In My Own Way: An Autobiography

If you have any interest in Alan Watt's writing, you will enjoy reading his autobiography. He is a great storyteller and this book contains some of this most funny stories. I found myself laughing out loud in many sections. One of the most memorable stories for me was his recounting of a game he used to play called, "you are the target." In this game, you shoot an arrow up in the air and measure how close it lands to you. This was done in the context of adolescent competition and Watts brings this spirit and fearlessness of youth alive. Alan Watts had a great sense of humor and was a deep thinker. He also had a gift for analogy and getting his points across with rich prose. This book represents some of his best writing in terms of vulnerability, openness and reflecting on his own life. It may or may not be very accurate, but it is certainly quite entertaining. I also found that this was a good book to get a sense of the context for various other books that Alan Watts wrote over the course of his life. I have found some to be better than others, but all of them to be useful in some ways. My favorite books by Alan Watts are the WAY OF ZEN, THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY and THE BOOK. Some of his later books, I found to be of lower quality, but he was in the zone when he wrote the three above. NATURE, MAN and WOMAN was also quite good and there is a lot of humor and deep insights throughout.

This is the finest autobiography I have read. Watts was a master of prose and many of the paragraphs in this work are memorable for their lyrical beauty. He was a very complex human being and does a frank job of highlighting his imperfections. Whatever missteps he took, though, he had a tremendous amount of wisdom to share. An added bonus to this book is that it gives the reader a vicarious introduction to many of the intellectual luminaries of the 20th century, many of whom were close friends of Watts.

Wisdom and humor are intermingled in this excellent book by a gifted writer who had a great deal to express, ponder, and celebrate with the rest of humanity. Alan Watts encourages us all to "follow our own weird" and not stifle the urge to live a full and meaningful life. In contrast to many authors who choose to offer a purely cerebral view of Zen Buddhism (which itself is a very non-Zen thing to do), Alan Watts writes in an direct, unpretentious, and inspiring manner, emphasizing along the way that we not take ourselves too seriously. To call Watts a hedonist, however, is to take a somewhat narrow view of his life and message, since he points out that one must accept all of life's so-called opposites: pleasure/pain, joy/sadness, life/death. It's quite a shame that this is out of print since it ranks with some of Watts's best writing. If you are fortunate enough to come across a copy of this book, do yourself a favor and read it, especially if you have a interest in religion in general or in Zen Buddhism in particular. Alan Watts should be an essential part of any study of Zen, or any study of life as a whole for that matter.

In My Own Way: An Autobiography is the endlessly engrossing story of the persona, the public figure, of Alan Wilson Watts, who is sometimes referred to, and rightly so, as "the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines," and Zen Buddhism in particular. It was not Alan's idea to write this book, as he candidly admits in the Preface to the book, since in his opinion he had not done anything worthy of recounting. "I have not fought in wars, explored mountains and jungles, battled in politics, commanded great business corporations, or accumulated vast wealth. It seemed to me, therefore, that I had no story to tell as the world judges stories." It was only at the insistence of two women in his life, his publisher's editor, Paula McGuire, and his third wife, Mary Jane Yates, that he consented to write down the details of the making of Alan Watts. Along the way we meet the people who influenced Alan, who helped guide, shape, and direct his persona. And though he was influenced by many people in his life, whose works and ideas found their way into his many books, essays, and lectures, Alan possessed, all on his own, a certain knack or genius for getting at the essence of a theme or subject. And then he was able to effectively communicate that essence, using his abundant imagination, to his readers and listeners. And this not just for the highbrows in the audience, but for every class of person who picks up one of his books and proceeds to make the effort to understand the ideas and concepts he expresses. Alan's work was, if anything, accessible to the reader, whatever his level of interest.The title of this review, The Way I Came To Be, refers to the story that makes up the book. And so much of that story centers around the people Alan interacted with from whom he gathered the ideas, concepts and "philosophy" that he expoused. It's the inside story of how Alan Watts came to think and see things in the way he came to think and see them. And for this value alone the book is abundantly worth reading and re-reading.(From a personal point of interest, it fascinated and amazed me, at first reading several years ago, how much my own life paralleled and intersected the same aspects of cultivation as his life: an early interest in Eastern philosophy; being associated with and entering a Western religious order, Episcopal in his case and old Catholic in my own; an interest in the metaphysical rituals of religion; a background in meditation combined with a fascination with psychology and psychoanalysis; and an insight into the little talked about mystical aspects of Western religions and the thought to express the marriage between Western and Eastern mysticism.)In My Own Way is, in reality, an extension of Alan Watts' previous books in that it covers a lot of the same ground but with new stories of the people he lived with which provides additional insight into the concepts and ideas he wrote about. For instance, t

This autobiography, published 1972, by Alan Wilson Watts, the expatriate British orientalist and philosopher, is a joy to read, a document of Watts' life, and a history of the 1960s counterculture. Watts early on evidenced a love for eastern philosophy. At the age of 20, he was already one of the major writers and thinkers on subjects such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism. He was a major exponent of the Zen outlook of Thou Art That. Watts, an unfrocked Episcopal priest, has often been derided (wrongfully) as a 'popularizer' of subjects more properly reserved for serious study and practice, and (more rightly) as sometimes glib and definitely irreverent. This book is a record of Watts' indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh with a high spiritual purpose. Watts wrote more than 20 books, and this is Watts at his irreverent best. Written with his tongue firmly jammed into his cheek, it is a compendium of a lifetime's worth of exuberant fun and learning for the joy of it. Watts gleefully recounts tales of spiritual masters with stomachaches, hidebound bishops drinking fine wines, and sexy women discovering their Buddha-nature. Nothing is too minor or too major for Watts's wit, and his reminiscences carry us from the bathroom of his childhood home in England to Canterbury Cathedral, from New York City to Big Sur, and touch on almost every major and many minor figures of the 1950s and 1960s. Watts unabashedly tells us that he finds his life intensely interesting. Anyone reading IN MY OWN WAY would agree.