A new look at Alan Watts

Alan Watts

Alan Watts was a big influend on Robert Anton Wilson, so yesterday I read an article about him published this year, "On Knowing Who He Was," by Christopher Harding.  

Here's how the article begins:

"On 16 November 1973, Joan Watts received a phone call that began in the worst possible way: ‘Are you sitting down?’ Her father, the English writer and philosopher Alan Watts, had died during the previous night, as a storm lashed his home in Marin County, California. His heart had failed at the age of just 58. Watts’s third wife, Mary Jane Yates King or ‘Jano’, blamed his experiments with breathing techniques intended to achieve samadhi, or absorptive contemplation: he had left his body, she thought, without knowing how to come back. Joan took a different view. Her father had become lost in work and alcohol. He had finally ‘had enough’, she concluded, and had ‘checked out’."

The article does not avoid discussing Watts' flaws but explains why he was an interesting thinker. 

I ran across the piece from a new Ted Gioia Substack newsletter, "The 25 Best Online Articles of 2024." I will probably read the article on MAD magazine Ted recommends. The Spotify article looks interesting, too, but Ted summarized it in another recent newsletter.

 

The RAW Semantics book club [UPDATED] [UPDATED AGAIN]

 

Brian directs our attention to a book on sale for practically nothing as a Kindle: "Chris Niebauer's 192-page 'No Self, No Problem Workbook' - going for £0.79 or $0.99 on Amazon Kindle format. He uses a left/right brain model, has lots of fun head "exercises", and, like RAW, deconstructs abstract generalisations and group fictions, etc." [UPDATE] Note that he's actually talking about the workbook version of the title. There are actually two very similar titles, and I bought both; both are dirt cheap. 

It sounded interesting so I bought it. Certainly the doctrine of "no self" is important to Buddhism, and I'm pretty sure Alan Watts wrote a book on it, e.g. The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Here is some of the publisher's description for Niebauer's book: 

"While in grad school in the early 1990s, Chris Niebauer began to notice striking parallels between the latest discoveries in psychology, neuroscience, and the teachings of Buddhism, Taoism, and other schools of Eastern thought. When he presented his findings to a professor, his ideas were quickly dismissed as “pure coincidence, nothing more.”

"Fast-forward 20 years later and Niebauer is a PhD and a tenured professor, and the Buddhist-neuroscience connection he found as a student is practically its own genre in the bookstore. But according to Niebauer, we are just beginning to understand the link between Eastern philosophy and the latest findings in psychology and neuroscience and what these assimilated ideas mean for the human experience."

Update: The idea of an online book club has been floated on Twitter.  If you aren't on Twitter and you want to indicate that you would take part, perhaps leave a comment here. 

RAW in 1960: A mystic but not a theologian [UPDATED]

Issue No. 14 of the Realist, December 1959 and January 1960,  (available here as part of the Realist Archive Project) has an "impolite interview" of Alan Watts, conducted by Robert Anton Wilson. Hat tip to @antlerboy on Twitter for pointing to it.  [UPDATE: In the comments, Prop Anon says both Paul Krassner and Wilson did the interview.]

As I was looking at the issue, I noticed something else. A. Finley Schaef, pastor of First Methodist Church of Astoria, N.Y., pens a very brief letter to the editor, printed under the headline "Accusation." It says, "Mr. Robert Anton Wilson's chronic rage against the Church notwithstanding, my impression is he is just another theologian in the Antichrist's clothing."

An editor's note in reply (I assume Paul Krassner) says, "Coincidentally, I accused Mr. Wilson of more or less the same disguise when he chose to title his column in Issue #13 'Notes of a Skeptical Mystic' rather than 'Notes of a Mystical Skeptic.' His response, to both Rev. Schaef and myself:

" 'I admit that I am a mystic. I deny that I am a theologian. For an interesting distinction between mysticism and theology, see Alan Watts' Myth and Ritualism in Christianity. If I were to be pinned down, I would describe myself in Erich Fromm's words -- 'a non-theistic mystic'.' "

Michael Johnson on Alan Watts

Alan Watts. From www.alanwatts.org

Michael Johnson has a new piece up about Alan Watts. The whole thing of course is quite interesting, but given the focus on this blog, I wanted to call attention to Michael's rather pithy summary of how Watts influenced Robert Anton Wilson:

Watts became a sort of mentor to Wilson, telling him there were some very interesting Harvard professors investigating psychedelic drugs in the context of religious experience. (RAW and Leary became friends and intellectual collaborators from the mid-1960s to Leary's death in 1996.) At another meeting, Watts told RAW he'd just read a fantastic book by Israel Regardie, about Aleister Crowley. RAW went on to become one of the world's most erudite explainers of Crowley, and indeed an Adept himself. At another time, Watts said that the biggest error in history books is the idea that the Roman Empire "fell." It never ended. This became a riff repeated in RAW's and Philip K. Dick's books.

Michael talks about how RAW influenced Watts, too. More here.

Cosmic Trigger Online Reading Group, Week Ten!

Aldous Huxley

By Charles Faris, Cosmic Trigger online reading group guest blogger

Welcome to week 10 of the Group Reading of Cosmic Trigger. This week we are covering pages 70-79 Hilaritas edition, 71-79 And/Or. 

We begin with A Discordian signal from Aldous Huxley, deceased,  in which The Materialist begins his experiments with Crowleyan techniques for mutating consciousness and winds up with a “cryptic and ambiguous” message from Aldous Huxley. 

First off, Bob bans the use of the word “I” and bites his thumb hard whenever he lapses, entering an altered state in 7 days. He announces that he is a psychic and gives tarot readings, although this trick takes 2 years to deliver anything impressive. He also dives into “Crowley’s method for achieving and transcending religious visions.” This method is further elaborated upon in Chekovian (never reveal a loaded gun unless you are going to use it) and/or Nietzschian (Eternal Recurrence with a twist) style a few pages later when The Space Lady returns once again.

Bob claims that working with these techniques resulted in his becoming skeptical of skepticism, and achieving ecstasy and “contact” without drugs. I would be interested is what methods our readers have used, and what results they have achieved thereby.

In The Net or the Network Bob ruminates of Jano Watts’ Net and notes that Aldous Huxley was a friend of Jano and Alan Watts, as well as Tim Leary. Huxley died same day as JFK. Kerry Thornley, the "2nd Oswald," named his son Aldous Wilson Thornley after Huxley and Bob, and Aldous had originally been turned on to peyote by Aleister Crowley, who styled himself Epopt of the Illuminati. 

Wilson traces another chain with Alan Watts, who introduced him to Zen Buddhism in 1957, Leary in 1964, and Crowley in 1971, leading Wilson to ponder if he was part of "a Net of coincidence or a Network of adepts."

Dimitrije Mitriniović

Then Bob deftly wraps these two chains around each other (double helix?) by mentioning that Watts had been “initiated into a magickal order” by one Dimitrije Mitriniović, a “rascal guru in the tradition of Crowley and Gurdjieff.”

Key line for me: Alan Watts describing himself as neither a “Guru or a philosopher or even a teacher…I am merely an entertainer.” This seems, as much as anything, to be a fair description of Old Bob himself. An entertainer adept at planting seeds, perhaps.

The Lady of Guadalupe sees Bob quitting his job at Playboy, moving to San Miguel de Allende, first municipality in Mexico to be liberated from Spanish rule. Bob digs into the Illuminati connections of Father Hidalgo, leader of the liberation, and from there steps into the eternal re-occurence of The Space Lady, this time in her guise as The Lady of Guadalupe. 

"The Shaman's whole family had now become involved in yoga and magick; weirdness was commonplace." The picture Bob paints of his family life in Mexico is touching and telling—a glimpse into the micro-world of The Author, which he balances with a short description of the crazed events happening in the world at large — “Nixon and Kent State and Cambodia and  everything.” And central to it all, Tim Leary’s struggle to remain out of jail, which seems to an emblem of just how hopeful the world appears to Bob at any given moment.

A key passage here is his daughter Luna’s description of how the metaprogrammer works—“You believe in ESP, so it happens around you. You don't believe in levitation, so it doesn't happen around you.” These two sentences, ingested with the proper set and setting, could replace the entire corpus of Bob’s work on programming and metaprogramming. Any thoughts the readers has on the efficacy of simplicity vs elaborateness would be gratefully received in comments!

Standard of Father Hidalgo, Father of Mexico, featuring The Lady of Guadalupe

With so many obscure references dropped like little seeds within the pages of Cosmic Trigger,  I’ve noticed that one advantage the reader of today has over the reader of 1977 is that it doesn’t take days and days in a library to (sometimes vainly) follow up on Wilson’s leads. A few of those which I found to be both interesting and enlightening were Alan Watts’ rascal guru Dimitrije Mitriniović, and Father Hidalgo, so I am including links for both of those characters. 

And that about wraps up this weeks reading. Next week we will dive into Sirius Rising and The Holy Guardian Angel, pages 79-91 in both of the editions I am referencing. Please feed the conversation with your comments, questions, and cross-talk, and most importantly — Do The Exercises! (And tell us what you got!)

Alan Watts -- A key RAW influence

Suddenly, Alan Watts is coming at me from all directions. The "Shrapnel" chapter in Coincidance (the second one) quotes Watts (about how the Roman Empire never fell.) The work-in-progress Daisy Eris Campbell play about RAW dramatizes the influence Watts had on Wilson. 

There's a new film about Watts. The creators of "South Park" have animated some of his lectures.

Michael Johnson, the Overweening Generalist guy, wrote to me this week to talk about the impact Watts had on RAW.

"In RAW's online Tale of the Tribe course, he credits Watts with turning him on to zen, Leary and Crowley. I think maybe this makes Watts the most influential living mentor in RAW's life, or at least in the Top 3," Michael wrote.

"RAW was introduced to Watts by Arlen. RAW introduced Watts to one of his later wives, Jano. And the two visited in Yellow Springs. Jano had a notion about synchronicities or what Lilly called Cosmic Coincidence Control Center, but Jano called it The Net. This was around 1962. Watts's riffs on the Roman Empire never falling had an impact on RAW. Watts told RAW he'd read a new book on Crowley by Israel Regardie and he thought it was amazing. RAW said any time Watts recommended a book it was something like a Sure Thing," Michael wrote.

(From RAW's intro to Eye In The Triangle: "It was recommended to me by Alan Watts, who said, 'It's the best book on mysticism that I've read in ten years or more.' I had been reading Alan's books for a decade and had known Alan for almost as long, and my Hemingway bullshit-detector had not yet found a sentence anywhere in his books containing BOVINE EXCRETA. If he recommended a book, I immediately trotted off to buy a copy. He knew what good writing was, even in the area of mysticism, where the author is, by definition, trying to unscrew the inscrutable and eff the ineffable.' (p.x)")

Michael explained that in those pre-Internet days, when "find the others" meant face to face relationships, Watts was a catalyst for intellectuals such as Robert Anton Wilson because Watts knew so many interesting people. Michael gave me some examples:

"Watts owned a houseboat in Sausalito, just north of San Francisco, and it was there that the gurus of the New Left, Gary Snyder, Leary, Ginsberg, Kesey, et.al...met to figure out if they should be activists or to drop out ala Leary. In Markoff's What The Dormouse Said, he writes that est 'was most closely derived from the version of zen taught by Alan Watts from a Sausalito houseboat during the 1960s.' (p.209) Ginsberg confronted Leary over his sloganeering for LSD there, on the houseboat. If you read Conners's The White Hand Society, it's basically Leary and Ginsberg spending most of their free time on the East Coast going around turning poets, painters, musicians and big-money-types onto LSD. So, within five years, there was some sort of schism between Tim and Allen.

"Watts was part of psychedelic inspired intellectual sessions in the mid-1950s with Oscar Janiger, the LSD psychotherapist who turned Cary Grant's life around, and who was a cousin to Ginsberg. In Sex Drugs and Magick RAW considers Watts, Aldous and WSB as the psychedelic sophisticates. All three had problems with Leary's media advocacy for LSD. All three were captured in artwork at Millbrook.

"When Watts traveled south to LA, he was in the matrix with Aldous, Isherwood, Gerald Heard, and Swami Prahavananda: big influence on Hollywood types. (see Don Lattin's Distilled Spirits, pp.131-135)."

Here is a Zen Pencils adaptation of Watts. You can also visit the official Alan Watts website, maintained by his son.

Shrapnel from Michael: "RAW thought Watts's biggest influence on others was 'mystical christianity.' Watts championed Bucky Fuller and McLuhan in 1967. I think Watts has been given short schrift by Aldous Huxley-ites: their infl has been complementary. The LaRouchites have long been paranoid about Watts and Huxley as Brit agents sent to the US to weaken its children through mysticism and drugs. Throw in Beatles there too...

"Tom Robbins said Watts was an influence on his first book, Another Roadside Attraction, and later quotes Watts within the context of the post-9/11 world: "When you become truly convinced the human condition is hopeless, you enter the Zen state." (Conversations With Tom Robbins, p.38 and p.125)

"By 1959 Watts was not smoking pot. Around then he started calling himself a 'philosophical entertainer,' 'in show biz,' "a genuine fake,' and 'an irreducible rascal.' When he took off with Jano he left former wife Dorothy and four kids. He was always hustling for money to pay his debts. He drank a LOT. Why did he quit psychedelics? He said (I paraphrase from memory): 'Because when one has picked up the telephone and gotten the message, one hangs up.' "



 

A theory for why Rome fell?

In Cosmic Trigger 2, which I've just finished, Wilson once again explains the SNAFU principle, in an interview published in ROC magazine, which apparently was published in Cleveland, Ohio:

In the power game, the more successful you become, the more motive people have for lying to you. The lie to flatter you, to avoid contradicting your prejudices, to keep their jobs, to tell you what they want to hear, etc. Have you ever told the truth, the whole truth, to anybody from the government? It's the same in any authoritarian organization, be it an army, a corporation or a patriarchal family. People say what those in power above them want to hear. In the big power struggles, the most successful conspiracy of the decade becomes the stupidest conspiracy of the next decade, because it never hears what might offend its self-image. Communication is only possible between equals. The power game creates total communication jam and everybody near the top drifts slowly but inexorably into a kind of schizoid fantasy. Then they get replaced by younger, hungrier predators who are not successful enough yet to frighten everybody into lying to them, and hence have at least a partial knowledge of what the hell is really going on.

I've been reading books for years about the "fall" of the Western Roman Empire, conventionally pegged as finishing up in A.D. 476. Couldn't this function as yet another theory for what went wrong, with the absolutist Roman emperors not getting the feedback they needed? (Even as the western empire fell apart, coins were being made proclaiming the glory of "Unconquered Rome.")

Then again, elsewhere in the book, Wilson quotes Alan Watts as follows: "The greatest error of the historians is the idea that the Roman Empire 'fell.' It never fell. It still runs the Western World, through the Vatican and the Mafia."

Wilson remarks, "I didn't believe that when Alan said it; I thought it was one of jokes. Now, I wonder."