Alan Watts–Here and Now

Contributions to Psychology, Philosophy, and Religion

Peter J. Columbus, Donadrian L. Rice, Peter J. Columbus, Donadrian L. Rice

• Editorial: SUNY Press
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781438442013
• Categoría: Théologie et religion
• Categoría: Religions asiatiques

Alan Watts—Here and Now explores the intellectual legacy and continuing relevance of a prolific writer and speaker who was a major influence on American culture during the latter half of the twentieth century. A thinker attuned to the spiritual malaise affecting the Western mind, Watts (1915–1973) provided intellectual and spiritual alternatives that helped shape the Beat culture of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s. Well known for introducing Buddhist and Daoist spirituality to a wide Western audience, he also wrote on psychology, mysticism, and psychedelic experience. Many idolized Watts as a guru-mystic, yet he was also dismissed as intellectually shallow and as a mere popularizer of Asian religions (the "Norman Vincent Peale of Zen"). Both critical and appreciative, this edited volume locates Watts at the forefront of major paradigmatic shifts in Western intellectual life. Contributors explore how Watts's work resonates in present-day scholarship on psychospiritual transformation, Buddhism and psychotherapy, Daoism in the West, phenomenology and hermeneutics, humanistic and transpersonal psychology, mysticism, and ecofeminism, among other areas.

CHAPTER ONE

Alan Watts' Anticipation of Four Major Debates in the Psychology of Religion

Ralph W. Hood Jr.

It is appropriate in a volume dedicated to the work and influence of Alan Watts that academics evaluate a man who many in the academy dismissed as a mere popularizer of topics in religion, which some claimed he lacked the credentials to treat with proper depth. In his autobiography, Watts (1973) admitted to the charge of “popularizer” and to the horror of academics who largely ignored his work in Asian mysticism, seeing him as unschooled in the primary language of the traditions he explored (p. 262). Yet Watts emphasized repeatedly that his was less an academic pursuit than a personal quest (p. 316). The quest was lifelong and resulted in twenty published books by the time he began his autobiography. Other writings were to follow. However, Alan's pursuits, documented in a series of books for wide-ranging audiences, were far from aimless. In this chapter, I argue that Alan's personal quest resulted in discoveries that anticipated the findings of academics who largely ignored his popular works.

When offered a chance to contribute to this volume I looked over my library and found that I had sixteen of Alan's books. AH have worn bindings and well-marked pages indicating a careful reading of admittedly popular works. I recalled that both as a college student and as a lifelong academic I had never seen Watts' works as required reading in courses in psychology (my general discipline) nor in the psychology of religion (my academic specialty). Yet, I also recalled seeing students and professors with various Watts' books. There was a virtual underground of collateral reading, much of it Watts' books, by students and professors of psychology whose academic interests did little to hide that there was a spiritual questing in the academy. As we see here, Alan Watts' personal quest was and still is widely shared by academics. However idiosyncratic Alan appeared to some, I argue that, in at least four areas, his own journey of discovery anticipated and then continued to parallel significant issues that occupy the contemporary academic study of the psychology of religion. The four issues championed by Alan Watts in his own journey can be identified as follows:

1. The claim to a perennialist philosophy rooted in mystical experience;
2. A cautious appreciation of the possibility that psychedelics can facilitate mystical experience;
3. The controversial claim of the relationship between eroticism and mystical experience; and finally,
4. The movement away from the study of religion to that of spirituality.

I rely on Alan Watts' autobiography, not the corpus of his published works, to show how his own quest was indeed one of genuine self-discovery that is available to all. The irony is that academics whose disdain of popular works kept Alan from a broader appreciation among scholars nevertheless belatedly championed his views in the academy.

THE PERENNIALIST THESIS

In the one undisputed classic text in the psychology of religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James (1902/1985) noted:

In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian Mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same reoccurring note, so that there is among mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think and which brings it about that the mystical texts have, as had been said, neither birthday or native land. (p. 324)

Alan Watts (1973), undoubtedly familiar with James' Varieties, noted early on in his autobiography that: “Taking the premises of Christian dogmatics, Hindu mythology, Buddhist psychology, Zen practice, psychoanalysis, behaviorism, or logical positivism, I have tried to show that all are aiming, however disputatiously, at one center” (p. 4). Academics have long challenged the “eternal unanimity” of James and the “one centeredness” of Watts' as popular ecumenical moves to seek a common core to what specialists say are distinct and often incommensurable faith and belief traditions (Katz, 1978a). Yet near the end of his autobiography, in reference to Dom Aelred's (a Benedictine from Ampleforth Abbey in Yorkshire) visit to see the Dalai Lama, Watts (1973) noted that Dom was “my idea of what a Benedictine should be” (p. 444). Aelred also illustrated for Alan a simple conclusion: “It seems that those who go deeply into any of the great spiritual traditions come to see the same place and find themselves talking the same language” (p. 445). Although not denying the particulars of any tradition that could be viewed as separating them, Alan sought and found a common ground. Midway in his autobiography this common ground was identified as:

that mystical and perennial philosophy which has appeared in almost all times and places. One could get behind the screen of literal dogma to the inner meaning of symbols, to the level at which Eckhart and Shankara, Saint Teresa and Ramakrishna, Saint Dionysius and Nagarjuna are talking the same language, (p. 180)

The academic debate over the claim to a perennial philosophy has two major sources. One is the work of W. T. Stace. In Mysticism and Philosophy, Stace (1960) argued for what he termed a common core to mystical experience. Stace's common core thesis is based on several assumptions. Most important for the present discussion here are these four:

1. One can distinguish experience from interpretation of experience.
2. All mystical experiences are characterized as an experience of unity.
3. The experience of unity may be introvertive (a pure contentless consciousness) or extrovertive (experience of unity in diversity).
4. The ontological status of the unity in both introvertive and extrovertive mysticisms is the same “one.”

I have defended the legitimacy of Stace's common core thesis in detail elsewhere (Hood, 1989, 2003a, 2006). Here it is sufficient to note that Stace's position quickly became the target of debate in academic circles (Gimello, 1978, p. 195). A rapidly rising tide of social constructionist thought in psychology argued that the experience/interpretation distinction was invalid (Hollenback, 1996; Proudfoot, 1985). Katz (1978b) launched an all-out attack on the common core thesis in a widely influential edited work. Arguing for the particularity of distinctive and different mystical experiences, Katz (1978a) declared forcefully: “There are NO pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences” (p. 26). He followed with two additional edited works, each heavily influenced by a social constructionist view (Katz, 1983, 1992).

As might be expected, none of the debate involved reference to Watts' popular works on the same topic. However, the presence of Alan's absence was obvious as academics began to appeal directly to experience, including their own, to support the common core thesis (Forman, 1990, 1998; Hood, 1989, 2003a, 2006; Parsons, 1999; Staal, 1975). As Watts had done, scholars turned East and found the commonality of thought supporting unmediated experience against the bias of Western academic social constructionist views. Authors writing from an experienced based view began to talk of a perennial psychology as opposed to philosophy. The focus was on mystical experience (psychology) and not its interpretation or social construction (philosophy). Allowing for unmediated experiences, academics began to follow a path already tread by Alan Watts.

Finally, the empirical psychology of religion began to provide systematic support for the common core or perennialist thesis. Much of this support is based on empirical research using a measure of reported mystical experience derived from Stace's work. Reviews of this research are readily available (Hood, 2005, 2006; Spilka, Hood, Hunsberger, & Gorsuch, 2003, pp. 290–340). Here I need but emphasize two facts about this research. First, both exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic studies support the claim that individuals reporting mystical experience can differentiate between the nature of the experience in phenomenological terms and various interpretations. Even when interpretations clash, experiences may be the same (Hood, 2003a, 2006). Second, in cultures as different as the United States and Iran, reports of mystical experience remarkably parallel Stace's common core delineation and the claim of perennialist psychologists (Hood et al., 2001). Watts must be smiling somewhere. His path demanded the practice and cultivation of mysticism. East or West he thought ultimately made little difference. It is useful to remember the subtitle to Watts' (1947) Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion. Academics on both conceptual and empirical levels are coming to map this necessity in more scientific ways than Watts' own popularization of it demanded. Alan's reliance on the authority of personal experience rather than words or concepts about experience is what he referred to as “not data but capta” (1973, p. 5). Academics could treat Alan's data as capta and a source of hypotheses that could be empirically tested for those who demand objective evidence for what others know firsthand as William James (1902/1985) long ago recognized (pp. 335–339).

PSYCHEDELICS AND MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE

There is little extended discussion of what in the 1960s were generally referred to as “psychedelic” drugs in Watts' (1973) autobiography. One reason is that he admitted that he had learned all he could from his own experience with LSD, and “that when one has received the message one hangs up the phone” (p. 402.) The history over the debate on what to call these drugs such as LSD and psilocybin has been well documented (Forte, 1997; Nichols & Chemel, 2006). Here I am interested in Watts' basic thesis that these chemicals under appropriate set and setting can facilitate genuine mystical experiences.

To turn once more to his autobiography, Watts (1973) noted how in his youth he sensed his estrangement from modern culture: “I carry over from childhood the vague but persistent impression of being exposed to hints of an archaic and underground culture whose values had been lost to the Protestant religion and the industrial bourgeoisie, indeed to the modern West in general” (p. 37). Offering several possibilities for the source of this estrangement, he appealed to experiences modern culture ignores or represses. He went on to assert that:

The disciplinum arcanum of this [rejected/repressed] culture, so easily mistaken in the child for idle reverie, was that intense contemplative watching of the eternal now, which is sometimes revived by the use of psychedelic drugs, but which came to me through flowers, jewels, reflected light in glass, and expanses of clear sky. (p. 37)

Alan Watts thereby anticipated an ongoing debate among academics on the relationship among religion, psychedelic drugs, and mystical experience that continues to provoke controversy.

One controversial issue is the claim that religion has its origin in primary experiences of the divine, a phrase essentially equivalent to mystical experience. Such experiences can occur spontaneously or more likely in set and settings conducive to facilitating these experiences. Exponents of the common core thesis and perennialist psychologists have long referred to the doctrine of causal indifference. The phrase suggests that a variety of conditions can facilitate mystical experience but the experience, once it occurs, may be identical regardless of differences in what we might call various facilitators or triggers of the experience. It may be that psychedelic drugs facilitate identical experiences triggered in Alan Watts by flowers or music, and by his experimentation with LSD. The issues can be made more complicated when given the fact that empirical studies document that people tend to differentially evaluate identical experiences based on differing triggers indicating that the principle of causal indifference is not a practice for the average person (Hood, 1980).

A second controversial issue is summarized under a term that Watts would surely see as academic obfuscation, archeopsychopharmacology. The term refers to interdisciplinary studies based on linking ancient texts and artifacts with the study of naturally occurring psychedelic substances to speculate on the origin of religions. It has led to the preference for the term entheogens to describe these substances among social scientists who study their ability to facilitate primary religious (mystical) experiences. Instead of mind manifesting (psychedelic), these substances are seen as God manifesting (entheogenic). (For reviews of this history see Forte, 1997; Nichols & Chemel, 2006; Spilka et al., 2003, pp. 283–289.) The nature of this debate centers on the claim that religions may have their origin in mystical experiences likely facilitated by the use of naturally occurring entheogens. For instance, Allegro (1971) argued that the Judeo-Christian tradition was heavily influenced by mystical states of consciousness facilitated by the mushroom amantia muscaria, a naturally occurring entheogen. Likewise, not only was the Judeo-Christian tradition influenced by Greek thought, Greek thought itself was heavily influenced by an ergot with entheogenic properties used in the Eleusinian mystery cults.

In a similar vein, Wasson (1968) argued that the sacred soma described in the Reg Veda was the fly agaric mushroom, another naturally occurring entheogenic substance. Merkur (2000...