Alan Watts Audiobooks

He called himself a philosophical entertainer, and the joke has aged rather better than most academic job titles. Alan Wilson Watts (1915 to 1973) was born in Kent, ordained as an Episcopal priest in the United States, walked away from the church a few years later, and spent the rest of his life explaining Buddhist, Taoist and Hindu ideas to a West that had barely begun to ask.

He wrote more than twenty-five books, among them The Way of Zen, Psychotherapy East and West and Nature, Man and Woman, which he considered his finest. But his real medium was speech. From a volunteer slot at the KPFA radio station in Berkeley he built a following that has never really gone away, and the talks he gave in Californian lecture halls and on public radio outlasted him by decades before the internet found them all over again.

What makes him worth an evening now is the manner: unhurried, mischievous, allergic to solemnity, and quite happy to leave you holding a question rather than a doctrine.

The recordings gathered here are the real Watts, which is to say the spoken one. Out of Your Mind is the obvious starting point and much the most reviewed of them: fourteen hours drawn from his seminars, circling identity, the ego and the game the universe plays with itself, and never once sounding like a lecture.

From there, You’re It! carries the same material further into hiding, seeking and being found, again in his own voice. The Holographic Web is the short one, under half an hour, and makes a fine test drive if you want to hear the cadence before committing a whole evening to it.

Begin with Out of Your Mind, ideally somewhere your attention is allowed to wander, and let the rest follow. The recordings are set out below.