The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

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theJourneyofPurpose TJOP (15 September 2013). "Is this life a Dream? - Alan Watts" . Retrieved 15 August 2017– via YouTube. In 1950, Watts married Dorothy DeWitt. He moved to San Francisco in early 1951 to teach. They began a family that grew to include five children: Tia, Mark, Richard, Lila, and Diane. The couple separated in the early 1960s after Watts met Mary Jane Yates King (called "Jano" in his circle) while lecturing in New York. Corcelli, John (August 2005). "Alan Watts on Living". Canadian Communications Foundation . Retrieved 2 August 2022. Peter Haskel (ed.): Bankei Zen: Translations from The Record of Bankei. Grove Press, New York 1984. p. 59.

Watts's biographers saw him- after his stint as an Anglican priest- as representative of not so much a religion but as a lone-wolf thinker and social rascal. In David Stuart's biography, Watts is seen as an unusually gifted speaker and writer driven by his own interests, enthusiasms, and demons. [60] Elsa Gidlow, whom Watts called "sister", refused to be interviewed for the biography, but later painted a kinder picture of Watts's life in her own autobiography, Elsa, I Come with My Songs. According to critic Erik Davis, his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity." [61] By the mid-fifties a “Zen Boom” was underway as Beat intellectuals in San Francisco and New York began celebrating and assimilating the esoteric qualities of Eastern religion into an emerging worldview that was later dubbed “the counterculture” of the 1960’s. Following the 1966 publication of The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, which sold very well, requests for appearances poured in. Alan lectured at colleges throughout the U.S. and conducted seminars at fledging “growth centers” across the country, such as the world-renowned Esalen Institute of Big Sur, California. Broadcasts of his talks continued at KPFA and KPFK, and spread east to WBAI in New York and WBUR in Boston. The weekly shows attracted a wide audience and Alan became an important figure in the counterculture movement.He urges us to understand the balance so that we can appreciate the good times. Otherwise, life would be very dull and we wouldn’t even be aware that we are even alive. It's like, man, you know, we are all just Watts also later wrote of a mystical dream he experienced while ill with a fever as a child. [10] During this time he was influenced by Far Eastern landscape paintings and embroideries that had been given to his mother by missionaries returning from China. The few Chinese paintings Watts was able to see in England riveted him, and he wrote "I was aesthetically fascinated with a certain clarity, transparency, and spaciousness in Chinese and Japanese art. It seemed to float..." [11] These works of art emphasised the participatory relationship of people in nature, a theme that stood fast throughout his life and one that he often wrote about. (See, for instance, the last chapter in The Way of Zen. [12]) The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East.” Watts, Alan W. (1937). The legacy of Asia and Western man: a study of the middle way. London: John Murray.

At first glance I thought this collection was of the Eastern Religion Professor Alan Watts, who by the way is not a new age Guru, as another reviewer has stated. It's obvious he has not read or listened to him. Attention: “an intentional, unapologetic discriminator”. Attention is a narrowed perception. Like a scanning mechanism, it is a flashlight in the darkroom that narrows our perception. While a narrowed perception is great for being sharp, it can only focus on one area at a time. But there are always gonna be ones who think they’re above you in their rather earthy pursuit of questionable possessions & peccadilloes! Watts is sampled in Dreams, a 2019 cinema and television advertisement for the cruise liner Cunard [78] Tragedy & Hope (25 August 2012). "The Real You - Alan Watts" . Retrieved 17 August 2017– via YouTube.In several of his later publications, especially Beyond Theology and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts put forward a worldview, drawing on Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, pantheism or panentheism, and modern science, in which he maintains that the whole universe consists of a cosmic Self-playing hide-and-seek ( Lila); hiding from itself ( Maya) by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe and forgetting what it really is – the upshot being that we are all IT in disguise ( Tat Tvam Asi). In this worldview, Watts asserts that our conception of ourselves as an " ego in a bag of skin", or "skin-encapsulated ego" is a myth; the entities we call the separate "things" are merely aspects or features of the whole. The 2017 video game Everything contains quotes from Watts' lectures. [76] (The creator previously worked on Her, which also referenced Watts [77] [69]) KPFA Folio, Volume 13, no. 1, 9–22 April 1962, p. 14. Retrieved at archive.org on 26 November 2014. We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”