Alan Wilson Watts has been considered the favorite communicator and advocate of pantheism, according to a collection of surveys at pantheism discussion groups (followed closely by Carl Sagan and Eckhart Tolle). Despite his death in 1973, his unforgettable voice still resonates with new life in fan videos improvised throughout the internet.
“We are all unconscious pantheists, trying to grasp the moment, the Eternal Now, in and as its various forms, trying to identify God with something in the moment.”
Watts insisted that he was a “philosophical entertainer” rather than an academic philosopher, but his library of over two dozen books and his invitations to teach at a number of universities prove he was a respected scholar in his own right. Raised in South-east London, he studied Eastern philosophies while receiving a master’s degree in theology at a Christian institution. He hoped to combine Western theology and Eastern philosophy, but found both sides to be plagued by dogma. So he went his own way.
“The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.”
For Watts, the traditional idea of God was limiting. His God was infinitely larger,
“The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.”
This kind of God includes everything and everybody,
“Everybody is fundamentally the Ultimate Reality. Not “God” in a politically kingly sense, but GOD in the sense of being the self – the deep, down, basic, whatever-there-is. And you’re all THAT, only you’re pretending you’re not.”
This kind of God is everything, including you,
“You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.”
And you are not just you here. You are everywhere:
“You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this universe.”
In other words, you are not separate from anything but part of oneness,
“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.”
And exactly what am “I”, according to Watts?
“I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time — a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment… only to vanish forever.”
Your identity, according to Watts, is just a symbol:
“Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word ‘water’ is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.”
To really define yourself as a part of this mysterious everything is impossible:
“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
Watts wanted to merge the Eastern and Western ideas into one full pantheistic understanding,
“Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.”
He believed that everything is connected,
“But I’ll tell you what the hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.”
Like many revered pantheists, he had more of an agnostic faith than a strict and certain belief. To know God, is to know everything. And Watts didn’t pretend to know everything,
“A person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.”
Despite his growing following, he was careful and honest about his role as a teacher rather than a spiritual guru,
“Anybody who tells you that he has some way of leading you to spiritual enlightenment is like somebody who picks your pocket and sells you your own watch.”
For Watts, things were simple:
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
You and I are a part of something much greater:
“Life is the universe experiencing itself, in endless variety.”
Watts pointed toward a divine unity or oneness. But that oneness is experienced in the illusion of duality,
“If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death — or shall I say, death implies life — you can feel yourself. Not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.”
Watts’ spiritual relativity echoes the science of Einstein’s relativity:
“You evoke light out of the universe, in the same way you, by nature of having soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood.”
His take on oneness was so profound that he found love to be universal,
“So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.”
Like the philosopher Wittgenstein, Watts felt that our problems are often caused by the limitations of language which are ineffective at describing oneness,
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
He felt it important to appreciate our lack of purpose,
“They describe yugen as watching wild geese fly and being hidden in the clouds; as watching a ship vanish behind the distant island; as wandering on and on in a great forest with no thought of return. Haven’t you done this? Haven’t you gone on a walk with no particular purpose in mind? You carry a stick with you and you occasionally hit at old stumps and wander along and sometimes twiddle your thumbs. It is at that moment that you become a perfectly rational human being; you have learned purposelessness.”
He found that play is the answer,
“This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
And laughter,
“A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.”
And living in the moment,
“The so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation… We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will there ever be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is.”
Watts found the perceived separateness of time to be a major issue for humanity,
“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is.”
Einstein discovered that time as we understood it was an illusion. Watts sees the same:
“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”
It’s all just now:
“The future is a concept—it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be because time is always now. That’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.”
Don’t worry. It’s all the way it is supposed to be:
“Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”