Nobody in his Senses

SS Vallejo

I first read Alan Watts' The Way of Zen (1957) in the early 1980s. I was alerted to Alan Watts by my then future father-in-law who kept a picture of the SS Vallejo on the wall of his bedroom in Minnesota.

The Vallejo is a legendary ferry that was converted to a houseboat and moored in Sausalito. Alan Watts inhabited the Vallejo from 1961 to 1969. The epicenter of the 1960's counter-culture was centered around San Francisco, if not this venerable but dilapidated houseboat.

The Way of Zen became a seminal book that introduced a burgeoning youth culture to Eastern Philosophy, and specifically to Buddhism, throughout the decades of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

The teachings of Alan Watts, and of my father-in-law, continue to guide me.

The video of Awareness Meditation (below) is from a KQED TV program called The Silent Mind  (1960 © KQED).

‎If we live in entirely in a world of thought, all the things we pursue in life tend in a way to become arid and unsatisfactory because we are living in an abstract world. In other words, nobody in his senses is going to eat a menu instead of dinner.
~Alan Watts (23:40)