Out of Your Mind

"Alan Watts was ready for the Sixties, and the Sixties welcomed Alan Watts with open arms. He described himself as a spiritual entertainer but there was nothing frivolous about the Eastern perspective that he was sharing with Westerners. When he spoke of consciousness, he was talking about the subtle levels of awareness that most Westerners had never noticed. When he spoke about the Web, he meant the The Web of Life not the internet. When he talked about Emptiness, he told us that it was a good thing. All of it was earth-rattling for most Westerners at the time. Now his son, in tandem with Sounds True, has transformed a series of his recorded lectures (available on CD as Out of Your Mind) into a new book which sums up much of what took America by storm when Alan Watts took center stage over fifty years ago. In today's e-world, he would be called a disruptor. In the Sixties, he was a breath of fresh air, opening doors to the rest of the world which had for too long been shut and locked. Let your customers know that some of what they find in this book will be familiar. That is the best testimony to the power of his legacy. Many of the ideas they find in the book, however, will be new to them and extraordinarily relevant to today's thinking. Reading the book, I sometimes felt as if the words had just crystallized on the page, distilled by the current merging of science and spirituality. I had to keep reminding myself how long ago they were written. Mark Watts honors his father with this well-organized, clear, and insightful record of his father's teachings." --Retailing Insight, Anna Jedrziewski

"It's not too far off to say that my interest in all things 'East and West' got its start with Alan Watts. I discovered his books at a tender age, basically in my mid-teens, and proceeded to read everything he had ever written. In fact, as I began to write myself, I remembered reading that they used to teach writing by having students copy out--word for word--large sections of the works of great writers. And so I proceeded to copy out--literally--ten of Alan's books, all of them, word by word. When I'm told to this day that I'm a very clear writer on very difficult topics, I always give Watts credit for this. And while over the years I have come less to believe in all the little details of Alan's works, I still find something absolutely right on about his general--I suppose we could call it 'attitude.' There is just something so right-minded about his overall awareness that I still love reading and listening to anything by him. Out of Your Mind certainly qualifies, and is a fine indicator of why Watts was both my philosophical and literary mentor. This book makes fine company with his best, and I can highly recommend it as a fine starting place to the wonderful world of Alan Watts." --Ken Wilber, author of Integral Meditation