most spiritual teachers ask to be believed. alan watts asked his audiences for the opposite. "i am not a zen buddhist, i am not advocating zen buddhism, i am not trying to convert anyone to it," he told audiences. "i have nothing to sell. i'm an entertainer." his own phrase — the title of a chapter in his most famous book — was "a genuine fake," and his biographer later took it for a title.
hold that honesty in one hand. in the other, hold what the entertainer actually delivered: possibly the clearest translation of eastern thought the western world has ever received.
the hallucination of the bag of skin
watts's central idea fits in one sentence from his 1966 book the book: on the taboo against knowing who you are: "the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination." you feel like a little someone behind your eyes, peering out at a universe that is not you. watts spent forty years arguing this feeling — however universal — is learned, not true. he called it the "skin-encapsulated ego," and he called the training social: the world persuades you to experience yourself as separate so it can hold you responsible, rank you, and sell to you.
his counter-image is one of the loveliest in modern writing: "as the ocean 'waves,' the universe 'peoples.' every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe." a wave is not a visitor to the ocean. it's something the ocean is doing. in a recorded lecture he put it with full showmanship: "you are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are."
you are not a stranger who arrived in the world. you are something the world is doing.
the backwards law
his other great tool arrived earlier, in 1951, in the wisdom of insecurity — written, remarkably, just after his own life had come apart. "i have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort," he wrote. "sometimes i call it the 'backwards law.' when you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink you float." grasping at security produces anxiety; the demand to be happy is what blocks it. the book's thesis is that insecurity isn't the problem to be solved — the frantic solving is the problem. a person who stops clutching at the bank discovers the river was carrying them anyway.
the honest portrait
and now the part a page like this owes you, because watts himself never hid it. he was an episcopal priest who left the church in 1950 amid the collapse of his first marriage. he married three times and left a family behind. and in his later years, on his houseboat in sausalito and in his cabin on mount tamalpais, he drank — heavily, and his friends said so plainly. friends and family who loved him remembered the bottle-a-day years without varnish. watts died in his sleep at fifty-eight, in november 1973, days after coming home exhausted from a lecture tour. the night before, his wife remembered, he'd been playing with balloons, delighting in their weightlessness — "like my spirit leaving my body," he said.
a fraud, then? that's the interesting thing: he beat everyone to the question. he never claimed mastery, lineage, or enlightenment. he discouraged disciples. the serenity industry that quotes him would have amused him — he charged admission and told you he was doing it. what he claimed was only that he'd found a point of view he enjoyed, and that he could hand it to you in plain english. on the evidence of half a century of readers who felt a lifelong knot loosen in a single paragraph, he could.
what to do with him
watts is the doorman of this path, not its destination. he'd tell you so himself. read him the way he asked to be heard: not as a master to follow but as an entertainer whose act happens to be true. and take his one practical dare — next time you catch yourself as the little someone behind your eyes, anxious and separate, try on the other view for sixty seconds: the wave remembering it's water. nothing to buy. nothing to join. just a point of view he enjoyed, offered to you for the length of a thought.