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alan watts
kem:
I was recently given a recording of an Alan Watts seminar circa 1990 (do you do it or does it do you?). I am finding it a nice sceptical look at religion(s) through western buddhist eyes. No woo, really.
I have read "the wisdom of insecurity" a couple of times and liked it. He seems to presage a bit of very modern neuroscience.
banyan:
I've listened to many, many hours of Alan Watts lectures. I was not a skeptic when I listened to them, and Alan Watts wasn't a skeptic, but there's no woo there. A lot of Buddhist philosophy and practice can easily be incorporated into a naturalistic world view. Alan Watts influenced how I live my life in a very major way, and I always recommend checking him out.
spiney:
Yeah, Alan Watts. Zen and the art of Lecturing.
GodSlayer:
yea, he's pretty cool.
spiney:
Unusually, he was academically respectable. He read the chinese version of Lao Tzu!, and quotes the actual ideograms in his book on The Tao.
He was also into psychoanalysis, and saw parallels between that and Eastern Mysticism. however, it was all in a scholarly way, not as woo! He was anti-establishment, and covered "similar ground" to Aldus Huxley, but more oriented towards Zen rather than Vedanta. You can get "some idea" of this from his book titles:
http://www.alanwatts.net/watts.htm
He was poles apart from people like - for example - Paul Brunton, who may have been sincere, but was partly fraudulent. Worth consulting is Masson's book "my father's guru".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Brunton
http://www.jeffreymasson.com/other-publications/my-fathers-guru.html
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