Every year or so, for many years now, I dive back into the work of Zen Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts. He died in the 1970s, but his work manages to be so relevant to me at every stage of my life. I’ve never had a guru – never really believed in the concept – but Watts has a way of synthesizing the most sage viewpoints that I find myself thinking of him a bit like an guru at times.

It’s his recorded lectures most of all that I come back to more and more. The timbre of his posh English accent, craggy from too many cigarettes and cocktails (not actually sure which alcohol he had a penchant for but I imagine him an equal opportunist on that score). He is/was the perfect blend of Eastern mysticism and Western materialism.

Granted, I’m a Californian by birth, so of course he appeals to me. A Buddhist Englishman transplanted into the 1960s-70s hippy world of California was immediately embraced by his community – mostly because he was so free-thinking. There’s an old saying that there’s no-one more English than an Englishman living outside of England, but I have to say that in Watts’ case, that wasn’t true. His aristocratic temperament we could say was classically English, but his character was something else entirely.

Watts had predominantly Capricorn planets in his natal chart with a Sagittarius ascendant. Arguably, being Sagittarius rising explains why he was so fluid and expansive in his expression; in his impressions of the world. The amalgamation of many cultural viewpoints within one’s teachings is a Sagittarian gift. My love for Watts has nothing to do with Astrology, though.

Astrology can feel very deterministic, which is one of the reasons why it turns so many people off. I have to zoom out and get a bit lost once in awhile to give myself perspective. Not everything has to fit neatly in its right place. Sometimes, the world doesn’t need to make sense; it simply needs to be experienced.

Here’s an excerpt from a lecture Watts gave that articulates this point really well:

You have to be able – to be a true scholar – to cultivate an attitude to life where you’re not trying to get anything out of it. You pick up a pebble on the beach and look at it: beautiful! Don’t try to get a sermon out of it. Just enjoy it. Don’t feel that you’ve got to salve your conscience by saying that this is for the advancement of your aesthetic understanding. Enjoy the pebble. If you do that, you become healthy. You become able to be a loving, helpful human being. But if you can’t do that, if you can only do things because somehow you’re going to get something out of it, you’re a vulture.

Of course life isn’t just about appreciating simplicity, but it is an important ability to access in one’s psyche. At the end of our lives, whenever that time comes, it is how well we have cultivated our spirit that comes into focus, not how much we own or how much we have accomplished. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. If we focus too much on the material nature of our bodies, we lose the plot. Our bodies are temporary real estate. They allow us to experience a miraculous range of sensations on planet Earth that we won’t experience in any other form. It’s worthwhile to embrace the opportunity while we have it.

Pure hedonism gets boring after awhile, but so does pure asceticism, or being too virtuous or “good” all the time. Just as all the great prophets in nearly every religious text have allowed themselves full hedonistic expression to find their spiritual centers, we humans aren’t meant to deny ourselves pleasure in any form. It’s when too much pleasure forces us to see our darkness, or compromises our spirit, that we must embrace this as something we are meant to unveil. A denial of pleasure or darkness will only push it further into our subconscious, where it festers into something grossly over-exaggerated and even dangerous.

I’ll end this with another excerpt from Watts:

See, that’s what happened in the beginning: when God created the universe, it was created — like all stars, all planets, all galaxies: they’re vaguely spherical. He created this and said, “You must draw the line somewhere.” That was the real thing he said first; before “Let there be light,” that came later. First thing was, “You must draw the line somewhere.” Otherwise, nothing will happen. You know? You’ve got to have the good guys, the bad guys, you’ve got to have this, you’ve got to have that. Light and darkness. Must draw the line somewhere.

Here’s the choice then: are you going to trust it or not? If you do trust it you may be let down. And this “it” is your self, your own nature, and all nature around you. There are going to be mistakes. But if you don’t trust it at all, you’re going to strangle yourself. You’re going to fence yourself ’round with rules and regulations and laws and prescriptions and policemen and guards. 

To live I must have faith. I must trust myself to the totally unknown. I must trust myself to a nature which doesn’t have a boss.