Alan Watts was born in London in January of 1915 at the start of the first World War. Always a seeker, at a young age he became fascinated with the arts of the Far East. Watts found his way to New York, Chicago and finally to San Francisco and became an author, Episcopal priest, Dean, lecturer, and finally a reticent guru-like figure to the flower children of the 1960s. Along the way he became friends with Joseph Campbell, Jack Kerouac, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Cousteau, Arthur C. Clark, the avant-garde composer John Cage, Tom Smothers, and Van Morrison, among many other luminaries of the time. In 1953, he began his charismatic Sunday morning public radio shows, which have now been broadcast nationally for over fifty years, and in 1957 he published his pivotal work, The Way of Zen, followed by Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen. By 1960, Watts had appeared in two seasons of his own public television series "Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life." Today he is perhaps best known for his many books, and for his leading role in the counter culture movement. By any account he lived a colorful life, traveled the world, and between the age of 20 and 48 was married three times, divorced twice, and had seven children. He died in 1973 at the age of 58, leaving behind an archive of recorded works spanning three decades. "Just a short résumé about this morning. I was discussing the various meanings of the word "maya" which in Sanskrit means "illusion", or at least that's the way it's generally translated. And I was trying to explain that it doesn't necessarily mean "illusion" in a bad sense. When we say a person is suffering from delusions, hallucinations and so on, it's always a putdown word, but "maya" is not so necessarily. So I showed you how it has the meanings of measurement as when we pretend that the world is divisible actually into feet or inches or hours or seconds or degrees, and divide things from each other by these measurements, that is to say, by the cutting power of thought. "Thought" from the latin "scio" means "to cut", and so "thought" is, you see, what you have to understand is that every "thing" is really a "think". A thing is a unit of thought in the same way as an inch is a unit of measurement. We divide the wiggly, continuous, wobbly, wild, Rorschach blot of the physical universe into things, so that we can think about it."

• published: 30 Sep 2015
• views: 3