Alan Watts - Wisdom of the Youth

Описание: "Future of Communication" Lecture on "More on the Future"

Alan Wilson Watts (1915-1973) was a naturalized American author and lecturer who interpreted Zen to the West. His writings were particularly popular among the so-called "beat generation" of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Alan Wilson Watts was born in Chislehurst, England, on January 6, 1915. Raised in the county of Kent, his introduction to Eastern culture came at about the age of 11 when he read the novels of Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace about Fu Manchu, the inscrutable Chinese detective, "and other sophisticated Chinese villains." Watts received his secondary education at King's School, Canterbury, where he did some creative writing and participated in fencing, rowing, and debate.

Watts believed that the key to the universe is fundamentally a higher consciousness or mind. The world is an emanation of the one Being or Consciousness. Unity is the nature of the universe while the distinctions between knowing subject and the objects of knowledge are actually expressions of unity. This fact, he said, is gaining support from the discoveries of science, such as those of the British biologist Joseph Needham, in whose work he was especially interested. The human predicament is the mistaken belief in the individual ego and the forms of activity which result. This places the individual in conflict with all of reality and results in the ego feeling ultimately responsible. Christianity in all its forms, Watts said, has reinforced this delusion, while Chinese and Indian thinkers have discovered the unity of the depths of the human being and the One which makes one "at home in the world." Watts even criticized the applications of Zen by the "beat generation" of the 1950s and traditional Japanese Zen schools as egoconscious.

True Zen, he said, was not that of the "solemn and sexless ascetic," but the liberation of the mind from traditional thought forms to raise human consciousness to identify with the Consciousness which is Reality. It is essentially a mystical experience of Reality "felt directly in a silence of words and meanings." Mystical thinkers of all traditions have discovered this, he said, and modern psychotherapy is coming to agree. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961) Watts referred to Carl Jung, Erich Fromm, Rollo May, Norman O. Brown, Abraham Maslow, and others as those who were bringing science closer to Eastern insight.

Music: Steve Jablonsky
Track: Mass Winnings, My name is Lincoln
Album - The Island