name	Aldous Huxley
alt	Blurry monochrome head-and-shoulders portrait of Aldous Huxley, facing viewer's right, chin a couple of inches above hand
birth name	Aldous Leonard Huxley
birth date	July 26, 1894
birth place	Godalming, Surrey,England
death date	November 22, 1963
death place	Los Angeles, California,United States
resting place	Compton, Surrey,England
occupation	Writer (fiction & non-fiction)
notableworks	''Brave New World'', ''Island'', ''Point Counter Point'', ''The Doors of Perception''
influences	Swami Prabhavananda, J. Krishnamurti, F. Matthias Alexander, Yevgeny Zamyatin, William Blake, Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells, Thomas Traherne
influenced	Christopher Isherwood, Michel Houellebecq, Jim Morrison, George Orwell, Huston Smith, Kurt Vonnegut
signature	Aldous Huxley signature.svg }}

Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including ''Brave New World'' and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine ''Oxford Poetry'', and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Huxley spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.

Aldous Huxley was a humanist and pacifist, and he was latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. He is also well known for advocating and taking psychedelics.

By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank, and highly regarded as one of the most prominent explorers of visual communication and sight-related theories as well.

Early life

Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, UK, in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley and his first wife, Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School. Julia was the niece of poet and critic Matthew Arnold and the sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and controversialist ("Darwin's Bulldog"). His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. Aldous had another brother, Noel Trevelyan (1891–1914), who committed suicide after a period of clinical depression.

Huxley began his learning in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, then continued in a school named Hillside. His teacher was his mother who supervised him for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside, he was educated at Eton College. Huxley's mother died in 1908 when he was 14. In 1911, he suffered an illness (keratitis punctata) which "left [him] practically blind for two to three years". Aldous's near-blindness disqualified him from service in the First World War. Once his eyesight recovered sufficiently, he was able to study English literature at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1916 he edited ''Oxford Poetry'' and later graduated with first class honours. His brother Julian wrote,

I believe his blindness was a blessing in disguise. For one thing, it put paid to his idea of taking up medicine as a career... His uniqueness lay in his universalism. He was able to take all knowledge for his province.

Following his education at Balliol, Huxley was financially indebted to his father and had to earn a living. He taught French for a year at Eton, where Eric Blair (later to become George Orwell) and Stephen Runciman were among his pupils, but was remembered as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn’t keep discipline. Nevertheless, Blair and others were impressed by his use of words. For a short while in 1918, he was employed acquiring provisions at the Air Ministry.

Significantly, Huxley also worked for a time in the 1920s at the technologically-advanced Brunner and Mond chemical plant in Billingham, Teesside, and the most recent introduction to his famous science fiction novel ''Brave New World'' (1932) states that this experience of "an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence" was one source for the novel.

Career

Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of 17 and began writing seriously in his early 20s. His first published novels were social satires, beginning with ''Crome Yellow'' (1921).

Bloomsbury set

During the First World War, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer. Here he met several Bloomsbury figures including Bertrand Russell and Clive Bell. Later, in ''Crome Yellow'' (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. In 1919 he married Maria Nys, a Belgian woman he met at Garsington; they had one son. The family lived in Italy part of the time in the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death in 1930, Huxley edited Lawrence's letters (1933).

Works of this period included important novels on the dehumanising aspects of scientific progress, most famously ''Brave New World'', and on pacifist themes (for example, ''Eyeless in Gaza''). In ''Brave New World'' Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning. Huxley was strongly influenced by F. Matthias Alexander and included him as a character in ''Eyeless in Gaza''.

Starting from this period, Huxley began to write and edit non-fiction works on pacifist issues, including ''Ends and Means'', ''An Encyclopedia of Pacifism'', and ''Pacifism and Philosophy'', and was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union.

The U.S.

In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, with his wife Maria, son Matthew, and friend Gerald Heard. He lived in the U.S., mainly in southern California, until his death, but also for a time in Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote ''Ends and Means'' (published in 1937). In this work he examines the fact that although most people in modern civilisation agree that they want a world of "liberty, peace, justice, and brotherly love", they have not been able to agree on how to achieve it.

Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta (Veda-Centric Hinduism), meditation, and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa. In 1938 Huxley befriended J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. He also became a Vedantist in the circle of Hindu Swami Prabhavananda, and introduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle. Not long after, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, ''The Perennial Philosophy'', which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world. Huxley's book affirmed a sensibility that insists there are realities beyond the generally accepted "five senses" and that there is genuine meaning for humans beyond both sensual satisfactions and sentimentalities.

Huxley became a close friend of Remsen Bird, president of Occidental College. He spent much time at the college, which is in the Eagle Rock neighbourhood of Los Angeles. The college appears as "Tarzana College" in his satirical novel ''After Many a Summer'' (1939). The novel won Huxley that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Huxley also incorporated Bird into the novel.

During this period Huxley earned some Hollywood income as a writer. In March 1938, his friend Anita Loos, a novelist and screenwriter, put him in touch with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer who hired Huxley for ''Madame Curie'' which was originally to star Greta Garbo and be directed by George Cukor. (The film was eventually filmed by MGM in 1943 with a different director and stars.) Huxley received screen credit for ''Pride and Prejudice'' (1940) and was paid for his work on a number of other films, including ''Jane Eyre'' (1944).

However, his experience in Hollywood was not a success. When he wrote a synopsis of ''Alice in Wonderland'', Walt Disney rejected it on the grounds that "he could only understand every third word". Huxley's leisurely development of ideas, it seemed, was not suitable for the movie moguls, who demanded fast, dynamic dialogue above all else. For Dick Huemer, during the 1940s, Huxley went to the first of a five meetings' session to elaborate the script of ''Alice in Wonderland'' but never came again. For author John Grant, although the movie's character the Caterpillar displays some characteristics familiar from Huxley's discussion of his experiments with hallucinogens, Huxley's contribution to the movie is nonexistent.

On 21 October 1949, Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', congratulating him on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". In his letter to Orwell, he predicted:

Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.

Post World War II

After the Second World War, Huxley applied for United States citizenship. His application was continuously deferred on the grounds that he would not say he would take up arms to defend the U.S. He claimed a philosophical, rather than a religious objection, and therefore was not exempt under the McCarran Act. So, he withdrew his application. Nevertheless, he remained in the country, and in 1959 he turned down an offer of a Knight Bachelor by the Macmillan government. During the 1950s Huxley's interest in the field of psychical research grew keener, and his later works are strongly influenced by both mysticism and his experiences with psychedelic drugs.

In October 1930, the English occultist Aleister Crowley dined with Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumours persist that Crowley introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion. He was introduced to mescaline (considered to be the key active ingredient of peyote) by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953. Through Dr. Osmond, Huxley met millionaire Alfred Matthew Hubbard who would deal with LSD on a wholesale basis. On 24 December 1955, Huxley took his first dose of LSD. Indeed, Huxley was a pioneer of self-directed psychedelic drug use "in a search for enlightenment", famously taking 100 micrograms of LSD as he lay dying. His psychedelic drug experiences are described in the essays ''The Doors of Perception'' (the title deriving from some lines in the book ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'' by William Blake), and ''Heaven and Hell''. Some of his writings on psychedelics became frequent reading among early hippies. While living in Los Angeles, Huxley was a friend of Ray Bradbury. According to Sam Weller's biography of Bradbury, the latter was dissatisfied with Huxley, especially after Huxley encouraged Bradbury to take psychedelic drugs.

Association with Vedanta

Beginning in 1939 and continuing until his death in 1963, Huxley had an extensive association with the Vedanta Society of Southern California, founded and headed by Swami Prabhavananda. Together with Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, and other followers he was initiated by the Swami and was taught meditation and spiritual practices.

In 1944 Huxley wrote the introduction to the "Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God", translated by Swami Prabhavanada and Christopher Isherwood, which was published by The Vedanta Society of Southern California.

From 1941 through 1960 Huxley contributed 48 articles to ''Vedanta and the West'', published by the Society. He also served on the editorial board with Isherwood, Heard, and playwright John van Druten from 1951 through 1962.

Huxley also occasionally lectured at the Hollywood and Santa Barbara Vedanta temples. Two of those lectures have been released on CD: ''Knowledge and Understanding'' and ''Who Are We'' from 1955.

After the publication of ''The Doors of Perception'', Huxley and the Swami disagreed about the meaning and importance of the LSD drug experience, which may have caused the relationship to cool, but Huxley continued to write articles for the Society's journal, lecture at the temple, and attend social functions.

Eyesight

With respect to details about the true quality of Huxley's eyesight at specific points in his life, there are differing accounts. Around 1939, Huxley encountered the Bates Method for better eyesight, and a teacher, Margaret Corbett, who was able to teach him in the method. In 1940, Huxley relocated from Hollywood to a ''ranchito'' in the high desert hamlet of Llano, California, in northernmost Los Angeles County. Huxley then said that his sight improved dramatically with the Bates Method and the extreme and pure natural lighting of the southwestern American desert. He reported that for the first time in over 25 years, he was able to read without glasses and without strain. He even tried driving a car along the dirt road beside the ranch. He wrote a book about his successes with the Bates Method, ''The Art of Seeing'', which was published in 1942 (US), 1943 (UK). It was from this period, with the publication of the generally disputed theories contained in the latter book, that a growing degree of popular controversy arose over the subject of Huxley’s eyesight.

It was, and to a noticeable extent still is, widely held that, for most of his life, since the illness in his teens which left Huxley nearly blind, that his eyesight was exceedingly poor (despite the partial recovery which had enabled him to study at Oxford). For instance, some ten years after publication of ''The Art of Seeing'', in 1952, Bennett Cerf was present when Huxley spoke at a Hollywood banquet, wearing no glasses and apparently reading his paper from the lectern without difficulty: "Then suddenly he faltered—and the disturbing truth became obvious. He wasn't reading his address at all. He had learned it by heart. To refresh his memory he brought the paper closer and closer to his eyes. When it was only an inch or so away he still couldn't read it, and had to fish for a magnifying glass in his pocket to make the typing visible to him. It was an agonising moment."

On the other hand, Huxley's second wife, Laura Archera Huxley, would later emphasise in her biographical account, ''This Timeless Moment'': "One of the great achievements of his life: that of having regained his sight." Here, she portrays the accomplishment as both metaphorical and considerably physiological in nature, attributing that which she cites J. Krishnamurti as naming the spirit of "freedom from the known", which she suggests that Huxley applied, non-exhaustively, in writing ''The Art of Seeing'' and utilising the Bates Method. After revealing a letter she wrote to the ''Los Angeles Times'' disclaiming the label of Huxley as a "poor fellow who can hardly see" by Walter C. Alvarez, she tempers this: "Although I feel it was an injustice to treat Aldous as though he were blind, it is true there were many indications of his impaired vision. For instance, although Aldous did not wear glasses, he would quite often use a magnifying lens." Laura Huxley proceeds to elaborate a few nuances of inconsistency peculiar to Huxley's vision. Her account, in this respect, is discernibly congruent with the following sample of Huxley's own words from ''The Art of Seeing''. "The most characteristic fact about the functioning of the total organism, or any part of the organism, is that it is not constant, but highly variable." Nevertheless, the topic of Huxley’s eyesight continues to endure similar, significant controversy, regardless of how trivial a subject matter it might initially appear.

Personal life

He married Maria Nys (10 September 1899 – 12 February 1955), a Belgian he met at Garsington, in 1919. They had one child, Matthew Huxley (19 April 1920 – 10 February 2005), who had a career as an author, anthropologist, and prominent epidemiologist. In 1955, Maria died of breast cancer.

In 1956 he married Laura Archera (1911–2007), also an author. She wrote ''This Timeless Moment'', a biography of Huxley. In 1960 Huxley himself was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, and in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel ''Island'', and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" at the Esalen institute, which were fundamental to the forming of the Human Potential Movement.

Death

On his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to his wife Laura for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular". According to her account of his death in ''This Timeless Moment'', she obliged with an injection at 11:45 am and another a couple of hours later. He died, aged 69, at 5:20 pm on 22 November 1963, several hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Huxley's ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, home of the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton, a village near Guildford, Surrey, England.

Media coverage of Huxley's passing was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on the same day, and the death of the British author C. S. Lewis, who also died on 22 November. This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft's book ''Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley''. Huxley's literary legacy continues to be represented by the literary agency headed by Georges Borchardt.

Awards

1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for ''After Many a Summer Dies the Swan''.

1959 Aldous Huxley American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit for ''Brave New World''.

1962 the Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.

Film adaptations of Huxley's work

1968 ''Point Counter Point'' BBC mini-series by Simon Raven.

1971 ''The Devils'' (Ken Russell) adapted Huxley's ''The Devils of Loudun''.

1998 US TV adaptation of ''Brave New World''

Selected works

Novels

''Crome Yellow'' (1921)

''Antic Hay'' (1923)

''Those Barren Leaves'' (1925)

''Point Counter Point'' (1928)

''Brave New World'' (1932)

''Eyeless in Gaza'' (1936)

''After Many a Summer'' (1939)

''Time Must Have a Stop'' (1944)

''Ape and Essence'' (1948)

''The Genius and the Goddess'' (1955)

''Island'' (1962)

Short story collections

''Limbo'' (1920)

''Mortal Coils'' (1922)

''Little Mexican'' (U.S. title: ''Young Archimedes'') (1924)

''Two or Three Graces'' (1926)

''Brief Candles'' (1930)

''Jacob's Hands: A Fable'' (discovered 1997) co-written with Christopher Isherwood

''Collected Short Stories'' (1944)

Poetry collections

''Oxford Poetry'' (magazine editor) (1916)

''The Burning Wheel'' (1916)

''Jonah'' (1917)

''The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems'' (1918)

''Leda'' (1920)

''Selected Poems'' (1925)

''Arabia Infelix and Other Poems'' (1929)

''The Cicadas and Other Poems'' (1931)

''Collected Poems'' (1971, posthumous)

Essay collections

''On the Margin'' (1923)

''Along the Road'' (1925)

''Essays New and Old'' (1926)

''Proper Studies'' (1927)

''Do What You Will'' (1929)

''Vulgarity in Literature'' (1930)

''Music at Night'' (1931)

''Texts and Pretexts'' (1932)

''The Olive Tree and other essays'' (1936)

''Ends and Means'' (1937)

''Words and their Meanings'' (1940)

''The Art of Seeing'' (1942)

''The Perennial Philosophy'' (1945)

''Science, Liberty and Peace'' (1946)

''Themes and Variations'' (1950)

''The Doors of Perception'' (1954)

''Heaven and Hell'' (1956)

''Adonis and the Alphabet'' (U.S. title: ''Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow'') (1956)

''Collected Essays'' (1958)

''Brave New World Revisited'' (1958)

''Literature and Science'' (1963)

''Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience 1931–63'' (1977)

''The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959'' (1977)

Screenplays

''Brave New World''

''Ape and Essence''

''Pride and Prejudice'' (Collaboration. 1940)

''Madame Curie'' (Collaboration. 1943)

''Jane Eyre'' (Collaboration with John Houseman. 1944)

''A Woman's Vengeance'' 1947

Original screenplay for Disney's animated ''Alice in Wonderland'' 1951 (rejected) ''Eyeless in Gaza'' BBC Mini-series (Collaboration with Robin Chapman. Aired 1971)

Travel books

''Along The Road: Notes and essays of a tourist'' (1925)

''Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey'' (1926)

''Beyond the Mexique Bay: A Traveller's Journey'' (1934)

Children's fiction

''The Crows of Pearblossom'' (1967)

''The Travails and Tribulations of Geoffrey Peacock'' (1967)

Drama

''The Discovery'' (adapted from Francis Sheridan, 1924)

''The World of Light'' (1931)

''Mortal Coils – A Play.'' (Stage version of ''The Gioconda Smile'', 1948)

''The Genius and the Goddess'' (stage version, co-written with Betty Wendel, 1958)

''The Ambassador of Captripedia'' (1967)

''Now More Than Ever'' (Huxley's lost play discovered in 2000 in the University of Münster, Germany's Department of English Literature)

Articles written for ''Vedanta and the West''

Distractions (1941)

Distractions II (1941)

Action and Contemplation (1941)

An Appreciation (1941)

The Yellow Mustard (1941)

Lines (1941)

Some Reflections of the Lord's Prayer (1941)

Reflections of the Lord's Prayer (1942)

Reflections of the Lord's Prayer II (1942)

Words and Reality (1942)

Readings in Mysticism (1942)

Man and Reality (1942)

The Magical and the Spiritual (1942)

Religion and Time (1943)

Idolatry (1943)

Religion and Temperament (1943)

A Note on the Bhagavatam (1943)

Seven Meditations (1943)

On a Sentence From Shakespeare (1944)

The Minimum Working Hypothesis (1944)

From a Notebook (1944)

The Philosophy of the Saints (1944)

That Art Thou (1945)

That Art Thou II (1945)

The Nature of the Ground (1945)

The Nature of the Ground II (1945)

God In the World (1945)

Origins and Consequences of Some Contemporary Thought-Patterns (1946)

The Sixth Patriarch (1946)

Some Reflections on Time (1946)

Reflections on Progress (1947)

Further Reflections on Progress (1947)

William Law (1947)

Notes on Zen (1947)

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread (1948)

A Note on Gandhi (1948)

Art and Religion (1949)

Foreword to an Essay on the Indian Philosophy of Peace (1950)

A Note on Enlightenment (1952)

Substitutes for Liberation (1952)

The Desert (1954)

A Note on Patanjali (1954)

Who Are We? (1955)

Foreword to the Supreme Doctrine (1956)

Knowledge and Understanding (1956)

The "Inanimate" is Alive (1957)

Symbol and Immediate Experience (1960)

Other

''Pacifism and Philosophy'' (1936)

''An Encyclopedia of Pacifism'' (editor, 1937)

''Grey Eminence'' (1941)

''The Devils of Loudun'' (1953)

''The Politics of Ecology'' (1962) (text)

''Selected Letters'' (2007)

Bibliography

Charles J. Rolo (ed.),''The World of Aldous Huxley'', Grosset Universal Library, 1947.

John Atkins, ''Aldous Huxley: A Literary Study'', J. Calder, 1956

Nicholas Murray, ''Aldous Huxley'', Macmillan, 2003, ISBN 0312302375

Laura Archera Huxley, ''This Timeless Moment'', Celestial Arts, 2001, ISBN 0890879689

Sybille Bedford, ''Aldous Huxley: A Biography'', Harper and Row, 1974, rev. ed., Ivan R. Dee, 2002 ISBN 1566634547

James Sexton (ed.), ''Aldous Huxley: Selected Letters'', Ivan R. Dee, 2007, ISBN 1566636292

David King Dunaway, ''Huxley in Hollywood'', HarperCollins 1990, ISBN 0385415915

Aldous Huxley, ''The Human Situation: Aldous Huxley Lectures at Santa Barbara 1959'', Flamingo Modern Classic, 1994, ISBN 0006547327

Conrad Watt (ed.), ''Aldous Huxley'', Routledge, 1997, ISBN 0415159159

Dana Sawyer, ''Aldous Huxley'', Crossroad Publishing Co., 2002, ISBN 0824519872

Jerome Meckier, ''Aldous Huxley: modern satirical novelist of ideas'', Firchow and Nugel editors, LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2006, ISBN 3825896683

References

External links

Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery

BBC discussion programme ''In our time'': "Brave New World". Huxley and the novel. 9 April 2009. (Audio, 45 mins)

BBC ''In their own words'' series. 12 October 1958. (Video, 12 mins).

UC Berkeley, 20 March 1962)">"The Ultimate Revolution" (talk at UC Berkeley, 20 March 1962)

Huxley interviewed on ''The Mike Wallace interview'' 18 May 1958. (Video)

Centre for Huxley Research

Category:19th-century English people Category:Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford Category:British people of Cornish descent Category:Cancer deaths in California Category:Consciousness researchers and theorists Category:Deaths from laryngeal cancer Category:Duke University faculty Category:English essayists Category:English expatriates in the United States Category:English humanists Category:English novelists Category:English pacifists Category:English poets Category:English satirists Category:English science fiction writers Category:English short story writers Category:English travel writers Category:English vegetarians Category:Huxley family Category:People associated with the Human Potential Movement Category:People from Godalming Category:People from Los Angeles, California Category:Psychedelic drug advocates Category:Western mystics Category:Writers from Los Angeles Category:1894 births Category:1963 deaths

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Region	Eastern Philosophy
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Name	Alan Wilson Watts
birth date	January 06, 1915
birth place	Chislehurst, Kent, England
death date	November 16, 1973
death place	Mt. Tamalpais, California, USA
School tradition	Zen Buddhism Hinduism Pantheism Religious naturalism Taoism
Main interests	Personal identity Higher consciousnessAesthetics Public Ethics
Influenced	}}

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest but left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.

Living on the West Coast, Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to ''The Way of Zen'' (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In ''Psychotherapy East and West'' (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be best thought of as a form of psychotherapy, not just a religion. Like Aldous Huxley before him, he explored human consciousness in the essay, "The New Alchemy" (1958), and in the book, ''The Joyous Cosmology'' (1962).

Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. His legacy has been kept alive with the help of his son, Mark Watts, and many of his recorded talks and lectures have found new life on the Internet. Critic Erik Davis notes the freshness, longevity, and continuing relevance of Watts's work today, observing that his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity."

Early years

Watts was born to middle class parents in the village of Chislehurst, Kent, in 1915, living at 3 (now 5) Holbrook Lane. His father was a representative for the London office of the Michelin Tyre Company, his mother a housewife whose father had been a missionary. With modest financial means, they chose to live in pastoral surroundings and Alan, an only child, grew up playing at brookside, learning the names of wildflowers and butterflies. Probably because of the influence of his mother’s religious family the Buchans, an interest in "ultimate things" seeped in. But it mixed with Alan’s own interests in storybook fables and romantic tales of the mysterious Far East.

Watts also later wrote of a mystical vision he experienced while ill with a fever as a child. During this time he was influenced by Far Eastern landscape paintings and embroideries that had been given to his mother by missionaries returning from China. The few Chinese paintings Watts was able to see in England riveted him, and he wrote "I was aesthetically fascinated with a certain clarity, transparency, and spaciousness in Chinese and Japanese art. It seemed to float...". These works of art emphasized the participative relationship of man in nature, a theme that stood fast throughout his life.

Buddhism

By his own assessment, Watts was imaginative, headstrong, and talkative. He was sent to boarding schools (which included both academic and religious training of the Muscular Christianity sort) from early years. Of this religious training, he remarked “Throughout my schooling my religious indoctrination was grim and maudlin…” During holidays in his teen years, Francis Croshaw, a wealthy Epicurean with strong interests in both Buddhism and the exotic little-known aspects of European culture, took Watts on a trip through France. It was not long afterward that Watts felt forced to decide between the Anglican Christianity he had been exposed to and the Buddhism he had read about in various libraries, including Croshaw’s. He chose Buddhism, and sought membership in the London Buddhist Lodge which had been established by Theosophists, and was now run by the barrister Christmas Humphreys. Watts became the organization’s secretary at 16 (1931). The young Watts explored several styles of meditation during these years.

Education

Watts attended the King's School next door to Canterbury Cathedral. Though he was frequently at the top of his classes scholastically, and was given responsibilities at school, he botched an opportunity for a scholarship to Oxford by styling a crucial examination essay in a way that was read as presumptuous and capricious.

Hence, when he graduated from secondary school, Watts was thrust into the world of employment, working in a printing house and later a bank. He spent his spare time involved with the Buddhist Lodge and also under the tutelage of a "rascal guru" named Dimitrije Mitrinović. (Mitrinović was himself influenced by Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, and the varied psychoanalytical schools of Freud, Jung and Adler.) Watts also read widely in philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry and Eastern wisdom. By his own reckoning, and also by that of his biographer Monica Furlong, Watts was primarily an autodidact. His involvement with the Buddhist Lodge in London afforded Watts a considerable number of opportunities for personal growth. Through Humphreys, he contacted eminent spiritual authors (e.g., Nicholas Roerich, Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan) and prominent theosophists like Alice Bailey. In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, heard D.T. Suzuki read a paper, and afterwards was able to meet this esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism. Beyond these discussions and personal encounters, Watts absorbed, by studying the available scholarly literature, the fundamental concepts and terminology of the main philosophies of India and East Asia.

Influences and first publication

In 1936, Watts' first book was published, ''The Spirit of Zen'', which he later acknowledged to be mainly digested from the writings of Suzuki.

In 1938 he and his bride left England to live in America. He had married Eleanor Everett, whose mother Ruth Fuller Everett was involved with a traditional Zen Buddhist circle in New York. A few years later, Ruth Fuller married the Zen master (or "roshi"), Sokei-an Sasaki, and this Japanese gentleman served as a sort of model and mentor to Watts, though he chose not to enter into a formal Zen training relationship with Sasaki. During these years, according to his later writings, Watts had another mystical experience while on a walk with his wife.

Watts' fascination with the Zen (or Chan) tradition—beginning during the 1930s—developed because that tradition embodied the spiritual, interwoven with the practical, as exemplified in the subtitle of his ''Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East''. "Work," "life," and "art" were not demoted due to a spiritual focus.

Priesthood and after

Watts left formal Zen training in New York because the method of the teacher didn't suit him. He was not ordained as a Zen monk, but he felt a need to find a professional outlet for his philosophical inclinations. He entered Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, an Anglican (Episcopalian) school in Evanston, Illinois, where he studied Christian scriptures, theology, and Church history. He attempted to work out a blend of contemporary Christian worship, mystical Christianity, and Asian philosophy. Watts was awarded a master's degree in theology in response to his thesis, which he published as a popular edition under the title ''Behold the Spirit''. The pattern was set, in that Watts did not hide his dislike for religious outlooks that he decided were dour, guilt-ridden, or militantly proselytizing—no matter if they were found within Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism.

All seemed to go reasonably well in his next role, as Episcopalian priest (beginning in 1945, aged 30), until an extramarital affair resulted in his young wife having their marriage annulled. It also resulted in Watts leaving the ministry by 1950. He spent the New Year getting to know Joseph Campbell; his wife, Jean Erdman; and John Cage.

In early 1951, Watts moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Here he taught alongside Saburō Hasegawa, Frederic Spiegelberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, lama Tokwan Tada, and various visiting experts and professors. Hasegawa, in particular, served as a teacher to Watts in the areas of Japanese customs, arts, primitivism, and perceptions of nature. Besides teaching, Watts served for several years as the Academy's administrator.

Watts also studied written Chinese and practiced Chinese brush calligraphy with Hasegawa as well as with some of the Chinese students who enrolled at the Academy. While Watts was noted for an interest in Zen Buddhism, his reading and discussions delved into Vedanta, "the new physics", cybernetics, semantics, process philosophy, natural history, and the anthropology of sexuality.

Middle years

After heading up the Academy for a few years, Watts left the faculty for a freelance career in the mid 1950s. In 1953, he began what became a long-running weekly radio program at Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley, which continued until his death in 1973. Like other volunteer programmers at the listener-sponsored station, Watts was not paid for his broadcasts; they did, however, gain him a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area. These programs were later carried by additional Pacifica stations, and were re-broadcast many times over in the decades following his death. The original tapes are currently held by the Pacifica Radio Archives, based at KPFK in Los Angeles, and at the Electronic University archive founded by his son, Mark Watts (alanwatts.org).

In 1957 when 42, Watts published one of his best known books, ''The Way of Zen'', which focused on philosophical explication and history. Besides drawing on the lifestyle and philosophical background of Zen, in India and China, Watts introduced ideas drawn from general semantics (directly from the writings of Alfred Korzybski and also from Norbert Wiener's early work on cybernetics, which had recently been published). Watts offered analogies from cybernetic principles possibly applicable to the Zen life. The book sold well, eventually becoming a modern classic, and helped widen his lecture circuit.

Around this time, Watts toured parts of Europe with his father, meeting the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung. In relation to modern psychology, Watts's instincts were closer to Jung's or Abraham Maslow's than to those of Freud.

Experimentation

When he returned to the United States, he began to dabble in psychedelic drug experiences, initially with mescaline given to him by Dr. Oscar Janiger. He tried LSD several times with various research teams led by Drs. Keith Ditman, Sterling Bunnell, and Michael Agron. He also tried marijuana and concluded that it was a useful and interesting psychoactive drug that gave the impression of time slowing down. Watts’ books of the ’60s reveal the influence of these chemical adventures on his outlook. He would later comment about psychedelic drug use, "When you get the message, hang up the phone."

For a time, Watts came to prefer writing in the language of modern science and psychology (''Psychotherapy East and West'' is a good example), finding a parallel between mystical experiences and the theories of the material universe proposed by 20th-century physicists. He later equated mystical experience with ecological awareness, and typically emphasized whichever approach seemed best suited to the audience he was addressing.

Supporters and critics

Watts's explorations and teaching brought him into contact with many noted intellectuals, artists, and American teachers in the human potential movement. His friendship with poet Gary Snyder nurtured his sympathies with the budding environmental movement, to which Watts gave philosophical support. He also encountered Robert Anton Wilson, who credited Watts with being one of his 'Light[s] along the Way' in the opening appreciation of ''Cosmic Trigger''.

Though never affiliated for long with any one academic institution, he did have a fellowship for several years at Harvard University. He also lectured to many college and university students. His lectures and books gave him far-reaching influence on the American intelligentsia of the 1950s–1970s, but he was often seen as an outsider in academia. When questioned sharply by students during his talk at University of California Santa Cruz in 1970, Watts responded that he was not an academic philosopher but rather "a philosophical entertainer."

Watts has been criticized by Buddhists such as Roshi Philip Kapleau, John Daido Loori, and D. T. Suzuki for allegedly misinterpreting several key concepts of Zen Buddhism. Examples of the criticisms by those who believe that zazen can only be achieved by a strict and specific means of sitting as opposed to a cultivated state of mind available at any moment in any situation would be when Kapleau claimed that Watts dismissed zazen on the basis of only half a koan. In regard to the aforementioned koan, Robert Baker Aitken reports that Suzuki told him "I regret to say that Mr. Watts did not understand that story." In Loori's translation of Dogen's The True Dharma Eye, the author also mentions this and expands further to suggest that Zen in its essence ''is'' zazen, and cannot be grasped without the practice. This had been the predominant interpretation of Zen in the West before Alan Watts began to write. One major point raised today, however, is that the state of Zen is like that of dog, always in the moment, regretting nothing. Although in one Koan Zhaozhou is said to have answered that a Dog does not have Buddha nature, in a different Koan from the same period Zhaozhou answered the same question in the positive, demonstrating the disagreements between the sects of 'walking monks' and 'sitting monks' that go back thousands of years. In his talks, Watts addressed the issue of defining zazen practice when he said, "A cat sits until it is tired of sitting, then gets up, stretches, and walks away."

He did, however, have his supporters in the Zen community, including Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. As David Chadwick recounted in his biography of Suzuki, when a student of Suzuki's disparaged Watts by saying “we used to think he was profound until we found the real thing," Suzuki "fumed with a sudden intensity," saying, "You completely miss the point about Alan Watts! You should notice what he has done. He is a great bodhisattva."

Applied aesthetics

Watts often wrote about, or sometimes alluded to, a group of neighbors in Druid Heights (near Mill Valley, California), who had endeavored to combine architecture, gardening, and carpentry skills to make a beautiful and comfortable life for themselves. These neighbors accomplished this by relying on their own talents and using their own hands, as they lived in what has been called "shared bohemian poverty." Druid Heights was founded by the writer Elsa Gidlow, and Watts dedicated his book ''The Joyous Cosmology'' to the people of this neighborhood.

Regarding his intentions, Watts attempted to lessen the alienation that accompanies the experience of being human that he felt plagued the modern Westerner, and (like his fellow British expatriate and friend, Aldous Huxley) to lessen the ill will that was an unintentional by-product of alienation from the natural world. He felt such teaching could improve the world, at least to a degree. He also articulated the possibilities for greater incorporation of aesthetics (for example: better architecture, more art, more fine cuisine) in American life. In his autobiography he wrote, "… cultural renewal comes about when highly differentiated cultures mix".

In his last novel ''Island'' (1962), Aldous Huxley mentions the religious practice of maithuna as being something like what Roman Catholics call "coitus reservatus". A few years before, Alan Watts had discussed the theme in his own book ''Nature, Man and Woman''. There, he discusses the possibility of the practice being known to early Christians and of it being kept secretly by the Church.

Later years

In his writings of the 1950s, he conveyed his admiration for the practicality in the historical achievements of Chán (Zen) in the Far East, for it had fostered farmers, architects, builders, folk physicians, artists, and administrators among the monks who had lived in the monasteries of its lineages.

In his mature work, he presents himself as "Zennist" in spirit as he wrote in his last book, ''Tao: The Watercourse Way''. Child rearing, the arts, cuisine, education, law and freedom, architecture, sexuality, and the uses and abuses of technology were all of great interest to him.

Though known for his Zen teachings, he was equally if not more influenced by ancient Hindu scriptures, especially Vedanta, and spoke extensively about the nature of the divine Reality Man that Man misses, how the contradiction of opposites is the method of life and the means of cosmic and human evolution, how our fundamental Ignorance is rooted in the exclusive nature of mind and ego, how to come in touch with the Field of Consciousness and Light, and other cosmic principles. These are discussed in great detail in dozens of hours of audio that are in part captured in the ‘Out of Our Mind’ series.

On the personal level, Watts sought to resolve his feelings of alienation from the institutions of marriage and the values of American society, as revealed in his classic comments on love relationships in "Divine Madness" and on perception of the organism-environment in "The Philosophy of Nature".

In looking at social issues he was quite concerned with the necessity for international peace, for tolerance and understanding among disparate cultures. He also came to feel acutely conscious of a growing ecological predicament; as one instance, in the early 1960s he wrote: “Can any melting or burning imaginable get rid of these ever-rising mountains of ruin – especially when the things we make and build are beginning to look more and more like rubbish even before they are thrown away?" These concerns were later expressed in a television pilot made for NET filmed at his mountain retreat in 1971 in which he noted that the single track of conscious attention was wholly inadequate for interactions with a multi-tracked world.

Political stance

Distrusting both the established political left and right, Watts found political inspiration in the Chinese sage Chuang-Tzu . He disliked much in the conventional idea of "progress." He hoped for change, but personally he preferred amiable, semi-isolated rural social enclaves, and also believed in tolerance for urban tenderloins, social misfits, and eccentric artists. Watts decried the suburbanization of the countryside and the way of life that went with it.

In one campus lecture tour, which Watts titled "The End to the Put-Down of Man", Watts presented positive images for both nature and humanity, spoke in favor of the various stages of human growth (including the teenage years), reproached excessive cynicism and rivalry, and extolled intelligent creativity, good architecture and food .

On spiritual and social identity

Watts felt that absolute morality had nothing to do with the fundamental realization of one’s deep spiritual identity. He advocated social rather than personal ethics. In his writings, Watts was increasingly concerned with ethics applied to relations between humanity and the natural environment and between governments and citizens. He wrote out of an appreciation of a racially and culturally diverse social landscape.

He often said that he wished to act as a bridge between the ancient and the modern, between East and West, and between culture and nature.

Watts led some tours for Westerners to the Buddhist temples of Japan. He also studied some movements from the traditional Chinese martial art T'ai Chi Ch'uan, with an Asian colleague, Al Chung-liang Huang.

Worldview

In several of his later publications, especially ''Beyond Theology'' and ''The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are'', Watts put forward a worldview, drawing on Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, pantheism, and modern science, in which he maintains that the whole universe consists of a cosmic self playing hide-and-seek (Lila), hiding from itself (Maya) by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting what it really is; the upshot being that we are all IT in disguise. In this worldview, Watts asserts that our conception of ourself as an "ego in a bag of skin" is a myth; the entities we call the separate "things" are merely processes of the whole.

Internet phenomenon

As part of his growing popularity, Matt Stone and Trey Parker – creators of the animated series South Park – have also contributed a video tribute by animating some of his lectures. This has spawned a culture of user animated videos all around the net.

Personal life

Alan Watts married three times and had seven children, five daughters and two sons. His oldest son, Mark Watts, currently serves as curator of his father's work.

He met Eleanor Everett in 1936, when her mother, Ruth Fuller Everett, brought her to London to study piano. They met at the Buddhist Lodge, were engaged the following year, and married in April 1938. A daughter, Joan, was born November 1938, and another, Anne, was born in 1943. Their marriage ended eleven years later, but Watts continued after that to correspond with his ex-mother-in-law.

After leaving Eleanor in 1950 Alan Watts married Dorothy DeWitt and moved to San Francisco in early 1951 to teach. They began a family that grew to include five children: Tia, Mark, Richard, Lila, and Diane. However the couple separated in the early sixties after Watts met Mary Jane Yates King while lecturing in New York. After a difficult divorce he married Mary Jane in 1964.

Watts lived with his wife Mary Jane in Sausalito, California in the mid-60s. He lived his later years at times on a houseboat in Sausalito called the Vallejo, and at times in a secluded cabin on Mount Tamalpais. Laden with social and financial responsibilities, he struggled increasingly with alcohol addiction, which may have contributed to his premature death.

In October 1973, Watts returned from an exhausting European lecture tour. There is currently no evidence proving the cause of Watt's death .

Books

1936 ''The Spirit of Zen'', Paperback. 1969 ISBN 0-8021-3056-9 A preview from Google Books

1937 ''The Legacy of Asia and Western Man''

1940 ''The Meaning of Happiness'', Paperback. 1970, ISBN 0-06-080178-6

1944 ''Theologica Mystica of St. Dionysius'', (translation from Greek of pseudo-Dionysius, available online)

1948 ''Behold the Spirit:A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion'', Vintage ed. 1972, ISBN 0-394-71761-9

1950 ''Easter – Its Story and Meaning''

1950 ''The Supreme Identity'', Vintage ed. 1972, ISBN 0-394-71835-6

1951 ''The Wisdom of Insecurity'', Vintage ed. 1968, ISBN 0-394-70468-1

1953 ''Myth and Ritual in Christianity'', Beacon Press 1971, ISBN 0-8070-1375-7

1957 ''The Way of Zen'', Vintage Spiritual Classics 1999, ISBN 0-375-70510-4

1958 ''Nature, Man, and Woman'', Vintage reissue 1991, ISBN 0-679-73233-0

1959 ''Beat Zen Square Zen and Zen'', Paperback, ASIN B000F2RQL4

1960 ''"This Is It" and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience'', Vintage reprint 1973, ISBN 0-394-71904-2

1961 ''Psychotherapy East and West'', Vintage ed. 1975, ISBN 0-394-71609-4 An excerpt

1962 ''The Joyous Cosmology – Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness''

1963 ''The Two Hands of God – The Myths of Polarity''

1964 ''Beyond Theology – The Art of Godmanship'', Vintage 1973, ISBN 0-394-71923-9

1966 ''The Book – On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are'', Vintage reissue 1989, ISBN 0-679-72300-5 An excerpt

1967 ''Nonsense'', ISBN 0-525-47463-3. (This book is a spiritual application of literary nonsense).

1970 ''Does It Matter?: Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality'', Vintage ed. 1971, ISBN 0-394-71665-5

1971 ''Erotic Spirituality – The Vision of Konarak''

1972 ''The Art of Contemplation''

1972 ''In My Own Way – An Autobiography 1915–1965'', Vintage 1973, ISBN 0-394-71951-4 A preview from Google Books

1973 ''Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal'', Vintage 1974, ISBN 0-394-71999-9

Posthumous publications

1974 ''The Essence of Alan Watts'', Celestial Arts 1977, ISBN 0-89087-210-4

1975 ''Tao: The Watercourse Way'', with Al Chung-liang Huang, Pantheon 1977, ISBN 0-394-73311-8

1976 ''Essential Alan Watts''

1978 ''Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery of Life''

1979 ''Om: Creative Meditations''

1982 ''Play to Live''

1983 ''Way of Liberation: Essays and Lectures on the Transformation of the Self''

1985 ''Out of the Trap''

1986 ''Diamond Web''

1987 ''The Early Writings of Alan Watts'', Paperback. 1995, ISBN 0-89087-794-7

1990 ''The Modern Mystic: A New Collection of Early Writings''

1994 ''Talking Zen''

1995 ''Become What You Are'', Shambhala Expanded ed. 2003, ISBN 1-57062-940-4

1995 ''Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion'' A preview from Google Books

1995 ''The Philosophies of Asia''

1995 ''The Tao of Philosophy'', edited transcripts, Tuttle Publishing 1999, ISBN 0-8048-3204-8

1996 ''Myth and Religion''

1997 ''Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking''

1997 ''Zen and the Beat Way''

1998 ''Culture of Counterculture''

1999 ''Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion'', edited transcripts, Tuttle Publishing, ISBN 0-8048-3203-X

2000 ''What Is Zen?'', editor: Mark Watts, New World Library, ISBN 0-394-71951-4 A preview from Google Books

2000 ''What Is Tao?'', ed. Mark Watts, New World Library, ISBN 1-57731-168-X

2000 ''Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation'', ed. Mark Watts, New World Library, ISBN 1-57731-214-7

2000 ''Eastern Wisdom'', ed. Mark Watts, MJF Books, ISBN 1-56731-491-0, three books in one volume: ''What is Zen?'', ''What is Tao?'', and ''An Introduction to Meditation'' (''Still the Mind''). These were assembled from transcriptions of audio tape recordings made by his son Mark, of lectures and seminars given by Alan Watts during the last decade of his life. They constitute simplified introductions to the philosophies he taught.

Audio and video works, essays

Including recordings of lectures at major universities and multi-session seminars: Many of his works have made it easier for western people to apprehend eastern esoteric thinking which until now required western people to travel to Asia and spend years learning the subtle nuances of the profound traditions.

1960 ''Eastern Wisdom in Modern Life'', television series, (here)

1960 ''Essential Lectures'', audio recordings, (here)

1960 ''Nature of Consciousness'', essay, (here)

1960 ''The Value of Psychotic Experience''

1960 ''The World As Emptiness''

1960 ''From Time to Eternity''

1960 ''Lecture On Zen''

1960 ''The Cross of Cards''

1960 ''Taoism''

1962 ''This Is IT''

1968 "Psychedelics & Religious Experience", in ''California Law Review'' (here)

1969 ''Why Not Now: The Art of Meditation''

1971 ''A Conversation With Myself'' (part 1 part 2part 3)

1994 ''Zen: The Best of Alan Watts'' (VHS)

2005 ''Do You Do It, or Does It Do You?: how to let the universe meditate you'' (CD)

2007 ''Zen Meditations with Alan Watts'', DVD, (here)

Other books

''Genuine Fake: a Biography of Alan Watts'', by Monica Furlong, Published by Heinemann, 1986

Academic connections

Saybrook University offers the only course on Watts in the United States and perhaps the world (HTP 3075: The Life of Alan Watts). Saybrook also has the only Watts academic chair in the world, which is held by Stanley Krippner, Executive Faculty Member.

Notes

References

Aitken, Robert. ''Original Dwelling Place''. Counterpoint. Washington, D.C. 1997. ISBN 1-887178-41-4 (paperback)

Charters, Ann (ed.). ''The Portable Beat Reader''. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hard cover); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (paperback)

Furlong, Monica, ''Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts'' Houghton Mifflin. New York. 1986 ISBN 0-395-45392-5, Skylight Paths 2001 edition of the biography, with new foreword by author: ISBN 1-893361-32-2

Kapleau, Philip. ''Three Pillars of Zen'' (1967) Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-5975-7

Stirling, Isabel. "Zen Pioneer: The Life & Works of Ruth Fuller Sasaki" Shoemaker & Hoard. 2006. ISBN 978-1-59376-110-3

Watts, Alan, ''In My Own Way'' New York. Random House Pantheon. 1973 ISBN 0-394-46911-9 (his autobiography)

External links

The Alan Watts Electronic University – Alan Watts audio and video courses, co-founded by Alan Watts, Mark Watts, and Henry Jacobs in 1973.

Alan Watts Podcast – The official Podcast of Alan Watts

Master Enlightenments Arts Seminars and Lectures by Alan Watts – Looking at many different forms of enlightenment – Recorded by Henry Jacobs in 1964/65 who set up the original Alan Watts radio network.

Alan Watts Online – Project Unicorn (also via Archive.org)

Watts essay on Nothingness (This link no longer functions.)

Alan Watts audio archive from the DIY Dharma website

Alan Watts Lectures and Essays Audio, video, essays and articles – resources from deoxy.org

Alan Watts Resource Compilation A collection of audio and video links of Alan Watts lecture and essays

Alan Watts on YouTube, South Park Interview with Mark Watts on the resurgence of his father's work

watts.progressiveradionetwork.org Gary Nulls online station with Alan Watts show including some archived audio lectures.

Alan Watts. The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Category:1915 births Category:1973 deaths Category:20th-century philosophers Category:Buddhism in the United States Category:Converts to Buddhism Category:Buddhist philosophers Category:Mahayana Buddhists Category:English Buddhists Category:English philosophers Category:English spiritual teachers Category:English spiritual writers Category:English Taoists Category:Harvard Fellows Category:Metaphysicians Category:Modern Buddhist writers Category:People associated with the Human Potential Movement Category:Western mystics Category:American Episcopal priests

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