Dharma Combat
Where Spiritual Giants Duke It Out

Alan Watts
Taking Hits

Ptolemy Tompkins:

"Another figure from the past who now revealed his true and very surprising colors was Alan Watts, the man of the Eternal Now who had so charmed and energized me with his rhapsodies on the Tao. The wise and watery Watts, it turned out, had in real life been a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, ego-toting man of the world: an all-too-human pleasure hound who was happy with the suchness of the Now largely because he could always count on a drink, a smoke, and a busty grad student fascinated with his grasp of the mysteries to fill it up . . .

The story of Watt's later years is a deeply sad one. As it turned out, the man who counseled me with such eloquence on the need to overcome all feelings of duality between my single, solitary self and the great world beyond could barely bring himself to spend a night alone. The man who prescribed freedom from all attachment to forms and concepts chugged vodka from the bottle, and in his final days sometimes actually lost consciousness momentarily at speaking engagements (a habit that, remarkably, often went either unnoticed by his adoring audience or else was read as a momentary lapse into samadhi). Toward th eend of his life, one of Watts's children is reported to have directly asked him why he insisted on drinking as much as he did when it was so clearly destroying him. Stepping out for a moment from behind the edifice of Enlightened One that had been hammered up all around him, Watts answered simply that when he didn't drink, he didn't like himself. The perfect sage for our age of packaged wisdom, Watts died of alcohol-related prolems in 1973, at the age of fifty-eight . . ."

- from The Beaten Path: Field Notes on Getting Wise in a Wisdom-Crazy World

 

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