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-- Updated April 17th, 2013, 5:03 am to add the following --
Toadny wrote:
(Nested quote removed.)
And a serial sexual predator, taking advantage of his gullible followers and betraying his partners, leading to a divorce and sacking as a priest, don't let's forget that shall we?
Many of us have chemical addictions to childhood emotional states/conditions. Drugs, such as alcohol, is 'chemistry', as a reaction, in the body.
The alcohol influenced chemistry corrupts our ability to reason. Emotional chemistry influence's corrupts our ability to reason.
Another thing about a writer is that their words are what is important, at least to me. Everything else is just the personality. And with personality aspects being brought into any debate, which is an emotional tendency rather than necessarily a reasoned one, what inevitably develops are forms of personality politics. "Granth the Enlightened" is just an example of personality politics.
For me, Alan Watts' personality, once I was introduced to it via youtube where it was displayed either with just his voice or film, I found to be an irritation. I found his personality made him come across as a bit of a show pony. However, this never put me off his books which will ever remain favourites of mine. I just do not bother to look up any of his lectures online. His fine works are well accounted for in literature.
It wouldn't surprise me if Alan Watts allowed his alcohol addiction to influence his reasoning capability in social life and situations, or, in fact, allow his personality and the influence of it on others, to influence HIS reasoning capacity in social life and situations. All he would have influenced however, in the latter scenario, in the superficial sense (as personalities are inherently superficial aspects of ourselves), is the SUPERFICIAL PERSONALITY of others and, possibly also, their superficial sexual demands.
One's sex is often used by either gender to glean some sense of power from or over another whom one may assume to be more powerful than themselves (eg, Monica Lewinski and Bill Clinton). Sexual politics and personality politics are really one and the same. They are just parts of social politics in this animal kingdom we sometimes confuse as humanity ('humanity' being an ideal or potential rather than a global actuality, on a universal scale. Individually, however, we can achieve at eventually becoming Human).
Personality does not interest me unless it is a social occasion designed around games with rules. Personalities are inherently superficial. People who only behave as their personality become a bore to me.
Personalities are like stars of their own parade. People who attempt to use their personalities, rather than any actual talent, BECOME MERELY stars of their own parade.
Alan Watts' scholarly TALENT is unsurpassed as an English interpreter of Eastern philosophies.
Toadny wrote:
(Nested quote removed.)
And a serial sexual predator, taking advantage of his gullible followers and betraying his partners, leading to a divorce and sacking as a priest, don't let's forget that shall we?
So his presumed sexual weaknesses and his alcoholism ARE forgotten by me (as I read his books, which is the only 'Watts' I am interested in) and quite deliberately and consciously so.
If reality was determined by a popularity vote we would not have any pioneers.
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