What was Alan Watts philosophy?

Alan Watts’ philosophy could be the gateway towards a better life—if you know how to apply it.

In today’s world of self-help gurus, seminars, and online coaching ‘experts’ it is hard to find our own philosophy.

One that resonates on a deeper level.

Finding ourselves might even require us to take a trip to the past and follow along with one of the world’s foremost thinkers, authors, and spiritual entertainers—Alan Watts.

That’s the focus of this post.

We’re examining his most influential teachings and how you can apply them to your life.

But first, let’s start with the man himself.

Alan Watt’s Philosophy—5 Principles to Apply to Your Life

If you haven’t heard of him, Alan Watts was a British philosopher who lived from 1915 until 1973. Yet, his teachings live on and have gained wild popularity over the past decade thanks to the internet, namely YouTube. You can still find many of his lectures through various YouTube channels and through the official archive at AlanWatts.org.

Watts was also the author of over 25 books including The Way of Zen, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, and Myth and Ritual in Christianity.

However, Alan Watts is best known for popularizing Buddhist and Zen teachings in Western culture. Instead of focusing on religion and the rules and regulations that often come along with dogma, Watts was passionate about creating a philosophy that made sense in any time or culture.

While much of his early life was spent in seminary schools and even a Buddhist lodge, Watts eventually settled in the US in San Francisco in the 1950s. It was there that he joined the faculty for the American Academy of Asian Studies. He was a lecturer and also the host of a popular radio show that secured a loyal following.

It was Watts’ fascination with Zen philosophy and tradition that sculpted his teachings, writings, and lectures. That is also the source of the five Alan Watts’ philosophy principles we’ll look at. Through his teachings, we can develop a powerful life philosophy that creates more harmony and less stress within our lives.

Principle #1. You are not your thoughts.

“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.”-Alan Watts

It’s easy to believe our thoughts are who we are. But according to Alan Watts’ philosophy, that isn’t the case. In fact, if we look at the very language we speak and think in, we can clearly see we ‘borrow’ them from our ancestors and other cultures before us.

When we identify with our thoughts, we’re limiting our experience to just those things. We box ourselves into an even smaller reality. Our emotions too could be said to be not our own. After all, don’t we learn how to be angry, sad, and happy from our parents and caretakers?

To identify our being with these things would be a mistake, according to Watts.

How to Apply This Principle to Your Life:

While it may not be possible to completely detach from our thinking mind, it is possible to stop being completely entangled with it. Stop believing that the words you say to yourself inside your own mind are all that you are.

Begin to experiment with your potential. Bring awareness to the fact that you aren’t the words inside your head and the fact that you are so much more. As you do, you can start to build a life that truly reflects who you really are.

Principle #2. You and the universe are one.

“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”-Alan Watts

Carl Sagan had a similar thought to Alan Watts, as has modern-day astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. These men study the very materials that make up your body. They understand at a fundamental level, at the most basic level of them all, you are, quite literally, the universe.

If you could say that you are made up of the universe could it not be argued that you ARE the universe? Alan Watts thought so. He felt that our existence served one purpose, to exist. Nothing more, nothing less. We are here to be alive. To feel, explore, and experience all that this universe has to offer.

How to Apply This Principle to Your Life:

Alan Watts believed that doing any job simply to earn money was downright stupid. Applying the idea that you and the universe are one requires you to let go of egotistical attachments to money, wealth, education, and other redundant activities. Instead, you are compelled to explore, learn, evolve, and become more than what you were at birth.

Ask yourself, how can I experience my unity with the universe every single day and contribute something of real substance?

Principle #3. Let go and enjoy the dance.

“The attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to the truth, what it might turn out to be.”-Alan watts

It’s so easy to get caught up in our own anxieties, depression, and stress. But Alan Watts’ philosophy urges us to let go and enjoy the dance of existence.  He tells us to have faith in what the unknown presents us with. Because, if we truly are the universe experiencing itself, then why would we have anything to fear? How could we be afraid of what will come next? If we have faith that it all turns out to be in our favor, no matter what way things go, then we have already won at the dance of life.

How to Apply This Principle to Your Life:

Begin to see where you’re clinging to life. Are you afraid to take a leap of faith in something you’re passionate about because you don’t know what will happen if you do? Begin to shed these old beliefs and see life for what it is, a dance.

Principle #4. Life is about change.

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”-Alan Watts

Life rarely makes sense. We can see a pattern of the consequences in our lives, but we don’t always understand the reasoning behind it. Alan Watts admonishes us to go with the flow of life. This is the art of Zen. It is the path towards liberation from stress, worry, and anxiety. If we begin to approach life the same way we would if we were floating in the water, not clinging to anything but simply recognizing that in order to survive we must truly let go and move with the flow of life, we can enjoy this experience more fully.

How to Apply This Principle to Your Life:

Do you fear change and the uncertainties that come with it? If so, ask yourself what would happen if you could let go and plunge with change as it happens. That was the core message behind Alan Watts’ philosophy.

Principle #5. Focus on the present as if that is all there is because it is.

“This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”—Alan Watts.

Alan Watts’ philosophy on life was one of simplicity. We tend to overcomplicate things as human beings, and particularly as westerners. Life isn’t that complicated. In order to fully enjoy this experience, we must be fully engaged in what it is we are doing. Instead of seeing that as ‘work’ see it as ‘play’. Because essentially, according to Watts, that is all we are here to do.

How to Apply This Principle in Your Life:

Meditation is always a great place to start if you want to learn how to focus on the present moment. Train your mind to focus on your breath and let go of old thoughts keeping you from being fully present. As you practice this, you’ll begin to live Alan Watts’ philosophy and enjoy more that life has to offer in the process.

Explore more of Alan Watts’ philosophy by reading his books or listening to his lectures through YouTube. There is much to learn from his teachings.

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.

He worked in his father's office from 1932 to 1939 while serving as a council member and member of the executive committee of the World Congress of Faiths in London. He read Bergson, Nietzche, Havelock Ellis, Jung, Bernard Shaw, and Eastern texts through the understandings of modern interpreters such as Swami Vivekananda, D. T. Suzuki, and Madame Blavatsky. In 1934 a Theosophical Society member introduced him to a Yugoslavian mystic, Dmitrije Mitrinovic, with whom he identified. From 1934 to 1938 he edited the Buddhist Lodge of London's journal, The Middle Way, and his first book, The Spirit of Zen, appeared in 1936.

Watts came to the United States in 1939 and was naturalized in 1943. Upon arrival in New York he studied under a local Zen master, Sokei-an Sasaki. But, believing that Christianity could be understood as a form of a mystical and perennial philosophy, he affiliated with the Episcopal Church. He received his Master of Sacred Theology degree from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, in June 1948 and was given an honorary Doctor of Divinity from the University of Vermont in 1958. Ordained an Episcopal priest, he served from 1944 until 1950 as Episcopal chaplain at Northwestern University. He then left the church. In an interview in LIFE magazine in 1961 Watts said that he left the church "not because it doesn't practice what it preaches, but because it preaches."

Watts returned to his early interest in Eastern thought. He sought to apply its principles to modern psychology in The Meaning of Happiness (1940). Among other writings in which he argued for a common mystical core underlying all religions, reflecting the influence of Aldous Huxley, a major attempt to reconcile Christianity and Eastern thought was Myth and Ritual in Christianity (1953). In 1964 in Beyond Theology he argued that they were in fact incompatible: "My previous discussions did not take proper account of that whole aspect of Christianity which is uncompromising, ornery, militant, rigorous, imperious, and invincibly self-righteous."

From 1951 to 1957 Watts taught comparative philosophy and psychology at the new American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, which became a graduate school of the College of the Pacific, and served as its dean from 1953 to 1956. Feeling as out of place in academy as he did in the church, he retired to a career of writing and lecturing. In 1959-1961 he was director and writer of the National Educational Television series Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life.

He was married three times—to Eleanor Everett (1938; divorced 1950); to Dorothy DeWitt (1950; divorced 1963); and to Mary Jane Yates King (1963)—and had seven children. He described himself as "an unrepented sensualist, an immoderate lover of women and the delights of sexuality, " as well as of fine food, drink, tobacco, clothes, books, and jewelry and of nature. From 1957 until his death on November 16, 1973, he continued to write and lecture at colleges, universities, medical schools, and mental health institutions in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia, including Harvard; Yale; Cambridge; the Universities of Chicago, Michigan, Indiana, and Hawaii; and the C. J. Jung Institute (Zurich).

Although his thought is associated with Rinzai Zen Buddhism, Watts did not wish to identify himself with any religious group, "on the ground that partisanship in religion closes the mind." He once called himself a spiritual "entertainer." His own mystical idealism, however, was more an amalgamation of ideas than traditional Zen, for he also borrowed from the Taoist philosophy of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu and the Advaita Vedanta of Shankara, treating all Eastern thought monolithically and interpreting it in modern terms.

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.