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chapter two Alan Watts: The Immediate Magic of God Alan Keightley Alan Watts had an abiding fascination with Rowan Tree Cottage in Holbrook Lane, Chislehurst, in the county of Kent, his home for more than twenty years before he left England for the United States. The drawing room in the cottage was a place of sheer magic for him long before he learned a language to explain its fascination. His mother taught the children of missionaries and this room contained gifts from their parents, Asian treasures gathered on their travels. The room gave Alan an interior compass that led him to the East through the West; through New York, Chicago, and finally, San Francisco. I located the cottage some years ago. The rowan tree had long since gone. As the owner led me into the small drawing room she commented that she had just a few callers interested in Alan Watts’ origins. She was puzzled by their particular interest in the bathroom upstairs and was surprised to learn that “upstairs” was a place of punishment for the young Alan. I explained that the “miserable bathroom” was where he was taught his prayers. She knew nothing about Alan Watts and directed me across the road to an elderly woman who had cared for Alan’s father in his final illness. She too had no awareness that his son had touched the lives of millions. The topography of Rowan Tree Cottage was an enduring metaphor for Alan’s changing relations with the Christian tradition. “Upstairs” was the realm of Christianity in its Anglican form. “Downstairs” was the domain of freedom and adventure, particularly the drawing room, the very presence of the mysterious East in Holbrook Lane, of all places. There were four phases of Watts’ descents and ascents on the metaphorical stairs. As a schoolboy he found Christianity to be an impossible religion, having concluded that there could be no high form of religion without mysticism at its center. Without this, Christianity was either a political ideology or a mindless fundamentalism. He thus declared himself a Buddhist. In the 1940s, he had second thoughts. A more mature Watts felt and thought that Christianity was plausible and became an Episcopalian priest. However, he left the church in 43 44 ALAN WATTS—HERE AND NOW 1950 having concluded for a second time that Christianity was an impossible religion. A decade before Watts’ death, the mood of the times had changed radically to the degree that Christianity became an option again for those who were spiritually awake. He endorsed this view by claiming, characteristically, that Christianity was now a “possible” religion by virtue of the very fact that it was “impossible.” Alan Watts was so prolific in books and recorded talks and the subject of his engagement with Christianity is so vast that a brief account can only sketch an outline of this. There is, however, a continuous thread running through all of Watts’ writings on religion. This is the assertion of the possibility of a direct, immediate, mystical realization of reality, before thought and words; before it is classified conceptually and vocalized. TOWARD AN APOPHATIC THEOLOGY During my visit to Rowan Tree Cottage, I sat for a few minutes in Watts’ cramped bedroom thinking of a passage in his autobiography: I especially remember that bedroom on Sunday twilights. . . . Alone in that bedroom I would hear the bells of Saint Nicholas [Church] falling down the major scale, ringing the changes forever downwards, to summon the faithful to Evensong, to the closing service of the day, with, as John Betjeman has put it, undertones of “death and hell at last.” (Watts, 1973b, p. 46) Alan Watts had been immersed in the Anglican tradition from birth until his late teens to a degree that is hardly imaginable today. He attended one of the oldest schools in England, King’s School, adjacent to Canterbury Cathedral, the worldwide Mecca of Anglicanism under the very wing of the archbishop himself. A photograph shows the thirteen-year-old Alan carrying the train of Cosmo Gordon Lang during his enthronement ceremony in 1928. Watts (1973b) recalled that he and his fellow pupils felt that they were being introduced to a very clear, perfectly logical cosmological order. God was supreme. Then Christ, who conferred spiritual power on his apostles. Finally there was the archbishop himself, an immediate descendent of those very apostles through ecclesiastical tradition. Watts commented that they knew their place and where they were and what the order of things was...

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