The mysticism of Alan Watts (2018)

Disclaimer: author is my teacher

If you are somewhat serious about spiritual practice, of course you should find someone who walked some of the path already, otherwise it's impossible for you to know - by definition, you haven't walked the path yet so you don't really know.

The most dangerous thing nowadays is going all in with what the main flow is flushing everyone into ;-)

He also "defends" the darker side.

He considered people plainly imperfect or openly corrupt more trustworthy than these with best intentions.

Because they getting a clear deal don't break the trade while some Saint goodies tend to hide ungly face.

Enough to observe fates of businesses built on "friendships"... splitting up more often than modern marriages and in uglier way..

This includes the ugly truths behind hypocritically democratic, narrow-minded binary systems, like a hammer seeing everywhere a nail.

At leasts these points made perfect sense for me observing reality.

Maybe it's just incompatible with your actual ideology. Maybe time to go deep into validity of it? Who said selflessness or altruism is not dangerous? If somebody imposes it on others that becomes really ugly really fast? Like why somebody modifies my choice in shop by some ideological carbon footprint? that's my personal choice what I want. Especially when you are aware it's a complete unscientific bs.

In a different context this would have been played for laughs, or it would have been considered trolling. I do not think the above commenter was trolling. People are just attached to idols and ideas they like and having them tarnished results in an impulsive reaction to defend them.

Like if Watts says, "Life isn't a journey, it's a dance," one can hear that and say, "Ok, I get what you're going for, I've reflected on it deeply, but for me, life is a journey, not a dance." And it's not necessarily true that, if one reflects deeper, and grows wiser, and puts down one's preconceptions, etc etc, they will eventually, in the fullness of time, realize Alan was right. That's the sort of presumptive condescension that is being called out.

A rigid sacred text that claim things are one way or that something must be done someway will inevitably fail when reality shows that things are some other way or that the results of some other action are better.

I should have used the word "elucidating" instead.

A lot of religious trappings seem partially to function as theater, show, or advertising. This generates some interest without understanding. The first understanding and further interest will probably come intellectually thereafter.

The Dalai Lama has characterized one of the strengths of Tibetan Buddhism as laying out a complete path, no "missing steps." In his Introduction to Buddhism, he describes how a beginner might start out with analytical contemplation before meditation, getting familiar with the idea.

I think that understanding this sort of thing can help the thing scale. Quite a few traditions hold that you must have living transmissions of sorts, or need a guru. I think that serves, in part, to show in a living being that it is possible and not an act...but we don't have 3.5 billion spiritual masters to mentor 3.5 billion other people, and I don't see anything wrong with replacing a little trip or roadblock on the path with intellectual understanding. The traditions, understanding, and concepts all exist to create a workable path. Scaffolding doesn't have anything to do with having a building in the end, but if you want a building, you'll probably find scaffolding useful along the way.

https://www.amazon.com/Master-His-Emissary-Divided-Western-e... goes into this a lot. It does that fairly literally. In split brain patients, if you have them, say, draw a picture using their left hand (right hemisphere), they tend to draw it impressionistically without much detail--you get the sense or form of the whole--it really doesn't see the "parts". The left hemisphere typically can't do this, and seems rather preoccupied with what it knows. If you ask a split brain patient to, say, draw an elephant with their right hand, they might draw a trunk, and ear, a tail, etc. and actually not have the ability to put them together in relation to draw an elephant. They might even draw skeleton, because they know about it--it really doesn't have a sense of the whole.

> I think mirror neurons are a good example. I still don't understand what difference it makes which neurons are involved in empathy. Pretty much every signal in the brain can be tuned out or strengthened, right?

I don't think it matters which neurons, but I think what the brain does matters quite a bit, like the difference between, say, someone who can work out a sum with a pencil and paper, vs someone who sees numbers and landscapes and just kind of squashes the images together and knows the sum (some people with exceptional calculation abilities have unusual synesthesias like that and can't actually tell you how they calculate at all). If Buddhism, say, makes a claim like "there's no difference between self and other", it makes a difference if, say, my brain just feels distress at seeing someone in pain, or if my brain has a representation of just exactly what that would feel like on my body in some detail. We know empathy is a thing, but neuroscience tells us in more detail by, say, various failure modes of the brain, that some people can't differentiate self and other, that seeing others, say, can invade their mental space in a very direct way that they can't tell from themselves. So to me, without knowing in detail by having already accomplished it, what the hardware could possibly do, then we can train it. Like, people run 4 minute miles all of the time now, but it was once considered not possible. Someone sets a new standard, and a kind of mental block of "that's impossible" seems lifted. Knowing just what various brain regions can do removes some mystery of what's possible--were some old spiritual masters spitballing theoretical possibilities, speaking perhaps metaphorically, or very literally describing something they achieved? It leans toward the possibility of the latter, and the ability to train the latter, if you know in detail that exactly some region of the brain does some thing exactly.

> Your last paragraph seems to make a more concrete claim, which is that we can tell which kinds of cognition are more or less draining, analogous to native vs emulated execution. This makes sense to me, but it's not clear that we couldn't already tell roughly how draining different modes of thought are without neuroscience, nor that the main claims of Eastern spirituality depended on how draining these different states are to hold.

I think my line of thinking on this is more of the same sort of thing. How would you know, say, that you're not emulating what's possible to run in hardware. Like you said, you could strengthen any signal of the brain. How would you differentiate between the thought that everything is one, vs the intuitive perception of it? So I tend to think that the reason they're pointing these things out is because of that sort of thing. Some claims of Eastern spiritually do depend on how draining a state is to hold. In Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, the recognition of emptiness is clarified as not being a matter of effort, and they use the metaphor of a bell. You don't continuously hammer the bell, you ring the bell and the tone simply continues to ring as long as it rings. If you notice it has stopped, you can ring it again, and eventually, recognition is continuous; it should not be a matter of effort, and effort would be one way to spot that you're not doing it right. So, I do have an unsupported suspicion that they're pointing alternative ways of being that aren't a matter of effort and that people often don't recognize.

You asked the OP to name someone, so presumably you're after someone famous.

> Watts was smart, insightful, highly versed in philosophy and religion. Does being an alcoholic or a smoker or <choose your transgression> negate that?

Not necessarily. Giving advice about those things is a separate matter though.

> Edit: it’s really sad that you would summarize this complex man as an “abusive alcoholic”. He dedicated decades of his life to learning and sharing knowledge, inspired millions of people, certainly advanced Western philosophy. In his late years he drank heavily - 30-something years after publishing his first book. What an unforgiving hypocrisy! A man with such a complicated story, a difficult relationship with his dad, failed marriages, just human drama that _all_ people have or will experience in their lifetime… what right did he have to disappoint you so tremendously?

I was using the OP's words. Was he an abusive alcoholic or not?

Or, did his advice work great on him - but he was such a sad case that what we all saw of him was his best possible self?