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Author Topic:   It Starts Now-- Alan Watts
Faith
Knowflake

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From: Bella's Hair Salon
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posted July 06, 2013 01:13 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Faith        Reply w/Quote
I love this video so much:

It Starts Now

Watts and I have the same birthday. I'm totally on his wavelength here.

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Randall
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posted July 07, 2013 11:41 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Randall        Reply w/Quote
No time to look right now. What is he about?

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PixieJane
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posted July 07, 2013 08:34 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for PixieJane        Reply w/Quote
I loved that!

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Faith
Knowflake

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From: Bella's Hair Salon
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posted July 08, 2013 09:39 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Faith        Reply w/Quote
^

@Randall

quote:
Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British-born philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts

This four minute video features part of one his lectures, set to music, with beautiful cinematography.

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mockingbird
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posted July 08, 2013 10:26 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for mockingbird        Reply w/Quote
Nice!

Can't wait to watch it

------------------
If I've included this sig, it's because I'm posting from a mobile device.
Please excuse all outrageous typos and confusing auto-corrects.

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T
Knowflake

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posted July 08, 2013 10:40 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for T        Reply w/Quote
Looking forward to watching this. I never delved deep enough into his writings, but loved everything I did read by him....had one of his books, but lent it out before I read it (the one with the mirror on the front of it). Have always loved the pieces I read by him over the years online and joined his fan pages on social networking many years ago.

If I remember correctly, he died from complications from alcoholism. Which made me even more interested in him. I found that rather intriguing.

WIll see what I can dig up. Going to watch the vid when I'm not so tired. Thanks Faith.

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T
Knowflake

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posted July 08, 2013 10:46 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for T        Reply w/Quote
ETA: This entire thread was great: http://alanwatts.tribe.net/thread/4748b465-2d8c-4cf9-ba3b-851182732d32

quote:
Alan Watts died in his sleep at the age of 58. No trauma, just a balloon...

He writes of alcohol and his relationship to alcohol in a number of his works, including his autobiography. He harbors no guilty or shame in often enjoying and inebrieted state - in fact, he writes about how the guilt that Western Civ. people associate with drinking might be related to why we associate the term "alcoholic" with the image of a "problem drinker." I..e., What does it mean to be an alcoholic? Does it have a pejorative connotation? Well, perhaps that is simply cultural. He points out, for example, how Japanese people (in his time and before) might drink quite heavily (yes, even Zen masters) and would be considered clinical "alcoholics," but they were "happy" drunks - always pleasant beautiful people



http://alanwatts.tribe.net/thread/4748b465-2d8c-4cf9-ba3b-851182732d32

quote:
I just found out that Alan Watts, whose books are quite lucid and clear, died of complications due to alcoholism. I understand he was 'just' human but it was still a disappointment to find out that he was also a womanizer, married three times.

And it makes me wonder about the Path. Is it the position they found themselves in, the temptation of guru status? Perhaps it is the dilemma of being "followed" by so many and, at the same time, the realization of the responsibility and at the same time the lack of wanting that responsibility? Is it the lack of freedom that comes with such responsibility, the fame a surprise?

Gia Fu Feng, who was with Watts at the Esalen Institute, that bastion of hippydom, had this to say:

Q. You've mentioned Alan Watts several times and I know that you've been with him when he was teaching. What was he like to be with?

A. You see Alan Watts was very creative. When he drinks he's very clever. He was in a class, you know, at night time, he was all drunk. But his lectures were never boring. He was a tremendous entertainer. He said, "I'm an entertainer, I'm no Buddhist philosopher."

Q. Alan Watts actually died from alcohol, didn't he?

A. Oh yeah. At that time he drank whisky by the bottle.

Q. But how could that tie in with the Tao?

A. That's from the Tao! The fact that he drank is totally in tune with the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove-his utter disregard for convention. One of the sages, a famous poet called Liu Ling, had a servant who followed him carrying a jug of wine and a spade. In this way he always had some wine to drink and his servant would be ready to bury him if he dropped dead during a drinking bout! It's in the Tao. So Alan Watts' drinking is quite Taoistic.

Something to think about.

I suppose in the end all is as it should be as the Path is solely our responsibility. That, more than anything, is the issue. It just came as a surprise as I too held him in something of a 'guru' light as if he was somehow different than I. I don't believe he held such a notion. He just had something he was compelled to teach.

Alcohol, drugs, anything chemical (yes, even my beloved caffeine) can be a distraction or a crutch. True transcendence is to arrive at a place not where these are deemed bad or condemned but that they are not needed at all and all judgment as to whether they are good or bad is left aside. This is non-attachment.

And I am not there yet either...

May I hold a soft spot in my heart for these individuals and may I reflect on the lessons their lives have to teach.
]http://spiritualmutt.blogspot.com/20...lcoholism.html


quote:
truth is truth no matter who says it or why, even if that person is lying.

http://indigosociety.com/showthread.php?38111-Alcoholism-Alan-Watts-died-from-alcoho
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Interesting anyway.

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T
Knowflake

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posted July 08, 2013 10:52 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for T        Reply w/Quote
The Sensualist - Life of Allan Watts

"Alan Watts and Suzuki Roshi were the two people writing about Zen in the 1950's says American Zen teacher Roshi Bernie Glassman. "Anyone who was around then and interested in Buddhism would have been influenced by Alan Watts." In the end, Watts lived a life bound by no rules save his own. "

"Regardless of how modestly-and uninhibitedly-he may have viewed himself, Watts had profound insights into the nature of life and existence that have affected millions of people. "My point was, and has continued to be, that the Big Realization. . . is not a future attainment but a present fact, that this now-moment is eternity and that one must see it now or never," he said. Watts's death from heart failure on November 16, 197? at age fifty-eight, at his home at Druid Heights was as unorthodox as his life. Hours after he died, but before authorities could get involved, Jano had him cremated on wood pyre at a nearby beach by Buddhist monks. Although public cremation is illegal, no charges were brought.

After Watts died, Gary Snyder (whom Watts once famously said he would have liked to claim as his spiritual successor) wrote this "Epitaph for Alan Watts":

He blazed out the new path for all of us and came back and made it clear. Explored the side canyons and deer trails, and investigated cliffs and thickets.

Many guides would have us travel simple, like mules in a pack train, and never leave the trail. Alan taught us to move forward like the breeze, tasting the berries, greeting the blue jays, learning and loving the whole terrain."

full:


http://www.wisdom-books.com/FocusDetail.asp?FocusRef=70

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T
Knowflake

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posted July 08, 2013 10:56 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for T        Reply w/Quote
Naked Reflections - Alan Watts Revealed & Reconsidered

There are those who maintain that Alan Watts' self-destructive alcoholism, marital infidelities and failures, and other personal shortcomings or, at least, questionable behaviors completely undermine any glowing claims that might be made for his greatness as a philosopher-sage, spiritual authority, or just plain self-described "philosophical entertainer." These idealistic critics would argue that Watts' numerous books and innumerable audio lectures--charming and eloquent though they may be--should be blithely ignored because they are the empty words of a man who knew not of what he spoke or wrote, or were verbal potions peddled by a charlatan or spiritual pretender.

But I watch this video (at the link below), and I say that not only was Alan Watts no charlatan (for no charlatan could walk and talk like the man in that video), but that he also expressed certain profound truths with such extraordinary eloquence and brilliance that it overrides his faults or, in Wilberian-integral terms, the unevenness of his lines of development. Alan Watts was a flat-out genius of a philosophical entertainer, and this video segment, along with the other segments comprising the entire video, are more impressive and inspiring to me than all of the words I've ever heard uttered by Ken Wilber, Thich Nhat Hanh, Krishnamurti and all of the other spiritual sages I've ever heard in person or on "record" put together, with all due and genuine respect to these remarkable persons in their own right.

Alan Watts was one of a kind whose likes will probably never come our way again. But THANK GOD we have videos like this to remember him by and benefit from. Moreover, if he was a fake, he was probably the most, in his own words, "genuine fake" one could ever hope to be, and that may have more to do with genuine "spirituality" than Watts' critics will ever realize as they pretend to be what they aren't and labor, like Sisyphus, to accomplish what they can't.
http://nagarjuna1953.blogspot.com/2007/09/alan-watts-revealed-and-reconsidered.html

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T
Knowflake

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posted July 08, 2013 10:57 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for T        Reply w/Quote
....handsome too, wasnt he? lol

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Faith
Knowflake

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From: Bella's Hair Salon
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posted July 09, 2013 08:14 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Faith        Reply w/Quote
Thanks so much, T! And I'm SO GLAD you are back!! I'm going to check out your links when I get more time.

For some reason, Watts' marriage failures and alcoholism don't bother me or strike me as particularly scandalous. Maybe because he wasn't religious and he wasn't even pretending to be. It's the hypocrisy of religious leaders who philander that gets on my nerves so much.

I'm not too familiar with Watts. The person who made this video is a regular on another forum I visit occasionally, and he or she just happens to make a lot of Watts videos.

So I just take the words as they are.

I don't think Watts was cute, frankly it feels a bit like astrological incest to admire someone born on my birthday! LOL

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Faith
Knowflake

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From: Bella's Hair Salon
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posted July 09, 2013 08:18 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Faith        Reply w/Quote
quote:
Originally posted by mockingbird:
Nice!

Can't wait to watch it


Thanks, I hope you like it! 'Just a neat little movie.

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T
Knowflake

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posted July 09, 2013 03:11 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for T        Reply w/Quote
quote:
Originally posted by Faith:

For some reason, Watts' marriage failures and alcoholism don't bother me or strike me as particularly scandalous. Maybe because he wasn't religious and he wasn't even pretending to be. It's the hypocrisy of religious leaders who philander that gets on my nerves so much.


Exactly. And so what if he was married multiple times or fell in love easily or liked to drink? None of those things he did make him a bad guy. His words were golden and affected many people in a positive way. Like you said, you can take them as they are or judge and toss it all out according to your own beliefs. I think with many creative & spiritually inclined people, they are often wide open and channelling w/o realizing it. I like that he wasnt afraid to break rules or ashamed to be himself. He just did his thing and let people think of him what they will.

I"ll have to look up his chart. lol Must be Saturn in my 7th that makes me think he's attractive (for an older man).

The vid was great. Looking forward to watching more at some point.

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Faith
Knowflake

Posts: 21731
From: Bella's Hair Salon
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posted July 09, 2013 05:39 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Faith        Reply w/Quote
quote:
Originally posted by T:
I think with many creative & spiritually inclined people, they are often wide open and channelling w/o realizing it.

!! Yes, now that you mention it...I can see how that may be the case. Also, Watts was a Scorpio moon. Not to say that alcoholism and womanizing are in the DNA of Scorpio moons, but for me, it's like, "Oh I can see how he would naturally be inclined like that...and philosophically inclined to follow his bliss regardless of what his bliss meant to the outside world."

But I didn't know him, of course, can't really judge anything, just spectate.

quote:
Originally posted by T:
The vid was great. Looking forward to watching more at some point.

There are so many Alan Watts videos on YouTube it's crazy! (Including a South Park tribute and Van Morrison song.) My appetite for his philosophy is really stoked now and if left to my druthers I could just listen non-stop for days (I did that kind of thing back when I was single, I have a strong compulsive streak.)

The Conversation with Alan Watts that you posted is excellent, I'm about halfway through.

Also, just clicking around on YouTube, I found this one...where he just said something that's got a lump in my throat:

"You are just as much the dark space beyond death as you are the light called life."

I knew it!

I have Venus trine Saturn and understand your 7H Saturn quite well, I think. For example, my husband is 18 years older than me.

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Faith
Knowflake

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From: Bella's Hair Salon
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posted July 15, 2013 02:50 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Faith        Reply w/Quote
Just wanted to add this...I transcribed it a few days ago. From T's link to Alan Watts' Conversations with Myself:

quote:
Everything that we're doing to try to improve the world was a success in the short run- made amazing initial improvements. But in the long run, we seem to be destroying the planet, by our very efforts to control and improve it. And it strikes me that that is because we are really too simple minded to understand what we're doing when we interfere with the natural world strongly and on a massive scale. We don't really interfere with it, because that would suggest that we are something different from it, something outside, but I think what we're doing is we are understanding it in terms of languages, numbers, in terms of a logic which is too simple for the job, too crude for the job. To begin with, we understand everything in terms of words or numbers and they're stretched out in lines, and our eyes have to scan those lines in order to understand them. But when I scan this view, I don't do it line by line by line, I see the whole thing at once, I take it in as if it were a wide-angle lens. But when I try to understand the world through literature and mathematics, I have to scan the lines. You know, that is why it takes us so long to get educated in school: I have to scan and organize miles and miles of print. And that takes us twenty years or more, to get through it. But life happens, changes go on too rapidly for that. Because you see in the world, everything is happening everywhere all together at once. And meanwhile we with out myopic little minds are working it out step by step.

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