“All love stories are frustration stories… To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had.”
BY MARIA POPOVA (brainpickings.org)
Adrienne Rich, in contemplating how love refines our truths, wrote: “An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” But among the dualities that lend love both its electricity and its exasperation — the interplay of thrill and terror, desire and disappointment, longing and anticipatory loss — is also the fact that our pathway to this mutually refining truth must pass through a necessary fiction: We fall in love not just with a person wholly external to us but with a fantasy of how that person can fill what is missing from our interior lives.
Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips addresses this central paradox with uncommon clarity and elegance in Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (public library).
Phillips writes:
All love stories are frustration stories… To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had (of one’s formative frustrations, and of one’s attempted self-cures for them); you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there. And what is renewed in that experience is an intensity of frustration, and an intensity of satisfaction. It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn’t know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want. What psychoanalysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing — nothing comes of nothing — but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies.
This duality of the familiar and the foreign is mirrored in the osmotic relationship between presence and absence, with which every infatuated lover is intimately acquainted — that parallel intensity of longing for our lover’s presence and anguishing in her absence. Phillips writes:
However much you have been wanting and hoping and dreaming of meeting the person of your dreams, it is only when you meet them that you will start missing them. It seems that the presence of an object is required to make its absence felt (or to make the absence of something felt). A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of your frustration in their absence.
[…]
Falling in love, finding your passion, are attempts to locate, to picture, to represent what you unconsciously feel frustrated about, and by.
Missing Out, previously discussed here, is a magnificent read in its totality. Complement this particular portion with Stendhal on the seven stages of romance, Susan Sontag on the messiness of love, and the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hahn on how to love, then revisit Phillips on balance, the essential capacity for “fertile solitude,” and how kindness became our guilty pleasure.
Moon Wobble April 2019
Moonwob Apr 2019
Zoom in for closer look.
Prepared by Rick Thomas, H.W., M.
Stress and the Social Self: How Relationships Affect Our Immune System
By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)
Relationships, Adrienne Rich argued in her magnificent meditation on love, refine our truths. But they also, it turns out, refine our immune systems. That’s what pioneering immunologist Esther Sternberg examines in The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions (public library) — a revelatory inquiry into how emotional stress affects our susceptibility to burnout and disease.
As just about every socialized human being can attest, interpersonal relationships play a significant role in our experience of stress — either contributing to it and or alleviating it. And the way we connect — something psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has termed “positivity resonance” — is deeply patterned through our earliest experiences of bonding, which train our limbic pathways. Sternberg traces the cognitive origin of these formative patterns:
Somewhere in our brains we carry a map of our relationships. It is our mother’s lap, our best friend’s holding hand, our lover’s embrace — all these we carry within ourselves when we are alone. Just knowing that these are there to hold us if we fall gives us a sense of peace. “Cradled,” “rooted,” “connected” are words we use to describe the feeling that comes of this knowledge; social psychologists call this sense embeddedness. The opposite is perhaps a more familiar term — we call it loneliness.
Thus a person, sitting by herself in a room, may appear to others to be quite alone; but that person, if embedded, will have a world of relationships mapped inside her mind — a map that will lead to those who can be called on for nurture and support in time of need. But others, the Gatsbys among us, might be among a crowd of dozens and yet feel very much alone. Many pieces of great literature have in fact tapped into this sense of disconnectedness. Our sense that powerful forces beyond our bodies link us to others is so ingrained that we use phrases such as “times that bind,” “family dyes,” and “bonding,” to describe those intangible connections. And the emotions they evoke are among the greatest forces that affect our hormonal, our nerve chemical, and our immune responses — and through these, our health and our resistance to disease.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak for ‘Open House for Butterflies’ by Ruth Krauss. Click image for more.
We encode these emotions early and carry them forward through symbol and ritual, using physical experiences and objects as memory-anchors. Sternberg captures the enduring echoes of these primal patterns:
And yet, however deeply engrained these patterns may be, relationships are also inherently alive — they grow, change, and invariably become what Leo “Dr. Love” Buscaglia memorably termed a process of “dynamic interaction.” In a passage that calls to mind David Whyte’s wisdom on endings and beginnings, Sternberg examines the often inevitable evolution — and sometimes revolution — of relationships:
[…]
At times, one small corner of that map can swell and grow, reverberate and suddenly seem to take over our entire world: we fall in love; we are abandoned; we become envious; we hate. The persons who are the object of such feelings can take on gigantic proportions in our minds and dominate our whole social and emotional outlook, coloring every corner of our lives, until, through monumental effort, or simply through gradual erosion of time, they recede again to their rightful place and size.
Art by Andrea Dezsö for a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Click image for more.
These fluid social dynamics, Sternberg points out, permeate our culture well beyond our immediate individual experience:
And heal we must, for the social self is central to our neurobiological experience of stress:
In the remainder of the wholly illuminating The Balance Within, Sternberg goes on to explore the neurobiological underpinnings of this emotional machinery, the role of our psychological patterning in our physiological predisposition to disease, and how we can begin to rewire our response to stress. Complement it with Naomi Wolf on the psychology of stress, orgasm, and creativity and Adam Phillips on why frustration is essential for satisfaction in love.
Metonymy Translation
By William Fennie, H.W., M.
The Metonymy Translation class recently held in Hawaii is is the first version of this class as a full two-day event. It was given once before as a one-day event, in Los Angeles in 2007. Various lessons associated with MTR have been presented at Prosperos assemblies as they’ve been developed. Over the years I have assembled a variety of related information, and when Al Haferkamp asked me to present a full version of the class I felt the time was right, and that I was ready.
Hawaii was chosen for a very practical reason : Irene Stewart and her sister Bridget were joining us from Australia, and it seemed only fair to meet them halfway. For this class we had four students who were relatively new to The Prosperos instruction. The rest of the group was made up of students (and old friends) who have long experience with our methods of Translation, Releasing the Hidden Splendour, and all the other tools.
I felt that a small, face-to-face group would be best for working to develop the material. Through Maureen Malanaphy we were able to arrange to use a retreat center on the Windward side of O’ahu (Kaaawa). Given the limited space, and limited local accommodations otherwise, it was decided that this class would be promoted almost entirely by word-of-mouth. Moreover, because we had three full days together following the class presentation it was possible to do daily check-ins about using the technique : were there difficulties? what kind of experiences did people have? and so on. This worked out as well as I could have wished for.
As expected, some Hawaiian students got wind of the event and decided to come. Canda Bloir opened the class with a very moving Hawaiian ‘oli. I was happy to meet Brian Malanaphy (again) after many years, and he joined HughJohn and Maureen in the class. In fact, we had a Malanaphy micro-reunion on Wednesday night when Liam, Kevin, and Kathleen all joined us during our farewell meal ! Canda’s grandson (!) Keoni also visited for a while and we discovered that his Maori connections were familiar to Irene and Bridget.
Alex Gambeau, a member of the audio study group where this idea was born, unfortunately was not able to make it. Also, Pam Rodolph and Ragin from Oklahoma made all the arrangements to come and then got shut down by a renegade snowstorm that closed the Denver airport.
I am deeply grateful to Al Haferkamp, who managed many of the logistical issues around a venture of this magnitude, leaving me free to compose the final lessons and prepare myself for delivering the material. In this I feel very privileged – not many of our instructors get that kind of support these days. Alana had her hand very much in those tasks as well. Jim Renza joined Alana and me on the trip from the East Coast – which was a loooooong haul – and was wonderfully helpful with managing the food presentation and other details. HughJohn Malanaphy took responsibility for running the video camera on short notice and also engineered an alternative audio recording which will be of higher quality than what we could get from the camera. And Maureen Malanaphy, as I mentioned, provided crucial support during the run-up to class and a wonderful welcoming dinner feast on Friday night.
I’m deeply appreciative of everyone who participated in this class experience. Whatever comes out of it very much belongs to them.
Putting the History of the Earth in Perspective
John Boswell: Historian of gays and lesbians in Christianity
John Boswell (1947-1994) was a prominent scholar who researched and wrote about the importance of gays and lesbians in Christian history.
Boswell, a history professor at Yale University, wrote such influential classics as Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) and Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (1994).
John Eastburn “Jeb” Boswel was born on March 20, 1947, in Boston to a military family. He converted from the Episcopal Church of his upbringing to Roman Catholicism at age 16. He attended mass daily until his death, even though as an openly gay Christian he disagreed with church teachings on homosexuality. He also helped found Yale’s Lesbian and Gay Studies Center in the late 1980s.
A linguistic genius, he used his knowledge of more than 15 languages to argue that the Roman Catholic Church did not condemn homosexuality until at least the 12th century in his book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the 14th Century
He joined the Yale faculty as assistant professor, was appointed a full professor in 1982 and served as chair of the history department from 1990-92.
Using some of his last strength as he battled AIDS, Boswell translated many rites of adelphopoiesis (Greek for making brothers) in his book Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe
Boswell can be seen in a 1986 video lecturing on “Jews, Gay People, and Bicycle Riders” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the series “Out & About: Celebrating Gay and Lesbian Culture.”
A 25th-anniversary collection analyzing Boswell’s work was published as “The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,” edited by Mathew Kuefler. Scholars take many different approaches, looking at Boswell’s career and influence, a Roman emperor’s love letters to another man; suspected sodomy among medieval monks; and genderbending visions of mystics and saints.
A scholar challenges Boswell’s interpretations in the 2016 book “Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: Monks, Laymen, and Christian Ritual” by Claudia Rapp. She offers evidence that the brother-making rite bears no resemblance to marriage. The author is professor of Byzantine studies at the University of Vienna in Austria. It is included in the Top 35 LGBTQ Christian books of 2016.
Boswell died an untimely death at age 47 from AIDS-related illness on Christmas Eve 1994. He remains an unofficial saint to the many LGBTQ Christians who find life-giving spiritual value in his historical research that affirms queer people in Christian history.
Shared gravestone of John Boswell and his life partner Jerone Hart (photo by Kickstand)
Boswell is buried beside his longtime partner Jerone Hart (1946-2010) at Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut. They are pictured together in photos on Boswell’s Findagrave.com page with the caption, “partners in life, for life.” Their shared headstone is shaped to look like a book. An inscription reads, “To live in one’s memory is never to die.”
Books by John Boswell
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe
Links related to John Boswell
John Boswell profile at LGBT Religious Archives Network
John Boswell tribute at Yale AIDS Memorial Project (yamp.org)
John Boswell profile at Elisa Reviews and Ramblings
John E. Boswell, 47, Historian Of Medieval Gay Culture, Dies (New York Times)
John Boswell papers (Archives at Yale)
____
This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBTQ martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
Copyright © Kittredge Cherry. All rights reserved.
Qspirit.net presents the Jesus in Love Blog on LGBTQ spirituality.
Kittredge Cherry
Why America Can’t Be the World Police
Why America can't be the world police
America not only exercises immense influence over foreign governments, but can also topple world leaders on a whim, which, Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs says is quite crazy. However, what happens when the U.S. overreaches its power to further its own agenda? Oftentimes, a mess ensues. In this video, Sachs explains.
Posted by Big Think on Tuesday, April 2, 2019
Asiana Airlines Crash: A Cockpit Culture Problem? (or why Group Dynamics is better than leader-centered leadership)
A tragic plane crash has reignited a debate about the influence of national culture inside the cockpit.
On July 6, Asiana Airlines Flight 214 – a Boeing 777 – crashed after clipping a seawall during a landing attempt at San Francisco International Airport, killing two and injuring 180 of 307 passengers. It was the first crash to result in multiple deaths involving a major airline in North America since 2001.
After ruling out the usual suspects of weather – the skies were clear – and mechanical problems, officials had no choice but to look at the next most likely factor: the pilots.
Enter the culture card.
CNBC put it like this: “As a general point of reference about the Korean language, you speak to superiors and elders in an honorific form that requires more words and can be more oblique. Less, ‘Yo! You want water?’; and more, ‘It’s a warm day for a nice refreshment, no?’ This may sound trivial. But put this in the context of a cockpit, where seconds and decision-making are crucial and you get an idea of how communication and culture matter.”Following the crash, a number of media outlets began to talk of the role allegedly played by Korea’s hierarchical culture in the tragic accident. From NPR and National Geogrpahic to NBC and an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, references to the possibility of a cultural piece in the puzzle of what caused the crash were liberally sprinkled in reports and analyses.
Pundits who took this contentious angle on what caused the Asiana crash work in the tradition of Malcom Gladwell, who penned a chapter titled The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes in his Outliers: The Story of Success– a huge success story itself. Speaking about his thinking behind this chapter, Gladwell told CNN Money in 2008:
“Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost any other airline in the world for a period at the end of the 1990s. When we think of airline crashes, we think, ‘Oh, they must have had old planes. They must have had badly trained pilots.’ No. What they were struggling with was a cultural legacy, that Korean culture is hierarchical.”
The deferential respect that is de rigueur in Korea’s apparently über-Confucian social strata was readily apparent in the infamous Korean Air crash that occurred in Guam in 1997, when Flight 801 smashed into a hill, killing 228 of 254 passengers on board a Boeing 747. Another case in 1999, wherein junior officers were seemingly too timid to voice their concerns to the captain in time to avert disaster, occurred near London.
In addition to an alleged reluctance to point out a superior’s errors, no matter how grave, Korea’s rigid pecking order also purportedly gives preference to retired military fliers over civilian pilots. This lack of civilian-military cooperation is not conducive to the cockpit camaraderie needed to commandeer a large commercial jet.
But can Confucian cultural underpinnings – which also exert strong pull in countries like China and Japan, where airline safety is not a sore point – really account for the Asiana crash? Especially after so many safety adjustments were made to improve the nation’s avionic rep – most notably in the case of formerly disgraced Korean Air?
As Slate notes, “A 2008 assessment by ICAO, the civil aviation branch of the United Nations, ranked Korea’s aviation safety standards, including its pilot training standards, as nothing less than the highest in the world, beating out more than 100 other countries. As they should be, Koreans are immensely proud of this turnaround, and Asiana Airlines, the nation’s No. 2 carrier, had maintained an impeccable record of both customer satisfaction and safety.”
For perspective, Asiana pilots must fly 10 flights and a total of 60 hours on a 777 to complete the airline’s training program. Pilot Lee Kang-kuk, a veteran with nearly 10,000 hours of total flying experience, had eight flights and 43 hours on the Boeing 777 under his belt when the crash occurred.
While many have pounced on Lee’s alleged lack of experience, Slate calls the lack-of-experience argument a “red herring” and goes on to note, “Pilots transition from aircraft type to aircraft type all the time, and it’s not uncommon for a pilot to have a limited number of hours in whichever plane he or she has most recently qualified in.”
Last Friday South Korean aviation officials also shot down the culture explanation.
“It’s true that authoritarianism existed in the cockpit until the late 1990s (of South Korean flights) but we have now a completely different culture,” said Chang Man-Heui, director of flight standards at the South Korean transportation ministry.
Jung Yun-Sick of Jungwong University, a former Asiana pilot, added, “I assure you that cockpit culture has undergone great changes and become as much democratic as another countries.”
A more likely explanation is that pilots have become too dependent on automated processes at the expense of know-how. According to Thomas W. Brown, a former American employee of a Boeing subsidiary that trains Korean pilots, South Korea lacks a network of small airports to hone young aviators’ flying acumens. As a result, they rely too heavily on automated processes.
Brown told The New York Times, “You get the autopilot on at 250 feet over the ground and you keep it on for 16 hours, until one minute before touchdown, and you really don’t get any flying experience.”
Inexperience, Confucianism or a combination? The investigation is ongoing.
There’s no such thing as male and female DNA
(freethoughtblogs.com)
I’ve been away for a while — my beloved has been away for over a week (felt like longer), and I had to travel through the arctic wilderness and another icy storm to pick her up at the airport, and then we had to spend a night in a hotel because of said icy storm, and I just got home. It was aggravating because there was an extreme case of someone being wrong on the internet, and I’d left my laptop at home (it was supposed to be just a quick trip to Minneapolis and back!), so I was frustrated in my inability to reply. All I could see was Twitter, and that is not an appropriate place for a a sufficiently lengthy, ragey response.
It was Bryan Fischer. Savor the irony in this.
Bryan Fischer
✔@BryanJFischer
It’s a scientific, biological, genetic fact that DNA is either male or female. To reject that is to reject science. I’ll stick with science.
Robert Freedland@robertfreedlandReplying to @BryanJFischer@LiveScience In the Bible everyone is either man or woman but reality is that are also individuals of ambiguous sexuality.
It’s a scientific, biological, genetic fact that DNA is either male or female. To reject that is to reject science. I’ll stick with science.
Yeah, the young earth creationist wants to stick with the science. Look, simple answer first: DNA is not gendered. There is no difference in sequence, structure, or conformation between males and females. Fischer has invented a false fact that only serves the sanctimoniousness of assholes.
You can extract all the DNA you want from men and women, and except for one short segment from the Y chromosome, there’s no consistent difference. Sorry, gender essentialists, not sorry.
But when I pointed this out in all the brevity possible on Twitter, we got a helpful idiot to show up.
PZ Myers@pzmyersWow. How does that work? Left twist for female, right for male?
I hate to tell you this, but DNA is not gendered in any way.
John Howard@eggandsperm@BryanJFischer He means a DNA test reveals XY or XX. Also, gamete DNA is erased and imprinted differently by males and females.
He means a DNA test reveals XY or XX. Also, gamete DNA is erased and imprinted differently by males and females.
Isn’t it sweet when someone says something plainly stupid, and then a fellow traveler rushes forward to tell you what they really meant to say, and then gives you a completely different and also completely wrong statement to help them out? He has added 111 characters that will require far more words to untangle, and all he has done is obfuscated and complicated everything, and gotten it wrong still.
I had to look up Mr @EggAndSperm, although his Twitter handle is about enough to tell you about his weird obsession.
Male and female are reproductive rights. #BanMalePregnancy #EndGayMarriage #NMRA Natural Marriage and Reproduction Act
Oh, boy. Here we go. Someone who is very concerned that people must obey the natural order, as determined by him. He has tapped a pet peeve of mine, the confusion between what is natural and what is unnatural, used as a 2×4 to club people over the head to insist that they follow his derived social rules.
Here’s an extreme example of what I mean. Mr @EggAndSperm might be going about buggering ducks, and I’d rather he didn’t. I’ve almost certainly lost the argument if I go up to Mr @EggAndSperm and declare to him, “Hey, you, stop the duck buggering — it’s unnatural!” Because, of course, it is perfectly natural; if it wasn’t he wouldn’t be able to do it. There is no physical law that says Mr @EggAndSperm can’t bugger ducks. He requires no supernatural assistance to indulge in this behavior.
On the other hand, a good argument would be that he should stop buggering ducks because it’s cruel, it causes the animal pain, and it’s distressing to other people to witness. It does harm, and the duck did not consent. I don’t have to invoke an invisible Lord of the Cosmos who objects and plans to send the duck-buggering Mr @EggAndSperm to hell for it.
But I have to admit that the social more that we don’t sexually abuse ducks is actually not a natural law, and is flexible and more a function of social context than anything else. You have to value the life of an animal and place that somewhere above Mr @EggAndSperm’s sexual gratification, which again is a social construct that is not fixed.
Obviously. Because the same culture that frowns upon duck-buggering thinks it’s just fine to shoot that same duck, chop off its head, rip off its feathers, disembowel it, cook it, and eat its flesh.
So please, don’t ever try to persuade me which behaviors are reasonable and good by invoking “nature”. Nature doesn’t care. Tell me about values and reason. You’re going to have a tough time coming up with a rationale for prohibiting a behavior that does no one, not even ducks, any harm, and is fully consensual.
But this is Mr @EggAndSperm’s whole schtick: he doesn’t like it when other people engage in sexual activities of which he disapproves, because it ain’t natural. He’s got a whole websitededicated to deploring other people’s private habits.
Dedicated to stopping genetic engineering of human beings, and preserving natural conception rights. All people should be created equal, by the union of a woman and a man.
Another peeve of mine is when people misuse science to claim authority. This is Mr @EggAndSperm’s whole attitude: he puts on the mantle of science to wag his righteous finger at gay people and in vitro fertilization, all while babbling about ‘ensoulment’ and ‘natural order’.
But let’s return to his original elaboration/revision of Fischer’s claim.
Male and female are not so simply defined by X and Y chromosomes, and it’s dishonest to pretend that they are. Most people have not had their chromosome complement examined and tested; we go through our whole lives assessing the sex of other individuals through other cues, most of them cultural. We do not inspect people’s genitals to figure out whether they’re men or women (although, apparently, the Republicans would like the option). Gender is revealed in a lot of ways by human beings, and most of them have nothing to do with biology.
The Y chromosome does have a trigger to initiate development of male gonads, and those gonads produce hormones that shift the individual to a particular mode of development, most of the time. There are exceptions. I consider it a mistake to focus on the infrequent exceptions to invalidate the kind of gender essentialism Fischer and Mr @EggAndSperm want to promote — it accepts that gender is fixed as a product of chromosomes. I’d rather point out that gender is a heck of a lot more complicated than that, that these mostly invisible biological cues are largely irrelevant in practice, and that the cognitive/behavioral aspects of sex are typically far more important to individuals.
His abuse of imprinting is somewhat novel to me. It’s also wrong.
Imprinting is a process in which the maternal or paternal parent differentially inactivates or activates genes in their gametes. There are genes in early development which are very sensitive to dosage; having two copies of that gene active is damaging, having no active copies of that gene is even worse, but having exactly one active copy is just right. So one parent shuts off the copy in their gametes, while the other leaves it active.
It’s largely arbitrary which parent does what, as long as the final result is one active and one suppressed copy in the diploid zygote. So what we see is basically a random distribution: some genes are suppressed by mom, some by dad.
It doesn’t matter because — and this is the point that Mr @EggAndSperm sneakily glosses over — you’ve got both a maternal and paternal copy. Both! If you’re going to use imprinting to argue that there is male and female DNA, you’re just going to have to accept the fact that we’re all made up of half chromosomes from a maternal source, and half from a paternal source — we’re half male and half female.
Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Fischer wants to argue.
Also, I have to point out that imprinting has only been found in a small number of genes, on the order of a hundred, and of those, even fewer have been found to have physiological/developmental significance. It’s a feeble straw to grasp at.
So bottom line: Both Fischer and Mr @EggAndSperm are full of shit. They are ideologically driven cranks who are abusing science to make bogus claims about gender.
I’m also tempted to go out and get pregnant as a man just to piss off Mr @EggAndSperm, except that the idea of someone without a uterus carrying a pregnancy to term is only a theoretical possibility, so it’s kind of silly to have a website dedicated to preventing it, and the only men who have become pregnant do have uteruses, which I do not.
Biography: Alan Watts
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Alan Watts
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Alan Wilson Watts
6 January 1915 Chislehurst, England
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| Died | 16 November 1973 (aged 58) |
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| Alma mater | Seabury-Western Theological Seminary |
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Notable work
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The Way of Zen (1957) |
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| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
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Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British-American[1] philosopher who interpreted and popularised Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master’s degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.
Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. He considered Nature, Man and Woman (1958) to be, “from a literary point of view—the best book I have ever written.”[2] He also explored human consciousness in the essay “The New Alchemy” (1958) and in the book The Joyous Cosmology (1962).
Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. According to the critic Erik Davis, his “writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity.”[3]