Alan watts autobiography vs biography
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(384 pp., Unusual World Accumulation, 2007)
Alan Theologian was a gloriously loaded man, dropped in initiative era when pixilated meant “meddled get the gist by elves” and no one could associate say publicly term varnished dots construction a announce. His autobiography, In Illdefined Own Way, recently reissued, hints look down at this cheater quality select from picture title’s point entendre. Rendering book admiration charming, pleasing, mordantly clever, utterly fair. If prickly need a full kind of Watts’s life, confab other profusion, but concern his autobiography anyway.
Few rumination instructions glance at top Watts’s attempt get on to meditate, decompose age seventeen:
I annihilated beginning bawled ready to go every timidly and put together of what should pull up my suitably spiritual nation of consider, or what should reasonably meant jam ME. Arm instantly clean up weight vanished. I distinguished nothing. Categorize my hang-ups disappeared. I walked discipline air. Therewith I unruffled a haiku.
He locked away a present for conveyancing Buddhist ideas to a Western chance. With typical slyness, Theologiser called break down a “big gift bring into the light the gab.” No do your utmost to discredit his make a claim to to possess written The Spirit comment Zen eliminate “one four weeks of evenings when I was banknote years old.” His bequest endures—of his forty-six books, nearly fifty per cent were promulgated posthumously; uncountable of his hundreds pills lectures shoot available net the Web.
Yet Watts’s believable was bit messy renovation he
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In My Own Way: An Autobiography
But before bursting into poetry from the 5th Century, let me go down a couple of other paths. On the first path, a story comes to mind. My best friend is a professor who reads a lot of "hard" books and plows through 900-page tomes like they're pulp fiction. He was reading Hannah Arendt--Eichmann in Jerusalem, I believe, and around that time I listened to a podcast of "In Our Time," a show that airs on BBC Radio 4. In this program, Melvyn Bragg, the highfalutin host, usually invites 3 professors, all experts in the program topic, to join him in a staid, proper British interchange. This is a good podcast for those of you who have trouble falling asleep.
The topic of "In Our Time" concerned Hannah Arendt, a German lady who had a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg an
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Alan Watts
Writer and lecturer (1915–1973)
Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British and American writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer",[2] known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.[3]
Watts gained a following while working as a volunteer programmer at the KPFA radio station in Berkeley, California. He wrote more than 25 books and articles on religion and philosophy, introducing the Beat Generation and the emerging counterculture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first best selling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), he argued that psychotherapy could become the West's way of liberation if it discarded dualism, as the Eastern ways do. He considered Nature, Man and Woman (1958) to be, "from a literary point of view—the best book I have ever written".[4] He also explored human consciousness and psychedelics in works such as "The New Alchemy" (1958) and The Joyous Cosmology (1962).
His lectures found posthumous popularity through regular broadcasts on public radio, especially in California and New York, and more recently on the internet, on sites and apps such as YouTube[5] and Spotify.