Alan Watts, interviewed by Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy (1966) - Part Two

Today I’m super excited to present to you another episode from the Archives From this trove of 1/2 inch reel to reel tapes that we recently found mouldering in a storage facility near the Monterey Airport - a 1966 dialogue between Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy and philosopher Alan Watts and today is PART TWO— notable for being one of the only instances I've encountered of Michael Murphy conducting an interview himself. But hey, when it’s Alan Watts, all bets are off. So, first, who is Alan Watts? He’s born in England, but moved to the United States in 1938 to pursue Zen training in New York. Then he attended a Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, got a master’s degree in theology. became an Episcopal priest in 1945, left the ministry in 1950 and then he moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies. It was during the 1950s that he met Dick Price and Michael Murphy - both of whom were kicking around the Bay Area after their stints at Stanford, trying to figure out what the heck they were doing with their lives. It’s widely known that Watts represents this pivotal figure in the transmission of Eastern philosophical traditions to Western intellectual discourse. By the time this conversation rolls around in 66, he had long since established himself as a rather famous interpreter of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Hindu metaphysics for American audiences. He’d had a rise to prominence in the 1950s which coincided with a broader cultural receptivity to Eastern philosophical frameworks. The Beats, early hippies, young people, intellectuals - they were all fascinated by Zen and the I Ching and Buddhism. At Esalen, where Alan Watts taught from the very first days in 1962 up until his death in 1973, he really found an ideal context for exploring the synthesis between Eastern contemplative traditions and this Western psychological inquiry which was coming to the forefront. And then the temporal context for this interview bears mentioning, too. This conversation occurs at a moment of considerable social upheaval: we’ve got an escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, and a pushback at home, we’ve got the emergence of several countercultural movements, including the civil rights movement and a rather new hippie/ pyschedelic culture. There’s a widespread questioning of established institutional authority. So it’s within this milieu that Watts and Murphy examine fundamental questions about human consciousness and the peculiarities of American cultural expression. And of course all delivered in that million dollar voice by Alan Watts. I mean, He could read a Denny’s menu and make it sound profound. To me, this is a treasure of a conversation - even though it’s historically situated, it addresses still-relevant questions about consciousness, about cultural development, and about humanity's place within larger systems. It also provides a lot of insight into the intellectual atmosphere that characterized Esalen's early years, when the boundaries between disciplines were very permeable and fundamental questions about human nature were approached with both rigor and imagination. Here's Alan Watts, interviewed by Michael Murphy, at Esalen Institute in 1966.