In my previous post, “Alan Watts and Psychedelic Christianity,” I tried to explain why I think he fails to understand that everyone will have life everlasting. Here, I tell a bit of autobiographical background about the role Alan Watts has played in my life.
I came across one of his books on Zen Buddhism in my late teens or early twenties, not long after first experiencing mescaline and LSD. This would have been in 1968 and 1969. He immediately became one of my intellectual heroes, succeeding Aldous Huxley, who had succeeded Albert Camus, because of psychedelics. (There were so many “Als” at the time, including Allen Ginsberg and the composer Alan Hovhaness.) I read every one of his books I could get my hands on, bought an LP record of him instructing the listener in how to meditate, and asked for and received as a Christmas present from Mary Jo, my girlfriend-soon-to-become-my-wife, a subscription to the Alan Watts Journal.
That subscription turned out to be a first slight disillusion with my hero. Months went by, and no copies came. Mary Jo wrote to complain, and some weeks later received a letter of apology from someone handling subscription fulfillment. After a few more weeks, several back issues came at once, and then, at irregular intervals, further issues, until the subscription ran out.
When Mary Jo and I were planning our wedding, I naively wrote to Watts to ask if he would be willing to officiate. About six months after we were married, we received a nice letter from his secretary, informing us that Mr. Watts no longer performed wedding ceremonies.
We did see him once in person, when he gave a talk at the community college I had attended before transferring and graduating from Cal-State Los Angeles. He shuffled onto the stage very slowly, wearing moccasins and loose clothing. This was probably at most some months before he died at the age of 58. At the time we didn’t know he was that close to the end of his life, but looking back now, I can see that there were clues that he was not in the best of health. I remember that after sitting down he said, slowly and with emphasis, “Nev-er hur-ry,” and then chuckled in a drawn out, throaty fashion that sounded distinctly unhealthy. With the callousness of youth, I was impatient at all this instead of being sympathetic as I now realize I should have been. He was still my favorite philosopher, but I guess what I wanted from him that evening was to relive in person the fresh enthusiasm I had felt upon first discovering his books, particularly The Joyous Cosmology. But, of course, just as one can’t ever take one’s first psychedelic trip more than once in this life, one can’t discover Alan Watts’s writing for the first time again either.
By the time of his appearance at the college, I had come across a copy of the Boo Hoo Bible, the Neo-American Church Catechism, by Art Kleps, in a bookstore in Long Beach. I enjoyed Kleps’s humorous but also seriously unapologetic defense of psychedelics as sacraments.
Tucked between two pages in the Boo Hoo Bible was a membership application card, listing the three principles of the church:
- Everyone has the right to expand his consciousness and stimulate visionary experience by whatever means he considers desirable and proper without interference from anyone.
- The psychedelic substances, such as LSD, are the True Host of the Church, not drugs. They are sacramental foods, manifestations of the Grace of God, of the infinite imagination of the Self, and therefore belong to everyone.
- We do not encourage the ingestion of psychedelics by those who are unprepared.
I had filled out my name and address, signed my agreement to the principles, and sent in my $5.
So, I was disappointed during the question and answer session at the Alan Watts talk when, questioned about psychedelics, Watts had urged caution, saying, “It’s a medicine, not a diet,” and “When you get the message, hang up the phone,” rather than talking about how fantastically beautiful and life-changing the experience was. Those comments in themselves were unobjectionable, but without making it clear how powerful the medicine is and how wonderful the message, they were misleading. A better metaphor would be to say, “You searched for gold in many places without finding it. You are to be commended for persevering despite your disappointment. But now that you have found it, you don’t need to go on searching. Instead, now you need to think about what to do with it.” Bonhoeffer says something like this about the question of whether the grace of salvation that Jesus brings can also be found in other religions. He says that it is possible, but if you go searching for it somewhere else after you have already found it here, that shows you don’t really realize what it is you have found.
In the Boo Hoo Bible, Art stated an equivalence between LSD and the Holy Ghost, and then cited Matthew 12:31, where Jesus says, “All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto man: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven.” In re-reading Nature, Man, and Woman recently, which led to the previous posting, “Alan Watts and Psychedelic Christianity,” I was shocked to see that Watts committed blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, by comparing psychedelic experiences unfavorably to non-psychedelic mystical experiences:
“Although these states appear to be similar to those realized through more ‘natural’ means [At least he put quotation marks around ‘natural’!], they differ in the sense that being able to swim with a life jacket differs from swimming unaided. From personal, though limited, experimentation with a research group working with lysergic acid, I would judge that the state of consciousness induced is confused with a mystical state because of similarities used in describing the two. The experience is multidimensional, as if everything were inside, or implied, everything else, requiring a description which is paradoxical from the standpoint of ordinary logic. But whereas the drug gives a vision of nature which in infinitely complex, the mystical state is clarifying, and gives a vision which is infinitely simple. The drug seems to give the intelligence a kaleidoscopic quality which ‘patterns’ the perception of relations in accordance with its own peculiar structure.”
By the time of the publication of The Joyous Cosmology four years later (1962), he had repented:
“Despite the widespread and undiscriminating prejudice against drugs as such, and despite the claims of certain religious disciplines to be the sole means to genuine mystical insight, I can find no essential difference between the experiences induced, under favorable conditions, by these chemicals and the state of ‘cosmic consciousness’ recorded by R. M. Bucke, William James, Evelyn Underhill, Raynor Johnson, and other investigators of mysticism.”
What had happened in the time between these two statements (1958-1962)? Timothy Leary had happened. [To be continued]