Alan Watts
<p>Jul 6, 2008 8:15 PM</p>
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ALAN WATTS  1915 to 1973.</p>
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a <a href="/wiki/Philosopher" class="mw-redirect" title="Philosopher">philosopher</a>, <a href="/wiki/Writer" title="Writer">writer</a>, speaker, and student of <a href="/wiki/Comparative_religion" title="Comparative religion">comparative religion</a>. He was best known as an interpreter and popularizer of <a href="/wiki/Asian" title="Asian">Asian</a> philosophies for a <a href="/wiki/Western_culture" title="Western culture">Western</a> audience.</p>
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He wrote more than twenty-five books and numerous articles on subjects such as personal <a href="/wiki/Identity_%28social_science%29" title="Identity (social science)">identity</a>, the true nature of <a href="/wiki/Reality" title="Reality">reality</a>, <a href="/wiki/Higher_consciousness" title="Higher consciousness">higher consciousness</a>, meaning of life, concepts and images of God and the pursuit of <a href="/wiki/Happiness" title="Happiness">happiness</a>, relating his experience to scientific knowledge and to the teachings of Eastern and <a href="/wiki/Western_culture" title="Western culture">Western</a> religions or philosophies (<a href="/wiki/Zen" title="Zen">Zen</a> <a href="/wiki/Buddhism" title="Buddhism">Buddhism</a>, <a href="/wiki/Taoism" title="Taoism">Taoism</a>, <a href="/wiki/Christianity" title="Christianity">Christianity</a>, <a href="/wiki/Hinduism" title="Hinduism">Hinduism</a>, etc.).</p>
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Watts wrote "I was aesthetically fascinated with a certain <b>clarity, transparency, and spaciousness</b> in Chinese and Japanese art. It seemed to float
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<h4>Worldview</h4>
<p>In several of his later publications, especially <i>Beyond Theology</i> and <i>The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are</i>, Watts put forward a worldview, drawing on Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, pantheism, and modern science; in which <b>he maintains that the whole universe consists of God playing hide-and-seek (<a href="/wiki/Maya_%28illusion%29" title="Maya (illusion)">Maya (illusion)</a>), hiding from himself by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting who he really is; the upshot being that we are all God 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.</b></p>
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My own approach to Asian philosophy was part of an<b> individual philosophical quest</b>. I am not interested in Buddhism or Taoism as particular entitites or subjects to be studied and defined in such a way that one must avoid "mixing up" one's thinking about Buddhism with interests in quantum theory, psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology, semantics, and aesthetics, or in Eckhart, Goethe, Whitehead, Jung, or Krishnamurti. I feel about academic "subjects" just as the Balinese feel about "Art" when they say, "<b>We have no Art: we just do everything as well as possible</b>...."</p>
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(note:  much of this material is from the well.com/user/davidu  article  below</p>
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In retrospect one can see that the Academy of Asian Studies was a transitional institution emerging from the failure of universities and churches<b> to satisfy important spiritual need</b>s. It was a bridge between the idea of a graduate school and the idea of a "growth center," such as the Esalen Institute</p>
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the wisdom of a transformed consciousness, of liberation from that exclusive identification of oneself with personality which overlays and conceals the basic sensation in the very back of the mind: the sensation of being identical with the universe, which is said to be the "oceanic feeling" of babies in the womb.</p>
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