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chapter four The Psychedelic Adventures of Alan Watts Stanley Krippner In 1963, I presented an extremely controversial paper at an international conference on general semantics at New York University. The presentation concerned LSD-type substances and how, if administered properly, they could help a person reestablish contact with what general semanticists call the “extensional world:” those aspects of nature that each culturefilters and constructs through its own lenses and vocabularies. Immediately after my talk, I noticed a tall woman wearing a large green hat with a floppy brim supported by a white cane, limping rapidly down the aisle. She wore a necklace of potbellied Buddhas, and earrings decorated with the same. Her first questions to me were, “Do you know Tim Leary? Do you know Alan Watts?” I acknowledged that I knew them both, having attended a reception for Watts when I was a volunteer participant in Leary’s Harvard University psilocybin research project. This colorful woman’s name was Virginia Glenn, and I discovered that she had been in the crowded room at the 1961 convention of the American Psychological Association when I first heard Leary discuss psychedelics. After attending the symposium, I had written Leary a letter volunteering my services as a research participant in his study. It was pure serendipity that I arrived the weekend of Watts’ reception and Leary graciously invited me to the event. At the sit-down pot-luck dinner Watts entertained the group by answering questions and giving short monologues on a variety of topics ranging from education in England (the land of his birth) to Eastern philosophy. Watts was a key figure in the life of Virginia Glenn. Upon discovering that she had acute diabetes, she decided to commit suicide but changed her mind after hearing a taped lecture by Watts. In the early 1950s, she traveled between Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, and Washington, DC, playing her collection of Alan Watts’ tapes for anyone interested in hearing them. She first met Watts in 1957 while working as a waitress in New York City. By then her diabetes 83 84 ALAN WATTS—HERE AND NOW was critical, sending her into frequent comas, and resulting in an incurable infection in her right foot. Despite her suffering, Virginia never complained about her condition. She began to schedule talks and seminars for Watts who looked upon her as a Bodhisattva—a living Buddha. I was living in New York City at the time and helped Virginia arrange Watts’ lectures, an essential task because she was legally blind. On July 3, 1970, Virginia and I had dinner in Greenwich Village; she had just returned from Boston where the physicians had examined her thoroughly and, as she put it, had “readjusted my chemicals.” She reached into her everpresent carrying bag to pull out a number of articles and announcements she knew would interest me. The next day, Virginia went into a coma, was rushed to a hospital, and died. Alan Watts was in Europe at the time, but on his return he wrote: What always interested me was her discrimination and good taste in a dimension thronged with charlatans. . . . Above all, Virginia’s genius was to bring together people who . . . would fertilize each other’s insight and imagination. She must have been the catalyst of hundreds of friendships. (Watts, 1970, pp. 1–2) The lasting fruits of my relationship with Alan Watts are a testament to Virginia’s divine gift. Her talent of introduction would prove to be a lifelong benefit and the reason I can now write about Alan Watts with such personal perspective. In this chapter, I suggest that Watts’ integrated outlook on individual and transpersonal identity, cultivated through his peculiar upbringing, his interest in Anglican Catholicism and various Asian philosophies, and the randomized series of personal collisions that marked his life, laid a sturdy groundwork for his exploration of psychedelic matters. Undoubtedly, his overweening attachment to material and scientific explanations was counterpart to his experiences of mysticism, but he levied novel and profound attacks on accepted wisdom that served as a prologue to later developments. Although rife with contradiction, the complex intervention of his life in his work and vice versa, was partially responsible for the fertility of his thought. THE ADVENTURES BEGIN In 1958, after returning to the United States from lecturing at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Alan was conversing with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. Alan’s two companions were exuding greater tranquility and compassion than in previous meetings...

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