I’m betting most posters here have heard of Alan Watts, the man many people credit with almost single-handedly introducing mainstream Americans to Buddhism (particularly Zen Buddhism) in the 1950s and helped spawn and grow in the US, during the 1960s and ‘70s, what became loosely termed western Buddhism.
This injection of Buddhism with its core Eastern beliefs and values led to a complete rethink of religious values in the West, leading to their easternisation, and to movements such as New Age spirituality and to the notion of an immanent universal god-like force that guides 'the enlightened' towards their maximal positive outcomes.
What many may not know is, that while Watts was gifted with prodigious talent and charisma as a communicator, according to his children and those who knew him, he never practised Buddhism.
But what will really shock those who don’t know his personal backstory, Watts was a raving alcoholic who was often drunk, up to staggering, when he gave lectures. However, it takes a keen ear to discern his drunkenness through his lectures.
The man could hold his piss – at least on stage.
His eldest children, Mark, Joan and Anne have revealed in interviews that Alan and his wife, Dorothy, their mother, were both chronic alcoholics who regularly drank themselves into blind states to the point that Watts’ parents intervened and took his daughters to live in England with them to protect them from their parents’ booze-fuelled psychodramas.
Watts later became obsessed with LSD and used it regularly.
When people asked him why he continued to drink to excess, given the toll it had taken on him and his family, he replied, ‘I like myself better when I’m drinking’.
He died in 1973 at 58, most probably, according to his son, Mark, from assisted suicide after he had been diagnosed with cancer,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmscwrJ17Eo
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