Alan watts autobiography vs biography

  • If you feel you've started to get familiar with Watts go ahead with In My Own Way, his autobiography.
  • Medium.com › on-reading-alan-watts-and-a-review-of-his-autobiography-.
  • Alan Watts's autobiography “In My Own Way” was one of those fine books which leaves you wanting more, and also happy it's over.

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    In My Own Way: An Autobiography

    June 10, 2020
    A 3.5 star book, IMO. Written in a style Watts called "clear," but a frustrating book for anyone that likes their biographies to proceed in chronological order. I mentioned in my review post that I was going to start this review with a poem by T'ao Ch'ien, a Chinese poet of the 4th-5th Century. I've decided to add that poem, which also contains a bit of prefatory prose, at the end as a coda to sum up, in a small way, how Alan Watts lived his life.

    But before bursting into poetry from the 5th Century, let me go down a couple of other paths. On the first path, a story comes to mind. My best friend is a professor who reads a lot of "hard" books and plows through 900-page tomes like they're pulp fiction. He was reading Hannah Arendt--Eichmann in Jerusalem, I believe, and around that time I listened to a podcast of "In Our Time," a show that airs on BBC Radio 4. In this program, Melvyn Bragg, the highfalutin host, usually invites 3 professor
  • alan watts autobiography vs biography

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    (384 pp., New World Library, 2007)

     

    Alan Watts was a gloriously pixilated man, born in an era when pixilated meant “meddled with by elves” and no one could associate the term with dots on a screen. His autobiography, In My Own Way, recently reissued, hints at this trickster quality right from the title’s double entendre. The book is charming, delightful, mordantly witty, utterly clear. If you need a full rendering of Watts’s life, consult other sources, but read his autobiography anyway.

    Few meditation instructions can top Watts’s attempt to meditate, at age seventeen:

    I annihilated and bawled out every theory and concept of what should be my properly spiritual state of mind, or what should be meant by ME. And instantly my weight vanished. I owned nothing. All my hang-ups disappeared. I walked on air. Thereupon I composed a haiku.

    He had a gift for conveying Buddhist ideas to a Western audience. With typical slyness, Watts called it a “big gift of the gab.” No re

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    In My Own Way: An Autobiography

    Author: Alan W. Watts

    Brand: New World Library

    Edition: 2nd

    Features:

    Binding: Paperback

    Number Of Pages: 384

    Release Date: 02-05-2007

    Details: Product Description In this new edition of his acclaimed autobiography — long out of print and rare until now — Alan Watts tracks his spiritual and philosophical evolution from a child of religious conservatives in rural England to a freewheeling spiritual teacher who challenged Westerners to defy convention and think for themselves. From early in this intellectual life, Watts shows himself to be a philosophical renegade and wide-ranging autodidact who came to Buddhism through the teachings of Christmas Humphreys and D. T. Suzuki. Told in a nonlinear style, In My Own Way wonderfully combines Watts’ own brand of unconventional philosophy and often hilarious accounts of gurus, celebrities, psychedelic drug experiences, and wry observations of Western culture. A charming foreword written b