Alan Watts: Give up control to gain it (audio)

Alan Watts: Give away control and you will have control

(Emotivate Life, July 6, 2021) Alan Watts delivers a counterintuitive lecture on how to have control of one's life. Give up that idea of control, of micromanaging everything. Delegate the power and have faith that others will execute their duties conscientiously and well.

No president could rule if managing what every minister and counselor were deciding and doing. It would be too much. But delegating power to competent and trustworthy people, everything will be taken care of and the president could take decisions worthy of a president's attention without being bogged down by all the details the others are tasked with. Therefore, give away control. and you will have it.

Alan Wilson Watts was once but a precocious lad.

Alan Wilson Watts (1915–1973) was a self-described "spiritual entertainer," a British philosopher,  an expert on Zen and various Eastern languages, a writer, and speaker known for interpreting and popularizing the Eastern philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism for a Western audience. 

Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. He received a Master's degree in theology from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and became an Episcopal priest in 1945.

He left that ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies. He gained a following while working as a volunteer programmer at the free speech radio (Pacifica, KPFA) in Berkeley.

He went on to write more than 25 books and articles on religion and philosophy, introducing the emerging hippie counterculture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism.

In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), he argued that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy. He considered Nature, Man and Woman (1958) to be, "from a literary point of view — the best book I have ever written."

He also explored human consciousness and psychedelics in works such as "The New Alchemy" (1958) and The Joyous Cosmology (1962).