Alan Watts saved my life. Literally. At one of the lowest points in my life, right after my spiritual breakdown, after I’d sold tons of my stuff, and sold or gave away a bunch more, and after I’d moved into the spare bedroom of a friend, I found Alan Watts.
Or, more specifically, I found his videos on YouTube. The man himself died in 1973. But he lives on in his many books and the hundreds of videos.
Watts was a Zen Buddhist philosopher. He began interpreting Eastern philosophy for a Western audience in 1950. This is especially interesting when you realize that he had studied to be an Episcopal priest and was a minister for five years in New York.
But Watts left the ministry, moved to California, and to join the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies. In his short 23 years of sharing his wisdom, he was prolific to say the least. What’s more, he was a powerful public speaker — and smart as hell.
However, he was far from a perfect human being. I’m sure he never aspired to be one. But when it comes to understanding humans, life, and “God,” I think he was a genius. Even the sound of his self-assured, British-accented voice brings me great calm and a measure of peace.
I will be commenting on many of my favorite Watts’ talks to share them with others. I’ll start with one called Let Go of these Bad Habits.
This relatively short talk (30 minutes) appears to be a response to a question about letting go of bad habits. However, as usual, Watts’ response goes far deeper than a mere answer to this simple inquiry. For me, the important wisdom we should gain from this talk is this:
As humans, we want power so we can engage in the pursuit of pleasure with no limits. But you can achieve great powers in this world and still be stuck here, in this material illusion. Because when you’ve reached the limit of pleasure, you have nowhere else to go but to hell. So, when we reach the limit of pleasures, if we keep pushing, and we push ourselves into the dark side. So power should not be the goal.
Here’s what Watts says in his own words:
“It’s important to consider this question: What do I desire? When we answer that question in a naïve way we figure out that we want to control everything … But that’s not what you really want. You want a surprise … You want a pleasant surprise.
“Now I think this is the greatest possible lesson for the western world to learn, because we are so hung up on the idea of power. Of control. Of being able to make everything go the right way. And we never thought it through. If you get control of it what are you going to do?
“A Buddha is one who has gone beyond the gods, because the gods have power. Buddhism imagines all kinds of heaven worlds inhabited by all kinds of gods. And the supreme of all the gods is called Ishvara. But it is said that all of those gods in their paradise worlds are in sansara. They are in the round of life and death, and what goes up must come down. They are immensely successful. They’re at the peak of power. Spiritual power. But they are not delivered yet, because they still don’t know what they want.
“Therefore in the exploration of what you want, you get to the point where you have all pleasures at your command … and eventually you get like the ancient Romans … who had to go every Saturday to the coliseum for a show that really had to surpass everything, because they had public baths, they had prostitutes, they had every kind of luxury.
“But when they went to see one of the big shows that people like Nero would put on, they would have, for example, floats surfing the coliseum, all full of slave girls from distant parts of the Mediterranean, who were garland with flowers and waving at the crowd innocently. And the next minute they would release wild lions into the arena to eat up all the slave girls. They got a big sadistic kick out that because you see, pursuing pleasure beyond a certain place takes you into what the Buddhists call the naraka world, which is to say the hells.
(In other words) “When you have explored pleasure to its ultimate limit the only thing you can get a kick out of is pain. So, naturally you descend from the deva world at the top of the wheel to the naraka world at the bottom, where it shows all of these beings in states of torture.
“Now of course the priests say when they’re bringing up children, if you do bad things you will end up in the hell world. But this is a very inadequate way of showing how you get to the hell world.
You get to the hell world as a result of not knowing what you want. As a result, of thoughtless pursuit of pleasure, which ends you eventually in the pursuit of pain. So when you’re in the hell world that’s where you want to be.”
Here Watts takes a long pause to let the heart of his message sink in.
“So then, the question is to clarify once more, what do you want? If you understand first of all that you don’t want absolute power, you don’t want absolute control. You want some control. We always love controlling something that is not really under our control … when something is partially under your control, but isn’t. Then you have the same sort of relationship with it that you have when you have someone you love.
“If the motivation of power gaining disappears … what other motivation takes its place in the origination of actions? It seems to me that the answer here is compassion. Simply because when you want to relate to another living being what you are really asking of them is that they be in the same situation as you are.
“You want to meet and encounter someone else who has your problems, your fears, and your delights. You don’t want a doll, you want another you. Another self. Because that would be at least as surprising to you as you are.
“There really is not a greater satisfaction that you can imagine than that kind of personal relationship wherein you can trust a being who is other than you and not under your control to do what you want because they like it. As you on your side would want to do in your way to give pleasure to the other person … now that’s compassion in the real sense of the word. Feeling with and through someone else. Where the whole trick is that you lose control for a while of the situation and say I throw the ball to you. Now it’s yours.
(So) “The more you give the power away. The more you ‘other’ yourself, the more of a self you are. Because self and other are reciprocal. So you find that people through a sadhana or yoga discipline have overcome their ego. Have transcended the ego. Are tremendously strong entities.
“You would think theoretically that they would be non-entities. And to lack entirely what psychologists call ‘ego strength.’ But actually they are nothing of the kind … they are very, very strong characters, because the more they have given it up, the more they get it.”
Note: Alan Watts said that he felt his best book is Nature, Man and Woman.
Photo credit: Lectures Beyond Beyond
