The Animated Alan Watts

I have really been enjoying reading and listening to lectures by Alan Watts lately. I posted about one of his books last week, The Wisdom of Insecurity, and while I flippantly suggested my summary made reading it unnecessary, it is in fact one of the most significant books I've ever read. Not just for its content alone, but because my place in life right now enables me to understand and appreciate it. I would not have understood it a year ago, and perhaps will think nothing of it in another year. But encountering the work of Alan Watts right now was rare serendipity.

Watts was a charismatic British teacher of Eastern religious thought. As a scholar and philosopher of religion, he was perhaps not a great force, but as a popularizer and philosopher of life, he was a genius. Insecurity was his first pure work of life philosophy, and the vigor and freshness of it more than 50 years later is still very compelling. It seems to boil out the essence of his thought and insight. The basic ideas are not new to me, a mix of philosophical idealism and mysticism, but the exposition left me a bit breathless. I can see why he became such a giant figure.

Very curiously, two of the most offensive people in Hollywood today, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, created some South Park-esque cartoon shorts narrated from lecture recordings of Alan Watts. And they're quite good even if entirely unexpected. So, why did they do them? Well, Parker noted in a interview, "[My] father tried to raise me Buddhist, as in Alan Watts Buddhism, which is Buddhism in a way." I suspect they also love Watt's deep sense of irony, and they illustrate it well.

Some Mormons will know that Parker and Stone also have a (almost entirely unwelcome) fascination with us. As offensive as we find their satire, they actually like Mormons. Trey Parker's first girlfriend was a Mormon, whom he really respected. Scientology, on the other hand, they also skewer but really do hate. But that's all another story.

The three shorts below are "official." But two others seem to also be by the same team, even if lacking some polish: Madness and I.

Alan Watts - Life and Music (full screen)

Alan Watts - Prickles and Goo (full screen)

Alan Watts - Appling (full screen)

The Taoist Farmer

Reading Alan Watts and basking in Eastern wisdom, it occurred to me that a visiting church leader this past weekend shared a  Chinese folktale that is a classic expression of the Taoist philosophy of living life in accordance with nature. I think he took away from it something rather different, but I'm happy that a wise allegory which has been so variously told in different times and cultures lives on in Mormonism. It has been given many titles, and there is a great children's book based on it under the title, The Lost Horse. That is congenial to westerners, but I prefer the more authentic title, The Taoist Farmer. There are more rigorously Taoist tellings, perhaps, but the  following is close to the version this person related:

The Taoist Farmer

A man who lived on the northern frontier of China was skilled in interpreting events. One day, for no reason, his horse ran away to the nomads across the border. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, "What makes you so sure this isn't a blessing?"

Some months later his horse returned, bringing a splendid nomad stallion. Everyone congratulated him, but his father said, "What makes you so sure this isn't a disaster?"

Their household was richer by a fine horse, which his son loved to ride. But one day he fell and broke his hip. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, "What makes you so sure this isn't a blessing?"

A year later the nomads came in force across the border, and every able-bodied man took his bow and went into battle. The Chinese frontiersmen lost nine of every ten men. Only because the son was lame did the father and son survive to take care of each other.

Truly, blessing turns to disaster, and disaster to blessing: the changes have no end, nor can the mystery be fathomed.

Creative Emptiness

Thought for the day from the introduction to Alan Watts’ classic The Wisdom of Insecurity (p. 10):

In [my former books] I was concerned to vindicate certain principles of religion, philosophy, and metaphysic by reinterpreting them. This was, I think, like putting legs on a snake—unnecessary and confusing, because only doubtful truths need defense. This book, however, is in the spirit of the Chinese sage Lao-tzu, that master of the law of reversed effect, who declared that those who justify themselves do not convince, and that to know the truth one must get rid of knowledge, and that nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness—from which men shrink.

Lao-tzu was the author of the Tao Te Ching, the foundational "scripture" of Taoism. Taoism is the most compelling of eastern philosophies to me. Contemporary therapies like CBT draw on its principles, as does Watts in this book, both of which basically argue that anxiety and insecurity are, paradoxically, "the result of trying to be secure, and that, contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves" from suffering and death (p. 9). In other words, embrace change as the only certainty in life. Live life mindfully and openly, but with no fixed expectations. Despair is nothing more than a fear of and resistance to change.

There, now you don't need to read the book. (A terrible summary, actually.)

But in fact, I liked this quote for other reasons, which I will not entirely explain. But it echoes my own experience of the conflict between theology and spirituality, religious discourse versus religious experience. Religious apologetics and sermonizing fill me with boredom or even mild melancholy, and theology may be intellectually engaging, but rarely anything more. To invoke an old saw, discoursing on religion is like dancing about architecture. To reduce it to words empties it of meaning, since it is irreducibly experiential. It can be evoked by the arts, including words-as-art, but words-as-description aspire to fixed definitions, which are limiting and grossly inadequate.

So, how exactly did I become a scholar of religion by vocation? Scholars can be mystics, too.