Alan Watts: The Philosopher-Entertainer Who Made the East Sing in Western Ears
Alan Wilson Watts (1915–1973) was never an academic philosopher in the conventional sense, yet no single figure did more to translate the spirit of Zen, Taoism, and Vedanta for the post-war West. Part scholar, part performer, part rogue Anglican priest, and full-time cosmic raconteur, Watts turned the most austere Eastern teachings into intoxicating, laugh-out-loud lectures that sounded like jazz improvisation on the nature of reality.
Born in Chislehurst, England, to a middle-class family, young Alan was already a spiritual prodigy. At thirteen he was haunting the Buddhist Lodge in London; by seventeen he was publishing his first book, The Spirit of Zen. In 1938, at age twenty-three, he emigrated to the United States, eventually landing in San Francisco just as the Beat movement was igniting. There he became the perfect bridge: a British accent that lent gravitas, a mischievous twinkle that disarmed authority, and an almost supernatural gift for making the ineffable feel obvious.
Alan Watts’ Core Message – in Plain English
It can be summed up in one sentence he loved to repeat:
“The individual is not a skin-encapsulated ego separate from the universe. You are the universe experiencing itself from one particular point of view.”
Or, in his even more playful version:
“You are something that the whole universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something the whole ocean is doing.”
What this actually means (broken down)
There is no real “you” inside the body looking out at a world “outside.”
That feeling of being a little person trapped behind the eyes is an illusion, a useful trance we learn in childhood.
Your real identity is the whole field: body + mind + environment + stars + past + future.
Everything you call “not me” is just as much you as your fingers are you. The boundary drawn by the skin is imaginary.
The universe is not a bunch of separate things and people bumping into each other.
It’s one single process pretending to be many, the way an actor pretends to be Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, and the stagehand all at once.
The game the universe is playing is hide-and-seek with itself.
It “hides” by pretending to be billions of separate creatures who feel lonely, frightened, and mortal.
It “seeks” by occasionally waking up and realizing “Oh… it was me all along!” — that moment is called enlightenment, satori, awakening, whatever.
Therefore:
• You don’t need to become anything you’re not.
• You don’t need to escape the world or get to some special state.
• You are already IT — the Eternal, the Tao, God, Brahman — playing human for a while.
His favorite metaphors for this
• The wave and the ocean
• The eye that cannot see itself (except in a mirror)
• God playing hide-and-seek and occasionally shouting “Boo!” when someone wakes up
• Life as a dance: the point is not to arrive somewhere; the point is the dancing
Practical consequence he hammered home
Stop taking the game so damn seriously.
Once you see that birth and death, pleasure and pain, success and failure are all part of the same cosmic drama you’re putting on for yourself, you can finally relax, laugh, and enjoy the show.
That is the entire message. Everything Watts ever said—Zen, Taoism, mysticism, psychedelics, sex, death—was just an elaborate, hilarious, beautiful set of variations on this single insight.
Everything Watts ever said circled back to this single insight. Whether he was talking about Zen koans, Christian mysticism, cybernetics, psychedelics, or the simple act of drinking tea, his mission was to jolt people out of the hallucination of separateness. He called it “the wiggling of the cosmos pretending to be individual people and things.”
Key Works That Changed Minds
• The Way of Zen (1957) – still the best single introduction to Zen ever written in English.
• The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966) – a psychedelic-era classic that told an entire generation, “You are IT.”
• Tao: The Watercourse Way (1975, posthumous) – his most mature and beautiful work, completed by collaborators from his final lectures.
• Hundreds of recorded talks (now freely available) that remain the primary way most people encounter him.
His Style and Method
Watts was the anti-guru guru. He drank sake on stage, smoked during lectures, and openly admitted he was an “entertainer” rather than an enlightened master. His talks weave scholarship, stand-up comedy, poetry, and sudden silence into a single flowing performance. Listeners often report the strange sensation that he is speaking directly to them, decades after his death.
Influence and Legacy
• The Beats (Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg) treated him as a philosophical godfather.
• The entire 1960s counterculture absorbed his ideas (often without knowing the source). Phrases like “go with the flow,” “be here now,” and the popular misunderstanding of ego-death all trace back, directly or indirectly, to Watts.
• Contemporary mindfulness and non-duality teachers (Eckhart Tolle, Sam Harris, Rupert Spira) stand on his shoulders, whether they cite him or not.
• His recordings have become the background music of yoga studios, psychedelic sessions, and late-night epiphanies worldwide.
The Controversies
Watts was criticized, then and now, for being too glib, for romanticizing Zen, for heavy drinking, for womanizing, for never “sitting” seriously in a monastery. His response was essentially Taoist: of course the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon; of course the menu is not the meal. He never claimed to be a saint; he claimed to be a philosopher in the original Greek sense (a lover of wisdom) who happened to be very good at describing the taste of the meal.
Watts’ Death and Last Joke
On November 16, 1973, at age 58, Alan Watts died in his sleep on a houseboat in Sausalito after a lifetime of warning people that death is simply “turning off the TV set.” His ashes were scattered half at his Druid Heights cabin in Marin County and half at the Green Gulch Zen Center. True to form, he left no lineage, no school, no formal disciples (only the echo of his laughter and the invitation to wake up to the marvelous joke that there never was anything to wake up from).
In the end, Alan Watts did not teach a doctrine. He performed a perpetual reminder: the universe is playing hide-and-seek with itself, and right now it is pretending, very convincingly, to be you reading these words. Relax. You’re in on the secret.
