Recently I was interviewed for the podcast Therapy for Guys, created and hosted by Quique Autrey, a teen and family therapist in Katy, Texas. The podcast’s tagline is, “A psychotherapist explores men’s issues relating to mental health, science, philosophy and spirituality.” Here’s the link: Beyond Theology: Christianity, Nonduality, and the Play of Existence And here’s…
Tag: alan watts
Everything Is More Beautiful Because We’re Doomed
The Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi has become something of a fashionable rage in America during the past few years, partly as an attitudinal accompaniment to the cultural influx of Kondo-style decluttering (Marie Kondo has said she’s partly inspired by wabi-sabi) and its interaction with the trendy rise of a minimalist aesthetic. Wabi-sabi refers to…
Autumn Longing: Alan Watts
Yesterday, I came across a passage in a book by Alan Watts that reignited an old passion for what I have referred to in the past as “the autumn longing.” In a kind of “deep cut” vein for this blog, longtime readers — by which I mean really longtime readers, those who have been with…
Book Review: ‘The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness” by Alan Watts
Alan Watts has long been one of my foundational philosophical influences. I think his writing style, famed for its almost preternatural lucidity and grace, has also influenced me by giving me a model to emulate. “Nobody could write like Watts, nobody,” Ken Wilber once observed in an interview for ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness and…
Alan Watts: “The Real You”
“It’s absolutely necessary that we let go of ourselves, and it can’t be done, not by anything that we call ‘doing it’ — acting, willing, or even just accepting things. . . . When you look out of your eyes at nature happening ‘out there,’ you’re looking at you. That’s the real you, the you…
Alan Watts on choosing your life’s work: Forget the money, follow your deep desire
What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like? … [When counseling graduating students who ask for career advice,] I always ask the question, “What would you do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?” … If you say that getting the…
The Fruits of Dystopia (SHORT FILM)
The present cultural prominence and popularity of dystopian fiction and film, including the newly minted subgenre of young adult dystopian novels (c.f. The Hunger Games), underscores the fact that we’re living in what can reasonably be characterized as dystopian times. Or perhaps, to be more accurate, we’re living in a real-world manifestation of an anti-utopia,…
Psychiatry’s internal war over “mental illness” unhinges everything
Have you or anybody you care about ever suffered from depression? How about bipolar disorder? Autism? Schizophrenia? Attention-deficit disorder? Obviously, given the prevalence of these mental and neurological illnesses, the answer is almost certainly affirmative. Or then again, maybe not. Here’s the dirty little trick that’s been pulled on all of us: each of those…
Letter to a student: Philosophy for fun and self-deprogramming
Yesterday I received an email from one of my former high school students. He asked me a few questions that indicated he has really entered into a reflective state of mind: Am I familiar with C.S. Lewis and Mere Christianity? What do people mean when they refer to other people, situations, or anything else as…