Watts
It’s a great pleasure to be with you.
Mintz
You’re conducting a—do you call it a workshop?—this weekend in Los Angeles.
Watts
In Long Beach, yes—with the Broadbent Institute.
Mintz
What’s it about?
Watts
Identity.
Mintz
Identity?
Watts
Yes. The question of who we are; what we are.
Mintz
Let’s kick it off on that level. Who are we? What are we?
Watts
Well, I think, you see, the trouble is that most people in the West have been brought up to believe that they’re in this universe as strangers on probation, or as flukes in a system which is fundamentally mindless and mechanical. And we say as a matter of ordinary speech, “I came into this world.” Well, you did nothing of the kind. You came out of it. You’re a symptom of the galaxy. And just as an apple tree apples, so this galaxy peoples. And the people—if they are intelligent as they claim to be—must therefore be symptoms of an intelligent galaxy. In other words, we are not lonely, isolated egos inside bags of skin, but we are actually functions of the total universe. We are the universe, each one of us, observing itself.
And we can’t know that directly. The puzzle here is, you see, that just as you cannot see your own head, and your head seems a blank to you—I mean you can see it in a mirror, but you can only see the outside of it—but basically you can’t see your own brain. And so it seems a blank. And everything that’s absolutely fundamental to you, basic to you, your inmost being, must always seem a blank. But that blank is the same thing as the heart of the universe. This is what I’m working on.
Mintz
Oh. What is it, then, Alan, that we do see? I understand what we don’t see, and I understand the reproduction of what we see, and I understand the extension of what we pretend to see. What is then the essence of one’s identity? What are we?
Watts
Well, the essence of one’s identity is that we are, each one of us, a different way of expressing the ultimate energy of the world—
Mintz
We are, each one of us, a different way of expressing the ultimate energy of the world?
Watts
—which some people call god. Only, the idea of god in the West is idolatrously tied up with the image of a universal political monarch, modeled on the pharaohs of Egypt and the Cyruses of Persia. And so therefore, if I say I am god—or as Jesus said, “I and the father are one”—this always sounds subversive. It sounds crazy. It sounds like saying, “I am the boss.”
But that’s not the only idea of god that one can have. In Hinduism, for example, god is considered the Self: the self of the individual and also the self of the universe. And if Jesus had lived in India and had announced that he was god, everybody would have said, “Of course. Congratulations! You found out.” You know? But in Palestine, where they had this monarchical conception of god, he was regarded as a subversive revolutionary and had to be crucified—because he said that. And nowadays, I mean, if you are born in the Bible Belt in the United States, and you suddenly announce that you’re god because you had an experience of cosmic consciousness, they put you in the booby hatch.
Mintz
I think it’s important for our listeners—for those who don’t know, for those who are uncertain, for those who aren’t sure—for you to define that term. What is cosmic consciousness?
Watts
Cosmic consciousness is a thing that can happen to anyone—like falling in love, or getting measles, or…. It’s an experience of being one with the whole scheme of things; where suddenly you wake up and see that, for always and always and always, you are one with this universe, and that the whole system of the universe—despite all its troubles—is fundamentally harmonious. It’s difficult to say that everything is right, because that doesn’t make any sense—because you don’t know right without wrong. But there’s this sensation of being “Aaaaah.” It’s called ineffable—that is to say, unspeakable. And the task of a poet and a philosopher such as myself is to eff the ineffable: to say what can’t be said—which is what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to express what it’s like to have cosmic consciousness because I believe that if human beings understand this kind of experience, they will be much more secure in themselves, and much less insane in their behavior.
Mintz
Yeah, yeah.
Watts
Because we behave insanely because we feel lost, because we feel alienated from the universe. And therefore we’re attacking the universe: we feel that we have to indulge in the conquest of nature, the conquest of space, that we have to beat everything into submission. And this is because we don’t realize that we are sons of god, or (if you want to say) true children of nature.
Mintz
Forgive me. Let me interrupt you for just a moment. We’ll do some messages and then we’ll return with Alan Watts.
Mintz
You brought up something that really intrigues me because, as I talk with people, it is a recurrent theme in their own lives, and that is this growing feeling of alienation from the planet that has become their home. Again, what causes it? And more significantly, what do we do to alleviate these feelings and increase the desire and the ability to become one with our planet?
Watts
Well, the feeling of alienation is basically that we have been taught to identify ourselves with centers of consciousness—or, that is to say, egos—inside bags of skin. Now, we don’t even identify with the whole bag! We don’t say, “I am a body,” we say, “I have a body.” And sometimes, if you congratulate a beautiful woman on the exquisiteness of her body, she says, “Oh, you’re just like a man! You admire me for my body. All you’re interested in is bodies, and I want to be admired for myself and not for my body.” But therein she defines herself immediately as a chauffeur; someone who has a body like an automobile, something you go around in, and that you are not. You disown it. So already you’re alienated from your body, and think of yourself as a sort of center of control about halfway between the ears and a little way behind the eyes.
And you identify yourself—the real, genuine self—with the way you talk, or with your ideas, or with your opinion of yourself. Now, it’s obvious that your opinion of yourself is not you. Because your opinion of yourself, or your image of yourself, contains no information whatsoever about how you circulate your blood, how you grow your hair, how you shape your bones, how you make your glands secrete the various fluids they do. And furthermore, it contains no information about how you manage to be conscious and how you work your brain. So your idea or image of yourself is completely false. It’s a caricature of what you actually are.
Now, we can go on from there. We say: but surely, I feel myself. The word “I” refers to your opinion of yourself, but we think we have underneath that an actual sensation of I. So I’ve been very interested in this, and so I explored it, and I found out what physical sensation it is that the word “I” refers to. And that is a chronic muscular tension, whereby we learn this in childhood when we are taught (quite falsely) to strain our muscles to produce mental or neural results—such as, you know, when mama says, “Try to go to sleep, darling.” You know, what ridiculous advice that is! Or, “You must have a bowel movement every day after breakfast.” And that can only result in absurd muscular strains. Or when the teacher in class—when all the children are not attending, they’re looking out of the window, flicking spitballs at each other, an so on—the teacher suddenly says, “Pay attention!” And everybody stares at the teacher and frowns. Or else, what do you do when I say to you, “Now listen very carefully. I want you to listen, because this thing that I’m going to say must not be missed. Now be sure to listen!” People go tight around the ears.
Now, none of this has any effect whatsoever, except obfuscation. It gets in the way. If you stare at something, you don’t see it clearly. And if you listen carefully and tense your muscles around your ears, you pay more attention to listening than to what you hear. So all this is nonsense. It’s like going along on the runway in a jet airplane, and you think, “This thing hasn’t taken off, and it ought to be up in the air,” and you start pulling at your seatbelt—it has no effect whatever. But we do this all the time. There’s a chronic sensation of muscular strain, and that’s what we mean by the word “I.”
Mintz
So the word “I,” as you define it—really eloquently also; I’ve never heard that reference—is this muscular tension.
Watts
Yes.
Mintz
Is there anything about the individual, is there any self-identity that transcends I?
Watts
Of course.
Mintz
What?
Watts
Well, first of all, there’s the individual organism—the whole, total body. And this—if we knew we were this, if we really felt our whole body—we would feel what our whole body actually feels, which is that it’s one with the universe. The body does not exist without its environment. It goes with it, just in the same way as a front goes with a back. We cannot possibly exist without the sun, and the sun cannot exist without the galaxy, and the galaxy cannot exist without the other galaxies. It all goes together. And therefore one might say the sun is as much one’s own internal organ as one’s heart. We are inseparable from all that—just as I said the front is inseparable from a back, or the head side of a coin is inseparable from the tail side. We go with all this. The universe that is said to be outside us is our own extended body.
Only, we have been taught to feel differently. We have been taught to feel that this universe outside us is a mindless mechanism, and that we can only survive and maintain human values an human reason by fighting it and by beating it into submission. But we are its fruits, just as the apple tree brings forth the apple. The apple is symptomatic of the nature of the tree, and so in the same way we, as intelligent organisms, are symptomatic of the universe in which we live.
Mintz
Excuse me. There are those who, understanding what you say—and really understanding what you say—have a fear, and the fear is the loss of self, the loss of self-identity. Not just the ego-sense of self-identity, but the belief that fusing with the whole, becoming part of everything all around one, tends to weaken the significance of the single entity of man—which even you say is this great, extraordinary, miraculous, single instrument. Do we tend to lose something in this merging with everything else?
Watts
No.
Mintz
We don’t?
Watts
All the people I know who have realized their identity with the universe—I mean, I’m talking about the great teachers of yoga, masters of Zen, mystics, and so forth—are very strong personalities. Because, you see, look: you can move every one of your fingers individually, but only because of their union with the hand, the union of the hand with the arm, the arm with the body, and the body with the environment. It is this union which is the basis for individuality. And nobody who realizes this kind of thing can possibly be regarded as a non-entity.
On the other hand, the more you try to be an individual—and you take courses on “how to be a real person,” “I can and I will,” “how to win friends and influence people”—the more you become a non-entity. You become, you know, just like an average salesman.
Mintz
Where’s the key, then? What’s the thing that individuals have to learn to do to make this merging possible? What do you do?
Watts
You don’t. The first thing you have to understand is that you can’t do anything about it. Because that reveals to you the fact that the self that you think you are doesn’t exist. In other words, the ego has no reality, except in the sense that the equator has reality. It’s a social institution. The equator is an abstract line. Nobody can trip over it, nobody’s ever going to tie up a parcel with it. It’s a useful social abstraction. Well, in exactly the same way, the self-image that we have and the sense of muscular strain—which constitute together the ego, which is in fact an illusion married to a futility—we find out that doesn’t exist. And when we find out that it doesn’t exist, the problem is solved.
Mintz
So when you say “do nothing,” you mean that literally? Make no effort at self-improvement?
Watts
Well, you can make the effort, but you will find out that it’s completely useless. It’s like straining at your belt to get the plane off the runway.
Mintz
So, again: you literally do nothing? I sense that there is something you mean about no-thing-ness that’s not implied in the word. I sense that you still are talking about some kind of exercise in meditative awareness—that there’s still something inherent in your concept besides doing nothing and watching TV and—
Watts
Oh no, that’s not doing nothing. See, you cannot do anything about it, and you cannot do nothing about it.
Mintz
I don’t understand.
Watts
Because there isn’t any “you” to do it, or not to do it—not in the sense in which we ordinarily think of “you,” of one’s self. That is an abstraction. It cannot do something to transform itself, it cannot do nothing to transform itself. But when that is understood, the problem is solved.
Mintz
Aha.
Watts
Because then, you see, what you find out is that although you, as the ego, do not exist, nevertheless you’re still breathing, still circulating your blood, your hair is still growing, life is still going on, the wind is still blowing. And you find out then that, instead of what you thought you were, there is a happening. And that happening is the whole universe going along. You are not its victim, you are not its puppet. Also, you are not pushing it around. There is neither fate nor free will. There is just this happening. There is nature going along, and that’s you.
Mintz
I understand. Can we pause for a moment, and then we’ll return?
If you’re just joining us, our very special guest tonight is Alan Watts, who we will return to in two or three minutes.
Mintz
In previous programs that we’ve done with each other, Alan, we always come around to the subject of social responsibility. I talk frequently with teenagers on our programs, and they’re always talking about protesting war and pollution, and destruction to the environment, and racism and chauvinism, and all of those things. They say that there is more than doing no-thing-ness, there is more than just self-improvement, that man must be tremendously involved in these issues. When you watch Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley and see the world falling apart, do you not feel some desire to, in some way, alter conditions on the planet?
Watts
Well, one of the problems is that, through mass communications—television and radio and newspapers—everybody is deluged with information about problems where they can produce no immediate effective action. Their ire is aroused, their adrenals are aroused, their sense of injustice is aroused, and they can’t do anything about it right then and there. And this is utterly frustrating to everyone.
Now, first of all, I’m personally obviously concerned about all these issues. I’m very concerned about ecology, about the conservation of our natural heritage. I’m concerned about prisons, about law, about economics, about hospitals. And I do a lot of work in these domains. But now, look here: Concern about any issue involving compassion towards human beings is tricky. You would not want your surgeon who’s operating on you to remove a bum appendix to be so concerned about you that his hand shakes when he’s operating. And so surgeons tend to do their operations in a kind of offhand way. They joke with each other while they’re operating. Because they must not be concerned in an emotional way, because their hands would shake.
So, in exactly the same way, when we do something in the way of political action, we must do it with a certain sense of detachment as if it didn’t matter. Gary Snyder, the poet (who’s a great friend of mine), he said that to do good ecological work you must in the first place realize that it doesn’t matter whether you succeed or fail. The universe will go on. It will be a mess for maybe a million years, but after that it’ll correct itself and begin all over again.
Now, if you know that, and you’re grounded on that sensation that it’s really all alright, then you can go into the work of correcting and doing things that need to be done right now without losing your temper. When a political initiative is a manifestation of somebody who’s lost his temper, it’ll fail. And therefore I dislike intensely most kinds of political enthusiasm, because they are manifestations of lost tempers. And that’s my basic feeling with regard to this. I am concerned about all the great political and economic issues of our time—about racism and poverty and so on and so forth—but I’m not going to lose my temper about it.
Mintz
I don’t mean to sound argumentative. It’s never my intention. But I just have to pursue this for another moment or two, and then we can move on to time, which I want to talk with you about. I understand to some degree and recognize the wisdom in so much of what you say, Alan. But I recognize that, as we sit here, almost sometimes in the lap of intellectual coziness, that we’re being listened to by people in huts with rats running through the living room, and hungry. And when you say such things as “perhaps in a million years the universe will reorient and correct itself then”—you and I can accept that, you know? We’ll go home to electric blankets tonight. But for 75% of all the people on the planet, they go home again to hunger and disease and poverty and blah, blah, blah, and I just have never totally been able to reconcile in my own head the doing of no-thing-ness with the belief that it’ll eventually all correct itself. Can you just clarify that—
Watts
No, that’s not quite the point. It isn’t doing nothing—it’s not forcing.
Mintz
Aha.
Watts
You cannot achieve any creative result by forcing it. When you force the growth of tomatoes, they come out enormous but taste of nothing. So likewise, when you force the growth of the Third World, what happens? “Kindly let me help you or you’ll drown,” said the monkey, putting the fish safely up a tree. The foreign aid program is a disaster, because we’re trying to impose our way of life on the Third World when they may not even want it! And what we have to do (and what we have not sufficiently done) is ask the Third World: “What kind of civilization do you want to have? Do you really want freeways, hot dog stands, Cadillacs? Do you want your definition of sanity to be fitness to drive a car?” Do they really want the kind of civilization we have? You know? We’ve got it. We’ve had it. And we’re pretty much through with it.
Japan has completely ruined itself by copying our culture. Oh yes, it’s a great prosperous industrial nation, but the smog has destroyed the cherry trees. And everybody in Tokyo is in such a demented state that they commute every day on underground trains where there are special officials who use their feet and arms to shove people into the trains. They condense them more thickly packed than sardines into these trains. And they spend an hour, two hours, every day going from work to home packed into these absurd conveyances. Progress? This is not progress. This is the ruination of a country. Yeah, maybe they make money—but what will they buy with it? I tell you: plastic. Increasingly, the Japanese eat plastic food, wear plastic clothes, drink out of plastic utensils, and live a completely frivolous and superficial life. This is progress?
Mintz
I understand what you mean now. We’ll pause and then we’ll return. I’d like you to talk with us a little bit about time. Your things about time and space always intrigue me. This is fun. It’s always so nice to have you aboard.
Watts
Thank you.
Mintz
Okay. We will return to our conversation with Alan Watts after some messages from some people who bring he and I to you.
Mintz
If you will, could you just talk a little bit about your theories about the nature of time and space, if you don’t mind the vagueness of my question?
Watts
Well, first of all, these are questions which all children bring up. I don’t know any wise child who doesn’t wonder about the infinite extension of space going on and on and on, outwards and outwards and outwards, for always and always. And likewise, a wise child wonders about time: how long has time been going on? How long will it go on? What was god doing before god created the world? And the imagination goes back and back and back and back until it gets exhausted. And I think it’s very healthy that children think about these things.
Of course, they get shut up by their parents, because they’re parents are sensible and realize that, of course, all these questions are absurd. And so when a child starts asking, “What happened before what happened before what happened,” father suddenly says, “Oh, shut up and suck your lollipop!”
Now, I was never repressed by my father in this way. He always went along with my wonderings. I’ve told this story in my autobiography, which I’ve just published, called In My Own Way. And I began as a little boy to be a philosopher by wondering about such things as space and time and existence, and it always seemed to me absolutely extraordinary that anything existed at all. It’s absolutely weird! As a matter of fact, “weird” is the word which I used most frequently in this book, because weird means what is strange, and also it means your own thing, your own weird, your own way of life, your vocation. It’s one of the other meanings of the word. Isn’t that interesting?
Mintz
Yes, it is.
Watts
So I have found that, in philosophy, the most interesting thing to do is to call in question ideas which are apparently basic common sense. Now, it’s part of basic common sense that the present is the result of the past: that there is a passage of time in which what comes after is the result of what goes before. Now, I’ve questioned this completely, because I think the world did not begin in the past. The world always begins now, and the past trails back from it like a wake from a ship. Now, the wake doesn’t drive the ship. The wake shows where the ship has been, and eventually it peters out and vanishes. So, in the same way, all that we know about the past of this world, we can trace it back a long way, but eventually the trail vanishes. And we will not understand the world by studying its past, but rather by being attentive to its present—because it all begins now. We are at present at the creation of the universe.
Now, you can discover this if you listen to all sound. Supposing for a moment you close your eyes and simply understand the world by listening. Let’s suppose that you don’t know anything. You abandon your theories. You’re a child. You’re a baby. You don’t know anything about it, and you just learn to understand what’s going on by listening to it. You will hear a basis of silence, and all sounds coming out of it and echoing away—because you are listening to the beginning of being. The sounds come out of the silence—plop!—and then that’s what your ears tell you. Because you can’t hear any past, you can’t hear any future. You just hear the now sounds coming out of the now silence. Well, that’s very strange!
But, in the same way, when you open your eyes at night and look out into the sky, you will see the stars shining out of space just as the sounds are coming out of silence. Now, the stars are electronic vibrations. They’re going nyooing-nyooing-nyooing-nyooing-nyooing-nyooing-nyooing-nyooing at a colossal speed, so that it’s so fast that they appear as brilliant light. But they are vibrations, and they’re coming out of space. Because space isn’t just something one disregards and can toss aside as being just nothing. Space is the ground of something. You can’t have something without space. You can’t have a solid without space.
Mintz
Explain that more.
Watts
Well, just as you can’t recognize light without the background of darkness. You wouldn’t know that you were alive and real unless you’d once been dead. When you trace your memory back and back and back and back, you come to a point where it peters out. And before you have your first memories as an infant, there is blank. Go ahead, now: what would it be like to go to sleep and never wake up when you’re dead? See? Go to sleep—you never wake up. Well, it won’t be like going into the darkness forever. It won’t be like being buried alive forever. It will be as if you had never existed—not only you, but everything else. It will be just as if nothing had ever happened at all. But that was the way it was before you were born.
And so, what can happen once happens again. Because this blank that we meet when we try to go back before we remember anything, and the blank that we meet when we think about going to sleep and never waking up, and the blank that we encounter when we try to see our heads, and the blank out of which the stars shine—is all the same blank. It’s you. Now, you can’t see it. You can’t pin it down, just in the same way that you can’t bite your teeth or kiss your lips or see your eyes. The empty thing, what we fear as so-called nothingness, is ungraspable, unintelligible, because it is ourselves.
Now, I’m not trying to convert anyone to this idea. I’m just trying to put it forward as an interesting thing to think over. Try it. Try it for size.
Mintz
You just come up with these extraordinary things. I’ve never heard you prescribe any specific way or method. Of the hundreds of people I’ve interviewed involved in metaphysical things, each one has their own little meditative exercise or practice or group to join or paper to sign up with. Is there anything—you don’t have students, but you do have many readers, and you do have followers, of course. Is there any device or method that you impart to them as a way of centering themselves, as a way of getting into this cosmic flow? The folks listening to us in Pomona, who listen to you and say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Do you tell them to do anything, Alan?
Watts
Well, you see, I back almost all the different methods. I am not a partisan in religion. You know, when you fill out a form and it says: name, address, age, sex—a lot of people, when they’ve got sex, they put “yes.” So if they put religion, I put “yes.” I don’t think it’s intellectually respectable to be a partisan in religion. And I say yes, you can use yoga, you can use Zen meditation, you can use certain forms of Christian meditation, Sufi meditation, Hasidic Jewish meditation. There are all kinds of ways. And all of them are suitable for certain temperaments and certain individuals.
And what I suggest as being easy is what I was just a little while ago describing to you is the way of listening: to get into the meditative state by listening to what is going on as a way of stopping thinking about it. Experience it directly, but don’t name it.
Mintz
Experience it directly, but don’t name it.
Watts
Yeah. Now, you cannot stop naming it if you’re thinking and talking to yourself inside your skull compulsively. You can’t stop that. You can’t smooth rough water with a flat iron. But if you find, for example, that you are talking to yourself all the time and you can’t help it, just listen to your talking to yourself as just mere noise—like the sound of the air conditioning or traffic out on the street.
But go beyond words. Realize that the world as it is is not the same as the world as it is described, just as the dinner is not the menu, and wealth is not money. And try, thus, in a relaxed way to experience what is going on: the vibration, the energy of the world itself, without naming it—without saying, “this is the sun,” “this is a tree,” “this is a cloud,” “this is a mountain,” “this is a noise of a car.” Experience the vibration directly just as you would listen to classical music.
Now, I find this is for many people an effective way into the state of meditation, and thus to the state of cosmic consciousness. Because when you truly listen in this way, as I said, it’s amazing how many things there are that aren’t so. You can’t hear the past, you can’t hear the future, you can’t hear anyone listening to the sound. Because all these things are abstractions: they don’t exist. There is simply the sound now. There’s an eternal now, and the past and the future are abstractions. The listener is an abstraction. There is just the sound. And when you get down to honest, naked, facing of reality, this is what you discover.
So here we are. We live in an eternal now—but yet, most people are under the delusion that they live for a future. And so they dementedly rush around living for the future, and they’re making all sorts of plans for everything to be alright later on, and when these plans mature they’re unable to enjoy them because they’re still working for some other future beyond that. Insane! And they teach their children the same trick. You know, we all think we must survive. Because if we don’t go on, we may not get there—wherever “there” is. We’re there already! We’re there now! But we say: “Oh, we must survive,” in order to get “there’s a good time coming, be it ever so far away.” Do you remember that song? Theeeere’s a good time coming, be it ever so far away. They think that’s one far-off divine event to which all creation moves, and we’re going to get there. Well, that’s a hoax. The far-off divine event is now.
And if we know that, then it is worthwhile making plans, because when the plans mature we’ll be able to enjoy the result—because we’ll be there, like we’re here now. But people who live in the future will never catch up. They’re like the donkey that has a carrot suspended from a stick which is attached to its collar. And they’re forever pursuing that damn carrot; can never catch it.
Mintz
You are just such a delight to interview and talk with, and hours just go by. It’s just remarkable. We could do eleven hours one day, and I feel certain we shall! We have just three or four minutes. Tell us a little bit about the new book—specifically who publishes it, because people are going to go out tomorrow and want to buy the Alan Watts biography.
Watts
Oh. The new book, In My Own Way, is my autobiography between the years 1915 and 1965, and it’s published by Pantheon Books, which is a division of Random House. Pantheon Books, yes.
Mintz
You were born in 1915?
Watts
In 1915, yes.
Mintz
Gosh.
Watts
In England. I was educated in England, but I fled to this country because the kind of work that I do only earns a living in this country. In all places in the world. It’s the most extraordinary thing. A philosopher, an independent philosopher who does not hold a chair of philosophy in a university, but simply earns his living by being a philosopher, can only be supported by the United States.
Mintz
That is bizarre. Weird!
Watts
It is.
Mintz
Was there—we have just a moment or two—but was there any one particular event or moment in your life where you suddenly knew what you were to do, or knew the course that you were about to pursue? I mean, like, up to the age of 22, did you plan to becoming a lawyer or a TV repairman?
Watts
No. I had decided more or less on my career when I was 14.
Mintz
You did?
Watts
Yes. I knew I was going to be a writer. I wasn’t absolutely sure what I was going to write about, but my interests at that time went very strongly to philosophy, especially to Oriental philosophy. I was reading about Chinese and Japanese culture, and then I came across Buddhism as a kind of root force in those cultures, and I got absolutely fascinated with it. So when I was 15, I was attending King’s School Canterbury, which is at the very heart of the Church of England. And I didn’t approve of the religion they were teaching, because they were teaching it in a very superficial way. I didn’t know about Saint Thomas Aquinas, or about Meister Eckhart, or about John Scotus Eriugena, and all the great fathers of the church. They never told us about that. They just gave us a lot of talk about church history, and the evils of sex, and so on. And I was bored.
Mintz
That’s when you were 15?
Watts
Yes. So I declared myself a Buddhist. Well, the British have an absolutely incredible confidence in their own correctness. Therefore, they can tolerate eccentricity in a way which Americans can’t. They said, “Jolly! Well, the man’s a Buddhist.” And they weren’t upset in the least. I mean, here one would be called weird, subversive, deviant, neurotic, some kind of everybody going into a panic when somebody’s different. But there they just said, “Huh.” You know? “Just another queer one.”
So I was encouraged. All my professors and teachers and my father encouraged me in my strangeness—or we say weirdness. And they said, “At last somebody is seriously interested in religion.” And so they awarded me first prize in divinity (in the study of religion) in the sixth form, which is the senior form of the school. That was just fantastically astonishing. So I ran into nothing but cooperation in this supposedly deviant adventure.
Mintz
And you have just been carrying on and turning more people on to these things than any single man I know in the country.
We are out of time. I thank you so much for visiting with us again.
Watts
Thank you.
Mintz
When you’re down in Los Angeles again, come see us.
Watts
I’ll do so, sure.