― Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts (Janauyr 6, 1915 – November 16, 1973) was an English writer, speaker, and self-styled “philosophical entertainer”, known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience. Watts gained a following while working as a volunteer programmer at the KPFA radio station in Berkeley. Wikipedia
(Contributed by Calvin Harris, H.W., M.)
A great tragedy of our time, this epoch of self-righteousness, is the zeal with which people would rather feel right than understand — the situation, the context, the motives and vulnerabilities behind the actions, the basic fact of the other.
Growling beneath it all is an aversion to our own imperfections — we would rather look away and toward the faults of others than fully step into our own shadow and embrace it with light. In so segregating our own nature, we abdicate our wholeness and cease being fully human.
How to rehumanize ourselves by owning our shadow is what Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973) examines in some wonderful passages from Tao: The Watercourse Way (public library) — his final book, which he never fully finished before death took him one late-autumn day; it was posthumously published with the help of his friend Al Chung-liang Huang.
Alan Watts, early 1970s. (Photograph courtesy of Everett Collection)
Watts writes:
At the head of all virtues Confucius put not righteousness (i), but human-heartedness (jen), which is not so much benevolence, as often translated, but being fully and honestly human.
[…]
A true human is not a model of righteousness, a prig or a prude, but recognizes that some failings are as necessary to genuine human nature as salt to stew.
A generation before Parker Palmer urged in his magnificent commencement address that you “take everything that’s bright and beautiful in you and introduce it to the shadow side of yourself” so that “the shadow’s power is put in service of the good,” Watts adds:
[…]
Trust in human nature is acceptance of the good-and-bad of it, and it is hard to trust those who do not admit their own weakness.
Art by Andrea Dezsö from a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales.
(It is worth nothing that Tao: The Watercourse Way was itself a way of admitting, and remedying, a human weakness on the scale of society — a decade before Ursula K. Le Guin so brilliantly unsexed the universal pronoun, Watts becomes the first to propose, in a footnote, that the Confucian word jen, which is ungendered in Chinese but has traditionally been translated into English as “man-heartedness,” instead be translated as “human-heartedness” and that all instances of “man” as the universal pronoun be replaced with “human.”)
Complement with Joan Didion on learning not to mistake self-righteousness for morality and the psychologist turned pioneering artist Anne Truitt on the cure for our chronic self-righteousness, then revisit Watts on love and the only real antidote to fear, happiness and how to live with presence, the art of learning not to think in terms of gain or loss, and the salve for our existential loneliness.
At the root of human conflict is our fundamental misunderstanding of who we are. The illusion that we are isolated beings, unconnected to the rest of the universe, has led us to view the “outside” world with hostility, and has fueled our misuse of technology and our violent and hostile subjugation of the natural world. To help us understand that the self is in fact the root and ground of the universe, Watts has crafted a revelatory primer on what it means to be human—and a mind-opening manual of initiation into the central mystery of existence.
In The Book, Alan Watts provides us with a much-needed answer to the problem of personal identity, distilling and adapting the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta.
A revelatory primer on what it means to be human, from “the perfect guide for a course correction in life” (Deepak Chopra)—and a mind-opening manual of initiation into the central mystery of existence.
(Goodreads.com)
