for Tai Chi instruction and practice on the deck. Alan loved to watch, but when questioned about participation, he laughed, “I’m basically a lazy intellectual.” After these sessions, when the other students had left for the day, I would sometimes remain to discuss nuances of Wen Yan (classical Chinese) or to translate texts. Alan’s “lazy intellectual” was a bit of Chinese style self-deprecation. Anyone with such a prodigious output and work schedule can’t exactly be described as “lazy.” And Alan did pride himself on one form of exercise that he enjoyed whenever possible: dancing or, at least, spontaneous movement to music. I personally participated in a particularly memorable example of this. During the last evening of an Esalen Institute workshop,

Alan Watts’ Last Summer  155 just as the approximately fifty students were finishing dinner, Alan surprised the entire group with several cases of beer, purchased at his own expense. As the festivities continued, Alan inquired, “Ken, do you have your wooden Tai Chi sword with you?” I said, “I can get it easily. It’s in my room, just across the meadow.” “Great,” Alan replied, and I ran, not sure what he had in mind. When I returned, at Alan’s request, the guests and staff had arranged all of the tables in the dining room in a giant circle. Alan, dressed as always in a kimono, stood on top of one of the tables and asked me to join him. Then, “Ken, raise your sword on high.” I raised my sword overhead, at which point Alan began singing in a booming voice, “Onward Christian Soldiers!”, made all the more grand by his King’s English (Today, by sound and appearance, he would be mistaken for Gandalf, from the Lord of the Rings movie). As he and I sang, we marched on the circle of tabletops. With a lifting motion of his hands, Alan motioned for the workshop participants to join us, and soon we are all stomping and singing: a wild, joyous, and nonsensical parade led by the Zen Master and his admiring young student. Looking back now, with the benefit of time, reflection, and various works written about him, I realize that Alan probably saw our relationship as parallel to his relationship with his first Buddhist mentor, Christmas Humphreys. Alan once wrote about his love for Christmas who had “given me my life.” Alan did the same for me. During our first encounter, in 1968, I undoubtedly “stunk of Buddhism,” a teenaged fanatic who chanted Pali sutras every day and was determined to become a monk in Thailand. Alan advised me to “stay away from those scrawny Buddhist monks” and, instead, practice meditation at the Zen Studies Society in Manhattan. He also directed me toward the book that inspired my lifelong fascination with the Chinese language. And when in that fateful first meeting I expressed my disdain of conventional education and fear of restrictive institutions, Alan looked at me piercingly, “Since you know what you need to do and have talent, you should just do it. The hell with the universities.” And thus I gained the confidence to design my own education, braving the financial and social challenges that followed, as well as the dismay of my parents. When I read about Alan’s rejection of an Oxford education in Monica Furlong’s biography, I felt I was reading a chapter in my own story.

This Dewdrop World At the end of the summer, Alan invited me to camp near the library for a week, and then spend another week as his guest on his houseboat, the S.S. Vallejo, an old ferryboat docked in Sausalito harbor. Before I left California, Alan hosted a going away party on the boat in my honor. What a joy it was to cook together for all the guests, an Indian feast of curries, pakora, and chapatis. After dinner, I was amused to see Alan’s

156  Kenneth S. Cohen eyes chasing an attractive 30-year-old woman. At one point, as she was walking nearby, he motioned her over. Placed his hands fully on her buttocks, he said mischievously, “Some people measure a person through their eyes. I measure them through their bottoms. I am a bottomologist, you see.” Instead of a slap, she responded with a playful smile and seductive sway of her hips. The mood took a somber turn when, later that evening, Alan was engaged in one of his favorite activities: blowing smoke from a briarwood pipe through a children’s soap bubble maker. Suddenly he poked a bubble and as the enclosed smoke dispersed, he said, with uncharacteristic solemnity, “Life is like a bubble, poof and it’s gone.” I had a premonition that I would not see Alan again. According to the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, “Life is like a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a dew drop, a flash of lightning.” I gave Alan as a parting gift a bag of peanuts (which he always loved) and a poem by the Chinese poet Tu Fu (712–770) that I had translated in his honor: We have met rarely in this life, Journeying like two distant stars. What sort of night shall this be, Together, now, in the candlelight? Does the strength of youth ever last? The hair at our temples has already greyed, And inquiring after old friends, half are gone– Cries of sorrow burn in our hearts. Who would guess that it would be twenty years Before I would again come to visit? When we parted, years ago, you had not yet married, And now, quite suddenly, this line of boys and girls. They are pleased to honor their father’s friend, Asking from where I have journeyed. Before all questions were answered Your children brought out the wine. In the night rain we picked spring chives, And steamed them with rice and millet. You say it is getting harder and harder to meet, So we raise our goblets, one cup becomes ten; Ten cups and we’re still not drunk– I thank you for the depth of these old affections. Tomorrow, separated by mountains and peaks, We will again be lost in the boundless affairs of the world.

Alan Watts’ Last Summer  157 Alan Watts seemed always prepared for death. He echoed the Bhagavad Gita when he said, “You never die because you were never born; you’ve just forgotten who you are!” But in his case, this realization did not lead to a life of resigned acceptance but rather a carpe diem savoring of life’s precious moments. “I want to go out with a bang and not a whimper,” he proclaimed. He knew he had a heart condition; yet he continued indulging in cigars and alcohol. When his friend, Al Huang, cautioned him about his health, Alan replied, “Well, if I die and you miss me, that’s your problem, isn’t it!” At which point Alan exploded in one of his famous belly laughs. (Alan made no effort to hide his vices behind a mask of holiness. Yet, I wished then, and now, that Alan had paid better attention to his health, but perhaps I am just being selfish. It was his choice.) A few months after that going away party, Alan returned exhausted from a European lecture tour. He died in his sleep, probably from a heart attack. Alan’s wife, “Jano,” with whom I had developed a friendship, called me that day with the news. She also announced his passing in a beautiful card sent to Alan’s many friends and associates. It was illustrated with Alan’s whimsical rendition of the enso, a black-ink circle drawn with a calligraphy brush, symbol of both wisdom and the circle of life, Alan’s ashes were divided in three portions. Some were buried near his library, with a Shiva-lingam-shaped wooden stupa marking the spot. Some were buried at Green Gulch Zen Center, on a hill facing the sea, under a great rock, naturally shaped like a pair of hands in gassho, prayer gesture. And the rest of his ashes disappeared or “were stolen,” as his family informed me - I like to think by a laughing Taoist Immortal. Seven years after his passing, I visited the place where I had spent that beautiful summer. Just as Alan’s face came to mind, I saw cutting through morning fog near the library a large, dark-brown hawk, coincidentally the same color as one of Alan’s favorite kimonos. It wheeled over my head, circled higher and higher, and disappeared. This hawk seemed to embody Alan’s vast vision of life, his high spirit, and keen perception. It was a fitting goodbye from the spirit of my great friend.

Acknowledgment Reprinted from Self & Society: An International Journal for Humanistic Psychology, 2015, 43(4), 299–310. Used by permission of The Association for Humanistic Psychology in Britain.

References and Relevant Reading Cohen, K. (1973). Wind-Flow: The art of Chinese poetry (unpublished manuscript), sections published in various issues of the East-West Journal and in

158  Kenneth S. Cohen Cohen, K. (1998), Taoism: Essential teachings of the way and its power (audiobook). Louisville, CO: Sounds True. Cohen, K. (1974). Summer with Alan Watts. Dragonfly: A Quarterly of Haiku, July issue. Cohen, K. (1997). The way of qigong: The art and science of Chinese energy healing. New York, NY: Ballantine. Feng, G. F. (Trans). (1972). Tao te Ching. New York, NY: Vintage. Furlong, M. (1986). Zen effects: The life of Alan Watts. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Gidlow, E. (1986). Elsa I come with my songs: The autobiography of Elsa Gidlow. San Francisco, CA: Booklegger Press. Johnstone, M. (1979). Brother wolf. Los Angeles, CA: Center Publications. Lin, Y. (1938). The importance of living, New York, NY: John Day. Needham, J. (1956) Science and civilization in China (Vol 2). UK: Cambridge University Press. Rose-Innes, A. (1944). Beginners dictionary of Chinese-Japanese characters: With common abbreviations, variants and numerous compounds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Schwenk, T. (1965). Sensitive chaos: The creation of flowing forms in water and air. Sussex, England: Rudolf Steiner Press. Society for Comparative Philosophy Bulletin. (1973a). Autumn issue. Sausalito, CA. Society for Comparative Philosophy Bulletin. (1973b). Summer issue. Sausalito, CA. Suzuki, D. T. (1976). Dogen, Hakuin, Bankei: Three types of thought in Japanese Zen. The Eastern Buddhist, 9(1), 1–17. Waddell, N. (2000). The unborn: The life and teachings of Zen master Bankei. San Francisco, CA: North Point Press. Watson, B. (Trans.). (1966). Chuang Tzu- basic writings. New York: Columbia University Press. Watts, A. W. (1975). Tao: The watercourse way (with Foreword, Afterword, Bibliography, and Illustrations by Al Ching-liang Huang). New York, NY: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (2017). Prefatory essay to Suzuki’s Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts – in the academy: Essays and lectures (pp. 155–164). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (original work published 1963) Whyte, L. L. (1948). The Next Development in Man. New York: Henry Holt.

12 Literary Nonsense as Enactment of Alan Watts’ Philosophy “Not Just Blathering Balderdash” Michael Heyman I have also The Bible of Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no. —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1789/1975) We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience… —Alan W. Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You are (1966/1989)

Are You Experienced? Alan Watts devoted a lifetime of philosophical discourse to an impossibility: conveying, through language, an “experience, a vision, a revelation which will explain, without words” (Watts, 1966/1989, p. 142) that life is a kind of “glorious nonsense.” As Alan Keightley (2012) puts it, Watts strove to transmit a “mystical realization of reality, before thought and words” (p. 44), and yet, with over 20 scholarly and popular books (and many more published posthumously), a variety of essays in magazines and professional journals, and countless lectures as a part of university faculty and as a renegade quasi-guru, Alan Watts did a remarkable job of forging his “thoughts and words” into multiple “bibles,” as William Blake (1789/1975) might have called them, from the 1930s up to his death in 1973. While Watts is known more as the philosopher-guru who brought Zen Buddhism to the West, his mission, particularly toward the latter part of his career, was more like Blake’s, that is, to convey his own syncretic vision, in Watts’ case, revealing the unified “truths” underlying seemingly disparate Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. And while he wrote and spoke assuredly, with the authority borne of wide and deep study of global spiritual traditions, he admitted the intractable inadequacies of his own discursive methods. Such flaws were not in his knowledge, reasoning, or communicative eloquence, but, as might not be surprising in attempting to express the ineffable, “nonsensical” nature of reality, in his unavoidable reliance on the bedrocks of sense: language and logic themselves.

160  Michael Heyman Looking back on his career, Watts (1972/2007) wrote: “My own work … is basically an attempt to describe mystical experience … of reality as seen and felt directly in a silence of words and mindings. In this,” he continued, “I set myself the same impossible task as the poet: to say what cannot be said” (p. 5). Such anxieties appeared increasingly as he published ever more volumes. In The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (1951/2011), his eighth book, he lamented that the “crux of what I was trying to say in those [earlier] books was seldom understood; the framework and the context of my thought often hid the meaning” (p. 10). Nine years later, in the Preface to This is IT and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience (1960/ 1973a), his insecurity concerning language resurfaces, as he writes about his efforts in communicating how “mystical experience” relates to “ordinary material life” (p. 11), yet, in the very next sentence, he admits: “I am instantly aware that I have used the wrong words; and yet there are no satisfactory alternatives” (p. 11). In the former example, he recognizes the failure of the entire “framework” of past books, the logic of his rhetorical methods; in the latter, he presents ideas and retracts them immediately due to the inadequacy of words themselves to convey his meaning. One of Watts’ solutions to the conundrum of philosophical language was to conceive of himself differently, not as a professor, priest, guru, or even a traditional philosopher, but rather as what he called a “philosopher as artist.” He explains in the essay “This is IT” (1960/1973b), that as this new type of philosopher, surprisingly, he “will not preach or advocate practices leading to improvement. As I understand it, the work of the philosopher as artist is to reveal and celebrate the eternal and purposeless background of human life” (p. 33). Like poets, the “philosopher as artist” uses language as art, to achieve what utilitarian language cannot do, to “say what cannot be said,” because, as he writes (striving for a rather Blakean goal), to know the “real world in its undefined (i.e. infinite) state … is to know life without trying to capture it in the fixed forms of conventional words and ideas” (Watts, 1951/2017b, p. 65). He further explains, in what we might call a Romantic vision of self, the nature of his “philosophic art”: “I am neither a preacher nor a reformer, for I like to write and talk about this way of seeing things as one sings in the bathtub or splashes in the sea” (Watts, 1960/1973a, p. 12). His selfdescription sounds rather like those critics who have dismissed his work as lightweight. But this is not, as it might seem, self-deprecation; rather, it is aspirational. Artistic expression, as he saw it, had no meaning except itself, and that is exactly what enables it to convey the true nature of reality, which also has no meaning, no purpose – in other words, no sense. Of course Watts’ many books are decidedly not simple bathtub ballads or “splashes in the sea,” though his The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966/1989) aspired to such aqueousness: he writes that he wanted this book to be passed on to his children, a

Literary Nonsense as Enactment  161 “slippery” book that would “slip them into a new domain, not of ideas alone, but of experience and feeling” (p. 11). In other words, he wanted to provide, rather than Blake’s “new bible,” a “new experience” (p. 12). It is not the material knowledge of something, as related by normative uses of language, that makes it real to us, but rather, “centrally and above all the experience […] of its being so, and for this reason [this method is] such a complete subversion of our ordinary way of seeing things. It turns the world inside out and outside in” (p. 19). Even in this book, however, though he wishes it to be otherwise, Watts must explain himself, hoping that his explanations will be “so clear that you will not only understand the words but feel the fact” (p. 53). His explanations’ “clarity” depends less on any artistic aesthetic than the old, doddering stewards of sense, language and logic, bringing him once again to the unbridgeable gap between something explained and something experienced. It is no coincidence that just one year after the The Book’s attempt at “philosophy as art,” Watts published a different vision of the “world inside out and outside in” not bound to the “fixed forms of conventional words and ideas.” He wrote in a manner aiming to solve his problems with philosophical discourse: a slim volume of poetry, song, and prose, simply called Nonsense (1967a; exp. ed., 1977d). My argument here is that Watts’ work in what G. K. Chesterton (1914), one of his heroes, called the truest form to “spiritual wonder” (p. 69), the genre of literary nonsense, enabled him to create an experience impossible through “normal” language. In form, Watts followed in the Victorian nonsense tradition, popularized by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, which he combined with the Eastern philosophical puzzles, such as Zen haiku and Buddhist koan. His goal was not to explain anything. He would not write as he was wont, in the “ordinary language of meaning—of leading to something else” (Watts, 1958b, n. p.), but rather in the baffling, playful, self-referential language of nonsense, precisely because it leads nowhere, or from a different perspective, everywhere. Through nonsense art, he invites a kind of divine performative play, exploiting the self-reflexive functions of nonsense literature that mirror our true relationship to ourselves and the world’s purposeless “nonsensical” nature. In the reading, singing, and chanting of this art, we are to experience the shift in consciousness Watts normally tried to explain. Employing a genre whose significance is not in what it means but in how it does not, he attempts, and just possibly achieves, the impossible: to give the experience of knowing without imparting knowledge. Indeed, in Nonsense he is able to do far more than create mere “splashes in the sea”; he becomes what might more accurately be labeled the “artist as philosopher.” Watts’ literary nonsense, in its subversive, artistic playfulness, proves a fitting vehicle to expose the weaknesses of language and logic, failings that simultaneously demonstrate the true nature of reality.

162  Michael Heyman

A World of Nonsense Throughout his career, Watts’ philosophy remained strikingly consistent; the “continuous thread” within was, according to Keightley (2012), “the assertion of the possibility of a direct, immediate, mystical realization of reality” (p. 44). The nature of this reality, what Watts might call the underlying unity of everything, foregrounds all other concepts. Of particular note here are the resultant concepts that relate to sense and nonsense, which include the ultimate “meaninglessness” of the world, the complexity and diversity that comprise yet hide said unity, and its joyful playfulness. Before moving to the Nonsense book itself, I shall outline these concepts, with two further aids: the first is a poem from the Nonsense volume, “Birdle Burble,” presented here in full: I went out of my mind and then came to my senses By meeting a magpie who mixed up his tenses, Who muddled distinctions of nouns and of verbs, And insisted that logic is bad for the birds. With a poo-wee cluck and a chit, chit-chit; The grammar and meaning don’t matter a bit. The stars in their courses have no destination; The train of events will arrive at no station; The inmost and ultimate Self of us all Is dancing on nothing and having a ball. So with chat for chit and with tat for tit, This will be that, and that will be It! (Watts, 1977a, p. 39)1 “Birdle Burble” (Watts, 1977a) is actually something of an outlier in the Nonsense volume in that, strictly speaking, it is only marginally nonsensical; it is, however, with a little teasing out, a fairly succinct portrait of Watts’ foundational principles and, not coincidentally, how his nonsense art functions. In a similar vein is “Rejoice, Ye Pure in ’Art” (Watts, 1967b), an unreleased recording of Watts (and his friend Henry “Sandy” Jacobs), giving what can only be called a nonsense sermon, which mixes Christian hymn, Zen anecdotes, and art-as-philosophy nonsense, in what Jacobs notes on the archived CD cover is a “Very silly maniacal, pseudo-religious declamation” (N. Lewis, personal communication, May 29, 2020). It is delivered by Watts’ invented comical persona, the over-the-top Anglican-cum-Buddhist, the “Reverend Crowson Munsie.” Like “Birdle Burble,” this performance is, at its root, expository, but it incorporates an abundance of nonsense elements, helping to “explain,” by way of performance and play with non-meaning, the philosophical principles connected to his conception of nonsense.2

Literary Nonsense as Enactment  163 We begin in “Birdle Burble” (Watts, 1977a), appropriately for nonsense, back-to-front, with Watts’ give-away, the capitalization of “It” in the poem’s last line. Watts’ “It” is frequently-used shorthand to refer to the totality of existence, the unity that, despite appearances of separateness, is everything. In “Birdle Burble,” “This will be that” functions in its lack of specificity; any kind of so-called separate entity, a “this,” is actually not separate from “that,” another seemingly separate entity. All are simply expressions or forms of “It.” The “Reverend Crowson Munsie” is more concrete in the nonsense sermon “Rejoice, Ye Pure in ’Art” (Watts, 1967b). He says, “No outstanding convexation without instanding concaving; billiard-wise, no cue-and-balls without the pockets; no mountaining without valleyfication.” This is to say, to take the last example, a mountain is not separate from the valleys around it; it is not even a thing, but rather a temporary organization of It, always changing, making it more accurate to refer to “mountain” as a verb, since nouns denote illusory stasis and separateness. Hence, the wise magpie’s properly “muddled distinctions of nouns and of verbs” (Watts, 1977a, p. 39). In “The Negative Way,” Watts (1951/2017b) explains the unity of It in terms of Eastern thought: “[T]he whole world of experience, including myself and others—is in essence identical with sunyata or Brahman. In other words, there is no reality but the absolute, nondual, and ultimate reality” (pp. 63–64). Or, in terms of Western thought, Watts (1966/1989) refers to Paul Tillich, the celebrated Christian theologian, whose concept for God as “the ground of being” also suits, for “the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming …, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it’s always the inspector. This, then, is the taboo of taboos: you’re IT!” (p. 18). “Birdle Burble” mirrors this language: “The inmost and ultimate Self of us all / Is dancing on nothing” (Watts, 1977a, p. 39); in other words, there is nothing outside the “ultimate Self” (the capital S signifying here) to dance on, because it already is everything (including anything it might perceive itself to be dancing upon). The true reality of “It,” it turns out, directly contradicts the traditional (i.e. misguided) definition of “sense”: the concept of purpose. To explain, we move backwards again in “Birdle Burble” (Watts, 1977a): “The stars in their courses have no destination / The train of events will arrive at no station” (p. 39). Stars are not only traditional emblems of our fates, but, like us, they are in constant motion, supposedly toward our celestially obscured purposes. But to Watts, they are not going anywhere; they are just going. Everything is always in motion, and motion precludes destination. Likewise, the events we perceive as moving us (and everything else) in time and space from A to B to C turn out to be going nowhere. The train can’t arrive because it is always going, always where it is. As Watts (1960/1973a) explains in “This is IT”: “everything, just as it is now,

164  Michael Heyman is IT—is the whole point of there being life and a universe” (p. 30). The “point” or purpose of the universe, the result of everything we perceive to have happened in the past, is nothing beyond the continual now, and there is nothing beyond the continual now. The “goal” of the universe is already fulfilled, in every moment, and could not have been otherwise than it is. “Human purposes,” he continues, are pursued within an immense circling universe which does not seem to me to have purpose, in our sense, at all. … The processes of nature as we see them both in the surrounding world and in the involuntary aspects of our own organisms … unfold themselves without aiming at future destinations. (pp. 32–33) If sense and meaning necessitate something leading to something else (a purpose, the “point” of something, a series of events, the train’s “destination”), but at the same time, according to the idea of the unified “It,” there can be nothing outside of that something (no “something else”), then this kind of sense is impossible. Just as with Alice in the LookingGlass world, no amount of running can get us anywhere but where we are, because here is there, or, in Watts’ (1977a) poem, “this will be that / And that will be IT!”3 Watts (1958b) sums up the impossibility of sense in “Sense of Nonsense,” a radio talk that details his indebtedness to nonsense literature: “This participation in the essential glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the word” enables us to understand that “thus the true meaning of life is nomeaning. That its purpose is no purpose and that its sense is non-sense” (n. p.). To Watts, as we have seen, “sense” is the misperception that things lead to other things, that the world and our lives move from here to there; but there is no fixed “here” or “there.” As soon as we try to see reality as fixed things, whether places, people, hippopotamuses, or gods, we must fail because there is no fixity, only flux, only “wiggliness” as Watts liked to call it. Watts (1958a) wrote in Nature, Man and Woman, “Nature is not necessarily arranged in accordance with the system of mutually exclusive alternatives which characterize our language and logic” (p. 12), and we are brought back to nonsense, the genre whose very foundation is subversion of language and logic. Discarding untenable concepts of purpose and fixity, Watts proposes a new way of seeing sense, or purpose, which, to us, may seem to be nonsense: recognizing that rather than being, as we instinctively suppose, solid matter, we are, instead, complex pattern, which is but an expression of the infinite complexity of “It.” As the Reverend Crowson Munsie preaches, we are “click-clack zig-zagly precisioned patternings … with all their articulate accurate delineated and definite structures” (Watts, 1967b, n.p). We need to only look out into the world to see a

Literary Nonsense as Enactment  165 reflection of this in the strange gambols, pranks, and spranks of creation. Watts (1966/1989) writes: It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd—uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don’t. Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of oneupmanship …? (pp. 3–4)4 He suggests that we can see this complexity by adopting the viewpoint of the “wise baby.” From this perspective, “the world becomes immeasurably rich in color and detail because we no longer ignore aspects of life which adults pass over and screen out in their haste after serious matters” (Watts, 1972/ 2007, p. 307). With new eyes that take in every complexity, every “tube species” from rhino to giraffe, every snowflake and diatom, every thing of everything, we are better able to see the totality of “It.” This undiscriminating vision allows us to see that “the point of life is its pattern at every stage of its development” (p. 307). The universe has been working toward nothing but the immeasurable complexity of us (and everything), the patch and pattern of “It” that we happen to presently inhabit; our form is our meaning. Purpose is nothing more than this: the patterned complexity of what already is. And patterned complexity for its own sake is a significant element in defining literary nonsense. Another significant aspect of seeing, as the “wise baby,” the nature of reality is to recognize that it is, as Watts might say, fun – ludic, exuberant, hilarious, and joyful. The Reverend Crowson Munsie, as usual, relates this with exactitude: “the whole of reality is chit-chit-puck tick-tock ping dit-ditdit dat-puck-ping clug-jug bonk spit-spit-spa honk dong vrrrooom boy-yoyoing pow tweet dit-dit siss-quock” (Watts, 1967b, n.p. italics added). Perhaps slightly more articulate, “Birdle Burble” (Watts, 1977a) offers that the “inmost and ultimate Self of us all / Is dancing on nothing and having a ball” (p. 39, italics added). While Samuel Beckett might find the world’s gibberish or the meaninglessness of “dancing on nothing” to be, ultimately, tragic, Watts (1972/2007) saw the world through the lens of G. K. Chesterton: “No[w] if Chesterton was right in feeling, as I do, that … humor is uniquely human, and that if, furthermore, man is made in God’s image, then, as Chesterton suggested, we should not be surprised at the verbal similarity of cosmic and comic” (p. 213). Even from the beginnings of his career, in The Legacy of Asia and Western Man, Watts (1937) proclaimed that true self-knowledge

166  Michael Heyman allowed us to “join in the laughter of the gods. For the gods are laughing at themselves” (p. 159), or, as he put it 35 years later “real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter” (1972/ 2007, p. 47). To explain how the humor arises, we could turn again to Reverend Muncie, who preaches with studied gravity that to become a disable (that is, perhaps, a nonsense disciple) “you have to make yolk in your egghead, yoghurt in your jughead, joke in your belly” (Watts, 1967b, n.p.). As Alice might say, this is “rather hard to understand,” but some kind of joke must be made out of some cranial matter, “that is clear at any rate” (Carroll. 2013, p. 116). More helpful, perhaps, would be the “wise baby’s” perspective, which finds that the unsolvable “confusions of the adult world are not really serious, but only the games whereby adults pass the time and pretend to be important” (Watts, 1972/ 2007, p. 307). In this vein, “all philosophical opinions and disputations sound like somewhat sophisticated versions of children yelling back and forth—‘ ’Tis!’ “Tisn’t!’ ‘ ’Tis!’ “Tisn’t!’—until … they catch the nonsense of it and roll over backwards with hoots of laughter” (Watts, 1973a, p.28). What the universe is doing, its “purpose,” Watts calls play, which he sometimes uses interchangeably with the activity of nonsense: “For as the nonsense of the madman is a babble of words for its own fascination, the nonsense of nature and of the sage is the perception that the ultimate meaninglessness of the world contains the same hidden joy as its transience and emptiness” (Watts, 1958a, p. 120). Such joy overflows in Watts’ own performances, as we hear in the recitation of the pseudoadmonitory nonsense poem “The Negative Confession,” when, after a long list of “serious” denials like “We just say: no, no” and “We just: don’t go,” he squeaks in an incongruous and ridiculous falsetto, “We don’t try: Tweeky tweeky tweeky,” (Watts, n. d.). In “Birdle Burble” the sound and word-play, a version of the madman’s babble, also echoes: “So with chat for chit and with tat for tit, / This will be that, and that will be It!” (Watts, 1977a, p. 39). On the untitled audio recording of Nonsense material (Watts, n.d.), after this last line of the written text, he adds, as a final joke, “So… that’s that!” while laughing with his signature rasp. He couldn’t help but laugh at himself, as the nonsense sage (and the nonsense Reverend) must.

How to Experience IT: Music, Poetry, and Finally, Nonsense As we have seen, Watts considered the consciousness of “It” and its qualities of purposelessness, complexity, and joyful playfulness, to be impossible to communicate in the logical language of philosophical discourse. But this does not mean it was impossible to communicate, via the new “experience” he claimed the world needed. He writes: the processes of nature as we see them both in the surrounding world and in the involuntary aspects of our own organisms are much

Literary Nonsense as Enactment  167 more like art than business, politics, or religion. They are especially like the arts of music and dancing, which unfold themselves without aiming at future destinations. (Watts, 1973a, pp. 32–33) The experience, then, comes about most readily through music and dance, arts that, unlike “words and symbols,” do not (at least to Watts) mean anything, that do not “point to anything beyond themselves” (Watts, 1966/1989, p. 119). While Watts has received little credit for it, it just so happens that, four years before publishing the Nonsense volume, he and a like-minded cadre created what is sometimes acknowledged as the first psychedelic album, called, unsurprisingly, This is IT (Watts, 1962), in many ways a nonsensical musical expression of It. Before Sandy Bull, John Fahey, and 13th Floor Elevators; before The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, and Frank Zappa, there was, unlikely as it may seem, “Alan Watts and friends in a spontaneous musical happening” (Watts, 1962, album cover). It would be easy to write off the album This is IT as Watts merely “on drugs,” but it was, in fact, intended, as earnestly as Watts could be in his Bohemian gleeful wildness, as an “interval for nonsense” (album cover) which would have psychological and philosophical benefits. His first LSD experience, long before the mid-60s fad, was in 1958, when he participated in an academic study conducted through the University of California. Over the next few years, with his own careful experimentation, he came to believe that LSD could be useful, like medicine, to help people see the totality of “It.” Indeed, his The Joyous Cosmology, also published in 1962, promoted these psychological benefits of LSD, as opposed to its being used just “for kicks” (Furlong, 1986/2012. P. 169). The album, while never explicitly mentioning LSD, was meant to fulfill a similar purpose, as the liner notes are mostly just a long passage from The Joyous Cosmology. It was recorded in informal gatherings with Watts’ free-spirited California friends Roger Somers, Leah Ananda, Joel Andrews, and others, has seven tracks, each a deep dive into wild musical and verbal experimentation – privileging exuberance over skillful musical chops. Tribal drumming, marimba and droning piano, mumbling vocalizations, philosophical lecturing, screaming, bodily noises, primal chanting, falsetto twitterings, scat-like syllables, and indecipherable interstellar languages (perhaps), all combine to create, through music, the “art of pure nonsense,” so that we may tap into “It” (Watts, 1962, album cover, citing The Joyous Cosmology). The experimental music from this album embraced unbridled expression of energy and emotion, while eschewing strict musical form and notions of virtuosity. It played a critical role in giving one side of the “experience” Watts was trying to generate, but interestingly, in some ways it was quite different from the other means he suggested: poetry.

168  Michael Heyman He often writes, as he does here in Nature, Man and Woman (1958a), that the means of awareness of “It,” “is in the realm of feeling rather than thought, and is in the spirit of poetry rather than formal, intellective philosophy” (p. 14). It might seem that poetry, which tends to be constructed precisely of the problematic “words and symbols” that “point… beyond themselves,” would be the antithesis of what he needed. Watts’ own take on poetry, inspired by his study of Zen, would help solve this problem. He writes in his 1948 article “Zen”: The Zen way of teaching is to demonstrate Reality rather than to talk about it, or, if words are used at all, to avoid formally religious terminology and conceptual statements. When Zen speaks it expresses Reality, not with logical explanations and doctrines but with everyday conversation, or with statements that upset the normal conceptual mode of thinking so violently that they appear as utter nonsense. (Watts, 1948/2017d, p. 115) The two modes he suggests here represent the two unique types of poetry he felt fit his formal and conceptual requirements. The first, of course, is haiku, “the simplest and the most sophisticated form of literature in the world” (Watts, 1960, p. 121). Part of his role in ushering Zen into the West was to introduce haiku, which he did via The Way of Zen (1957) and his essay “Haiku” (Watts, 1960), originally heard as a radio broadcast in 1958. With its “everyday” conversational language, oddly juxtaposed images, leaps of logic, formal intricacies, and especially its minimalism, it manages to communicate the “moment of intense perception” (Welch, n.d., n. p.) that Watts so valued. Welch connects Watts’ notion of haiku to Roland Barthes’(1970) Empire of Signs, noting that haiku functions not by being “signifier,” but simply by being (Welch, n.d., Note 8). In this, it frustrates our usual intellectual approach to finding meaning, reaching for symbols, signs, and definitions, by simply letting the poem be what it is and nothing beyond. Haikus “in their courses have no destination,” as Watts might have written (see 1977a, p. 39). While haiku may have suited Watts in terms of form and function, when he took poetry into his own hands, his form of choice was an old favorite, literary nonsense, which, from a different angle, still satisfies the “Zen way of teaching,” using “words and symbols” in musical, subversive, tautological, “utterly” non-sensical ways.5 Watts’ own experience in nonsense literature goes back to his childhood, and to the “fathers” of modern English nonsense literature, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. He notes in his autobiography, “At a very early age I was presented with a handsome edition of the nonsense limericks of Edward Lear” (Watts, 1972/ 2007, p. 21). Though he doesn’t mention Carroll in his childhood reading, there is little doubt he read him, considering, in particular, the

Literary Nonsense as Enactment  169 first poem of the Nonsense volume, “The Lovelorn Loon” (Watts, 1935/ 1977f) an “epic limerick on the folly of reaching for the moon” (Watts, 1977c, p. xi), completed in 1935 when Watts was 20, which begins: A certain umstumptular loon Fell vastly in love with the moon; With shimular turve And binlimular gurve He caroozed to the gorble bassoon. (Watts, 1935/ 1977f, p. 1) In the nineteen limerick stanzas that follow, Watts demonstrates his youthful nonsense apprenticeship to both Lear and Carroll, the former of which is seen in the modified use of Lear’s signature limerick form, and the latter of which comes about through the constant use of neologisms, almost every stanza jam-packed with them, in a manner similar to Carroll’s iconic nonsense poem “Jabberwocky.” “The Lovelorn Loon,” written before Watts’ more serious engagements with the genre of nonsense, is quite different in tone, method, and effect from the other works in the volume. Its anti-Capitalist message vies with, and perhaps overpowers our experience of the form, pulling it away from Watts’ later nonsense forms. In his twenties, Watts’ interest in nonsense literature became more integrated into his study of philosophy, as he came under the sway of one of the genre’s great critics and promoters, G. K. Chesterton. Watts (1972/ 2007) wrote: “of all [Chesterton’s] many essays the most profound and provoking was ‘On Nonsense,’ the peculiarly British kind of nonsense represented by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, which is something of a much higher and subtler order than mere twaddle, gibberish, poppycock, or balderdash” (p. 212). Chesterton’s (1914) “Defence of Nonsense” argues that the dour Christianity of the day “has forgotten that a thing cannot be completely wonderful so long as it remains sensible” (p. 48). It was Chesterton who helped Watts make the connection between mystical spirituality and this higher order of nonsense. In the service, then, of making the world “wonderful,” Watts gives us Nonsense, first published in 1967, a book that has received little to no critical or even bibliographical recognition. He himself doesn’t mention it in his autobiography, either, but it does pop up in one letter, written July 9, 1967, to his agent, Henry Volkening: “I want to try an experiment with one of the young, small, and very up-and-coming publishers here. He has asked me for a book of nonsense ditties…” (Watts, 2017a, p. 322). The publisher was Jeff Berner, at the time a young columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, a member of the second wave of Fluxus artists, and a teacher of avant-garde history at the University of California. Berner was also a regular participant in the eclectic and sometimes wild gatherings

170  Michael Heyman on Watts’ houseboat in the Sausalito harbor, where, as Berner states, Ram Das, Timothy Leary, and various prominent counter-culture filmmakers, artists, poets, and thinkers, would mingle (personal communication, August 5, 2020). Watts’ Nonsense fits rather impishly into Berner’s fledgling press, Stolen Paper Editions, which included Astronauts of InnerSpace, a volume of trippy avant-garde poetry, Finnish “visionary” Kalevi Lappalainen’s Outside the Alphabets, and Lenore Kandel’s “holy/erotic poems” The Love Book (Advertisement, 1967). Berner’s placement of Nonsense in this list suggests the seriousness with which its silliness was taken. In this same letter to Volkening, Watts (2017a) mentions that he is not asking for an advance because “the job is already done” (p. 322), implying that the texts were written before this date. Aside from “The Lovelorn Loon,” which he states was finished in 1935, we have no further dates for the other texts here. In the introduction to the volume (a brilliant exercise in prose nonsense, itself, written in 1967, he mentions that some of “the following ditties, mellifluous and cacophonous […] have been running in my head since childhood and early youth” (n. p.), though the similarity to the language and ideas in the essay “This is IT” (1960/1973) and The Book (1966/1989) suggest some came about in the late 1950s, into the 1960s. The 1967 edition of Nonsense was a small run, selling modestly, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area ( J. Berner, personal communication, August 5, 2020), but 10 years later, in 1977, an expanded edition published by E. P. Dutton appeared (posthumously), introduced by Berner and illustrated by Michel Dattel in the manner of Heinz Edelmann’s late-1960s Yellow Submarine artwork for The Beatles, giving it the feel, in a way, of a children’s book. In addition to a rather dapper photo of a grinning Watts, this edition also includes three brief essays, “On Nonsense,” “A Conversation on Goofing,” and “On Drudgery,” which deepen the philosophical and practical implications of performative nonsense literature. Lastly, in the back of this edition, an audio cassette was offered by mail order, which included Watts reciting, singing, and chanting his work, in addition, perhaps, to parts of his lectures from which the included essays came.6 By titling the book Nonsense, Watts puts it squarely in the Victorian genre tradition, but, like all nonsense artists, he carves his own style. The genre of nonsense as we know it today in the West, and what Watts was most familiar with, came from its development and popularization in the work of Lear and Carroll, though theirs came, in many ways, from a confluence of older traditions, both high-literary and folk. Indeed, the genre is often defined ostensively by Lear and Carroll’s work, but the more theoretical definitions are manifold. Nonsense criticism picks up significantly in the mid-twentieth century, with Elizabeth Sewell’s The Field of Nonsense (1952) and since then has bifurcated bounteously. Wim Tigges’s (1988) comprehensive, more scientific approach calls it a genre which

Literary Nonsense as Enactment  171 balances a multiplicity of meaning with a simultaneous absence of meaning. This balance is effected by playing with the rules of language, logic, prosody and representation … In order to be successful, nonsense must at the same time invite the reader to interpretation and avoid the suggestion that there is a deeper meaning. (p. 47) Tigges (1988) adapts his work, in part, from Susan Stewart, employing a long list of formal devices commonly used in nonsense, including neologism, imprecision, infinite repetition, simultaneity, and arbitrariness. Stewart’s (1979) definition, in Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature, embraces sense and nonsense-making in terms of social contexts, and others, such as Noam Chomsky and JeanJacques Lecercle, have discussed it in terms of linguistics and philosophy. As we have already seen, G. K. Chesterton developed a spiritual school of nonsense criticism that was probably the most influential to Watts, but it was Watts’ roots in Lear and Carroll that shone most brightly in Nonsense. In 1871, Edward Lear responded to accusations that his popular book Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets (1871) was hidden political satire or otherwise “symbolic,” to which he answered, “The critics are very silly to see politics in such bosh: not but that bosh requires a good deal of care, for it is a sine qua non in writing for children to keep what they have to read perfectly clear & bright, & incapable of any meaning but one of sheer nonsense.” (Lear, 1988, p. 228). In writing this, Lear put himself in a critical camp that claimed nonsense to be, in a way, utterly meaningless, or as he put it elsewhere “nonsense pure and absolute” (Lear, 1872, p. iv). Of course, one should not trust writers to divulge their “meanings,” but Watts, at least in certain ways, did subscribe to this non-sense angle (at least regarding conventional sense), as we see in “On Nonsense,” the first essay in the expanded 1977 edition of Nonsense: Life is a kind of nonsense in the same way that music is a kind of nonsense, because music isn’t usually supposed to mean anything other than itself. Using the nonsense in words means using words for their musical value, like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear did. (Watts, 1977e, p. 41) We must admit that Watts, for all his experience and knowledge, knew little about musical aesthetics, and so while music theory may not have been his strong suit,7 he tried to employ the concept of using words for their “musical value,” to be sound without sense, in his own writing. In this way, as “On Nonsense” suggests, Watts finds an analogy of sorts for

172  Michael Heyman the nonsense of life through playful, meaningless, sonorous language, as in the limerick example he gives elsewhere: Thrumula thrumula thrilp comlipsible lipsible lilp dim thrick and me thrummy lumgumptulous bunny sormgurgle umbumdular bilp (Watts, n. d.)8 What Watts wrote of life applies equally to his complex, “meaningless,” musical nonsense: “It is simultaneously the purest nonsense and the utmost artistry” (Watts, 1966/1989, p.120).9 While the follies of nonsense language express the joy and nonsense of “It,” they also expose the fraud of “sensical” language itself. Language’s functioning is symbolic and symptomatic of our own misconceptions of reality, as critiqued by Watts, and shown by the mechanics of nonsense literature. In many of his works, he explains how words can never be used as a proper conduit to the world, that they are inherently problematic. Words, he admits, are necessary for our survival as a kind of shorthand, but they are ill-equipped, even downright antithetical, to take on any kind of expression of the true nature of reality (Watts, 1951/ 2011, p. 50). The problems with language are legion, as expanded upon in detail in Watts’ work throughout his life. To summarize briefly here, he found language, first of all to be inadequate to describe experience: “Words can express no more than a tiny fragment of human knowledge, for what we can say and think is always immeasurably less than what we experience” (Watts, 1955/ 2017c, p. 127). Just as an inch is infinitely divisible, so an experience is infinitely “meaningful.” Furthermore, as Watts states, “there are experiences that defy the very structure of our language, as water cannot be carried in a sieve” (p. 127). What he calls the “ordinary language of meaning, of leading to something else” (Watts, 1958b, n. p.) is faulty because, as we have seen earlier, the “stars in their courses have no destination” (Watts, 1977a, p. 39); likewise, words, though we may think otherwise, lead us nowhere except back to themselves. This kind of circularity is another part of words’ inadequacy, in that their meaning, in a way, is a kind of illusion created by their circular nature. In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts (1951/ 2011) writes that “all ‘explanations’ of the universe couched in language are circular, and leave the most essential things unexplained and undefined. The dictionary itself is circular. It defines words in terms of other words” (p. 48). Such circularity jibes with the Deleuzean “paradox of regress,” a central component of nonsense. The “sense” of a word, in a way, does not exist

Literary Nonsense as Enactment  173 at all, but rather, like the sense of any kind of logical proposition, must be already assumed. Deleuze (1969/1990) expresses it as such: Sense is always presupposed as soon as I begin to speak […]. In other words, I never state the sense of what I am saying. But on the other hand, I can always take the sense of what I say as the object of another proposition whose sense, in turn, I cannot state. I thus enter into the infinite regress of that which is presupposed. (p. 28) Sense presupposes sense, and words presuppose other words, leading us in giant loops of meaning, in infinite regression. Words become a shell game where the joke is on us; no matter which shell we pick the meaning is never there. Next time, we think, we might just catch it. More fools we. Even when words manage, in their stumbling and impossible way – John Gardner’s Dragon says that humans, with their language and logic, “rush across chasms on spiderwebs, and sometimes they make it” (1971/ 1989, p. 64) – to define what we think is a thing, we are once again misled. Words are static and create separation in a world whose very existence is defined by its fluidity and connectedness, as has been shown earlier, with “Birdle Burble” (Watts, 1977a) and “Rejoice, Ye Pure in’Art” (Watts, circa 1967b). Watts (1951/2011) writes, To define is to isolate, to separate some complex of forms from the stream of life and say, ‘This is I.’ When man can name and define himself, he feels that he has an identity. Thus he begins to feel, like the word, separate and static, as over against the real, fluid world of nature. (p. 46) This feeling, of course, is illusory, but language, these fabricated boxes, is just our way of splitting reality into “millions of arbitrary distinctions called feet, inches, stars, trees, men, ounces, pounds, and mountains” (Watts, 1951/ 2017b, p. 66). In our mistaking our arbitrary boxes for reality, “we are bewitched by words. We confuse them with the real world, and try to live in the real world as if it were the world of words” (Watts, 1951/ 2011, p. 50). Language exposes our common illusion of reality; nonsense language exposes our common illusions of language. Elizabeth Sewell’s (1952) perspective on nonsense reflects Watts’ on language: she states that nonsense, unlike like most other kinds of writing, depicts “Not a world of ‘things’ but of words and ways of using them...” (p. 17). Going further into the process of this world creation, Anna Barton

174  Michael Heyman (2015) writes, “[nonsense] complicates or obstructs the relationship between word and world, or word and meaning, rather than using words as a conduit to the world they describe” (n. p.). But it’s all a matter of perspective. The relationship between “word and world” is only “obstructed” if we are seeing word and world incorrectly, as a kind of achievable “conduit,” rather than the words’ (and world’s) true emptiness (or oneness, their being the same) that Watts argues for. And so, by creating an intentional, self-reflexive “world of words,” through nonsense art Watts is fighting fire with fire, exposing the inadequacy of words with words themselves, sometimes neologisms and neargibberish-wordishness, and sometimes words used in illogical ways. In the passage above from “On Nonsense,” Watts (1977e) is careful to mention that, in his own nonsense writing, he is “using the nonsense in words” rather than what we might expect, “using nonsense words” (p. 41, italics added). The implication is that nonsense is implicit in all words, nonsense or not. The same is true for logic. He writes, “absurdities arise when we think that the kind of language we use or the kind of logic with which we reason can really define or explain the ‘physical’ world” (Watts, 1951/ 2011, p. 48). The playful use of aesthetically complex non-meaning is a crucial connection between literary nonsense and his philosophical concept of nonsense, but of course Carroll and Lear did not only use words purely for their musical value, as shown in, for example, Humpty Dumpty’s linguistic discourse on the meanings of the words of “Jabberwocky.” Watts (1958b) explains in his “Sense of Nonsense” talk that literary nonsense is an art form that is not just chaos. That is not just blathering balderdash. But that has in it rhythm. Fascinating complexity. A kind of artistry. It is in this kind of meaninglessness that we get the profoundest meaning. (n. p.) This is the rub. Literary nonsense, in its deepest functioning, does not signify by regular means. In many ways, it simply doesn’t make sense: and yet, a meaninglessness imbued with rhythm, complexity, and artistry seems to bring us to a different kind of meaning, in a different kind of way – to the truths of existence that Watts wishes us not to understand, but to experience. Reading, however, is not enough; Watts’ nonsense “experience” necessitates performance. As he states in the introduction to Nonsense, texts therein “are written to be read aloud – to be chanted, muttered, declaimed, or bellowed while showering, shaving, dusting, or driving” (Watts, 1977c, p. xi). Nonsense’s texts (and the nonsense of the world) are not something to be understood intellectually but rather to

Literary Nonsense as Enactment  175 be experienced in continual doing. Alan Levinovitz (2017) has noted this characteristic of literary nonsense as an experience of rewarding sense-juggling […] [It] is something more than the quality of a symbol or set of symbols: it is the nexus of connection between ambiguous semantic elements, a reader, and a context, which together determine a particular and rewarding experience. (p. 255)10 Nonsense does not exist solely in text but arises as interaction between text, reader, and context that cannot end and cannot come to conclusions, as such, but must exist in a continual state of “juggling.” As soon as the sense juggling stops, as soon as only one version of sense is grasped, the other balls fall, and it is no longer nonsense. Performance itself creates the nonsense experience, demonstrated, as we have seen, with Watts’ (1962) album This is IT, where he encourages listeners to be spontaneous, joyous, and energetic, to perform “nonsensically” in such a way that reflects the nature of reality. He explains further in his “Sense of Nonsense” (1958b) radio talk: “It is this participation in the essential glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the world” (n. p.). Our participation is essential. By performing nonsense literature, we are really just making explicit what is implicit – because everything we do (and even the concept of “we”) is also nonsense. It’s just IT.

Closing Ditargument… So far, I have been dancing around (and occasionally with) Watts’ more proper nonsense texts, and so, as a conclusion of sorts, I will look to one poem that represents many of the formal and philosophical elements discussed here. “Ditargument” (Watts, 1977b) is a poetic dialogue, performative by nature, in the tradition of the nonsense dialogue trope seen in Carroll’s (2013) “A-sitting on A Gate,” and extended by Mervyn Peake (1972), in “Tintinabulum”11 where an “enlightened” nonsense figure parries verbally with a bowler hat-wearing square. Watts (1977b) distinguishes his unnamed speakers with indentation and italics, the nonsense voice being flush left and non-italic: Willy is belly and belly is willy. A ditty-song, a ditty-song, and goddam silly. (p. 21, lines 1–2) The disagreement begins immediately, as the nonsense-speaker compares two things (belly and willy) that seem quite similar if we consider

176  Michael Heyman them as words (in this world of words), with their near rhyme and visually similar construction. But the statement also seems to posit the symmetric property, in mathematical parlance, of two unique variables (x = y and y  =  x), since “belly” and “willy,” despite their sounds, are clearly different things. And so, even before we consider what these things are, language and logic are already at odds. “Willy” could be a name, but coming from an Englishman like Watts, and not being capitalized in its second appearance, most likely means “penis,” especially in relation to another lower-stratum body part, the belly. However one may read it, this formal proposition, whether linguistic or strictly logical, defies common sense; it is absurd – as long as one remains ignorant of the “true” nature of reality, of “It,” where there are no true separations, where all things are, in significant ways, each other, where even the use of discrete variables (or words, or body parts) betrays a misunderstanding of the interconnectedness of all things. The sense-speaker will have none of it, dismissing it as a lowly nonsense song, a “ditty-song,” linking it, tellingly, to the “meaninglessness” of music – and its being, generally, goddamned silly to such a right-thinking gentleman. The nonsense-speaker is undaunted and rattles off three more lines of nonsense, to the derision of the sense-monger. Braddle-pin, pot-pin, a long gone done. Just “dum-diddy, dum-diddy, dum-dum, dum.” Mugwump double-rump is sitting on the fence. You say nothing that makes any sense. Fiddle in the middle and be diddled with quibbles. Try something better-’n piddling with riddles. (Watts, 1977b, p. 21, lines 3–8) The nonsense here occurs through several methods: starting with neologism, in “Braddle,” though the context (with a “pot-pin,” more concrete but still unclear) shows it’s a kind of pin, just as the Owl and Pussycat’s “runcible spoon” (Lear, 2001, p. 239) is some kind of spoon.12 “A long gone done” mixes in a rarity for nonsense, syntactic confusion: “done” with the article “a” and the adjectives “long gone,” would suggest its being a noun, which it is not, nor does it serve as an adjective or the past participle of “do.” The more usual semantic levels of meaning get juggled as well, with the addition of the near rhymes of “long” and “gone” and the visual rhyme with “gone” and “done.” Adding in the consonance (with the “g”), we are almost led to say “dong,” which, while fitting into the cheeky humor with “willy,” (and perhaps Lear’s “Dong with a Luminous Nose”?) nevertheless still does not make sense. We may shuffle the meanings around, with the alternative syntactical and semantic options, but the sense never settles, the juggling balls continue to revolve. A “Mugwump double-rump” seems a creature of sorts, given its

Literary Nonsense as Enactment  177 (unexplained, though highlighted) twin-posterior, and might well refer to the creatures in William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, something Watts no doubt was familiar with. Another possible source for “Mugwump doublerump” could be the famed nineteenth-century American political flipfloppers, but however one connects the dots, the picture, and story of this figure “on the fence” remains obscure. In the third nonsense line, sound over sense seems to rule, with the parade of “-iddle”-rhymed words leading us blithely into murky ambiguities. And yet, “sitting on the fence” is indeed to be “fiddling” in the “middle,” and the sense-speaker seems to be “quibbling,” with the nonsense-speaker’s (ab)uses of language and logic. By balancing nonsense and sense, Watts brings us tantalizingly close to making sense – always a sign of successful nonsense – without actually doing so, at least in the conventional manner. The greatest mistake of the sense-speaker, perhaps, is calling all of this nonsense “riddles.” Riddles, commonly confused with nonsense, only seem to be nonsensical until one finds their answer. In other words, the “Mugwump,” for instance, surely should be a specific reference from which we could derive the “true” meaning of the whole. But approaching nonsense from this angle, that it is a puzzle with an answer, that it is a set of signs with corresponding signifiers, is antithetical to its function as nonsense. The nonsense-speaker, perhaps mockingly, then notes annoyance with a quirk of language, the sense-speaker’s ambiguous contraction “’n,” (as in, “better-’n piddling”), which could mean “and” or “than.” In an attempt to provoke the nonsense-speaker, then, the sense-speaker goes on a rant, using commonly connected phrases with “’n”: Burger-’n-bun; Buttons-’n-bows; Bottle-’n-jug; Pepper-’n-salt […] (Watts, 1977b, p. 21, lines11–14) This boring list goes on, to be countered immediately with the nonsensespeaker’s retort: Fiddle-di-dee! Riddle-mi-ree! Lickety-split! Lickety-cut! Clippety-clop! Dickery-dock! Slippery-slop! Flipetty-flop! Clickety-clack!

178  Michael Heyman Jigetty-jog! Rickety-tin! Chippetty-CHOP! (p. 21–22, lines 22–33) The first thing to note here is that the “argument” occurs, in part, not by logic and semantics, but via the patterned complexity that characterizes nonsense – in this case, in the poem’s meter. The sense-speaker speaks in antispasts (/∪ ∪/), and so, by way of dialogic equivalency, at least in sound, the nonsense-speaker answers in identical meter, giving a kind of musical, extra-semantic answer. This equivalency is reified in the next exchange, also, wherein the sense-speaker’s amphimacers (/∪/) such as “Cook-’n-serve; / Pork-’n-beans” (lines 34–35) are countered with: Chick-a-dee! Peek-a-boo! Fol-de-rol! Doodle-doo! […] (p. 22, lines 44–47) And so the “argument” carries on by way of form through mirrored meter, regardless of meaning. In this manner, one might expect a parallel retort to the sense-speaker’s list items that are each two linked but separate things, and yet the nonsense-speaker’s list items, despite keeping the same rhythmic foot, all represent only one thing, as if to say, the sound properties of words may imply two separate things – but words, clearly, cannot be trusted, and we’re reminded of the language flaws earlier discussed. Of course, the “argument” is not executed through form and meter exclusively. Many of the words and phrases have various semantic and referential layers of “juggled” meanings that, in different ways, respond to the dreary sense-flushed phrases. The sense-speaker begins, as we have seen, with workmanlike “and” phrases such as “Burger-’n-bun” and “Sugar-’n-spice.” These are everything we expect, clichés in language and practice, linked by the “’n” so (mockingly?) reviled by the nonsensespeaker. Aside from employing the directness of metrical engagement, the responses all seem to try to derail the stolid staleness, but in different ways. “Fiddle-di-dee!” is, appropriately, the first; not only is it a nonsensical expression of contempt (often for what is perceived as nonsense itself, as in Edward Lear’s (2001) “Young Lady of Lucca” (p. 169) or the “Pobble Who Has No Toes” (p. 397), but it also happens to be the representative bit of nonsense that the Red Queen asks Alice to translate to French, in Through the Looking-Glass. But even the terms with some root in semantic or pragmatic functioning are followed by a deeper dive into nonsense, as with, “Riddle-mi-ree,” which is a snatch from a

Literary Nonsense as Enactment  179 traditional English nursery rhyme (Opie & Opie, 1951, p. 363). Of course, this phrase has an actual word in it, “riddle,” but it is nonetheless more nonsensical as a functioning phrase than “fiddle-dee-dee,” implying, in a way that, counterintuitively, words that seem the most sensical are perhaps the most dangerously nonsensical, getting, again, to the heart of Watts’ objections to language. Throwing “riddle” into this more gibberishlike statement also hearkens back to, and mocks, the earlier (erroneous) association made between riddles and nonsense. In the long, rhythmic lists of “Ditargument” (Watts, 1977b), the debaters dig themselves ever deeper, and meanings mushroom, so much so that their culling would take us far beyond the limited space of this chapter. Some of the nonsense terms are just onomatopoeic (“clippety-clop”), some are concrete things (“chick-a-dee”), some come from snatches of nursery rhyme (“dickery-dock”), and some are common phrases nonsensical in a literal meaning, but colloquially clear (“lickety-split”). As we have seen, there are nods to Lear and Carroll and to pop culture, as seen possibly in the “Mugwump” reference, in addition to the poem’s final phrase, “Love-a-duck!”, originally a British expression of exasperation (Oxford English Dictionary) that also happens to be in the title of the 1966 Roddy McDowall film, Lord Love a Duck. This ending, while perhaps giving some sense of the nonsense-speaker’s state of mind, is hardly conclusive. How, then, is this conflict resolved? As befitting a nonsense poem, there is no definitive resolution, only a kind of infinite back and forth implied. Within the quasi-argumentative engagement of meter and the various references and types of nonsense, we see to the heart of Watts’ (1977b) method of “ditargument” and peek, as well, into the formation of this odd title, which we might see as a portmanteau of “ditty” and “argument.” Reappropriating “ditty” would be a dig at the sense-speaker, who uses the term “ditty-song” to mock the nonsense as a meaningless musical trifle, but more importantly would elevate this “music” to a method of truth-telling, even enlightenment. Ironically, they are both correct. Watts, in a way, presents philosophical debate as song that functions only in performance, that convinces not, primarily, by what it says (what the sense-maker desperately wants), but by how it says it. Such “music” has no conclusive meaning in conventional ways (it is “goddam silly”), but that’s exactly what makes it work. Through our performance of its expressions of “It,” its skillful complexity, and its playfulness, we achieve the experience Watts so wished his many books could explain. As belly is willy, so sense is nonsense, a revelation arrived at in ways wholly different from our expectations. As Deleuze (1969/1990) writes, sense “is not something to discover, to restore, and to re-employ; it is something to produce by a new machinery” (p. 72), and here, Watts is the engineer. Or, to put it more in his terms, by writing in modes of literary nonsense, he fully becomes an artist-as-philosopher.

180  Michael Heyman

Acknowledgements The Alan Watts Organization was a generous and invaluable resource for this essay. They provided from the archives several crucial recordings, including much of what was probably on the Nonsense cassette tape, and the unreleased “Rejoice, Ye Pure in ’Art.” Many thanks to the Organization, and in particular, to Nora Lewis and Mark Watts. Thanks, also, to Jeff Berner for his enthusiastic support, to Eric Connally for his mathematical meatiness, to Peter Columbus for easing the way into the Watts world, and to Jodie Tesoriero for her insight into the American Book of the Dead.

Notes 1 This poem is dedicated to James Broughton. All references to Nonsense come from the 1977 edition. 2 “Rejoice, Ye Pure in’Art,” (the title is a play on nineteenth-century hymn “Rejoice, Ye Pure in Heart”) exists in a few takes, with only slight textual variations. It seems Watts tried different performative ideas, such as making the speaker Cockney, but the most complete version, and that used here, is declaimed from the pulpit of the “Reverend Crowson Munsie.” 3 Watts himself likened some of his work to the Looking-Glass world, as in The Wisdom of Insecurity, when he admits: This begins to sound like something from Alice Through the Looking Glass, of which this book is a sort of philosophical equivalent. For the reader will frequently find himself in a topsy-turvy world in which the normal order of things seems to be completely reversed, and common sense turned inside out and upside down. (Watts, 1951/ 2011, p. 9). 4 This example is also given, in a very similar form, in the “Sense of Nonsense” (Watts, 1958b) radio talk. 5 Welch (n.d.) notes that Watts did try his hand at a few haiku himself. See his note, 13. 6 This cassette is no longer available. I have used recordings pulled from the Alan Watts Organization archives, to reconstruct much of what was probably on it. 7 In a letter on Dec 12, 1960, to Timothy Leary, Watts displayed an unfortunately imperialistic approach to classical Hindustani music. He notes: I was quite startled to realize that the music was pure nonsense… [The singers] were not singing words: they were lulling, playing with syllables (dit-da stuff), and blowing their oboes just to make weird spontaneous noises. There was nothing “classical” about it; it was the most abandoned, delightful blathering […].” (Watts, 2017a, p. 390) Of course, this music was indeed classical Indian music and anything but nonsense (though certainly improvisational), but Watts, in his ignorance, saw it as a rhapsodic expression of the spontaneity and joy of being in the present: “nonsense” as a musical method of experiencing “It.”

Literary Nonsense as Enactment  181 8 This limerick I have transcribed from the recording that probably would have been a part of the original cassette tape to accompany the 1977 edition of Nonsense. Variants exist in “On Nonsense” (Watts, 1977e, p. 41) and The Book (1966/1989, p. 119). 9 Such aesthetically mindful complexity and form (and indeed the balance kept with some sense-elements) is also what distinguishes nonsense from more experimental conceptual poetry, like Dada, sound poems, and Fluxus art. 10 Levinovitz (2017) is extending my own definition of nonsense as “sensejuggling” (Heyman, 2012, p. 5). 11 This poem didn’t appear until Peake’s posthumous A Book of Nonsense (1972). It’s quite possible that Watts was familiar with Peake’s nonsense in the popular Gormenghast novels (1946–59) and in separate volumes such as Rhymes Without Reason (1954). 12 When Lear (2001) created the “runcible spoon” (p. 239), it was indeed a nonsensical spoon type. Only later, in obstinate contradiction to the “runcible hat” (p. 429) Lear weareth and Aunt Jobiska’s “Runcible Cat” (p. 396) did it, regrettably, acquire an Oxford English Dictionary-sanctioned definition as a kind of slotted spoon.

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182  Michael Heyman Levinovitz, A. (2017). Slaying the Chinese jabberwock: Toward a comparative philosophy of nonsense. Comparative Literature. 69(3), 251–270. Opie, I., & Opie, P. (1951). The Oxford dictionary of nursery rhymes. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Peake, M. (1972). A book of nonsense. London, UK: Owen. Sewell, E. (1952). The field of nonsense. London: Chatto and Windus. Stewart, S. (1979). Nonsense: Aspects of intertextuality in folklore and literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Tigges, W. (1988). An anatomy of literary nonsense. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Watts, A. W. (n.d.). [untitled audio recording]. The Alan Watts Archive: The Alan Watts Organization. Watts, A. W. (1937). The legacy of Asia and Western man. London: John Murray. Watts, A. W. (1958a). Nature, man and woman: A new approach to sexual experience. London: Thames and Hudson. Watts, A. W. (1958b). Sense of Nonsense (audio transcript). AlanWatts.org. Retrieved January 8, 2020, from https://www.alanwatts.org/1-1-3-sense-ofnonsense/?highlight=The%20Sense%20of%20nonsense Watts, A. W. (1960). Haiku. In N. Wilson Ross (Ed.), The world of Zen: An EastWest anthology (pp. 121–128). New York, NY: Vintage. Watts, A. W. (1962). This is IT (record album). Sausalito, CA: MEA. Watts, A. W. (1967a). Nonsense. San Francisco, CA: Stolen Paper Editions. Watts, A. W. (1967b). Rejoice, Ye Pure in ’Art [audio recording]. The Alan Watts Archive: The Alan Watts Organization. Watts, A. W. (1973a). This is IT. In This is IT and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience (pp. 15–39). New York, NY: Vintage. (Original work published 1960) Watts, A. W. (1973b). This is IT and other essays on Zen and spiritual experience. New York, NY: Vintage. (Original work published 1960) Watts, A. W. (1977a). Birdle Burble. In Nonsense (exp. ed., M. Dattel, Illus., & J. Berner, Prod., p. 39). New York, NY: Dutton. Watts, A. W. (1977b). Ditargument. In Nonsense (exp. ed., M. Dattel, Illus., & J. Berner, Prod., pp. 21–22). New York, NY: Dutton. Watts, A. W. (1977c). Introduction. In Nonsense (exp. ed., M. Dattel, Illus., & J. Berner, Prod., pp. xi–xii). New York, NY: Dutton. Watts, A. W. (1977d). Nonsense (exp. ed., M. Dattel, Illus., & J. Berner, Prod.) New York, NY: Dutton. Watts, A. W. (1977e). On nonsense. In Nonsense (exp. ed., M. Dattel, Illus., & J. Berner, Prod., pp. 41–42). New York, NY: Dutton. Watts, A. W. (1977f). The lovelorn loon. In Nonsense (exp. ed., M. Dattel, Illus., & J. Berner, Prod., pp. 1–17). New York, NY: Dutton. (Original work written 1935) Watts, A. W. (1989). The book: On the taboo against knowing who you are. New York, NY: Vintage. (original work published 1966). Watts, A. W. (2007). In my own way: An autobiography. Novato, CA: World Library. (Original work published 1972) Watts, A. W. (2011). The wisdom of insecurity: A message for an age of anxiety. New York, NY: Vintage. (Original work published 1951) Watts, A. W. (2017a). The collected letters of Alan Watts ( J. Watts & A. Watts, Eds.). Novato, CA: New World Library.

Literary Nonsense as Enactment  183 Watts, A. W. (2017b). The negative way. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - In the academy: Essays and lectures. (pp. 63–66). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Original work published 1951) Watts, A. W. (2017c). The way of liberation in Zen Buddhism. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - In the academy: Essays and lectures (Kindle). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Original work published 1955) Watts, A. W. (2017d). Zen. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - In the academy: Essays and lectures(Kindle). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Original work published 1948) Welch, M. D. (n.d.). Haiku missionary: An annotated response to Alan Watts’ “Haiku.’” Retrieved January 1, 2020, http://www.graceguts.com/essays/haikumissionary-an-annotated response-to-alan-watts-haiku

13 Alan Watts, Ali Akbar Khan, and Hindustani Music in the Psychedelic Sixties Samuel B. Cushman The disciplinum arcanum of this culture, so easily mistaken in the child for idle reverie, was that intense contemplative watching of the eternal now, which is sometimes revived by the use of psychedelic drugs, but which came to me through flowers, jewels, reflected light in glass, and expanses of clear sky. I also get it from music that is not mechanical and does not march, as from the music of India which I loved at first hearing and which continues, like a lost name on the tip of the tongue, to put me in mind of a long-forgotten afternoon in a sunlit room where magicians were playing on the heartstrings of the universe. —Alan Watts, In My Own Way, 1973

No moment announced the arrival of Indian music in the United States more definitively than Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha’s Sunday afternoon performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967. With Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and members of the Grateful Dead among the onlookers packing the Monterey County Fairgrounds, the eminent sitarist and his virtuosic tabla accompanist delivered a memorable set that introduced Hindustani (North Indian) art music to a youthful American audience. To this day Shankar’s rise to celebrity  – largely a byproduct of his high-profile relationship with Beatles guitarist George Harrison – remains emblematic of the late 1960s. As the association of Indian music with the psychedelic counterculture intensified, however, Shankar’s (1997) “campaign against drugs” (pp. 181–182) solidified as a feature of his performances and public persona. Despite the sitarist’s persistent efforts to decouple his artform from psychedelia, associations of Hindustani music with drug use became entrenched to the point of cliché. Within months of Shankar’s landmark performance at Monterey, another accomplished Indian musician, sarod master Ali Akbar Khan, met with philosopher Alan Watts just over one hundred miles away aboard his Sausalito houseboat, the S.S. Vallejo. In February of that year Watts, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder had convened aboard the same vessel to debate the orientation and goals of the psychedelic movement in the so-called “Houseboat Summit.” On this particular

Alan Watts, Ali Akbar Khan, and Hindustani Music  185 occasion, however, Khan sought to raise funds for a college of Indian music in the San Francisco Bay Area. With Watts’ assistance, the sarodist procured a large initial donation that helped him open a school in Berkeley the following summer. Ali Akbar Khan never attained fame or wealth to rival that of Shankar and instead devoted his life to perpetuating the teaching lineage of his father, renowned teacher and performer Allauddin Khan. Both Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan had learned their craft together from this master of Hindustani music, but their paths diverged as Shankar became an international celebrity and Khan focused his efforts on opening and sustaining branches of his music college in India, the U.S., and later Switzerland. Khan’s personal relationship with Alan Watts, beginning in the late 1960s, can hardly be considered central to his musical career, and yet their little-known friendship stands as a direct link between key players in the 1960s psychedelic movement and Indian music culture in the U.S. As Ravi Shankar took a hardline public stance against the use of psychedelics, Khan befriended one of the psychedelic movement’s intellectual elders and established networks of support fueled by the momentum of the so-called “San Francisco Renaissance,” about which Watts (1973) writes: I am too close to what happened to see it in proper perspective. I know only that between, say, 1958 and 1970 a huge tide of spiritual energy in the form of poetry, music, philosophy, painting, religion, communications techniques in radio, television and cinema, dancing, theater, and general life-style swept out of this city and its environs. (p. 284) This essay examines Alan Watts’ engagements with Indian music, including the circumstances and impact of his relationship with Ali Akbar Khan and considers points of resonance and dissonance between the psychedelic movement of the 1960s and Indian music culture in the U.S.

Modes of Engagement Alan Watts’ (2017a) recently published letters reveal that psychedelic experimentation and recordings of Indian music had collided in Watts’ intellectual milieu well ahead of his first meeting with Ali Akbar Khan in the summer of 1967. In a letter to Timothy Leary dated December 12, 1960, Watts (2017b) recalls listening to French musicologist Alain Danielou’s UNESCO compilation of “Hindu music” recordings after ingesting a synthetic form of psilocybin manufactured for therapeutic research. At least two points about the letter are worth noting. The first is a contextual note regarding the term Hindu music, used here to reference specific forms of art music from North India. This terminology

186  Samuel B. Cushman gained traction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, via the earlier accounts of prominent European Orientalist scholars such as William Jones and Augustus Willard, within a sweeping campaign of Indian cultural nationalism. From a twenty-first-century critical perspective, such conceptions of Hindu music are bound to idealized notions of cultural purity along the lines of religion and nationalist politics and fail to reflect the complex histories of Hindu and Muslim syncretism that have shaped the musical traditions known collectively as Hindustani. Secondly, and with specific regard to Watts’ experience, the 1960 letter to Leary conveys the author’s basic unfamiliarity with these musical practices and a profound surprise at what passed for “serious Hindu music.” In Watts’ words, “there was nothing ‘classical’ about it; it was the most abandoned, delightful blathering” (p. 390). The spontaneity and playfulness of this unfamiliar musical form bearing the label “classical” led Watts to conclude, “What is serious, classical, and terribly important is at root nothing but play.” According to Watts, the experience proved “profoundly healing and illuminating” for both him and Mary Jane Yates King, who would become Watts’ third wife. One other reference to Indian music in Watts’ collected letters predates his first meeting with Ali Akbar Khan. The letter in question is dated July 6, 1965, and addressed to Watts’ aging father. As Watts (2017c) relays recent events, he mentions a tape of “some absolutely astonishing Indian music from Madras” he picked up while visiting friends in La Jolla, CA (p.  471). The nature of this particular recording is impossible to discern without more information, but given the association with Madras, the recording was quite possibly Carnatic (South Indian) rather than Hindustani in origin. In any case, the quality of the recording subsequently inspired Watts to host a listening party. The letter to Watts’ father lacks the descriptive detail of his 1960 letter to Leary, at least insofar as Indian music is concerned, but it confirms that Watts’ interest in, and appreciation for, Indian music had solidified by 1967. Music scholars and cultural critics have long drawn attention to a fleeting period of intense, faddish interest in Indian music arising with what Ravi Shankar dubbed “The Great Sitar Explosion” of the mid 1960s (Farrell, 1997, pp. 168–178). By this time both Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar had been touring the United States since the mid-1950s and had found enthusiastic audiences among jazz and classical music aficionados. Hindustani music did not make its way into mainstream popular culture, however, until a number of influential British and American bands – including the Beatles, the Byrds, and the Rolling Stones – began experimenting with “Raga Rock,” a trendy strain of pop/rock-fusion featuring sitar, tabla, or other fragments of Indian sounds and stylistic approaches. Each Beatles album released between Rubber Soul (December, 1965) and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (May, 1967) features Indian instrumentation on at least one track, courtesy of George Harrison, and

Alan Watts, Ali Akbar Khan, and Hindustani Music  187 during this period, experiments with Indian sounds became commonplace in the popular music soundscape. By the time Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha played their Sunday afternoon set at Monterey in June 1967, they were riding a wave of international publicity linked to the meteoric success of the Beatles and other popular bands that had experimented with Indian elements. This phenomenon only served to augment the widespread popularity of Indian arts, philosophy, and aesthetics within a 1960s countercultural zeitgeist. Psychedelic Counterculture and Indian Music In assessing this explosion of interest in Indian classical music in the United States during the late 1960s, ethnomusicologist Bonnie Wade (1978) differentiates between an “Indian music fad” and the “serious and widespread receptivity to Indian classical music that was simultaneous with, and undoubtedly due in part to, ‘the fad’” (p. 36). According to Wade’s interpretation, “the fad” refers primarily to the ephemeral interest of the psychedelic counterculture in Indian music and the association of that music with drug use. “Serious,” by contrast, refers to sustained academic and intellectual engagement characteristic of the widespread efforts to promote Indian music education in the U.S. Although Wade acknowledges the simultaneity of faddish and serious engagements and the undeniable influence of “the fad” on more sustained “serious and widespread receptivity,” it is also important to acknowledge that these two modes of engagement do not map cleanly onto discrete demographics. Shallow, faddish interest undoubtedly characterized a number of engagements with Hindustani music at the height of its popularity in the U.S., but assessing seriousness – or lack thereof – in these engagements based solely on the presence or absence of psychedelic drug use is too simplistic, given the complex social and cultural realities of the era. Against the backdrop of Indian music’s immense popularity in the late 1960s and this spectrum of “faddish” and “serious” modes of engagement, I now reorient this conversation around Alan Watts’ relationship with Ali Akbar Khan, and Indian music more generally, as a means of reevaluating dismissals of countercultural engagements with Indian music vis-á-vis psychedelic experimentation. In 1965, Ali Akbar Khan, who was known affectionately to his students as Khansahib, took his first teaching post in the United States for the recently formed Asian Society for Eastern Arts (ASEA). At the time, the sarod maestro had been recording and touring in the U.S. on and off since 1955, but the 1965 ASEA session at the home of Louise and Sam Scripps in Lafayette, CA, marked his first prolonged engagement with American students. Over the following two years, enrollment in the summer session increased, and a number of students began traveling back and forth to India to continue their studies. As interest in Indian music

188  Samuel B. Cushman burgeoned in the U.S., enrollment reached 80 students in the summer of 1967 and threatened to exceed the capacity of ASEA’s rented space at Mills College. That summer Ali Akbar Khan and his senior students began exploring possibilities for breaking off from ASEA and creating a yearround educational institution in the Bay Area. One of Khan’s students, Hisayo Saijo, worked as Alan Watts’ secretary in the late sixties, and another, Henry “Sandy” Jacobs, happened to be the audio engineer and archivist responsible for recording numerous Alan Watts lectures and seminars. These two students told Khan of Watts’ desire to meet him, and subsequently scheduled a meeting aboard the S.S. Vallejo ( J. Kohn, personal communication, December 8, 2017). As the story goes, once Khan told Watts of his aspirations, Watts picked up the phone and called his neighbor, Don McCoy, a wealthy real estate agent and head of Rancho Olompali, a “hippie-style commune,” in nearby Novato, CA. McCoy, who already knew and appreciated Ali Akbar Khan’s music, brought a check for $20,000 within the hour. That check, procured by Watts and furnished by McCoy, provided Khan and his students with the initial funds for the Ali Akbar College of Music (AACM), which opened in Berkeley the following summer. This episode is recalled in varying degrees of detail by Ruckert & Khan (1998, p. 243) and Lavezzoli, 2006, p. 66), and I have added details from personal correspondence with George Ruckert (November 29, 2017) and Jim Kohn (December 8, 2017). In the years that followed, Watts remained active in his efforts to fundraise for the College. According to Jim Kohn (personal communication, December 8, 2017) – one of Khan’s earliest American students and a former director of the AACM – “Alan joyously supported Khansahib’s College and his music.” Watts and Khan presented multiple seminars together aboard the S.S. Vallejo, though surviving documentation of specific programs is scarce. Generally speaking, the events featured a combination of sarod performance by Khan and lectures delivered by Watts. One winter Watts even staged a fundraiser for the College while Khan embarked on his annual tour of India. Beyond Watts’ fundraising efforts, Kohn recalls that the two icons “became instant pals” and were known to share an affinity for scotch whiskey, which they enjoyed together. Following Watts’ death in late 1973, the New Maihar Band – a group of students from the AACM – performed for the “Alan Watts Memorial Celebration” at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco on June 9, 1974. Without the fundraising assistance provided by Alan Watts, Don McCoy, and later the Grateful Dead, who performed at a benefit concert for the AACM at the Berkeley Community Theater on September 20, 1968, the College may never have established its place as a mainstay of the Bay Area’s musical landscape, let alone open its doors. Indian musicians’ experiences amidst the counterculture were not without their tensions, however, and Jim Kohn recalls that the “new age scene at Rancho

Alan Watts, Ali Akbar Khan, and Hindustani Music  189 Olompali was a bit much for the Indians who had gone there to play a little concert for Don and for Jerry Garcia et al.” ( J. Kohn, personal communication, February 20, 2018). Nonetheless, Kohn notes, “Khansahib saw that the future of serious Indian classical music study might well be in the West” and attributes this sentiment to a new source of eager students fueled by “a passion for Eastern culture and minds that had been expanded at least in part by psychedelics.” This claim suggests that in addition to the fundraising and promotional efforts of key figures in the psychedelic counterculture, the high level of interest among American students who enrolled at the AACM was fueled, at least in part, by cultural and social currents inextricable from the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. To be fair, it is unlikely that a majority of the youth counterculture possessed anything resembling a “serious” interest in Indian music, and for many listeners, the music likely provided little more than an exotic soundtrack for getting high. Within this emergent demographic, however, an embryonic enthusiasm to pursue rigorous Indian music study developed within certain listeners. It is impossible to determine the proportions of seriously-interested-prospective-students to stoned-out-of-their-minds hippies that flocked to Indian music concerts in the late 1960s, but it is historically inaccurate to treat these as discrete demographics based solely on engagement in – or abstinence from – psychedelic drug use. In assessing the relationship between the psychedelic movement and Indian music culture in the U.S., Kohn concludes, “Without the psychedelic sixties, Indian music would have remained an esoteric artifact of an Asian country” ( J. Kohn, personal communication, February 20, 2018).

Indian Music and Psychedelic Experience In light of this strong link between the “psychedelic sixties” and the popularity of Indian music in the U.S., what, if anything, does Indian music have to do with psychedelia on an ontological or phenomenological level? Is this unforeseen pairing, which became so ingrained in the European-American cultural imagination by events of the 1960s, merely a byproduct of historical happenstance, or is Indian music somehow uniquely compatible with psychedelic experimentation and even the possibility of facilitating mystical experience? What accounts for the intense attraction of Alan Watts and countless other western listeners to Hindustani music at the height of a cultural revolution defined, in part, by a quest for transformative spiritual experience aided by psychoactive substances? Acknowledging critical issues of orientalist fantasy and selective cultural appropriation, both of which undoubtedly contribute to prevailing representations of India as a locus of mystical spirituality in the western imagination – what ethnomusicologist David Reck (1978) refers to as “The Peculiarly Western Magical Mythical Image of India”

190  Samuel B. Cushman (p. 5) – I will instead consider the phenomenological significance of human perceptions of time and their relationship to embodied, subjective experience. In the epigraph that opens this essay, Watts (1973) conjures an image of “a long-forgotten afternoon in a sunlit room where magicians were playing on the heartstrings of the universe” (p. 37). This vivid representation draws attention to Watts’ phenomenological experience of the music, which like his experience of flowers, jewels, light reflected in glass, open sky – and sometimes psychedelic drugs – offers a means of cultivating heightened awareness of biological realities in the present moment – a state of being Watts sees as conducive to the possibility of mystical experience. Watts explicitly focuses on the metric and rhythmic properties of Indian music, which he identifies as a prime example of “music that is not mechanical and does not march” (p. 37). His observed link between certain musical styles and a disciplinum arcanum of western culture emerges from the interplay of musical time structures and subjective experience. It is worth noting that Watts’ phrase disciplinum arcanum appears to be his version of the early Christian phrase disciplina arcani, or doctrine of the secret (from Latin disciplina, a branch of study, science, or art, doctrine; and arcani, genitive of arcanus, secret or mystery) (Latham & Howlett, 1975-1997, 117, 678). Watts’ use of this phrase references forms of knowledge, or ways of knowing, that have been undervalued, or abandoned entirely, by modern European-American culture. In reference to the same passage (Watts, 1973, p. 37), Hood (2012) identifies Watts’ sense of “estrangement from modern culture.” Hood observes, “Offering several possibilities for the source of this estrangement, [Watts] appealed to experiences modern culture ignores or represses” (pp. 28–29). Expansive, non-metric musical phrasing and development are integral features of Hindustani performance practice, and performances generally open with what is known as alap, an unmetered exposition of a raga that can range from a matter of seconds to over an hour in length. For western listeners, alap can be a difficult concept to grapple with because it develops according to principles operating outside of familiar metric and harmonic structures. If alap can be said to possess a rhythmic structure – and I would argue alap is fundamentally rhythmic though not metric – this structure develops in phrases more consistent with variations in human breathing than with the relentless precision of a clock or metronome. In present-day Hindustani performance practice, which once adapted to limitations imposed by early audio recording technology (e.g. the three-minute side of a phonograph record) and has since been tailored to accommodate the expectations and attention spans of modern audiences, alap sections often appear in shortened forms. Even today, however, the opening alap of a vocal or instrumental recital can exceed an hour in length, and appreciating this extended form of exposition requires the listener to embrace expanded musical time spans.

Alan Watts, Ali Akbar Khan, and Hindustani Music  191 During lengthy alap performances, which are characteristic of the older Hindustani style of dhrupad (almost certainly the classical form Watts encountered in the experience with synthetic psilocybin he relayed to Leary in 1960), developmental trajectories slow to a crawl and musicians focus on microtonal subtleties in intonation as they gradually reveal the key phrases and identifying features of a raga. This intense focus on intonational subtlety and long-form melodic development allows listeners to experience the physicality of pitch relationships, and skilled musicians aim to convey specific emotional qualities (rasa) through raga performance. The concept of rasa, elaborated by Bharata Muni in the Sanskrit Nāṭyaśāstra (c. 200 BCE-200 CE), is fundamental to Vedic theory and central to the elite music and dance traditions of North India. Rasa, which literally means “juice” or “essence,” refers to specific moods or emotional flavors, which can be evoked in a sensitive audience through works of art, theater, music, dance, and poetry. Detailed discussion of Vedic aesthetic theory and Hindustani performance practice exceeds the scope of this essay, and for our purposes, it suffices to establish that Watts’ assessment of the non-mechanical, non-marching temporal feel of Indian music, as well as the image he renders of Indian musicians “playing on the heartstrings of the universe,” is consistent with key stylistic features and guiding aesthetic principles of Hindustani performance practice. In an essay entitled “Psychedelics and Religious Experience,” first published by the California Law Review, Watts (1968/2017d) explores links between psychedelic drug use and the psychology of religion. Following William James (1917) and Aldous Huxley (1954), Watts (1968/2017d) concerns himself specifically with the power of psychedelics to induce “those peculiar states of consciousness in which the individual discovers himself to be one continuous process with God, with the Universe, with the Ground of Being, or whatever name he may use by cultural conditioning or personal preference for the ultimate and eternal reality” (p. 285). Watts claims such states, when induced by psychedelic drugs, are “virtually indistinguishable from genuine mystical experience” and discusses objections to the use of psychedelics arising from “the opposition between mystical values and the traditional religious and secular values of Western society” (p. 285). Drawing on his experiments with a range of psychoactive chemicals, including LSD-25, mescaline, psilocybin, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and cannabis, Watts subsequently identifies four dominant characteristics of psychedelic experiences. Foremost among the four characteristics is “a slowing down of time,” or “a concentration in the present” (Watts, 1968/2017d, p. 287). Watts expands, “One’s normally compulsive concern for the future decreases, and one becomes aware of the enormous importance and interest of what is happening at the moment” (p. 287). Imagining how such an

192  Samuel B. Cushman orientation toward time could help a listener cultivate appreciation for the expansive developmental time spans of Hindustani music requires little in the way of mental gymnastics. [Note the other three dominant characteristics of psychedelic experiences Watts identifies are “awareness of polarity,” or “the vivid realization that states, things, and events which we ordinarily call opposite are interdependent”; “awareness of relativity,” or seeing one’s place within “an infinite hierarchy of processes and beings – a hierarchy in which every level is in effect the same situation”; and “awareness of eternal energy, often in the form of intense white light, which seems to be both the current in your nerves and that mysterious e which equals mc2” (pp. 288–289).] Instead of situating psychedelic drug use as somehow requisite for a western listener’s enjoyment of Indian musical development, I contend that psychedelic substances may merely facilitate perceptual shifts and reorientations toward chronological time and physical phenomena (e.g. the audible frequency spectrum), which are compatible with the aesthetic goals of Hindustani musical performance. Rather than viewing psychedelic experimentation as necessary for the broad popular appeal of Indian music in the late 1960s, it feels more productive to situate the consumption of psychedelic substances and the consumption of Indian music as two unique vehicles or portals (Hume, 2007) to potentially similar states of subjective experience. That the psychedelic movement and Indian music subculture intersected so dramatically in the post-1960 international context attests to a shared orientation toward the possibility of spiritual transcendence through musical experience. As a budding Indian music enthusiast and intellectual advocate for the transformative potential of psychedelic substances, Watts appears to have intuited certain resonances in the affective possibilities provided by psychedelic drugs and Indian music insofar as both anchored sensory experience in what he calls the “intense contemplative watching of the eternal now” (1973, p. 37). Despite Ravi Shankar’s firm opposition to psychedelic drug use, the language he uses to describe the spiritual and religious foundations of Hindustani music is not so different from the language Watts employs in “Psychedelics and Religious Experience.” Shankar (1968/2007), like many Hindustani musicians, viewed music as a fundamentally spiritual enterprise: Our tradition teaches us that sound is God—Nada Brahma. That is musical sound and the musical experience are steps to the realization of the self…We are taught that one of the fundamental goals a Hindu works toward in his lifetime is a knowledge of the true meaning of the universe—its unchanging, eternal essence—and this is realized first by a complete knowledge of one’s self and one’s own nature. (p. 24)

Alan Watts, Ali Akbar Khan, and Hindustani Music  193 Shankar likely would have objected to Watts’ (1968/2017d) claims that psychedelic experiences could prove “virtually indistinguishable from genuine mystical experience” and offered a viable path to genuine self-realization and subjective identification with the “unchanging, eternal essence” of the universe (p. 285). Watts’ observations regarding the potential for psychedelics to aid transformative awareness of the true nature of self and universe nonetheless reflect an embodied spiritual knowledge akin to what Shankar encountered through music. While Shankar and Watts disagreed about the means for achieving such embodied understanding, at least insofar as drug use is concerned, an ideological orientation toward “those peculiar states of consciousness in which the individual discovers himself to be one continuous process with God” informed the spiritual pursuits of both men. Not surprisingly, Shankar accessed such states primarily through musical performance. In his second autobiography, Shankar (1997) writes: For me, it is performing that generates a deep ecstasy, physically, mentally, and spiritually…I have a real feeling of being high, sometimes ‘higher,’ or even ‘highest!’…It’s hard to explain; one can achieve a similar feeling at the height of meditation or sometimes when making love. I feel so near God when deeply involved in music. (p. 182) Through musical performance, Shankar claims to have entered states of being that rendered experimentation with drugs wholly unnecessary in his view. Though he operated within a milieu where psychedelic drug use was commonplace, and even encouraged, he focused on cultivating heightened states of awareness through musical performance and objected to the notion that psychedelics could contribute to genuine spiritual realization or a heightened appreciation for music. Put most simply, Shankar (1997) states, “I have strong feelings against hallucinogens” (p. 182). Watts (1968/2017d) identifies two primary categories of objections to the use of psychedelic drugs: first, that these drugs may be dangerous; and second, that drugs are an escape from reality (pp. 293–294). Based on passages in his autobiographies, Shankar’s objections did not fit cleanly into either category. His primary concern appears to have been with combatting prevailing associations of drug culture with Indian music and representations of India more broadly. In Shankar’s (1997) view, these negative associations were strengthened by so-called “drug gurus” in America he claimed propagated misinformation about India and its history of spiritual asceticism. According to Shankar, “These ‘gurus’ went as far as saying that one cannot meditate properly, play music, or even pronounce the sacred word OM unless one is under the influence of

194  Samuel B. Cushman such drugs.” In a retrospective critique of the role of drugs in the sixties, Shankar identifies Alan Watts as one such “drug guru”: By then the whole scene was happening together: the hippy movement was already in full swing, with the Vietnam war protests, the drugs scene, meditation, the fascination with India, the encouragement to take drugs by Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts (the three big drug gurus) … and in among all this were sitars and Indian music. It all became so mixed up. What really irritated me, and I started talking about it, was that some people took the name of India as the House of Drugs. They would say “Everyone takes drugs there—and you can’t do music, meditation or yoga, or even make love, unless you do.” (1997, p. 198) While it is fair to claim Watts advocated for the transformative potential of psychedelic experimentation on both individual and societal levels, Shankar appears to have conflated the nuanced intellectual positions of Watts with more radical psychedelic zealots such as Timothy Leary. More than manifestos meant to promote drug use, Watts’ writings on psychedelics convey careful attempts to dispel powerful cultural taboos and reconcile psychedelic understanding with rich philosophical, religious, and scientific histories. Rather than locating India as the “House of Drugs,” Watts identified resonant connections between his own embodied psychedelic experiences and lessons of non-duality he found at the ideological core of Indic philosophical and religious traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Watts viewed the mystical philosophical traditions of Asia as valuable sources of wisdom that could help revive the beleaguered spirit of European-American modernity, and Indian music provided a sonic articulation of philosophical principles that could only be integrated through direct sensory experience. In the final pages of In My Own Way, Watts (1973) discusses his admiration for Ali Akbar Khan’s artistry within a lengthier reflection on Zen that closes his autobiography: I was talking to Ali Akbar Khan, the sarod player, who is generally regarded as the greatest living master of Indian music. I have a particular personal admiration for him, for he is at once holy and sensuous, a complete man. Wine and women go with his song; a song of unsurpassed technique which he also uses as a type of yoga-meditation in which—if one can use temporal language about things eternal—he is very advanced. Discussing this, he dropped the remark, “All music is in the understanding of one note.” (p. 450)

Alan Watts, Ali Akbar Khan, and Hindustani Music  195 By characterizing the sarodist as both “holy and sensuous,” Watts embeds the transcendent spiritual qualities of Khan’s music in the physical sensorium. The holiness Watts perceives in Khan is not the holiness of an ascetic or renunciate, for “Wine and women go with his song.” Watts (1973) subsequently uses Khan’s remark, “All music is in the understanding of one note,” to pivot to observations regarding the ontological and spiritual significance of sound: Now this really ought not to be explained. But if you just listen, relating yourself to the world entirely through the sense of hearing, you will find yourself in a universe where reality—pure sound— comes immediately out of the silence and emptiness, echoing away as memory in the labyrinths of the brain. In this universe everything flows backward from the present and vanishes, like the wake of a ship; the present comes out of nothing, and you cannot hear any self that is listening. This can be done with all the senses, but most easily with the ears. Simply listen, then, to the rain. (p. 450) As Watts (1973) reflects on the process of experiencing the world through the ears, he evokes the Hindu concept of Nada Brahma, or the idea that sound is God, mentioned earlier by Ravi Shankar. Shankar (1968/2007) notes that “musical sound and the musical experience are steps to the realization of the self” (p. 24) and identifies sound as central in understanding the nature of the universe and consequently the nature of the self. Here Watts (1973) implicates the perception of auditory stimuli in the unmediated experience of a reality in which “everything flows backward from the present and vanishes, like the wake of a ship” (p. 450). For both Shankar and Watts, the world of auditory experience assumes the significance of a form of direct contact with the ultimate truth or reality of the universe. Making meaning from this endless stream of vibrations therefore must begin with direct sensation, as Watts (1973) concludes: Trying to catch the meaning of the universe in terms of some religious, philosophical, or moral system is really like asking Bach or Ali Akbar Khan to explain their music in words. They can explain it only by continuing to play and you must listen until you understand, get with it, and go with it—and the same is true of the music of the vibrations. (p. 451)

Conclusion Though Watts’ observations emerged from within a twentieth-century psychedelic milieu, he touches on themes that are by no means unique to the psychedelic movement of the 1960s or new age culture in general.

196  Samuel B. Cushman Far from dismissing the significance of religious, philosophical, and moral systems, Watts posits that meaning must first resound in the senses before one turns to external interpretative frames. To do otherwise would be as futile as trying to grasp the music of master musicians through words. That Watts concludes his autobiography by placing Ali Akbar Khan alongside Bach conveys obvious admiration for his esteemed friend, but also places Hindustani music – a relative newcomer to the U.S. – alongside the revered Baroque canon. Watts himself never studied Hindustani music, but it is clear that between 1960, when he first communicated his fascination to Timothy Leary upon hearing recordings of unfamiliar music from India, and his death in November 1973, he cultivated a deep appreciation for Indian music. His appreciation blossomed at a time when both Hindustani music and psychedelic drugs came into vogue in the U.S., yet it was anything but superficial. Watts’ friendship with Ali Akbar Khan, his profound respect for the sarodist’s craft, and his tangible efforts to help Khan establish and maintain a year-round educational institution in the Bay Area are testaments to influential connections between the 1960s psychedelic movement and Indian music culture in the United States. Though this pairing also produced new tensions and drew criticism – most notably from Ravi Shankar, who felt his art being eclipsed by its associations with drug use – Watts’ engagements complicate dismissals of the psychedelic movement’s encounters with Indian music as faddish, shallow, and frivolous. A full five decades after the end of the 1960s, the Ali Akbar College of Music still spreads the teachings of its namesake to new generations of students, and the dramatic popularization of Hindustani music amidst the psychedelic counterculture continues to resonate.

References Farrell, G. (1997). Indian elements in popular music and jazz. In Indian music and the west (pp. 168–200). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hood, R. W. (2012), Alan Watts’ anticipation of four major debates in the psychology of religion. In P. J. Columbus and D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts—Here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 25–41). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hume, L. (2007). Portals: Opening doorways to other realities through the senses. New York, NY: Berg. Huxley, A. (1954). The doors of perception. London, UK: Chatto and Windus. James, W. (1917) Lectures XVI and XVII. Mysticism. In The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature, being the Gifford lectures on natural religion delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902 (pp. 379–430). New York, NY: Longmans, Green & Co. Latham, R. E., Howlett, D. R., et al. (1975–1997). Dictionary of medieval Latin from British sources, 1 A-L, 117, 678. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Alan Watts, Ali Akbar Khan, and Hindustani Music  197 Lavezzoli, P. (2006). The dawn of Indian music in the west: Bhairavi. New York, NY: Continuum. Reck, D. (1978). The neon electric Saraswati: Being reflections on the influences of Indian music on the contemporary music scene in America. Contributions to Asian Studies, 12, 3–19. Ruckert, G., & Khan, A. A. (1998). The classical music of North India. Delhi: Munshirm Manoharlal. Shankar, R. (1997). Raga mala: The autobiography of Ravi Shankar. New York, NY: Welcome Rain Publishers. Shankar, R. (2007). My music, my life. San Rafael, CA: Mandala Publishing. (Original work published 1968) Wade, B. (1978) Indian classical music in North America: Cultural give and take. Contributions to Asian Studies, 12, 29–39. Watts, A. W. (1973). In my own way: An autobiography. New York: Vintage. Watts, A. W. (2017a). The collected letters of Alan Watts ( J. Watts & A. Watts, Eds.). Novato, CA: New World Library. Watts, A. W. (2017b). [Letter to Timothy Leary]. In The collected letters of Alan Watts ( J. Watts & A. Watts, Eds., pp. 390–391). Novato, CA: New World Library. (Original letter written December 12, 1960) Watts A. W. (2017c). [Letter to Laurence Watts]. In The collected letters of Alan Watts ( J. Watts & A. Watts, Eds., pp. 470–471). Novato, CA: New World Library. (Original letter written July 6, 1965) Watts, A. W. (2017d). Psychedelics and religious experience. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - in the academy: Essays and lectures (pp. 285–296). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Original work published 1968)

14 Alan Watts and his Queer Readers Not So Strange Bedfellows Philip Longo

In the June 1959 issue of The Ladder, a San Francisco magazine published by the Daughters of Bilitis, the lesbian social/political organization, editor Del Martin (1959) told readers about a recent radio program on Berkeley’s KPFA in which “philosopher and minister” Alan Watts answered a listener’s question concerning homosexuality. As Martin tells it, Watts defended sexual diversity, discussed “man’s dangerous tendency toward ‘classification’” and further noted: “We have a problem of getting to see the richness in varying categories” (p. 13). Explaining to listeners the “enormous gradation of sexual patterns,” Watts referenced Gavin Arthur’s theretofore unpublished work on “The Circle of Sex,” a clocklike conceptual scheme describing 12 divisions of sexual type, with the “extreme male” at 12 o’clock and the “extreme female” at 6 o’clock.1 This scheme, Watts proposed, is a better way of thinking about sexual difference than binary models opposing male/female because it shows a steady continuum of individual differences emerging between gender poles. Moving from a binary model to a scalar one, Watts presents homosexuality as a variation within nature which should be respected by society and not seen as a disease to be “cured” by psychiatrists: “It is a society that is wrong--diseased--for not accepting the different individual” (as cited in Martin, 1959, p. 13). A “philosopher and minister” on the radio talking affirmatively about homosexuality would have been quite an unexpected, but welcome piece of news to lesbian audiences in 1959; most prominent public intellectuals and clergy did not endorse the nascent homophile project of social acceptance. In fact, the earliest known radio broadcast overtly discussing homosexuality had aired only months earlier – November 1958 – also on KPFA. On that broadcast, “The Homosexual in Our Society,” Elsa Knight Thompson (1958) interviewed two influential voices in the homophile movement, Dr. Blanche Baker and Hal Call. The former was a homosexual-affirming psychiatrist and collaborative friend of Gavin Arthur. The latter owned San Francisco’s PanGraphic Press (the first gay owned and operated press) and edited The Mattachine Review, a periodical of the Mattachine Society founded in

Alan Watts and his Queer Readers  199 1950 from which the Daughters of Bilitis would branch. Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, these homophile organizations, augmented by a growing publishing and communication network, effectively leveraged voices like Watts to gain wider social acceptance for notions of sexual orientation and gender diversity that had become commonplace in homophile circles. Below, I track Watts’ participation within these circles in order to demonstrate his largely unacknowledged influence in twentieth-century American homophile, transgender, and queer liberation movements. By tracing Watts’ engagement with Arthur’s Circle of Sex as well as queer readers’ appropriation of Watts’ work through a practice of remixing, we can see how Watts and his queer readers engaged in a common project of promoting sexual and gender diversity during mid-century efforts to categorize emerging sexual and gender identities.

Queer Remix in the Homophile Communication Network Hal Call’s Pan-Graphic Press published the first monograph of Arthur’s The Circle of Sex in 1962 with Dr. Baker’s preface. The monograph’s fourpage advertising pamphlet contained a photo of “leading philosopher” Alan Watts alongside his handwritten endorsement noting that Arthur’s design is the first “which makes sense of all the sexual variations in sexual temperament. We are able to see what has hitherto been called sexual normality and abnormality as an order like the spectrum of colors” (Advertisement, 1962a, p. 4). Watts’ position as a heterosexual religious and philosophical authority with access to mainstream communication venues likely helped to validate and publicize homophile ideas during a moment when gay and lesbian groups were hoping to legitimize homosexual identity to their homosexual constituencies and to mainstream audiences (Meeker, 2006; Sears, 2006). An important heterosexual contributor to this project, Watts’ contact with homophile activists and press influenced his own body of work; sex, like spirituality, psychedelics, or philosophy, provided a discourse and an array of conceptual frameworks for Watts to develop his own challenges to the rigid patterns of dualism and systematic categorization that he saw as endemic to mid-twentieth century social thought. Given the fragmented circulation and cross-pollination of theories, it is difficult to untangle the lines of influence between Watts and his queer readers. From one viewpoint, Watts’ engagement with Arthur’s work can appear appropriative. Then again, Arthur could be seen as using Watts’ connections to mainstream communication to promote his own work. Alternatively, we can see a type of symbiotic relationship and affinity between Watts and his readers. None of these perspectives fully capture the circulation of sexual theories through the complex homophile,

200  Philip Longo transgender, and gay liberation communication networks in which Watts played a critical role as a cited authority and conduit to larger mainstream heterosexual audiences. As Meeker (2006) describes it, these complex communication networks of homophile readers built by the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis are characterized by complex relationships between writers, readers, and texts within a dynamic socio-political framework; they resist dualistic discursive frameworks. An added difficulty of determining lines of influence is the nature of citation within communication networks composed of media fragments often abstracted from their original contexts and remixed into new products. For example, the “origin” of Arthur’s “Circle of Sex” is difficult to determine because it is a remix of sex theories synthesized by Arthur in consultation with Baker and Watts (discussed below) plus several others, including participants attending his 1957 Midwinter Institute lecture hosted by ONE magazine, another homophile periodical closely related to the Mattachine Society and also published occasionally by Pan-Graphic Press. ONE’s February 1957 follow-up description of the Midwinter Institute reveals the nature of Arthur’s remixing of sexual thought to develop his scheme and its potential for wider circulation among homophile groups: “His talk, spiced with many personal references to friends and acquaintances among the great and near-great in many lands, will long be remembered by those who filled the banquet room” (Slater & Legg, 1957, p. 11). Del Martin (1957) likewise attended the Midwinter Institute, reporting on it in the February 1957 issues of The Ladder. This in turn was distributed through many print and personal communication channels and then remixed by Watts on radio, whose version was then remixed again by Martin (1959). Within rhetorical theory, “remixing” can be defined as “the process of taking old pieces of text, images, sounds, and video and stitching them together to form a new product” (Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2009, n.p.). Remix is a long-neglected aspect of composition, but it is perhaps one of the most important of contemporary composing practices. Remixing “is how individual writers and communities build common values; it is how composers achieve persuasive, creative, and parodic effects” (n.p,). While Ridolfo and DeVoss focus on remix as a property of digital composition, the homophile and transgender communication networks participated in analog remixing in the 1950s–1960s print-based media environment. These readers, alongside heterosexual conduits like Dr. Baker and Watts, sought to “build common values” about the nature of gender identity and sexual orientation both for their own readers and mainstream audiences. Yet while remix is one way that communities build common values, that does not mean that all audience members interpret texts in the same ways. Martin’s (1959) lesbian readers would probably have received the Circle of Sex description differently than the thousands of heterosexual Bay Area listeners of Watts’ radio broadcast, “Way Beyond the West.” This

Alan Watts and his Queer Readers  201 reminds us that any given rhetorical act can produce, as Bessette (2016) notes, “multiple contradictory receptions” that can render it both queer and normative at the same time (p. 157). Focusing on this “fragmented” nature of reception, Bassette offers a methodology of queer rhetoric in situ that attends to the historical specificity of a potentially queer rhetorical act, the power complexities within this act, and an attention to the diversity and range of audiences. In the case of Watts’ role within this dynamic communication network, this methodology in conjunction with a theory of remix reveals how Watts was influenced by fragments of thought circulating within nascent homophile and transgender communication networks, how these communication networks were shaped by Watts’ work, and how in turn, Watts amplified homophile and transgender ideas to both queer and mainstream audiences.

Between Opposite and Different: Watts’ Writings on Sexuality and Gender A cisgender heterosexual man, Watts was not “queer.” Arguably, however, he was not heteronormative. In his aptly titled autobiography, In My Own Way, Watts (1972) describes himself as “an epicurean who has had three wives, seven children, and five grandchildren--and I cannot make up my mind whether I am confessing or boasting” (p. xii). Thus, Watts alludes, his sexual ethics did not align with dominant midcentury American norms of sexuality or gender. Like some of his heterosexual and many of his queer contemporaries, Watts questioned and provoked heteronormative ideologies of sexuality. In “No More Armed Clergymen” – an essay written for The Gay Liberation Book (Richmond & Noguera, 1973) – Watts (1973) explained: Although some of my best friends are men, and homosexual men at that, my preference is to [have sex] with women. But that is my own taste, and it would never occur to me to impose it on others by sermonizing, much less by requiring policemen to become armed clergymen to enforce my taste on everyone. (p. 88) While Watts’ challenges to heteronormative social structures was true in his personal life and his social connections, it was particularly true throughout his prolific output of writings, radio programming, lectures, and books (e.g., Watts, 1958, 1961). In one of the few substantive studies on Watts’ views of gender and sexuality, Levering (2012) persuasively argues that Watts was more influential than other “students of ‘The East’” on American thought about gender and sexuality. Watts’ writing on sexuality and gender indeed owed a great debt to Eastern thought, but as Levering points out, Watts’ writings are particularly interesting because

202  Philip Longo they also “presaged what later became a popular point of view or started a trend within the counterculture” (p. 163) and, alongside others, brought a “profound change in how Americans regard the relation between sex and religion, or sex and spirituality” (p. 178). While true, Levering overlooks Watts’ impact on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender readers (and vice versa) during a period marked by explosions of discourse about sexuality and gender. In many ways, Watts’ challenge to sexual norms and sex’s relation to spirituality presaged “queer theory” – a body of politically oriented academic theory articulated in the early 1990s. A few years after the appropriation of the mid-century epithet “queer” by Queer Nation – an activist group founded in 1990 in New York – Warner (1993), in Fear of a Queer Planet (the first major anthology of queer theory), explains academics’ shift from gay and lesbian social theory toward queer social theory: “The preference for ‘queer’ represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of more thorough resistance to the regimes of the normal” (p. xxvi). While queer theory, like Watts’ own writing, challenges norms of gender, sex, and sexuality, it expands its intellectual project to theorize differently in relation to social norms, binaries, and identity categories of all sorts. As Warner (1993) notes, “For both academics and activists, ‘queer’ gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual” (p. xxvi). Queer theory then has an ambivalent relationship to identity categories seeing them as sometimes a necessary political or personal tool, but one that never captures the full spectrum or diversity of human sexual experience. It interrogates not only the limitations of identity categories but also the social processes and power relationships inherent in that act of categorization. Watts’ body of work shared an affinity for these intellectual moves, so he unsurprisingly drew on queer readers and, in turn, they often drew on him in supporting the importance of self-definition. If social categories are a necessary but useful fiction, for Watts and his queer readers, the real question is who gets to write these categories? For much of the twentieth century, until 1950s and 1960s emergence of homophile and transgender communication networks, sexual and gender minorities were most often written about, rather than being able to write and circulate among themselves. Because of rapid growth of communication networks, changes in censorship laws, and changes in cultural attitudes about sex (often bracketed under the term “the sexual revolution”), gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people had increasing opportunities to write about themselves to each other (Sears, 2006; Meeker, 2006; Meyerowitz, 2002; D’Emilio & Freedman, 2012). Yet, their writing was severely limited by the available discourse on sex and gender that embraced dualistic models of “inversion” and Freudian-repression that

Alan Watts and his Queer Readers  203 many found at best constraining and at worst oppressive to their own sense of identity and community building. Toward articulating new conceptual schemes of sex and gender, queer readers found a theoretical ally in Watts whose prolific body of work could be read as a challenge and critique of social categories of all sorts, including sometimes explicitly, categories of gender and sexuality. Moving to California from Chicago in Winter, 1951, Watts became embedded in a West Coast intellectual network containing various strands of countercultural aesthetics, spirituality, consciousness, and social thought, with sexuality often at its center. Stopping in Los Angeles, prior to joining the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, Watts offered a public lecture while also visiting “the British Mystical Expatriates of Southern California” – Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and Gerald Heard – all associated with Swami Prabhavananda ‘s Vedanta Society of Hollywood and Heard’s ashram at Trabuco Canyon (Heard later wrote two articles on homosexuality and spirituality for ONE under the pseudonym “D.B. Vest” [see Vest, 1953, 1955]). After his lecture, Watts (1972) noted: “I must confess that Los Angeles, with its notorious interest in goofy spiritualities, seemed – and turned out to be – an economic blessing for one with my own peculiar talents” (p. 236). At Watts’ lecture, the issue of sexual desire led to contentious discussion. The root of the matter: “Can you be an enlightened, realized, and liberated being and still engage in sexual intercourse?” (p. 237). Siding with sexual asceticism (or at least reticence to celebrate sexuality) were Swami Prabhavananda’s Vedantists, Krishnamurti’s followers, Zen practitioners, along with Heard and Isherwood. Conversely, the “good Freudians and Jungians” were all for healthy sexual instincts. Aldous Huxley “was wobbling on the edge of decision” (p. 238). For Watts, the question contained a false dichotomy of asceticism versus liberation: “I see no more reason why a Buddha or spiritually ‘realized’ person should abstain from sex than that he should abstain from breathing, unless, of course, it just happens that he is not interested” (p. 241). Watts’ stance became emblematic of an entire communication network that during the 1950s and 1960s attempted to integrate spirituality and sexuality to promote sexual liberation. In doing so, the writers in this network drew on Eastern traditions to critique the false dichotomy of sexual repression and liberation set up by Western Christian traditions and psychoanalytic thought. While compelling cases have been made that such mid-century engagement with “Eastern” philosophical and spiritual traditions are orientalist and appropriative (e.g., Klain, 2003; Szalay, 2006), these frameworks obscure the complex remixing of spirituality, psychology, sexology, and queer experience that characterized the communication networks, and they cannot adequately account for fractured reception of their central ideas about sexuality and gender among disparate audiences.

204  Philip Longo Leaving Los Angeles, Watts journeyed northward to the first of many visits with novelist Henry Miller in Big Sur, the rocky stretch along Highway 1 that Watts (1972) called “mystical country” (p. 243). Miller, of course, is known for writing sexually explicit novels which led to major obscenity trials forming an important precursor to the early 1960s “sexual revolution.” Early-1950s Big Sur, years before Esalen Institute’s 1962 founding, was already an important node of bohemian thought and practice around religion and sexuality. Mildred Edie Brady’s (1947b) Harper’s Magazine article “The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy” derisively described the emerging Big Sur zeitgeist centering on Henry Miller, sentiments she also shared in a letter to Gavin Arthur (Brady, 1947a). Though Brady presages later critiques of countercultural sexuality and spirituality, her article nevertheless articulates the growing post-war California communication network fusing spirituality, psychology, and social critique with sexuality, which Watts would soon join. Brady (1947b) wrote: You could describe it, in brief, as a combination of anarchism and certain concepts related to psychoanalysis which together yield a philosophy--holding on the one hand that you must abandon the church, the state, and the family…and on the other offering sex as the source of individual salvation in a collective world gone to hell. (p. 313) In addition to Big Sur, the 1950s San Francisco Bay Area, where Watts established himself for the next two decades, was home of two aesthetic movements: The San Francisco Renaissance and the literary Beats, both embracing Eastern thought and radical sexual morality. While the Bay Area became an important developmental node for radical sexual thought, Los Angeles and California generally became home of homophile and transgender communication networks and activism. Watts’ lectures and seminars up and down the coast demonstrate the centrality of discussions of sexuality around these networks throughout California, and to a lesser extent, other urban centers of North America and Europe. In this way, Watts’ local and international connections helped propel the ideas developing in the countercultural and queer communication networks on the West Coast to larger audiences. Altogether, these cross-pollinating communication networks articulated many emerging countercultural trends within the sexual revolution. They shaped the growing interest in Eastern spiritual traditions, New Age spirituality, and gestalt psychology while transforming postwar conceptions of sexuality by integration into spiritual traditions and social psychological models (Kripal, 2007). And they thus challenged two dominant frameworks structuring sexual regulation: Christianity and Freudian psychology, each regarding sex and gender in narrowly dualistic frames of male/female or liberation/repression. Pre-World War II, these dualistic

Alan Watts and his Queer Readers  205 models structured social regulation of sex for religious, legal, and medical professionals who considered sexuality problematic for religiosity, social order, and mental health. Postwar, however, these binary frameworks evolved and transitioned to “rigorous nondualism” (Sedgwick & Frank, 1995) informed by systems theory, ecology, and Buddhism – models of thought that were more complex and internally dynamic than prior binary-based models. Watts belonged to this “cybernetic fold” (Zaretsky, 2015), engaging ecological and post-Freudian psychology (not always uncritically) plus Zen and Vedanta as complementary frameworks, to offer a richer, complex, and more varied account of human experience. Throughout Watts’ varied body of work is a persistent frustration with intractable, dualistic thinking. In Nature, Man, and Woman (1958) and Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts critiqued binary gender roles and sexual repression, offering new models of thought informed by nondualistic philosophies and religions of Asia. The “problem” of liberation is insoluble, suggests Watts (1961), because of the way it is posed in a dualistic language of opposition (p. 99). This opposition recapitulates itself in dialectical tension; a dualistic understanding of sexuality in which desire exists only at the opposite poles of prohibition and liberation: “It would not be unreasonable to regard puritanism, like masochism, as an extreme form of sexual ‘decadence’” (Watts, 1958, p. 154). Watts (1961) critiqued Freud’s concept of primary repression as “a most deeply ingrained social attitude” that reveals the logic of prohibition that shapes desire in twentieth-century America. Watts adds: “Liberation is not the release of the soul from the body; it is the recovery of the tactical split between the soul and the body which seems to be necessary for the social discipline of the young” (p. 173). This “tactical split” of desire from ego – as a social disciplinary mechanism – leads to “a fruitlessly alternating dualism” where desire exists only at the opposite poles of prohibition and liberation. “In this dualism,” Watts writes, “sexuality is now good and now bad, now lustful and now prudish, now compellingly grasped and now guiltily inhibited” (p. 73). Furthermore, sexual dualism abstracts desire from experience: “For when sexuality is set apart from a specially good or a specially evil compartment of life, it no longer works in full relation to everything else” (Watts, 1958, p. 157). That is, by reducing sexuality to dualistic frames, Western thought separates desire from the rest of experience in a drive to discipline sexuality. Sexuality’s implicated power dynamics of domination/submission mean that puritanism and decadence serve the same social order. In Watts’ (1958) view, thsse “disordered sexuality” of Eastern cultures is because sexuality remains unintegrated into human experience and social structures (p. 11). Watts (1958) argues that sex differentiation is a social role, noting that nature, in both Eastern and Western traditions, is aligned with the feminine. Rather than seeing the alignment of nature with femininity as caused by a natural state, Watts views gender as emerging from social

206  Philip Longo roles modeled on the binary construction of sex. This sexual dualism, moreover, “is a disposition in which the split between man and nature is related to a problematic attitude toward sex, though like egg and hen it is doubtful which came first.” Thus, Watts suggests, “it is perhaps best to treat them as arising mutually, each being symptomatic of the other” (p. 141). That is, the emergence of a sexual hierarchy between men and women and bi-modal attitudes toward desire stem from a fundamental dualism in Western religious and philosophical traditions, a binary way of thinking about sexuality, gender, and nature. Reimagining the relationship of men, women, and nature vis-à-vis gender and sexuality, Watts (1958, 1961, 1966) remixes and synthesizes texts from Eastern traditions, post-Freudian psychology, Western philosophy, cybernetics, and sexologists Albert Ellis and Alfred Kinsey toward developing a complex scalar model examining relationships between polar opposites. Watts (1961) describes a conceptual realm located “between opposite and different,” while proposing an alternative ontological model called the “field pattern” that lies “beneath” the separation of the individual and the world and the separation of sexes from each other: In this view the differences of the world are not isolated objects encountering one another in conflict, but expressions of polarity. Opposites and differences have something between them, like two faces of a coin; they do not meet as total strangers. When this relativity of things is seen very strongly, its appropriate affect is love rather than hate or fear. (p. 44) Note the similarity between Watts (1961) and Arthur’s Circle of Sex scheme structured by gender gradations beyond dualistic oppositions of sex. Though Watts (1961) does not cite or reference Arthur, by 1959, he was already discussing Arthur’s concept on his radio program.

Unintentional Communities: The Circle of Sex Goes Mainstream Watts wrote Psychotherapy East and West at Druid Heights near Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, north of San Francisco. Druid Heights, founded by lesbian poet/activist Elsa Gidlow and architect Roger Somers as an “unintentional community” and artist retreat, was a central gathering place for many Beat and countercultural figures including bisexual poet/ filmmaker James Broughton, who filmed The Bed (1968) – an experimental pornographic film in which Watts played a priest (of course) and Gavin Arthur meditates on a bed next to a snake (Youmans, 2015; Broughton, 2006). Arthur, the great-grandson of President Chester A. Arthur, was living in San Francisco in the late 1950s and 1960s, frequently visiting Druid

Alan Watts and his Queer Readers  207 Heights. By the late 1950s, Arthur was an almost penniless “aristocrat of bohemians” (Watts, 1965a, p. 135) after roaming the 1920s–1930s modernist circles of London, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, and New York, founding a San Louis Obispo artist colony in the 1940s, and later working as a gold prospector and then a teacher in San Quentin; by 1960, he was an astrological counselor and local countercultural hero in The Haight District of San Francisco. Watts (1972) describes Arthur’s apartment walls as covered with an array of photographs of friends, “celebrities, relatives, gurus, and magicians.” Arthur is “a supernexus in the ‘Net’ through whom thousands of interesting people have somehow been woven together” (p. 308). Watts’ initial contact with Arthur likely occurred when Watts’ daughter Anne married Joel Andrews, Arthur’s nephew. Watts’ and Arthur’s relationship from 1959 to 1966 was mutually fruitful, representing a connection of two communication networks defining the sexual revolution and gay liberation. In 1965, Watts even performed the marriage ceremony between Arthur and Ellen Janson. Concurrent with Watts’ engagement within Eastern, New Age, gestalt psychology and cybernetic communication networks, homophile groups, and emerging transgender communication networks were challenging established sex and gender binary models extant since the 1870s when sexology emerged as a distinct medical discipline. Beyond sexual and gender dualism within Christianity, late nineteenth and early twentieth century writing on “sexual deviance” or “abnormality” centered on the “inversion” model (Meyerowitz, 2002). Not distinguishing “gender orientation” from “gender identity” (a distinction emerging from 1960s homophile and transgender communication networks), the inversion model saw homosexual men and women as “inverts” who appeared male or female on the outside but were internally members of the opposite sex. In-vogue Freudian-inspired psychologies, often based on inversion models, frequently sought cures for homosexuals and gender deviants through repression or control of abnormal desires, allowing conformity with normal society. The Mattachine Review, ONE, and The Ladder contain many personal narratives of inversion therapy plus critiques of mainstream psychiatry’s understanding of sexual orientation and repression. New models of sexuality, shifting toward scalar or categorical types, e.g., the Kinsey scale, were referenced often in the publications as were snippets of non-Western, ancient, and esoteric Western thought, thus giving readers alternative and resonant reflections of their identity. Arthur’s Circle of Sex schema appeared frequently in homophile publications because it offered readers a seemingly scientific, post-Freudian model allowing readers to see themselves outside of traditional categories. The schema helped explain and legitimate sexual and gender identities at a time when existing models failed to do so. Similar to Watts’ unique synthesis of diverse texts, Arthur’s (1962a, 1966) manuscript remixes the work of sexologists Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, and

208  Philip Longo Alfred Kinsey with sexual radical Edward Carpenter and Arthur’s personal anecdotes about friends and famous people from history who fit into the Circle of Sex typology (e.g., Gertrude Stein is a “Dyke Type” at ten o’clock; Edward Carpenter is the “Finoccio Type” at four o’clock). Baker’s (1962/1966) “prologue” describes Arthur’s scheme as evolving Kinsey’s seven-point linear scale: “the rigidity of [Kinsey’s] graph misses so much of the subtle blending of male and female trains as one observes them in individuals, either male or female, homosexual or heterosexual” (p. 5). Yet categorizing human sexual expression, Arthur (1962a) admits, is ultimately fruitless: “There are probably as many sexual types as there are people. But just as with the gradations of the color wheel…I have found it convenient to separate the variety of sexual types into twelve categories” (p. 18). Interestingly, nowhere in any of his published writings, does Arthur identify his own sexual type, although in a letter to his second wife, Esther Murphy, he described himself as a “2 o’clock” category (the bisexual “Caesar” type) on his scheme, “loving entities in whatever category Nature may have cast them” (Arthur, 1961, p. 2). He was married to three women (two of whom were bisexual) and slept with many men (Cohen, 2012). Perhaps, as Arthur (1966) explains, his point was not really to rigorously define sexual types but to push back on “the demand that we see ourselves in a singular pattern, that all men be alike in one way, all women in another” (p.151). He decried the “outmoded either-or thinking” (p.151) that blinds us to the infinite human variety of sexual expression theorized by the circle. Despite the Circle of Sex scheme’s circulation within the homophile press, its publication proved difficult to achieve. Archived correspondence shows Arthur enlisting Allen Ginsberg (1959), Elsa Gidlow (1962), Albert Ellis (1962), Christopher Isherwood (1964), and Watts (1965b) to advocate publication through Grove Press, a New York-based press known for resisting censorship laws and publishing sexually explicit books. Although the advocacy was unsuccessful, Watts continued sharing the manuscript with others (such as Joseph Campbell) while accepting Playboy’s invitation to write an article about the scheme for their December 1965 issue (Watts, 1964). Up to this point, the Circle of Sex circulated among approximately 10,000 mostly homophile readers; by 1965, it was in a magazine read by 7 million mostly heterosexual males who were eager for content about the “sexual revolution.” As most cultural historians agree, the mid-1960s sexual revolution was primarily a discursive affair, prompted more by changes in censorship laws and modes of communications than by changes in behavior or attitudes (Schaefer 2014; Escoffier 2003). The term “sexual revolution,” coined decades earlier by Wilhelm Reich, appeared in Playboy in mid-1963, followed by mass dissemination via many high-profile magazines between 1964 and 1966. Time considered the sexual revolution in January, 1964, followed months

Alan Watts and his Queer Readers  209 later by Newsweek. Contemporaneously, Life published a groundbreaking but exploitative article and photo spread on the “Homosexual in America.” Playboy, however, was the mass market periodical considered synonymous with sexual revolution. Circa 1965, Time’s circulation was nearly 3 million, and Newsweek’s was 1.5 million. Playboy’s 7 million subscribers rivaled Life magazine’s circulation; by many estimates, women accounted for 20–25% of Playboy readers (Fraterrigo, 2009; Pitzulo, 2011). In the article, Watts (1965a) begins by sketching Arthur as a “maverick,” an “inspired eccentric” and an “aristocrat of bohemians” who developed the schema “with the sympathetic advice of such great sexologists as Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Alfred Kinsey” (p.166). Though overstating the involvement of these thinkers, Watts faithfully describes the schema while concluding, like Arthur, its predictive validity for sexual types is less important than its revelations concerning the nature of social categories that limit gender expression and sexuality, what Watts calls “this crude, clumsy, and insensitive either/or classification of sexual types” that the circle schema forces us to surpass (p.166). After fully describing the schema’s 12 types, Watts remarks: The schema is merely a “suggestion-not yet a rigorous of scientific classification” (p.286). The schema is not for diagnosing sexual types, but rather for legitimating “abnormal” gender expression and sexual orientation: “Under the immense social pressure of sexual mores and fashions, the individual is often unable to admit, even to himself, that he belongs to an ‘abnormal’ type” (p. 286). Watts’ point is that social categories often function to create standards of normal and abnormal that obscure the varieties of human sexuality. Yet, how might this Circle of Sex message reach Playboy readers in a different way than it did homophile readers? Interestingly, the Playboy article does not include a visual depiction of The Circle diagram. Instead, it offers an image of male and female heads in the place of the original diagram’s rich description.2 Playboy’s artwork thus conveys the Circle of Sex as about relationships between masculinity and femininity within heterosexuality. The subheading explains “an ingenious delineation of the age-old magnetism between male and female in which a clock face is used to chart the 12 libidinal types that attract and repel” (p.135). Instead of providing justification for readers having little interest in the magnetic attraction between male and female (as is the schema’s original intent), the Playboy version provides justification for the “age-old” attraction at the heart of heterosexuality, a telling misreading of both Arthur’s and Watts’ textual description. In this way, we can see how the schema, rather than offering support for abnormal sexual types, may be understood by Playboy readers in a way that neither of their authors intended and is quite different than gay and lesbian readers would interpret it. Nevertheless, the Playboy Circle of Sex article was successful for both Arthur and Watts. Beyond gaining much needed money, Arthur received a University Press contract to publish a new and expanded edition of the

210  Philip Longo book, with Watts’ Playboy article inserted as an introduction following Baker’s prologue, thus courting a larger, mostly heterosexual mainstream audience than was possible with Pan-Graphic press’ homophile reputation and distribution. For Watts, the Circle of Sex article was the first of many essays he wrote for Playboy throughout the 1960s on such topics as materialism, psychedelics, cooking, religion, and of course, sex. His 1968 article “Wealth Versus Money” earned the Playboy Editor’s Award for best nonfiction essay of the year. A frequent Playboy reader, Watts, wrote several letters to the editor responding to articles throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. In Does It Matter? Watts (1970b) called Playboy “that remarkable journal which, posing as a high-class girlie magazine, publishes some of the most exciting philosophical thinking in America, and thus at least exposes some six million readers to the intellectual life” (p. xv). Watts exposed these readers to ideas that had been, before publication, only circulating among a few thousand people at most. In this respect, Watts played a rather important role not only in developing the intellectual infrastructure of the sexual revolution and the counterculture, but also in furthering the aims of homophile groups seeking mainstream legitimacy and acceptance of homosexuality and gender variance, even if the acceptance of sexual and gender diversity also served the purpose of heterosexual readers.

“Defining Yourself is Like Biting Your Own Teeth”: The Queer Remixing of Alan Watts While Watts was a conduit for homosexual thought to mainstream audiences, his work was also taken up by queer readers, particularly during the less assimilationist-minded and more radical period of gay and transgender liberation movements emerging in the mid-to-late 60s. Watts was frequently invoked by transgender writers who cited him to justify the importance of identity self-definition. As new transgender publications and activist communication networks grew in the 1950s–1960s, sexual orientation was disentangling from gender identity while simultaneously medical professionals were popularizing new terminology and categorization of trans identities, in what Meyerowitz (2002) calls a “taxonomical revolution” around gender and sexuality (p.169). By 1960, as transgender historian Susan Stryker (2008) puts it, “the identity labels and border skirmishes between identity-based communities that still inform transgender activism today had already fallen into place” (p.50). At stake for trans readers in the mid-to-late twentieth century was not only an identification through a network of like-minded readers, but also a thorough discussion of the nature of categorization of transgender identity and experience itself. Turnabout: A Magazine of Transvestism (1963–1968), for example, articulated a more inclusive views of transsexual identities than did Virginia Price’s Transvestia (1960–1980), the first and highest

Alan Watts and his Queer Readers  211 circulating transgender publication of the period that focused on transvestite concerns for mostly heterosexual male cross dressers (Hill, 2007). In Turnabout’s Summer 1966 issue, publisher Fred L. Shaw (1966a) opens their column “Labels are for Suitcases” with an unsourced Watts quotation: “A human being must always recognize that he is qualitatively more than any system of thought he can imagine. Therefore, he should never label himself. He degrades himself when he does” (p. 2). Obviously indebted to Watts, Shaw writes that in an “Age of the Pigeonhole” where “category is king,” labels and categorization such as “transvestite” can be a double-edged sword. While Shaw concedes that labels can sometimes serve a useful function, “we have become the victims of a mad scheme of terminology which defines and degrades our very essence as human beings” (p. 2). This is particularly true of such terms as “transvestite” – a necessary and convenient label for Turnabout readers to identify themselves to themselves and each other, but is also “a trap which limits our inner selves to a pattern of behavior which has been outlined, defined, and decreed by someone else” (p. 2). Such labels on identity determined not by the people being identified “stand in the way of our own free-wheeling attempts at establishing and defining our individuality, which is a difficult enough process. As Alan Watts has also said, “Defining yourself is like biting your own teeth” (p. 2). Yet, define themselves they did. In the same Summer issue, Turnabout (1966) contains discussion of Harry Benjamin’s (1966) groundbreaking The Transexual Phenomenon. Arthur, a friend of Benamin’s, had sent The Circle of Sex to Benjamin in 1959 eliciting a positive response from him (Benjamin, 1959); while Benjamin’s “Sex Orientation Scale” table subtitled “Sex and Gender Role Disorientation and Indecision” was more researched-based than Arthur’s, we can see some similarities between their categorization.3 Indeed, both were influenced by Kinsey’s six-point scale, by offering alternative scalar frameworks for gender identity and sexual orientation. Benjamin’s table differentiates types ranging from “Pseudo Transvestites” to “True Transexuals.” Turnabout (1966) explains the table’s categorization utility by distinguishing its readership from those of its “West Coast rival” Transvesstia. Readers of Turnabout fall into the “Type-2 Fetishistic Transvestite” category (the writer disagrees with the use of the term “fetishistic”), whereas Transvesstia readers espousing “the cause of the ‘girl within’” are in the “Type 3 True Transvestite” slot (Shaw 1966b, p. 26). Turnabout (1966), however, quickly acknowledges the chart emerges from and used for clinical purposes: “In other words, most of us do not fit in any one category in every aspect of the psychosexual profile” (Shaw 1966b, p. 26). Here again, the need for and the critique of categorization of the complexities and diversities of gender identity and sexual orientation reveal the limits of the categorization process itself. There is a realization that identity categories are necessary

212  Philip Longo for both self-identification and social legitimacy, but it is a matter of who creates the categories that draws these readers to cite Watts. As noted above, Watts (1965a) directly handled sex and gender categories. But perhaps the most influential of Watts’ writings for transgender readers was The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. In The Book, Watts (1966) argues that sex is “no longer a serious taboo,” but that the true taboo is an unrecognized, but mighty one: “our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are (p. ix). Watts’ wideranging discussion, citing his characteristic blend of Western scientists, cyberneticists, psychologists, philosophers, and spiritual traditions from both the east and west, is in many ways a more accessible description of ideas from two earlier works (see Watts, 1958, 1961). Most notable for transgender readers is Watts’ (1966) emphasis on non-dualistic thinking plus the functions of social structures – religion, modern science, rationalism – in preventing experiences of interconnection to the surrounding world. Knowing who we truly are, for Watts, means stripping away the social/cultural patterns of thinking that structure personal understanding of self, including gender and sexuality. For Watts, categorization may be useful for conceptualizing the world, but it harms when it is mistaken for the world as it actually is. Using the metaphor of “one of the presiding images of human thought” – the “net” or grid as a tool of categorization (e.g., Benjamin’s model) – Watts (1966) writes: But it is always an image, and just as no one can use the equator to tie up a package, the real wiggly world slips like water through our imaginary nets. However much we divide, count, sort, or classify this wiggling into particular things and events, this is no more than a way of thinking about the world: it is never actually divided. (p.60) The major categorization that concerns Watts (1966) is primarily a spiritualphilosophical issue of self-definition in relation to the universe, noting how several Western religious and philosophical traditions, plus midcentury cybernetics, fail to capture reality. While appearing as an ontological study, The Book (Watts, 1966) is really an epistemic one: Watts reveals how our inherited structures of thought serve to limit our abilities to understand who we really are. References to The Book appear in transgender publications in the 1980s and 1990s. Joanna Clark’s (1986) article on “Health Insurance and the Transexual” appearing in the Toronto-based Metamorphosis: The Magazine for F-M Transsexuals (published by transmale activist Rupert Raj from 1982–1988) quotes a passage from The Book on the sacredness of individuals as manifestations of the Whole: “thus the soul isn’t in the body, but the body is in the soul” (p. 5). Clark explains: “In other words, the transsexual is as sacred as all the others in the expression of the

Alan Watts and his Queer Readers  213 mystery of God’s universe” (p. 5). Similarly, Dr. Sarah Seton’s (1991) feature “Transsexual Theater” published in Twenty Minutes – the newsletter of Twenty Club, a Hartford, CT., transgender and intersex support group – quotes Watts (1966) while discussing the psychological costs of stigma on transsexuals. Seton’s argument for the “Right-To-Name-the-World” as a birthright for everyone is particularly important for transsexual people who are socially deprived of naming themselves. Her arguments use Watts’ (1966) terminology while markedly dismissing von Kraft-Ebbing’s (1877) taxonomy of “abnormal” sexual instincts. Seton (1991) writes: For the transsexual, the operative meta-beliefs are “Society’s opinion of me is true” and “Transsexualism is a psychopathia sexualis.” Taboos like these create “permissible talk” and “no talk.” The No-Talk-Rule is the taboo against naming the world — the disenfranchisement of the Right-to-Name-the-World. (p.7) Even decades after his 1973 death, Watts’ had sway with transgender readers. Allen’s (1997) article “Will There Be Blue Eyeshadow in Heaven, or, Is God a Crossdresser?” published in Transgender Tapestry contained a dialogue between two friends about whether God approves of cross dressing: “Alan Watts spoke of God forgetting who ‘he’ was so that he could manifest as all the separate beings and forms in the universe. If this is the case, then God cross dresses in the forms of nature, culture, and everything we experience.” “So you are saying that we, and everyone and everything else, are actually God cross dressed in, well, the drag of the universe?” “The universe as a form [of] divine drag? It has a Zen-like appeal to it, I have to admit. The only difference would be that, according to Watts, God has forgotten who he is and so doesn’t realize that he’s engaged in a form of drag we call the universe”. (p. 47) While Watts did not explicitly discuss God in terms of drag, Allen’s (1997) invoking of Watts signals an alternative view of spirituality where humans, nature, and God are not distinct from one other and that embraces the notion of “wiggliness” or “play” in the universe. Watts (1966), critiquing the notion of God as “The King of the Universe, the Absolute Technocrat” (p. 18), draws upon a Vedanta understanding of God: “In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except God. There seem to be other things than God, but only because he is dreaming them up and making them his disguise to play hide-and-seek with himself” (p. 19). In answering the question of whether there is cross dressing

214  Philip Longo in Heaven (and thus whether God would approve of it), Allen (1997) finds powerful support in Watts’ oeuvre to argue that God is doing drag all the time, so why wouldn’t he approve of humans doing it? In “Clothes—On and Off,” for example, Watts (1970a) writes, “because the whole universe is a masquerade, we may as well do it with the utmost flair and elegance” (p. 66). Yet, despite affinities between transgender theorizing and Watts’ own thinking, it is striking that so many transgender publications reference Watts’s work. While Watts was close to the communication networks of homophile publishing and organizing, and while gender identity is a frequent topic throughout his writing and lectures (e.g., Watts, 1958, 1963/2018), he did not seem to interact with many transgender writers or read much about transgender topics. And yet, resonances of Watts’ thought in transgender communications networks continued years after his peak popularity, highlighting how these readers remixed and shared fragments of his work, responding to it in ways that Watts did not anticipate. Looking for theories to explain and articulate their sense of gender identity, these readers reworked non-binary frameworks popularized by Watts, dispersing fragments of them through their publications. Beyond citation in transgender publications, Watts was also engaged by gay readers associated with activist and revolutionary groups (e.g., the Gay Liberation Front) attempting self-definition against earlier homophile groups (e.g., the Mattachine Society) considered too assimilationist. His essay “No More Armed Clergymen” appeared in The Gay Liberation Book (1973) whose editors Lee Richmond and Gary Noguera plus contributors Allen Ginsberg and Paul Goodman lived at Druid Heights at times, overlapping with Watts’ stays there (Youmans 2015). In the essay, Watts (1973) defends same sex desire, and critiques how Christian religious authorities have politicized law enforcement to police homosexuality. “No More Armed Clergymen” directly references homosexuality and is the only piece authored by Watts explicitly for gay readers. In other respects, however, Watts’ (1973) arguments vis-à-vis spiritual dimensions of sexuality and the critique of religious and state structures who regulate sexuality are not entirely different than arguments offered in Nature, Man, and Woman (1958) and in his articles and letters for Playboy. Accordingly, Watts, like The Gay Liberation Book project itself, contextualized the late 1960s version of gay liberation within a larger project of sexual freedom. As gay activist-scholar Dennis Altman (1973) writes in his “Introduction” to the volume: “For it is only in a society that is frightened of and guilty about sexuality that the homo-hetero distinction is maintained with the vigor that applies to Western societies” (p. 16). Whereas earlier homophile activists sought to legitimize identity categories while building identity-based communication networks, later queer liberation movements like the Gay Liberation Front saw their project as an expansive mission – liberating sexuality

Alan Watts and his Queer Readers  215 for everyone. Altman writes: “Gay liberation also means a release of genuine eroticism which offers a potential for liberation to all of us, gay or straight” (p. 16). Altman’s description of gay liberation demonstrates once again the potent cross fertilization of Watts’ ideas with those of his queer readers.

A Concluding Note on Alan Watts and Camp Likewise, a March 1972 issue of the Toronto-based gay liberation magazine The Body Politic (1971–1987) published Hugh Brewster’s two-page spread on “Counter-notes on Camp” (a play on Susan Sontag’s famous “Notes on Camp”) that seeks to educate readers on the political and aesthetic potential of camp as a type of gay cultural subversion. Brewster (1972) sees the potential in camp to move outside of gender norms through camp performance like drag. This is juxtaposed to a problematic gay “machismo” which seeks to shore up a stable masculine gender identity. The article quotes Watts’ (1970a) essay “Clothes--On and Off”, particularly a passage on homosexuality and machismo: it is destructive and deadly in those young and unrealized homosexuals who affect machismo (ultra-masculinity) and who constitute the hard core of our military-industrial-police-mafia combine. If they would go and fuck each other (and I use that work in its most positive and appreciative sense), the world would be vastly improved …. This is, perhaps, the real meaning of the slogan, “Make love, not war.” We may be destroying ourselves through the repression of homosexuality. (p. 65–66) The Watts (1970a) quotation in Brewster’s (1972) Body Politic spread is flanked by cartoons of “machismo” types engaging in violence but imagining homosexual sex in thought bubbles, echoing Watts’ point that violence is a result of repressed homosexuality. Note, however, that this passage is only a minor aside in Watts’ original essay that focuses on the many social forms, not just gender or sexual orientation, evident in clothing patterns. Yet, for gay liberationist readers, this Watts quotation signals an authoritative justification for camp by showing the consequences of machismo and the liberation of sensibilities that play with both masculine and feminine gender roles. In Brewster’s (1972) piece, Watts shares the spread with images and references to gay camp icons like Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, and Lana Turner, plus famously camp homosexuals like Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, Gore Vidal, and Allen Ginsberg. Watts’ role here does not so much grant him camp icon status, but it demonstrates how his ideas take on fresh meaning within a new network of reference points.

216  Philip Longo Camp, Brewster (1972) explains, is “a way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon, concerned with grace, stylization and artifice” (p.10). It is also, as many queer cultural theorists have pointed out, a way that gay men have taken the elements of heterosexual culture and appropriated them for their own culture-building (Halperin, 2012). Watts is not a “camp” figure per se, but he is subject to the same rhetorical and aesthetic process of appropriation and remix outside of his writing’s original context and its intended audience. As such, Watts has become part of the queer cultural lineage, itself a bricolage of textual fragments that queer people reference and remix for their own new purposes. In the contemporary moment, we can glimpse Watts’ influence on drag superstar RuPaul Charles whose career embodies the prolific remixing of myriad cultural texts with a strong undercurrent of New Age spirituality, most notably in her signature slogan “we’re all born naked and the rest is drag.” RuPaul has spoken of Watts in relationship to her own spiritual practice and philosophical approach to drag in high-profile interviews (see Lawson 2019; Harris 2017) and on her own podcast (Charles & Visage, 2019) and has claimed that she listens to a Watts lecture every night (RuPaul 2011). On Twitter, a digital platform often defined by remixing, RuPaul has posted clips of Watts lecturers, notably one entitled “23 Seconds of Wisdom by Alan Watts” to her 1.4 million followers: “The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real deep down you is the whole universe. You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something the whole ocean is doing” (RuPaul 2018). This clip recalls Watts’ and Allen’s notion that the universe itself is God in drag, and it also contains a rebuke toward taxonomic categorizations of stable sexual and gender identities, two mainstays of drag culture that RuPaul has brought to mainstream consciousness. RuPaul, like other queer readers before her, has remixed Watts’ work by fruitfully decontextualizing it to serve their own purposes within different rhetorical contexts. This strategic remixing demonstrates how queer readers responded, and continue to respond, to Watts’ work in ways distinct from his heterosexual readers. And it also reminds us of how fragments of Watts’ writings traveled long after his death in ways that he could have never anticipated, and yet, that furthered the aims of his life’s work.

Notes 1 Please refer to the following link to access an image of Gavin Arthur’s Circle of Sex Schema: https://biandlesbianliterature.tumblr.com/post/174162964555/ the-circle-of-sex-by-gavin-arthur-image, accessed 17 November 2020. 2 Please refer to the following link to access an image of Playboy’s Circle of Sex image: https://www.iplayboy.com/issue/19651201, accessed 17 November 2020. 3 Please refer to the following link to access an image of Benjamin’s Sex Orientation Scale as presented in Turnabuout magazine, 1966 (Summer),7,24, https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/downloads/fb4948535, accessed 17 November 2020.

Alan Watts and his Queer Readers  217

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Editor’s Conclusion Peter J. Columbus

There seems to be a tendency, at least among certain spiritual seekers, to project an idealized aura of mystical and intellectual perfection onto Alan Watts, only to be sometimes disillusioned upon hearing stories of Watts’ apparent licentious lifestyle and outsized comradery with the demon alcohol. Yet, it is this very personal and existential disquietude which served as the fodder for constructive insights informing Watts’ groundbreaking work. There is also cultural malaise to acknowledge – the postWorld War II era of capitalist affluence and its concomitant anxiety in America that was languishing under the Damocles Sword of nuclear annihilation, plus ongoing racial strife, gender inequality, environmental degradation, and military conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Further complicating matters is the tension between Anglican Christianity and Western Scientism into which Watts was born, raised, and educated, plus eventual encounters with Buddhism’s challenges to European and American epistemological hegemonies. Living within this context, and writing against this backdrop, Watts was not the mere “popularizer” that he is commonly made out to be. Despite his accessible and often deceptively easy style of writing, Alan Watts’ work and life are, at least to the eyes of this editor, rather challenging, intricate, and complicated matters. These challenges, intricacies, and complications remain important in the twenty-first century as we experience new variations on old themes of cultural malaise and epistemological hegemony. The daunting reality of global climate change and the glaring necessity of a Black Lives Matter movement are two salient examples. It is common to label socio-historical eras in terms of cognitive and affective psychological features, for example, “the Great Depression” and the “Age of Anxiety.” In the present day, I would argue, the socio-cultural era (at least in America) exudes a borderline psychological quality as people automatically and habitually position themselves and each other as intractably on this side or that side of this or that issue, or as exceedingly good or exceedingly bad in light of one or another moral/ethical/ value system. There are now – in contrast to previous eras – multiple

Editor’s Conclusion  221 competing, supplementary, and sometimes contradictory interpretive lenses through which to see and understand whatever there is to be seen and understood, and people seem to have difficulty in accommodating to the interpretive pluralism that is characteristic of contemporary times. Thus, on the issue of Alan Watts, some readers idolized him as a guru, while others see him as too flawed or too intellectual for the sensibilities of certain spiritual practitioners. Still others consider Watts as a simplistic writer pandering to pedestrian receptivity rather than addressing subject matters in ways that are conducive to scholarly discourse. Additionally, however, there is an emerging field of Alan Watts studies – a recognition, among some academics in various disciplines and specialties, of the necessity for elaborating and mapping Watts’ thinking vis-à-vis its historical influence and contemporary relevance. As editor of the present text, I have tried to assemble a cadre of writers who could employ a variety of descriptive and interpretive lenses toward understanding the interplay between Watts’ popularity and the problematics of his life and work in Humanistic Psychology, comparative religion and philosophy, and arts and humanities, including backstories and developmental influences on Watts himself. Clinical psychologists tell us that borderline psychological qualities include fragile and distorted self-images or senses of self, often linked to traumatic episodes in life and experiences with relationships that are unstable, hostile, and conflictual. Amidst the questions and problems of identity that are reflected in the present-day borderline, zeitgeist is where, I suggest, a key contemporary relevance of Alan Watts is to be found. This relevancy is found not only in Watts’ explorations of individual problems of identity as they arise in socio-cultural contexts, but also in people’s relations to each other, to culture and society, to nature, and to the cosmos. Clinical psychologists also tell us that therapeutic treatment of borderline pathos is at least partially afforded by allowing for situational awareness and attention to emotional experience, that is to say, mindfulness and acceptance, or in Watts’ words, a “wisdom of insecurity.” Remediation is further facilitated through discerning and transforming basic behaviors and beliefs that lie beneath erroneous selfperceptions and interactional problems with others. In Watts’ words, it is an issue of identifying and transmuting the socio-cultural “taboo against knowing who you [and we] are.” The word “conclusion” has a double-edged meaning. One meaning, obviously, is to end, finish, or terminate – as in bringing the present book to a close, which I am deliberately and studiously trying to do. The second meaning is to draw inference and supposition as, in this case, to conjecture about the future trajectory of the study of Alan Watts’ life and work. Building on matters addressed in the present text, I will venture to suggest three worthwhile investigatory directions. First is a deeper and more thorough study of Watts’ personal and professional reflexivity,

222  Peter J. Columbus particularly but not limited to his understanding of the philosophical, religious, and spiritual insights and practices of various peoples and cultures of Asian origin. It will not do for naïve readers to appropriate from Alan Watts what they fallaciously imagine to be ecologically valid versions of, say, Chinese or Japanese Buddhism. It is likewise untenable for the wholesale disqualification of Watts on the grounds that he radically misappropriated the religious and spiritual riches of Asian peoples and cultures. Instead, I suggest, Watts serves as an edifying example of a twentieth-century religious philosopher who is honestly (but not flawlessly) grappling with his own Western and Christian heritage in relation to that which he is not. Speaking of that which is not, or nothingness, the second direction of study concerns the intellectual climate in which Watts lived and worked, particularly in relation to the existentialists. How do we, for example, make sense in the twenty-first century of Watts’ “nonsense” in relation to the absurdism of Albert Camus? Third, more research and analysis is needed concerning Watts’ place in the contemporary terrain of consumer capitalism. Does his liberatory messaging still resonate to the core of being, or are his words now compromised within a capitalist realism? If so, how and to what extent? Is Watts on his way to being thoroughly commodified? Even the present book is offered for sale by a for-profit publisher. The predicament is not lost on this editor. A word of editorial caution. We live in an era when authors, Alan Watts in this instance, are not the final arbiters of the meanings and veracities contained in their writings. Watts’ words and sentences are pregnant with connotations and denotations waiting to be born from the mind of whomever reads a page of his texts. Some meanings born of another mind are faithful to the author’s intentions, allowing for understandings of Watts in the ways that he wanted to be understood, and possibly furthering the benevolent and compassionate intentions of his life’s work. Other interpretations maintain less fidelity to the author’s intent; and “therein lies the rub” said The Bard’s Hamlet. Already mentioned in the present text is the use of Watts as a rhetorical strawman by thinkers who are less interested in understanding his life and work than with legitimating, advocating, and elevating some other agenda. A downright pernicious infidelity to Watts, his life, and his work is the tendency of a few Alt-right writers to tether their inhumane thinking, by vague and tenuous association, to various writings by Watts. (I hesitate to offer any citation here so as to not feed the beast.) A possible concern for the future, at least to this editor’s imagination, is a problematic absolutizing, totalizing, or reifying of Watts’ oeuvre in some way or form as the single or unified approach to seeing reality and understanding the world. Absolutized structures are inherently authoritarian and oppressive, becoming forms of epistemological hegemony. Alan Watts, now dead, cannot rejoin to the wholesale or piecemeal appropriation or subjugation of his work for purposes of which he would not have condoned; he can neither “suffer

Editor’s Conclusion  223 the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” nor “take arms against a sea of troubles.” Aside from a measure of interpretive diligence, here and now, I can only lament with Hamlet: “For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.” Finally, what follows below is a bibliographic resource providing a list of Watts’ books, including those posthumously published, plus books, chapters, and journal articles about Watts, as well as theses and dissertations on various aspects of his life and work. When charting a course of study on Alan Watts, it is helpful to know where one is and where one has been. Notice, for example, the difference in tone, content, and assessment of Wheelwright (1953) versus Nordstrom and Pilgrim (1980) versus Smith (2010). Likewise note the comparative dearth of theses and dissertation on Watts. He was, relative to many scholarly types, located on the fringes of academic legitimacy, and thus persona non grata in the eyes of thesis and dissertation committees – a view that is finally changing. Note also the expanding map of Watts’ influence. See, for example, Kocela (2017), Wheeler (2020), and Zhang (2019).

Alan Watts: A Revised Bibliographic Resource Peter J. Columbus

Alan Watts’ Major Books Watts, A. W. (1936). The spirit of Zen: A way of life, work, and art in the far east. London: John Murray. Watts. A. W. (1937). The legacy of Asia and western man: A study of the Middle Way. London: John Murray. Watts, A. W. (1940). The Meaning of happiness: The quest for freedom of the spirit in modern psychology and the wisdom of the East. New York: Harper & Row. Watts, A. W. (1947). Behold the spirit: A study in the necessity of mystical religion. New York: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1950a). Easter: Its story and meaning. New York: Schuman. Watts, A. W. (1950b). The Supreme Identity: An essay on Oriental metaphysic and the Christian religion. New York: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1951). The wisdom of insecurity: A message for an age of anxiety. New York: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1953). Myth and ritual in Christianity. New York: Vanguard. Watts, A. W. (1957). The way of Zen. New York: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1958). Nature, nan and woman. New York: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1960). This is IT, and other essays on Zen and spiritual experience. New York: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1961). Psychotherapy East and West. New York: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1962). The joyous cosmology: Adventures in the chemistry of consciousness. New York: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1963). The two hands of God: The myths of polarity. New York: Braziller. Watts, A. W. (1964). Beyond theology: The art of godmanship. New York: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1966). The Book: On the taboo against knowing who you are. New York: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1971). Does It matter: Essays on man’s relations to materiality. New York: Pantheon. Watts, A. W., & Elisofon, E. (1971). Erotic spirituality: Vision of Konarek. New York: Macmillan. Watts, A. W. (1973a). In my own way: An autobiography —1915-1965. New York: Vintage. Watts, A. W. (1973b). Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown: A mountain journal. New York: Pantheon.

Alan Watts: A Revised Bibliographic Resource  225

Posthumous Works Watts, A. W. (1974). The essence of Alan Watts (M. J. Watts, Ed.). Millbrae, CA: Celestial Arts. Watts, A. W. (1975a). Tao: The watercourse way. New York: Pantheon. Watts, A. W. (1975b). The essential Alan Watts. Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts. Watts, A. W. (1978). Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery of Life. New York: A&W Visual Library. Watts, A. W. (1980). Om: Creative Meditations. Millbrae, CA: Celestial Arts. Watts, A. W. (1982). Play to live: Selected seminars (M. Watts, Ed). South Bend, IN: And Books. Watts, A. W. (1983) The Way of Liberation: Essays and Lectures on the Transformation of the Self (M. Watts & R. Shropshire, Eds.). New York: Weatherhill. Watts, A. W. (1985). Out of the Trap: Selected lectures. South Bend, IN: And Books Watts, A. W. (1986). Diamond Web: Live in the moment (M. Watts, Ed.). South Bend, IN: And Books. Watts, A. W. (1987). The Early writings of Alan Watts ( J. Snelling, D. T. Sibley, & M. Watts, Eds.). Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts. Watts, A. W. (1990). The Modern Mystic: A new collection of early writings ( J. Snelling & M. Watts, Eds.). Dorset, UK: Element. Watts, A. W. (1994). Talking Zen (M. Watts, Ed.). New York: Weatherhill. Watts, A. W. (1995a). Become what you are. Boston: Shambhala. (Expanded edition, 2003) Watts, A. W. (1995b). Buddhism: The religion of no-religion (M. Watts, Ed). Boston: Tuttle Watts, A. W. (1995c). The Tao of philosophy: The edited transcripts (M. Watts, Ed.). Boston: Tuttle. Watts, A. W. (1996). Myth and religion (M. Watts, Ed.). Boston: Tuttle. Watts, A. W. (1997a). Taoism: Way beyond seeking (M. Watts, Ed.). London: Thorsons. Watts, A. W. (1997b). Zen and the Beat Way (M. Watts, Ed.). Boston: Tuttle. Watts, A. W. (1998). Culture of Counterculture (M. Watts, Ed.). Boston: Tuttle. Watts, A. W. (2000a). What is Zen? (M. Watts, Ed). Novato, CA: New World Library. Watts, A. W. (2000b). What is Tao? (M. Watts, Ed). Novato, CA: New World Library. Watts, A. W. (2002). Zen: The supreme experience: The newly discovered transcripts (M. Watts, Ed). London: Vega. Watts, A. W. (2006). Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected talks, 1960–1969 (M. Watts, Ed.). Novato, CA: New World Library. Watts, A. W. (2017a). Alan Watts – In the academy: Essays and lectures (P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice, Eds.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Watts, A. W. (2017b). The Collected Letters of Alan Watts ( J. Watts & A. Watts, Eds.). Novato, CA: New World Library. Watts, A. W. (2017c). Out of your mind: Tricksters, interdependence, and the cosmic game ofhide and seek (M. Watts, Ed.). Boulder, CO: Sounds True. Watts, A. W. (2020a). Just so: Money, materialism, and the ineffable universe (M. Watts, Ed.). Boulder, CO: Sounds True. Watts, A. W. (2020b). The fish who found the sea (Children’s book, K. Le, Illust.). Boulder, CO: Sounds True.

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Writings on the Life, Work, and Influence of Alan Watts Books Brannigan, M. C. (1988). Everywhere and nowhere: The path of Alan Watts. New York: Peter Lang. Clark, D. K. (1978). The pantheism of Alan Watts. Downers Grove, IL: Inter-varsity Press. Columbus, P. J., & Rice, D. L. (Eds.). (2012a). Alan Watts - here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Distefano, M. J., & Machuga, M. (2017). A journey of two mystics: Conversations between a Girardian and a Wattsian. Eugene, OR: Resource. Furlong, M. (1986). Zen Effects: The life and work of Alan Watts. Boston: Houghton. (Alternative title: Genuine Fake: The life and work of Alan Watts) Keightley, A. (1986). Into every life a little Zen must fall: A Christian philosopher looks to Alan Watts and the East. London: Wisdom. Lhermite, P. (1983). Alan Watts: Taoiste de Occident [Alan Watts: Western Taoist] Paris: La Table Ronde Stuart, D. (1983). Alan Watts. Briarcliff Manor, NY: Stein & Day.

Articles & Chapters Baird, R. M. (1988). The influence of Oriental mysticism on American thought. In T. Sakamoto & K. Takeno (Eds.), America’s changing scene (pp. 74–84). Tokyo: Eichosha Shinsha. Ballantyne, E. C. (1989). Alan Watts. In C. H. Lippy (Ed.), Twentieth-century shapers of American popular religion (pp. 436–445). Westport, CT: Greenwood. Bancroft, A. (1989). Alan Watts, 1915–1973. Twentieth-century mystics and sages (pp. 17–29). London: Arkana. (Original work published 1976) Bennett, J. (2015). Alan Watts’ “dramatic model” and the pursuit of peace. Self & Society, 43(4), 335–344. Brannigan, M. C. (1977a). Alan Watts’ metaphysical language: Positivity in negative concepts. Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica, 8, 341–350. Brannigan, M.C. (1982). The theory of non-duality in the philosophy of Alan Watts. Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica, 13, 241–251. Brannigan, M. C. (2012). Listening to the rain: Embodied awareness in Watts. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 149–161). Albany: State University of New York Press. Brown, J. (2009). The Zen of anarchy: Japanese exceptionalism and the anarchist roots of the San Francisco poetry renaissance. Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 19(2), 207–242. Chase, C. W. (2015a). Square gnosis, beat eros: Alan Watts and the occultism of Aquarian religion. Self & Society, 43(4), 322–334. Chase, N. (2015b). The dramatic worldview of Alan Watts: A psychological commentary on three lectures entitled “The Nature of Consciousness”. San Francisco, CA: Saybrook University. Cohen, K. S. (2015). “You can tell a yogi by his laugh”: Reminiscences of Alan Watts’ last summer. Self & Society, 43(4), 299–309.

Alan Watts: A Revised Bibliographic Resource  227 Columbus, P. J. (1985). A response to Nordstrom and Pilgrim’s critique of Alan Watts’ mysticism. The Humanistic Psychologist, 13(1), 28–34. Columbus, P. J. (2012). Phenomenological exegeses of Alan Watts: Transcendental and hermeneutic strategies. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 59–82). Albany: State University of New York Press. Columbus, P. J. (2015a). Alan Watts: A bibliographic resource. Self & Society, 43(4), 354–358. Columbus, P. J. (2015b). Guest editor’s introduction – special theme symposium: Alan Watts. Self & Society, 43(4), 295–297. Columbus, P. J. (2015c). Psychotherapy east and west: A retrospective review, part 1 – 1961-1970. Self & Society, 43(4), 345–353. Columbus, P. J. (2017). Psychotherapy east and west: A retrospective review, part II. Self & Society, 45(3–4), 276–282. Columbus, P. J., & Rice, D. L. (2012b). A new look at Alan Watts. In Alan Watts here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 1–24). Albany: State University of New York Press. Columbus, P. J., & Rice, D. L. (2017). Alan Watts and the academic enterprise. In Alan Watts – in the academy: Essays and lectures (pp. 1–41). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Coupe, L. (2010). This is It: Alan Watts and the visionary tradition. In Beat sound, Beat vision: The Beat spirit and popular song (pp. 22–55). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Dart, R. (2004). Thomas Merton and Alan Watts: Contemplative Catholic and Oriental anarchist. The Merton Journal, 11(2), 12–15. Dashti, L., & Mehrpour, S. (2017). Representations of social actors in J. Krishnamurti and Alan Watts’ philosophical speeches. Journal of Applied Psycholinguistics and Language Research, 4(4), 51–59. Dunbar, D. (1994). Alan Watts’s word on myths of polarity: Power to women, nature, and the left hand of God (pp. 57–62). In The balance of nature’s polarities in new-paradigm theory. New York: Peter Lang. Dunbar, D. (2015). Alan Watts, Taoism, and the return to yin. In The balance of nature’s polarities in new-paradigm theory (rev. ed., pp. 59–65). EBook released by author. Available at https://gumroad.com/l/yiQg Eden, P. M. (1984). Alan Watts – An appreciation. The Middle Way, 58(4), 217. Editors (1984). Alan Watts, 1915-73: In memorium. The Middle Way, 58(4), 211–212. Foster, M. (1986a). A Western Bodhisattva. In R. Miller & J. Kenny (Eds.), Fireball and the lotus (pp. 135–149). Santa Fe, NM: Bear. Franklin, E. F., & Columbus, P. J. (2017). Jung Watts: Notes on C. G. Jung’s formative influence on Alan Watts. Self & Society, 45(3–4), 267–275. Fuller, A. R. (2008). Alan Watts. In Psychology and religion: Eight points of view (pp. 167–194). Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Furlong, M. (1984). Alan Watts. The Middle Way, 58(4), 213–216. Garrett-Farb, B. (2017). An aesthetic appreciation of Alan Watts. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 57(1), 33–63. Gordon, S. (2012). Existential time and the meaning of human development. The Humanistic Psychologist, 40, 79–86. Gordon, S. (2015). Alan Watts and Neurophenomenology. Self & Society, 43(4), 311–321.

228  Alan Watts: A Revised Bibliographic Resource Harding, D. (1984). Alan Watts – sage or anti-sage? The Middle Way, 58(4), 221–223. Hood, R. W. Jr. (2012). Alan Watts’ anticipation of four major debates in the psychology of religion. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 25–41). Albany: State University of New York Press. Huang, C. (1975a). Foreword. In A. W. Watts, Tao: The watercourse way (pp. viixiii). New York: Pantheon. Huang, C. (1975b). Once again: A new beginning. In A. W. Watts, Tao: The watercourse way (pp. 123–128). New York: Pantheon. Huang, C. (2012). Watercourse way: Still flowing with Alan Watts. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 219–232). Albany: State University of New York Press. Jackson, C. T. (1984). Zen, mysticism, and counter-culture: The pilgrimage of Alan Watts. Indian Journal of American Studies, 4(1), 89–101. Keightley, A. (2012). Alan Watts: The immediate magic of God. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 43–57). Albany: State University of New York Press. Khripko, E. (2019). Game paradigm comparisons as the stage of the formation of cross-cultural dialogue between Buddhism and psychoanalysis. International Journal of Applied Exercise Physiology, 8(3.1), 381–387. King, P. C. (2001). Roots and wings: Thomas Merton and Alan Watts as twentieth century archetypes. The Merton Journal, 8(2), 36–44. Kocela, C. (2017). The Zen of “good old neon”: David Foster Wallace, Alan Watts, and the double-bind of self-hood. In B. Pire (Ed.), David Foster Wallace: Presences of the other (pp. 57–72). Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press. Krippner, S. (2012). The psychedelic adventures of Alan Watts. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 83–102). Albany: State University of New York Press. Krishna, G. (1975). The dangers of partial awareness: Comments on Alan Watts’ autobiography. In The awakening of Kundalini (pp. 96–105). New York: Dutton. Lasar, M. (2000). Three gurus and a critic. In Pacifica Radio: The rise of an alternative network (pp. 112–132). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lawson, M. (1988). Growing up lightly: Rascal-gurus in American educational thought. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 20(1), 37–49. Leary, D. J. (1969). Enlightenment: Watts, Brown, and the hippies. In Voices of convergence (pp. 92–132). Milwaukee, WI: Brice Publishing Levering, M. L. (2012). Alan Watts on nature, gender, and sexuality: A contemporary view. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 163–182). Albany: State University of New York Press. Mazur, L. (2017). Hans Jonas i Alan Watts: teodycea a mit spekulatywny [Hans Jonas and Alan Watts: A speculative theodicy]. Racjonalia. Z punkto widzenia humanistyk, 7, 55–74. Metzner, R. (2012). From the joyous cosmology to the watercourse way: An appreciation of Alan Watts. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - here

Alan Watts: A Revised Bibliographic Resource  229 and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 103–121). Albany: State University of New York Press. Morgan, J. H. (2008). Alan Watts: “Beyond separation”. In P. Mohanty & R. C. Mailik (Eds.), Language, culture and society: Studies in honor of Acharya Bhabananda (pp. 171–180). Dehli: Indian Institute of Languages. Nangle, J. (2015). Shut up and lick your lollipop. A personal view of Alan Watts. Self & Society, 43(3), 264–267. Nordstrom, L., & Pilgrim, R. (1980). The wayward mysticism of Alan Watts. Philosophy East and West, 30(3), 381–401. Ostdiek, G. (2017). Alan Watts and secular competence in religious praxis. Self & Society, 45(3–4), 256–266. Perry, W. N. (2007). Anti-theology and the riddles of Alcyone. In H. Oldmeadow (Ed.), Light from the East: Eastern wisdom for the modern West (pp. 50–65). Bloomington, IN: Wisdom Traditions. (Original work published 1972, Studies in Comparative Religion, 6(3), 176-192). Pickering, A. (2011). Cyborg Spirituality. Medical History, 55(3), 349–353. Pope, A. (2012). Contributions and conundrums in the psycho-spiritual transformation of Alan Watts. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 183–202). Albany: State University of New York Press. Puhakka, K. (2012). Buddhist wisdom in the west: A fifty-year perspective on the contributions of Alan Watts. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 203–217). Albany: State University of New York Press. Recoulley, A. L. (1986). Daemon est deus inversus: The androgynous dialectics of Alan Watts. The USF Language Quarterly, 25(1–2), 13–21. Rice, D. L. (2012). Alan Watts and the neuroscience of transcendence. In P. J. Columbus & D. L. Rice (Eds.), Alan Watts - here and now: Contributions to psychology, philosophy, and religion (pp. 123–148). Albany: State University of New York Press. Robins, M. H. (1984). Remembering Alan Watts. The Middle Way, 58(4), 218. Roszak, T. (1969). Journey to the East…and points beyond: Allen Ginsburg and Alan Watts. In The making of a counter culture: Reflections on the technocratic society and its youthful opposition. New York: Anchor books. Sadler, A. W. (1974a). The complete Alan Watts. The Eastern Buddhist (new series), 7(2), 121–127. Sadler, A. W. (1974b). The vintage Alan Watts. The Eastern Buddhist (new series), 7(1), 143–148. Sadler, A. W. (1985). Editorial jottings: Alan Watts, Alan Whittemore & others. The Whittemore Newsletter. (November), 1–4. Sanders, C. J. (2017). Alan Watts and the re-visioning of psychotherapy. Self & Society, 45(3–4),244–255. Saxena, N. B. (2020). AI as awakened intelligence: Buddha, Kurweil, and the film Her. Theology and Science. DOI: 10.1080/14746700.2019.1710351 Shipley, M. (2017). “A critique of culture”: Alan Watts, psychedelic Buddhism, and religious play in postwar America. Self & Society, 45(3–4), 233–243. Sibley, D. T. (1979). Alan Watts and the therapeutic process. Self and Society, 7(11), 139–141. Sibley, D. T. (1984). The legacy of Alan Watts: A personal view. The Middle Way, 58(4), 219–220.

230  Alan Watts: A Revised Bibliographic Resource Singer, J. (1983). Four men in search of enlightenment. In Energies of love: Sexuality re-visioned (pp. 95–117). New York: Anchor Press. Smith, D. L. (2010). The authenticity of Alan Watts. In G. Storhoff & J. WhalenBridge (Eds.), American Buddhism as a way of life (pp. 13–38). Albany: State University of New York Press. Smith, D. L. (2014). How to be a genuine fake: Her, Alan Watts, and the problem of the self. Journal of Religion and Film, 18(2), Article 3. Retrieved from http:// digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1239&context=jrf Suligoj, H. (1975). The mystical philosophy of Alan Watts. International Philosophical Quarterly, 15, 439–454. Swearer, D. (1973). Three modes of Zen in America. Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 10(2), 290–303. Wang, H. (2009). Life history and cross-cultural thought: Engaging an intercultural curriculum. Transcultural Curriculum Inquiry, 6(2), 37–50. Wheeler, B. L. (2020). Participating in paradox: An integrative framework. Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Article first published online, October 19, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167820965100 Wheelwright, P. (1953). The philosophy of Alan Watts. The Sewanee Review, 61, 493–500. Wolter, D. C. (2013). In search of the self: Eastern versus Western perspectives. Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research, 1(1), Article 1. Retrieved from: http://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/ojur/vol1/iss1/1 Woodhead, L. (2001). The turn to life in contemporary religion and spirituality. In U. King (Ed.), Spirituality and society in the new millennium (pp. 110–123). UK: Sussex Academic Press. Zhang, Y. (2019). Wilfred Bion’s annotations in The Way of Zen: An investigation into his practical encounters with Buddhist ideas. Psychoanalysis and History, 21(3), 331–355.

Dissertations and Theses Doctoral Dissertations Anderson, J. J. (2012). Seeing beyond the veil: Addressing the unseen barrier to socially sustainable behavior. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Saybrook University, San Francisco, CA. Atsina, C. A. (2002). Global dialectics of narrative identity. Mediating the voluntary and involuntary [Abstract]. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of San Francisco, CA. Retrieved 1/18/2020 from https://philpapers.org/rec/ATSGDO Becker, D. (1995). Alan Watts (1915–1973): le philosophe-artiste. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Nancy-Université, France. Brannigan, M. (1977). From illusion to insight: The evolution from ego-consciousness to Self-consciousness in Alan W. Watts. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. Greer, J. C. (2019). Angelheaded hipsters: From the birth of beatnik antinomianism to psychedelic millennialism. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Alan Watts: A Revised Bibliographic Resource  231 Jolicoeur, R. (2001). Alan Wilson Watts, spiritualité orientale en Occident, un parcours première période, 1935–1958 [Alan Wilson Watts: Eastern Spirituality in the West: The first journey, 1935–1958]. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Laval University, Quebec, Canada. Stark, J. F. (1983). Alan Watts: A case study in the appropriation of Asian religious thought in post-World-War II America. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara. Vestal, D. G. (1974). A Comparative Study of Representative Emphases in the Thought of Alan Watts and Francis Schaeffer. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary,

Masters Theses Angel, L. J. (1971). My interpretation of Alan Watt’s philosophy as it might apply to education. Unpublished master’s thesis, California State College, Sonoma. Bogner, A. G. (1983). Alan Watts and the Zen of adult education. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Kansas, Lawrence. Clark, D. K. (1976). A theistic response to the pantheistic world view of Alan Watts. Unpublished master’s thesis, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Greer, J. C. (2011). Pride and paradigmatic prejudice: Alan Watts and Zen scholarship. Unpublished master’s thesis, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Guerin, S. P. (2004). The Zen of work and the Zen of leisure: The political thought of D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Rochester. Hinz, W. (1991). Alan Watts' theological anthropology and its implications for religious education. Unpublished master’s thesis, McGill University. Jolicoeur, R. (1991). Alan Watts: la fonction de la pensée intuitive dans le processus creative. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Laval. Jones, G. E. (1960). An analysis of similarities in writings of Paul Tillich and Alan W. Watts on the predicament of man in his relationship to God, Society, and self. Unpublished master’s thesis M.A. Thesis, Brigham Young University Knapp, L. J. (1971). A study of the sources of Alan W. Watts' The book on the taboo against knowing who you are. Unpublished master’s thesis, Montclair State College. Lagenaur, M. B. (1974). Frithjof Schuon and Alan Watts: Understanding at different levels. Unpublished master’s thesis, Indiana University. O’Donnell, R. A. (1978) Alan Watts: Zen, Language, and Philosophy. Unpublished master’s thesis, California State University, Long Beach. Owens, B. R. (1975). Alan Wilson Watts' Philosophy of Communication. Unpublished master’s thesis, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Santangelo, S. (1982). La esencia de Alan Watts [The Essence of Alan Watts]. Unpublished master’s thesis, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Spallier, R. (2012). Een filosofie van de pijn. Pijn en genot: de Siamese tweeling van Da Vinci in de filosofie van de Stoa, Nietzsche, het Taoïsme en Alan Watts. Unpublished master’s thesis. University of Antwerp Stauffer, A. L. (1969). The relationship between Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis: Watts and Fromm, a comparison. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Oklahoma, Stillwater.

232  Alan Watts: A Revised Bibliographic Resource Tanguay, F. (2018). Le lâcher-prise : une approche historique. Unpublished master’s thesis, Laval University, Quebec, Canada. Teed, C. L. (1977). Alan Watts and the Christian mythos. Unpublished master’s thesis, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. Tiffany, N. (1976). Alan Watts: A critical study and bibliography. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of California, Los Angeles. Tremblay, D. (1984). Pour une conception sociale du soi : Georges H. Mead et Alan W. Watts [For a social conception of the self: Georges H. Mead and Alan W. Watts]. Unpublished master’s thesis, Laval University, Quebec, Canada

Undergraduate Theses Black, N. A. (1994). Understanding difference through paradox: Exploring the relationship of language to religious truth in the writings of William James, William Blake, Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, and Jacques Derrida. Unpublished senior thesis, Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, IL. Duggan, E. F. (2014). Three lives, three paths: The spiritual quest of Thomas Merton, Alan Watts, and Annie Dillard. Undergraduate thesis, University of Hawaii, Manoa. Retrieved 1/13/2020 from https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii. edu/handle/10125/33680 Farley, T. J. (1970). Alan Watts: On eastern nondualism and modern western science. Unpublished senior thesis, Loras College, Dubuque, IA. Foster, M. P. (1986b). Alan Watts: A western Bodhisattva. Unpublished senior thesis, Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, IL. Jennings, J. (2005). Self-educated Buddhism and Alan Watts. Unpublished senior thesis, Reed College. Loeschel, J. (2014.) Listening to the rain: A fresh look at the works of Alan Watts. Undergraduate thesis, Texas State University, San Marcos. Retrieved 1/13/2020 from https://digital.library.txstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10877/5058/Loechel JessicaFinal.pdf?sequence=1 Masi, W. (2015). The Gospel reinvented: A new addition to the Jesus of Alan Watts. Undergraduate thesis, University of Southern Maine, Retrievd 1/13/2020 from https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article= 1156&context=etd Sjogren, E. (2014). The sound of rain needs no translation: Alan Watts on society and modern man. Unpublished undergraduate thesis, University of Stockholm, Sweden. Spencer, E. A. (2019). The postmodern metaphor: A double-bind. Undergraduate honors thesis, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC. Retrieved 2/21/2020 from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f535/9d2a0faabad375a782302de0da3b8f 341abc.pdf

Acknowledgement Revision of a bibliography published in Self & Society: An International Journal for Humanistic Psychology, 43(4), 354–358. Used by permission of The Association for Humanistic Psychology in Britain.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes AAAS see American Academy of Asian Studies (AAAS) AACM see Ali Akbar College of Music (AACM) academic and literary reviews (1970s–1980s) 35–37 Adams, R. M. xvii, xxxii Alan Parson’s Project 57 Alan Watts Memorial Celebration 188 Alan Watts Society for Comparative Philosophy (SCP) 152 Al Chung-liang Huang 8, 151, 154, 157 Ali Akbar College of Music (AACM) 188, 189, 196 alienation xxi, xxiii, 15, 17–19, 33, 80–82, 84, 125, 126, 129 Alla Rakha 184, 187 Allen, A. A. 81 Allen, J. J. 214; “Will There Be Blue Eyeshadow in Heaven, or, Is God a Crossdresser?” 213 Allport, G. 45 Alpert, R. 85 Altman, D. 214–215 ambiguous play 57 American Academy of Asian Studies (AAAS) 16, 27, 79, 151, 203 American Journal of Psychoanalysis 10, 28 analytical psychology 6, 7, 10, 21, 32 Ananda, L. 167 Andersen, T. 21 Anderson, H. 13, 15, 23 Anderson, R. 154 Andrews, J. 167, 207 Angel, E.: Existence 17

Anglican Christianity 220 anicca (impermanence) 82 anxiety 125–129 Aoki, H. 154 Aquarian religion, occultism of 92–94; Bildung 103–104; enframing of 94–96; eros 100–103; gnostic occultism 96–100 Archives of General Psychiatry 28 Arendt, H. xxxi Arthur, C. A. 206–207 Arthur, G. xxvi, 204, 206; Circle of Sex, The 198–200, 206–210 “Ascended Masters” 94 ASEA see Asian Society for Eastern Arts Asian Society for Eastern Arts (ASEA) 187, 188 “Astral Temple of Jesus and Mary” 94 Astronauts of Inner-Space 170 atheism xxiv, xxvii, 135 Australia and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, The 36 autopoiesis 47, 50, 53 avidya (ignorance) 82 Bachelard, G. 14 Bachofen, J. J. 102 backwards law see law of reversed effort bad faith 123 Baker, B. 198–200, 208 Bankart, C. P. 39–40 Bankei Yotaku: “Unborn Buddha Mind, The” 154 Barthes, R.: Empire of Signs 168

234  Index Barton, A. 173–174 “Basic Bibliography” 96 Bateson, G. 10, 13, 19, 23, 24, 27, 28, 139; Communication Project xxi, 15–17 Bateson, N. 24 Baudrillard, J. 127 Bayley, D. 153 BearWolf, M. 103 Beatles, The 170; Rubber Soul 186; Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 186 Bed, The 206 being-in-itself 122, 124, 129 Benjamin, H.: Transexual Phenomenon, The 211 Bennett, J. xxiv, xxvii, 95 Bentley, A. F. 27 Berner, J. 169–170 Berry, T. 136 Bhagavad Gita 157 Big Sur 204 Bildung 94, 97, 99, 101, 103–104 Birch, C. 137–138, 141, 143; Liberation of Life, The 143 Bishop, E. 10 Black Lives Matter 220 Blake, W. 159, 161 Bodhidharma 124 body–soul relationship 109 Bonhoeffer, D. 34 bounded rationality 70 Bowler, K. 81 Bowring, F. xxxi, xxxii Brady, M. E.: “New Cult of Sex and Anarchy, The” 204 Brazelon, D. T. 34 Brewster, H. 216; Body Politic, The 215 Broughton, J. 14, 180n1, 206 Brown, N. O. 27, 30, 34, 100 Buber, M. 34 Bucke, R. M. 100 Buddhism xv, xviii, xx, xxi, 4, 29, 34, 95, 99, 120, 194, 205; and existential nothingness 121–125; modern xiv, xv, xix, xxvii, xxx; psychedelic xxii–xxiii, xxx, 79–89; and psychotherapy 40–41; self 19, 50; Theravada xvi, 21, 98; Three Marks of Existence 82; Western xx; Zen xvi, xix, xxix, xxx, 14, 16, 51–53, 80, 83, 104, 120, 123, 159, 194 Buddhism in England 14

Burroughs, W.: Naked Lunch 177 Burton-Bradley, B. G. 36 Byrds, the 186 California Law Review 191 Campbell, J. 24, 208 Camus, A. 222; “L’Mythe de Sisyphe” 121 capitalist realism xxx, 129–131, 222 Carpenter, E. 208 Carroll, L. 119, 161, 168–170, 174, 179; “A-sitting on A Gate” 175; “Jabberwocky” 169 Carse, J. P. 57, 59, 61 Carus, P.: Gospel of Buddha, The 123 CAW see Church of All Worlds Cayce, E.: There Is a River 95 cenopythagorean ontology 112, 113 censorship laws 202 ceramic model of the universe xxiv, 135–139; peace, implications for 142 C. G. Jung Institute xx Ch’ang Chien 150 Charles, R. 216 Chase, C. xxiii, xxvii, xxviii Chesterton, G. K. 6, 161, 165; “Defence of Nonsense” 169 Chia Tao 153 Chomsky, N. 171 Christianity xvi, xviii, xxvii, 4, 37, 93, 99, 135, 136, 204; Anglican 220 Chuang Tzu 152 Chuang Tzu 152 Church of All Worlds (CAW) 96, 98 Circle of Sex schema xxvi Clare, A. 36 Clark, J.: “Health Insurance and the Transexual” 212–213 classic monotheism xxiv, xxvii, 135 Claxton, G. 54 Cleaver, E.: Soul on Ice xvii Cobb, J., Jr.: Liberation of Life, The 143 Cohen, K. xxv, xxviii, 153 Cohen, K. S.: Wind-Flow: The Art of Chinese Poetry 151 Cold War 97 Columbus, P. xx, xxi, 3, 10, 45, 46 Communication Project xxi, 15–17 consciousness xx, xxi, 5, 31, 34, 39, 44–53, 64, 82, 94–100, 102, 104, 110, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 133, 141, 161, 166, 191, 193, 203, 216; altered

Index  235 states of xvi, 45, 80; chemistry of xvii; hard problem of 44; historically-effected xxiii; human xiv, 47, 93, 96, 120; psychedelic 80, 83–86, 88, 89; religious 92; self-consciousness xxx, 16; of the specious present xxii; therapeutic xxiii contrived contingencies 65, 66, 72 control society 68, 69 Cooper, J. W. xxviii Copan, P. xviii, xxviii Corless, R. 8 Corpus Hermeticum 93 countercultural spirituality 79, 204 Cox, H. 34 Crawford, J. 215 creative morality 113 Crowley, A. 98 Csikszentmihaly, M. 66 Cushman, S. B. xxvi, xxx cybernetics xxx, xxxi, 68, 205, 206, 212 Daggett, M. P. 95 Danielou, A. 185 d’Aquili, E. 47 Dashti, L. xxvii Das, R. 170 Dattel, M. 170 Daughters of Bilitis 199, 200 Davis, E. 79 DCT see Divine Command Theory death xxv, xxvi, 34–35, 87, 95, 109, 131, 141, 142, 157; anxiety xvi, 18, 36; Black Death 138; ego and 36–37 de Beauvoir, S. 123 de Chardin, P. T. 34, 139 Deleuze, G. 68, 69, 173, 179 Denning, M. 100 desacralization (or de-sacramentalization) 99 de Shazer, S. 23 DeVoss, D. N. 200 Dewart, L. 34 dharma 85 dialectical idealism 126 dialectical materialism 129 Diamond Sutra 156 Dietrich, M. 215 digital gameplay 51, 57, 58, 60, 64–68, 70–72 disconnection 17, 19, 81, 89, 119

discord 87–88 Divine Command Theory (DCT) xxiv, 113, 115–116 Does It Matter? 143, 210 Don Quixote 67 Don Quixote 152 double bind concept 16–17, 63–64, 67 Doublefine 60 Dow Schull, N. 68 dramatic model of the universe 138–142; peace, implications for 141, 142; social justice and ecological harmony 143, 144 Druid Heights 206, 214 dukkha 82 Dutton, E. P. 170 dysfunctional social systems xxi, 30 Eastern philosophy, Jung’s influence on: hermeneutic reflexivity 3–5; modern psychology 5–7; shadow side of Watts 7–9 Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life (KQED television program) xix ecological harmony 141–144 Edelmann, H. 170 ego 34, 44, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70, 124; control 101; and death 36–37; egoic functions 36; ego-mind 123; embodied 53; liberation 32; transcendence 31, 32 Eichler, R. M. 28 Eliade, M. 102 Elisofon, E. 103; Erotic Spirituality: The Vision of Konarak 102 Elkins, D. 30–31 Ellenberger, H. F. 45; Existence 17 Elliot, T. S. 52 Ellis, A. 206, 208 Ellis, H. 207, 209 embodied cognition xxii, 45, 49–51, 53 embodiment 50–51, 54 Emerson, R. W. 95 empiricism 120; radical xxii, 45, 46, 48–49, 112; scientific 48 enactivism 50 Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology 103 eros 34, 83, 92–94, 100–103 Esalen Institute 24, 40, 152, 154, 204 estrangement 15, 17, 18, 33, 36, 80–84, 190

236  Index Etc.: A Review of General Semantics 28 eternal oscillation 102 evangelicalism 84 Everything 58–59, 71, 72; critique of 60–64 existential nothingness 121–125 Fadiman, J. xvii Fanon, F. 123 finite game 57, 59, 61 First Occult Review Reader, The 95 Fischer, M. 129 fixity 164 flow 66 Flow of Zen 151 Foucault, M. xvii Four Noble Truths xxx Franklin, E. xx Frankl, V.: Will to Meaning, The 36 Freedland, N.: Occult Explosion, The 95–96 free play xxii, xxxii, 57–59, 61, 65 Freudian psychology 204 Freud, S. 18, 32, 40, 101 Fromm, E. xxi, 13, 80; sociocultural critique 18–19 Fuller, B. 34 Fuller, R. C. xvi, 81 fully-automatic model of the universe 137–138, 142; peace, implications for 142 functionalism 54 Furlong, M. 8, 155 Gadamer, H.-G. xxiii, 94 gamification xxii, 57–60, 64, 66, 70–72 Garcia, J 189 Gardner, J. 173 Garland, J. 215 Gautama Buddha 123 Gay Liberation Book, The xxvi, 201, 214 gender 201–206; identity xviii, 199, 200, 207, 210, 211, 214–216; orientation 207 Gendlin, E. 47 Genet, J. 215 Genuine Progress Indicator 143 Gergen, K. xxi, 20 Gestalt Therapy 34, 46 Gidlow, E. 14, 153, 206, 208 Ginsberg, A. 30, 87, 184, 208, 214, 215

global capitalism xxx Gnostica xxiii, 98–100 gnostic occultism 96–100 Goethe, J. W. xxii, 54, 102 Goldenhersh, M. 153 Goldstein, K. xxii, 54 Goodman, P. 30, 214 Goolishian, H. 23 Gordon, L. 34–35, 38 Gordon, S. xxii, 33, 47; “Alan Watts and Neurophenomenology” xxi Gormenghast 181 Govinda, L. xiv Graham, B. 81 Grateful Dead 188 Grayson, N. 60–64, 67, 72 Green Egg xxiii, 96, 98, 99 Green Gulch Zen Center 157 Grof, S. 24 Group Analysis 36 Grove Press 208 Gurdjieff, G. I. 95, 98 habituation 109, 110 haiku xxv, 154, 161, 168 Haley, J. 13, 15, 17, 27; “Control in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy” 16 Han Call 198, 199 Harper’s Magazine 204 Harrison, G. 184, 186 Harr, L. E.: Dragonfly: A Quarterly of Haiku 151 Hartley, E. 151 Hasegawa, S. 154 Hayes, J. 153 Hayward, T. 142 Heard, G. 203 “Heathen Invasion, The” 95 Hegel, G. 126 Heidegger, M. 47 Henderson, J. L. 31, 32 Hendrix, J. 184 Her xv hermeneutics 93, 94; hermeneutical phenomenology 46; hermeneutic reflexivity 3–5 Hermeticism 93 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 98 Heyman, M. xxv hieros gamos or hierogamy (sacred marriage) 100–102

Index  237 Hiett, P. J. 39 Hillman, J. 21 Hinduism xx, xxiv, xxix, 29, 45, 53, 79, 88, 95, 99, 101, 194 Hindustani music 184–196 Hinkle, B. M. 31 Hirschfeld, M. 207, 209 holistic biology 54 holistic negation 119–133 holistic neuroscience 54 holographic theory 49 homophile communication network, queer remix in 199–201 Hood, R. W. 190 Hosking, D. M. 20 “Houseboat Summit” 184–185 Hoyt, M. 20 Huff, P. A. xviii, xxxii Huizinga, J. 61 Hulsey, N. xxii humanistic psychology xx–xxii, 45–46 Human Potential Movement xxi, 40 Humphreys, A. 14 Humphreys, C. xiv, xxv, 14, 155 Humpty Dumpty 174 Hurley, M. 99 Husserl, E., 47–49, 53 Husserlian transcendental phenomenological method 46 Huxley, A. 85, 92, 100, 191, 203 hyper-reality 127 id 40 immersive play 64 immortal archetypes 84 industrial modernity 131–133 infinite game 57–72; Everything, critique of 60–64; simulation 69–72 instrumentality/instrumentalism 61, 64, 67, 72 interplay 57, 58, 61 Irish Times, The 36 Isherwood, C. 203, 208 Islam 93, 135, 136 Is-ness 85 isolation 18 Iwamura, J. N. xix; Virtual Orientalism xviii Jackson, D. 16, 17 Jacobs, H. “Sandy” 188

James, W. xxii, xxiii, 45, 47, 48, 51–52, 110–112, 191 Jnana Yogi 149 Jobiska, A. 181n12 Johnstone, M. 154 Jones, F. 98, 102, 103 Jones, W. 186 Joplin, J. 184 Journal of Analytical Psychology 28 Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 39 Joy Workshops 34 Judaism 93, 135, 136 Jung, C. G. 29, 32; influence on Eastern philosophy 3–11; “Mana Personality, The” 7; “Mystics of Today” 6; Secret of the Golden Flower, The xx, 27 Kandel, L.: Love Book, The 170 Kant, I. 121 Kapleau, R. P. 83 Keightley, A. 162 Keller, C. A. 37 Kerouac, J. xviii Khan, Ali Akbar xxvi, 184–196 Khan, Allauddin 185 King, M. J. Y. 186 Kinsey, A. 206, 208, 209 kinship relations 99 Knee of Listening, The 98 Kocela, C. 223 Kohn, J. 188, 189 Korzybski, A. 149 Kotaku 60 KPFA 198; Folio 94 Kripal, J. J. xvii, xxi, 39, 40, 98–99 Krippner, S. 83 Krishna, G. 8 Krishnamurti, J. 6, 203 Ladder, The xxvi, 198, 200, 207 Laing, R. D. 24, 100 land ethic 114 Langlitz, N.: Neuropsychedelia xvii Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching 150 Laozi 130 Lappalainen, K.: Outside the Alphabets 170 Laughlin, C. 47 LaVey, A.: “Church of Satan” 96 law of reversed effort 129–131

238  Index Lawrence, D. H. 102; Lady Chatterly’s Lover 103 Lax, W. 20 Lear, E. 161, 168–170, 174, 179, 181n12; “Dong with a Luminous Nose” 176; Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets 171; “Young Lady of Lucca” 178 Leary, D. J. 34 Leary, T. 85, 86, 92, 170, 180n7, 184, 185, 194, 196 Lecercle, J. -J. 171 Leopold, A. 114 Levering, M. 201–202 Levinovitz, A. 175, 181n10 libido 40, 101 Life 209 life-as-play 64, 70, 71 Lin, Y.: Importance of Living, The 151 literary nonsense xxv, 159–179 Llewellyn Publications 98 loneliness 18 Longo, P. xxvi, xxvii Lord Love a Duck 179 Lord of the Rings 155 Lovdjieff, C. xvii Lowell, R. 10 Lyft 68 Magical Philosophy, The 100 Magritte, R. 126 Malaby, T. M. 65–66 MANAS 28 “Mandala House” 150 Mann, F. 37 Marcuse, H. xix, xxxi, xxxii, 27, 30, 81 Martin, D. 198, 200 Marx, K. 18 Maslow, A. 13, 24, 45, 92, 100 Mattachine Review, The 198–199, 207 Mattachine Society 200 Maturana, H. R. 50 May, R. xxi, 13, 24, 45; Existence 17; sociocultural critique 17–18 McClay, B. D. 10–11 McCoy, D. 188 McDowall, R. 179 McEvilley, T. 123 McGonigal, J. 66 McLuhan, M. 34 McManus, J. 47 Mead, G. H. xxi, 13, 20

Meeker, M. 200 Mehrpour, S. xxvii Mental Research Institute (MRI) 17 Merleau-Ponty, M. xxii, 47, 54 Metzner, R. 85 Meyerowitz, J. 210 Miller, H. 204 mind 20, 50; ego-mind 123; as phenomenology in action 51; as a selfless 51 mind–body problem 109 Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction 21 mindfulness meditation (samma sati) xvi Minz, E. 34 Modern Mystic and Monthly Science Review, The 6 Moffett, J. 19, 33 Monterey International Pop Festival 184 Moore, A. xxiv, xxx moral competence, in religious praxis 113–116 MRI see Mental Research Institute Mumford, L. 81 Murphy, E. 208 Murphy, G. 45 Murphy, M. 92 Murray, H. 45 Myers, D. 71 Nada Brahma 192, 195 Naess, A. xxiv, 139 Needham, J. 27; Science and Civilization in China 151 neo-Advaita 84 neo-orientalism xiii Neo-Paganism 93 Neo-Platonism 113 neurophenomenology 44–54; embodied cognition 49–51; first-person methods 47; radical empiricism 48–49; specious present 51–53; third-person methods 47 Newell, A. 70 Newsweek 209 Noguera, G. 214 no-mind 123–125 nondirective counseling 21 nondualism xiii, 62, 69, 205 non-repressive sublimation xxxii

Index  239 Nordstrom, L. xxxii, 223; “Wayward Mysticism of Alan Watts, The” xiii Nostra Aetate xxix nothingness xxiv, 120–126, 133, 142, 222 not-knowing perspective 21–23 nowness, fourfold structure of 53 Oakes, M. 153 Occult Explosion Album, The 96 occultism of Aquarian religion 92–104; Bildung 103–104; enframing of 94–96; eros 100–103; gnostic occultism 96–100 Occult Review 95 ONE 200, 207 ontology xvi, xxi, 18, 30, 33, 34, 44, 51, 67, 108, 110, 111, 120–122, 125, 128, 130, 133, 135, 189, 195, 206, 212; cenopythagorean 112, 113; of negation 121; panentheistic 139 O’Reilly, D. 58–60 Orion xxiii, 94, 95 Ostdiek, G. xxiii–xxiv, xxviii Osto, D. 79–80, 87 Ouspensky, P. D. 95, 100 Paganism xxiii, 97–98; contemporary 93; Neo-Paganism 93 panentheism xxiv, xxvii–xxviii, 135, 139 Pan-Graphic Press 198–200 pantheism xviii, xxvii, xxviii, 93 Parabola xvi Paramahamsa Yogananda 99 peace: ceramic model of the universe 142; dramatic model of the universe 141, 142; fullyautomatic model of the universe 142; implications for 140–144; inner 141–142; outer 141–142 Peake, M.: Book of Nonsense, A 181 Pendderwen, G. 99 Perls, F. 24, 34 person-centered perspective 22 phenomenological comportment 54 phenomenological ethology 54 phenomenological hermeneutics xxvii Phillips, O. 100 philosophical unconscious xxi, 29 Pickwick Papers 152

Pierce, C. S. xxiii, 121, 122 Pilgrim, R. xxxii, 223; “Wayward Mysticism of Alan Watts, The” xiii Plato 132 Plato’s Cave 131 play 57–72; ambiguous 57; cosmology 57, 71; digital gameplay 51, 57, 58, 60, 64–68, 70–72; free xxii, xxxii, 57–59, 61, 65; quixotic 67–68, 70; theology 64, 72 Playboy 208–210, 214 post-World War II psychotherapy, in North America 13–24; communication patterns 15–17; not-knowing perspective 21–23; people as meaningmaking and meaning-sharing beings, comprehending 14–15; simplicity 21–23; social construction and Eastern philosophical influences 19–21; sociocultural critique 17–19 pragmaticism 109–113 pratityasamutpada (dependent origination) 82 Pribram, K., 49 Price, V.: Transvestia 210–211 primary repression 205 problematics xvii–xx Prothero, S. 104 psychedelic Buddhism xxii–xxiii, xxx, 79–89; discord and unity 87–88; enframing 83–87; responding to estrangement 80–83 psychedelics xiv, xvi, xviii, xix, xxvi, xxvii, 49, 184–196; Buddhism see psychedelic Buddhism; counterculture, criticisms of 84; mysticism 79, 80, 83 Psychiatry 28 Psychoanalytic Review, The 28 psychotherapy xvi; 1960s “crisis” in 28–29; post-World War II, in North America 13–24 Psychotherapy East and West (Watts) xvi, xxi, xxix, xxxi, 10, 13, 15, 19, 22–24, 95, 96, 99, 205, 206; 1961–1970 28–35; academic and literary reviews (1970s–1980s) 35–37; criticism and commentary 31–35; Orientalism 38–39; postmodernism 38–39; in 21st century 39–41

240  Index Puhakka, K. 39–41; “Buddhist Wisdom in the West: A Fifty-Year Perspective on the Contributions of Alan Watts” 40 purpose 164 queer remixing 210–215; in homophile communication network 199–201 queer rhetoric in situ xxvi, 201 queer theory 202 quixotic play 67–68, 70 radical empiricism xxii, 45, 46, 48–49, 112 Raj, R.: Metamorphosis: The Magazine for F-M Transsexuals 212 Ransom, D. C. 16 Raschke, C. A. 87 rationalism xx, 4, 5, 48, 120, 212 Reagan Era xiii Reck, D. 189–190 relational self 20 religiousness xvi religious wisdom (gnosis) 83 remixing: definition of 200; queer 199–201, 210–215 repressive desublimation xiv, xix, xxx–xxxii repressive sublimation 101 Revue de Theologie et de Philosophie 37 Rexroth, K. 14 Rhymes Without Reason 181 Rice, D. L. xxi, 3, 10, 46 Richmond, L. 214 Ridolfo, J. 200 right mindfulness (sammā-sati) 85 Rioch, M. J. 28, 30 Roberts, O. 81 Rogers, C. 13, 21, 24, 45; On Becoming a Person 22 Rolling Stones, the 186 Rosch, E. 49–50 Rose-Innes, A.: Chinese and Japanese Characters 151 Roszak, T. 97, 100, 104; Unfinished Animal 93 Ruckert, G. 188 Ruesch, J. 32–33 Sadler, A. W. 9 Said, E. xix, xviii; Orientalism xxix, 35

Saijo, H. 188 salience xv–xvii Salzman, L. 28 Sanders, C.: “Alan Watts and the Re-visioning of Psychotherapy” xx–xxi San Francisco Chronicle 169 “San Francisco Renaissance” 185, 204 Sarraute, N.: Portrait of a Man Unknown 33 Sartre, J.-P. xxiv, 33, 120–122, 124–129, 132–133; Being and Nothingness 120, 121; Existentialism is a Humanism 122 Sasaki, R. F. xiv, xviii Sasaki, Sokei-an xiv Satir, V. 24 SBNR (spiritual but not religious) community xvi Schopenhauer, A. 119–120 Schutz, W. 34 Schwenk, T.: Sensitive Chaos 151 scientific empiricism 48 SCP see Alan Watts Society for Comparative Philosophy Second Vatican Council xxviii Secret of the Golden Flower, The 4–5 secular competence, in religious praxis 107–117 secular mindfulness xiv, xix, xxvii self 19, 44, 45, 50, 81, 87, 89, 99, 101, 111–113, 139, 144; relational 20; Romantic vision of 160; as skin-encapsulated ego 135, 137, 143; supernatural 113; transcendental 113; virtual 51 self-awareness 61, 111 self-help xvi, 119, 120 self-love 87 self-reflection 107, 109, 110 sensus communis 94, 96, 100, 102–104 Seton, S.: “Transsexual Theater” 213 Sewell, W. 173; Field of Nonsense, The 170 sex differentiation 205–206 Sex Orientation Scale 211 sexual deviance 207 sexual dualism 205, 206 sexuality 201–206 sexual orientation 143, 199, 200, 207, 209–211, 215 sexual revolution 208 shadow side of 7–9

Index  241 Shankar, R. 184–187, 192–195; campaign against drugs 184; “Great Sitar Explosion, The” 186 Shannon, C. 70 Shaw, F. L. 211 Shaw, G. B. 34 Shipley, M. xxii–xxiii Sicart, M. 67–68 Simon, H. 70 simplicity 21–23 simulation xv, xxii, 58–60, 64, 66–72 Sire, J. W. xxviii Skynner, A. C. R. 36 Sluzki, C. E. 16 Smith, D. L. xiii–xiv, xvii, 63 Snyder, G. xiv, 14, 99, 151, 184 social constructionism 19–21 social justice xv, xxx, 141–144, 150 Solomon, B. 152 soma myth 88 Somers, R. 167, 206 Sontag, S.: “Notes on Camp” 215 specious present 51–53 Spectator, The 38 Spence, L.: Encyclopedia of Occultism 95 Spiegelberg, F. xiv spirituality xiv, xvi, xix, 7, 69, 101, 169, 189, 203, 213, 216; altruistic 88; countercultural 79, 204; embodied 34; psychedelic 80; sex and 202 Sri Aurobindo 139 Stark, J. 153 Stein, G. 208 Stern, D. 47 Stewart, S.: Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature 171 St. James, Margo 153 Stolen Paper Editions 170 Streng, F. 154 Stryker, S. 210 Sturcey, C. 153 submission 68 Suchness 88 Sugrue, T. 95 Suits, B. 61 supernatural dualism 136 supernaturalism 142 surveillance capitalism 70 Sutton, M. A.: American Apocalypse 81 Sutton-Smith, B. 57

Suzuki, D. T. xiv, xviii, xxix, 6, 14, 83, 95, 119, 123, 151; Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism 152 Suzuki, S. xiv Swami Prabhavananda 203 Swami Vivekananda 99 Taoism xx, xxi, xxiv, xxix, 3, 4, 27–29, 31, 45, 53, 79, 82, 94, 120, 139, 149–152, 154 Tao Te Ching 130 Taylor, E. 31 Taylor, T. L. 72 Teachers College Record 28 techne-Zen xix, xx, xxx, xxxi temporality 125–129 Theosophy 84 Theravada Buddhism xvi, 98; Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction 21 Thompson, E. K. 49–50; “Homosexual in Our Society, The” 198 Thoreau, H. D. 95 Thornton, E. 36–37 Three Poisons xxx Through the Looking-Glass 119, 178 Tigges, W. 170–171 Tillich, P. 136–137, 163 Time 209 “Time-Extended Marathon” group encounters 34 Transcendentalism 84 transcendental phenomenology xxvii, 46 transcultural comparisons 29–30 Transgender Tapestry 213 transmutations 93 transpersonal psychology 45 Tu Fu 156 Turnabout xxvi Turnabout: A Magazine of Transvestism 210, 211 Turner, L. 215 Turning, A. 70 Tweed, T. A. 104 Twenty Minutes 213 Uber 68 ubiquity xv–xvii Unified Field Theory 151 unintentional communities 206–210 unity 87–88

242  Index urbanism 98 Utne Reader, The xvi Varela, F. xxii, 49–51, 53; and neurophenomenology 46–47; and radical empiricism 48–49 Vedanta 3, 4, 27, 28, 138, 139, 152, 203, 205, 213 Vest, D. B. 203 Vidal, G. 215 Vipassana xvi Volkening, H. 169, 170 von Kraft-Ebbing, R., 213 von Uexkill, J. J. xxii, 54 Wade, B. 187 Wagner, R.: Tristan and Isolde 103 Warner, M.: Fear of a Queer Planet 202 Watts, A. W.: and Ali Akbar Khan 184–196; Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion 8, 9, 94; Beyond Theology xviii, xxvii– xxix, 101; “Birdle Burble” 162, 163, 173; Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, The xxiii, 49, 99, 140, 141, 160–161, 170, 181n8, 212; “Clothes—On and Off” 214, 215; complete insecurity of 116–117; “Conversation on Goofing, A” 170; “Ditargument” 175–179; Does it Matter? 143; “Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life” 104; Erotic Spirituality: The Vision of Konarak 102; Gay Liberation Book, The xxvi; “Haiku” 168; holistic negation of 119–133; and infinite game 57–72; intellectual endeavor xiv; “Is there an ‘Unconscious’?” 6; Joyous Cosmology, The xvi–xvii, 82, 86, 167; Legacy of Asia and Western Man, The xx, 4–6, 10, 165–166; Legacy of Asia to Psychotherapy East and West, The 3; “Lovelorn Loon, The” 169; Man and Woman 99–101, 164, 168, 205, 214; Meaning of Happiness, The xx, 7, 10, 32, 141; Modern Mystic,

The 95; In My Own Way 194, 201; Nature 99–101, 164, 168, 205, 214; “Negative Way, The” 163; “No More Armed Clergymen” 201, 214; Nonsense xxv, 161–167, 169–171, 174–175, 181n8; and occultism of Aquarian religion 92–104; “On Drudgery” 170; “On Nonsense” 170–172, 174, 181n8; problematics xvii–xx; “Psychedelics and Religious Experience” 191, 192; “Psychology of Acceptance, The” 6–7; Psychotherapy East and West see Psychotherapy East and West; “Rejoice, Ye Pure in’Art” 162, 163, 173, 180n2; “Reverend Crowson Munsie” 162, 163, 165, 180n2; and secular competence in religious praxis 107–117; “Sense of Nonsense” 164, 174, 175, 180n4; “Spirituality and Sexuality” 100; Supreme Identity, The 94; Tao–The Watercourse Way xxv, 9, 52, 150, 151; This is IT and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience 160, 163–164, 166–175; Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity, The 95, 99, 103; “Way Beyond the West” 200–201; “Wealth Versus Money” 210; Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, The xxiii, 8, 119, 128, 133, 160, 172, 180n2; “Zen” 168; individual entries Watts, M., 24 Watzlawick, P. 16, 17 Way of Zen, The xix, xxx–xxxi, 20, 168 Weakland, J. 15, 16, 23 wealth–money distinction xxxii Weiner, N. 70 Weisskopf-Joelson, E. 28–30 Welch, M. D. 180n5 Western Buddhism xx Western Scientism 220 Wheeler, B. L. 223 Wheelwright, P. 223 White, J.: “Evolution and the Future of Humanity” 100; Highest State of Consciousness, The 100

Index  243 Whitehead, A. N. xxiv, 27, 139, 140, 151 Whyte, L. L. xxv, 27, 151–152 Whyte, W. 81 Wilde, O. 215 Wilhelm, R. 27 Willard, A. 186 Williams, R. J. xix, xx Williams, R. D. 58 Wittgenstein, L. 151 Woodhead, L. xvi work as play 58 world systems theory 143

Yee, N. 67 Yoga 139 Yonge, K. A. xvii

Zaehner, R. C. 38 Zalesky, P. xiii zazen (samma samadhi; quiet sitting) xvi, 154 Zeitschrift fur Katholische Theologie 37 Zell, T. 97 Zell-Ravenheart, O. 97 Zen and the Beat Way xiii “Zen and the Problem of Control” 16 Zen Buddhism xvi, xix, xxix, xxx, 14, 34, 80, 83, 104, 120, 159, 194; double bind concept 16; embodied cognition 51; nothingness 123; stream of consciousness 52–53 Zen Studies Society 155 Zhang, Y. 223 Žižek, S. xx, 129, 131 Zuboff, S. 70