Top 5 Videos Of Alan Watts

Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen. -Alan Watts

Alan Watts (1915-1973) was one of the foremost interpreters and popularizer of Zen, eastern and western philosophy and psychedelic substances. He criticized modern society and thereby found a large following in the 60′s. He didn’t label himself a Zennist, a buddhist or a philosopher, but rather a philosophical entertainer, because that was what he did, he painted reality with words. With his clarity of thought and deep insight, mixed with his experience as a priest and a scholar he inspired many to re-think their way of life and so to take it all a bit less serious and leave more room for play and joy. Yet, while entertaining, he never stopped spreading his wisdom. He had a brilliant understanding of duality, of the implications that if one thing is true, it necessarily follows that the opposite must be true aswell, that there is no left without a right and no up without a down. And so he inspired and helped many on the philosophical and spiritual path. Alan Watts wrote extensively and hundreds of hours recorded talks are now free to listen. The creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, animated some bits and pieces of his lectures and this spawned many other animations and even a remix. Watch these 5 videos for a quick dose of inspiration!

Bonus: Alan Watts’ book on his psychedelic experiences, The Joyous Cosmology

Do you have a favorite Watts talk? Please share it in the comments!