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Alan Watts



Alan Wilson Watts (1915–1973) was an English author, teacher, and speaker known for his modern interpretations of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism for a Western audience. He moved to the United States in 1938, and after training in Zen Buddhism he became an Episcopal priest, later leaving the ministry to teach about religion, philosophy, psychotherapy, human consciousness, and psychedelics. Watts gained a huge following in the 1960s from people seeking alternative ways of seeing the world.

Alan Watts
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Celebrating the Life & Teachings of Alan Watts

Through his bestselling books and popular broadcasts, Alan Watts did as much as anyone to introduce Americans to Buddhism. David Chadwick recalls his friend, the unconventional philosopher who uncovered The Way for so many.

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FindCenter Quotes ImageNever pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

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What Is Tao?

In his later years, Alan Watts, noted author and respected authority on Zen and Eastern thought, turned his attention to Taoism. In this book, he draws on his own study and practice to give readers an overview of the concept of the Tao and guidance for experiencing it themselves.

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Alan Watts Reconsidered

Watts hammers away at one central idea, essentially the insight of his mystical moments, that all of creation is one. - David Guy

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The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness

The Joyous Cosmology is Alan Watts’s exploration of the insight that the consciousness-changing drugs LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin can facilitate “when accompanied with sustained philosophical reflection by a person who is in search, not of kicks, but of understanding.

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FindCenter Quotes ImageWhat we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ...

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Zen and the Beat Way

Well, in the same way, all sorts of things that we believe to be real--time, past and future, for instance--exist only conventionally. A person who lives for the future, who (like most of us) makes his happiness dependent upon what is coming in the future, is living within an illusion. - Alan Watts

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The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East

Alan Watts’s The Spirit of Zen was one of the first books to introduce the basic foundation of Zen Buddhism to English-speaking audiences.

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This Is It: And Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience

Six revolutionary essays from "the perfect guide for a course correction in life, away from materialism and its empty promise" (Deepak Chopra), exploring the relationship between spiritual experience and ordinary life—and the need for them to coexist within each of us.

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FindCenter Quotes ImageZen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

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Abram Hoffer