Alan Watts · articles that mention them
British and American writer and speaker Alan Watts (1915–1973) popularised Buddhist, Taoist and Hindu philosophy for Western audiences, and his lectures remain popular in the internet age.
The Marginalian revisits a 1967 Alan Watts lecture on the limits of language, arguing that life's deepest knowing is reached not by more thought and explanation, but by stopping the inner conversation and touching the 'unspeakable world' directly.
The Marginalian highlights Alan Watts’s 1960 lecture “Love of Waters,” in which the philosopher uses the ocean to explore timeless time, the inseparability of life and death, and how self-awareness can alienate us from nature—while the sea itself offers a path back to our roots.
In his final book, Tao: The Watercourse Way, Alan Watts explored the Confucian virtue of jen: not righteousness, but the wholeness of being fully and honestly human, including one's own failings. The Marginalian revisits his argument that self-righteousness cuts us off from our shadow and from real trust in human nature.
The Marginalian revisits Alan Watts's argument in The Wisdom of Insecurity that freedom is not control over circumstances or escape from uncomfortable feelings, but undivided presence in the present moment, which also makes love possible.
Alan Watts argues that a culture fixated on future rewards loses the ability to enjoy the present, and that the remedy is timing—moving with events as one moves with music.
The Marginalian revisits Alan Watts's 1951 book The Wisdom of Insecurity, where he argues that belief clings to wished-for truths while faith opens the mind to reality, and calls that openness the essential virtue of science and honest religion.
Alan Watts’s essay “Wealth Versus Money” argues that treating money as wealth is a dangerous confusion of symbol with reality—one that blocks a truly productive and leisurely economy.
A 2014 Marginalian essay revisits Alan Watts’s 1951 book The Wisdom of Insecurity, where he argued that living for an abstract future and consuming constant streams of distraction rob the present of its value.
In his 1966 book The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts argues that the sense of a separate self is a hallucination and invites readers to experience the self as an expression of the whole universe.
A free account makes the site yours too:
Already have an account? Log in
