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chapter nine Contributions and Conundrums in the Psychospiritual Transformation of Alan Watts Alan Pope The writings and lectures of Alan Watts elucidate a vision of psychospiritual transformation that is at once comprehensible and profound. Comprised of expositions on Eastern philosophy interpreted through his own Western enculturation, his work sheds light on presuppositions that guide philosophical and psychological inquiry, offering valuable critical perspectives on the nature of personal development and spiritual liberation. Watts’ analyses are largely consistent with a proposition that has guided my own research, namely, that personal transformation is essentially a process of learning to see. For Watts, the most fundamental transformation occurs when we see the unity out of which duality appears. However, it remains an interesting question as to what extent Watts managed to adopt this vision for himself. Although Watts drew principally from Buddhist, Daoist, and Vedanta literatures to formulate his theoretical framework , his experiential understanding derived less from the rigorous application of meditation practices associated with these traditions than from experimentation with psychotropic drugs (Watts, 1960, 1962, 1971). Through psychedelic journeying , Watts achieved glimpses of liberation from ordinary, conventional ways of seeing, but others have suggested that he nevertheless held firm to an intellectual appropriation that limited his own vision (Nordstrom & Pilgrim, 1980). The charge is that he interpreted Eastern thought from a functionalist Western sensibility that reduces mysticism to materiality. In this view, as brilliant as many of Watts’ ideas were, they often misrepresented the Eastern philosophical traditions on which they were based. This chapter offers both an appreciation of Watts’ contributions to our understanding of psychospiritual transformation and a critical appraisal of his attempts to incorporate the Eastern orientation. WATTS IN THEORY: AN APPRECIATION The phrase psychospiritual transformation implies that the process of personal change and growth involves an intimate interaction between psyche (soul) and 183 184 ALAN WATTS—HERE AND NOW spirit. Whereas the realm of spirit had been largely ignored by Western psychology , Watts found in Eastern spirituality a larger context within which Western psychological thought could be situated. This enlarged perspective offered him the critical stance he needed to begin to forge a viable connection between Eastern and Western understandings of the mind and the interrelated connections between psychological and spiritual processes. Watts articulated this attempted union most clearly in his 1961 book Psychotherapy East and West, which Eugene Taylor (2003) describes as “possibly one of the most influential texts of the American psychotherapeutic counterculture” (p. 185). This section draws on this and other works in developing a review of some of the major themes that Watts developed in his quest for the “practical transformation of consciousness” (Watts, 1972, p. 247). Exposing the Myths that Guide How We See In order to learn how to see properly, we must first understand how our vision has been distorted. With brilliance and clarity, Watts articulated the basic myths through which we have historically oriented ourselves and made sense of the world (Watts, 1966, 2004). The Ceramic Model of the universe, which arises from Genesis, conceives all material substances as pots created by an external source, God. Just as Jesus was the son of a carpenter, so, too, is God a craftsman, a potter who shapes and breathes life into little clay figurines of which we are each exemplars. But the Renaissance introduced the notion of a mathematical universe, converting the cosmos into a machine holding no place for God. This vision, which Watts calls the Fully Automatic Model, comes with two variants—one in which God made the machine and then abandoned it, and another in which God never existed. The universe and everything in it, ourselves included, consists of random combinations of atoms which accidentally have formed the coherence we know as our reality, and the entropy against which we struggle. In Watts’ view, the fully automatic model became a scientific dogma that shaped our view of reality and created a tremendous sense of isolation and anxiety. Watts posited a third alternative to these Western conceptions deriving from the Hindu Vedanta. In the Dramatic Model of the universe, God out of boredom makes up disguises in order to play hide-and-seek with itself. We adopt a persona, our egoic identity, as a mask that covers over our true nature as Atman, the divine core of human personality that is ultimately none other than Brahman, or God itself. It was this myth that captured Watts’ imagination and provided the basis for his own way of seeing the nature of self and...

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