One of the more famous Zen memes is famous stated by Yangshan as "What do they teach where you come from?" It's a question that invites an free flowing answer.
Given our current round of content brigading from r/AlanWatts is likely to follow the pattern of similar brigading from /r/buddhism, r/meditation, r/humanism, r/newage, and r/psychonauts with a few "follow up posts on the wisdom of Alan Watts", how can we apply Yangshan's question and learn something?
What does Alan Watts teach?
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Alan Watts post generally don't invite discussion about the post or it's underlying values/beliefs... Alan Watts posts are designed to get upvotes because of their "common sense awwwisdomness".
- Does mean that Alan Watts' followers don't know what he believed?
- Does this mean that Alan Watts' followers don't know what they believe, themselves?
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Alan Watts posts generally don't examine outliers at all or want to discuss them.
- Did Watts always think this way? When did he change his mind?
- Which traditions/texts shared Watts' perspective, and which don't?
The fact that these questions aren't asked, that these conversations don't occur, suggests to me that Alan Watts' followers tend to be both ignorant of Watts' teaching in the big picture and ashamed of their beliefs generally.
Most Alan Watts followers come from traditional religious homes... can you imagine a Christian not knowing the difference between old and new testaments? Can you imagine a Buddhist spamming quotable restatements of 4NT but not knowing the 8FP?
Ignorance of context, feelings of shame about relevance.
New Age Guru syndrome is when people love a quote, but suffer from ignorance of context about the system of thought the quote is based on, and feelings of shame about the quote not being relevant to real life, a particular conversation, or any other system of thought.
It's the sort of legacy that Watts himself would be ashamed of.
Submitted May 04, 2020 at 05:41PM by ewk https://ift.tt/2WpXIgP
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