About Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker best known for interpreting and popularizing Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst UK, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career in the priesthood, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, and received a Master's degree in Theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest but in 1950 left the ministry and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.

Living on the West Coast, Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at Pacifica radio station KPFA in Berkeley. Watts wrote on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be best thought of as a form of psychotherapy, not just a religion. Like Aldous Huxley before him, he explored human consciousness in the essay, The New Alchemy (1958), and in the book, The Joyous Cosmology (1962).

About Henrysandy Jacobs

Curator - Alan Watts Seminars

This website is the result of a personal decades-long recording project of Henrysandy Jacobs, a longtime friend and co-conspirator of Alan Watts. Culled from a lifetime of introspection and study of Eastern Philosophy during the course of their friendship, Henry began recording all of the Alan Watts spoken word engagements you can hear today, including all of the material available at Alan Watts Seminars.

Jacobs is also a sound artist and improviser par excellence. His influential recordings as well as collaborative projects resonate with an irreverent sense of humor and a love for the musics of the world. From the early 1950s into the 1970s, Jacobs experimented with tape music and staged the early surround sound and visual spectacle 'Vortex'. In 1964, Jacobs co-produced a short documentary film on quitting smoking entitled "Breaking the Habit", which was nominated for an Oscar that same year. A direct attack on the tobacco industry, the film's success resulted in all tobacco advertising being removed from radio and television almost fifty years ago.

A contemporary of Ken Nordine and Lenny Bruce, Jacobs honed an individual style that was droll and laid-back but winked at you at the same time. On his recordings for record labels Folkways, World Pacific, Fantasy, Important Records and Locust Records, as well as his private label MEA, the world of Jacobs is an audio collage that embraces many cultures and sensibilities.

A word from Henrysandy Jacobs

Posted Monday, May 16, 2011

When I moved to the West Coast in the 1950's, I was already quite aware of the writings of Alan Watts. We both shared an admiration for Polish-American philosopher and scientist Alfred Korzybski and his theory on "meta-linguistics", popularized as General Semantics.

Many friends had raved to me about Watts' pen as well as his voice. I came face to face with Alan at Pacifica Radio Station KPFA , where both of us were doing radio shows. We became very close friends. Quite soon, we planned and began a twenty-year documentation project of recording state-of-the-art magnetic tapes of all Watts' speaking activities—seminars, lectures, even nonsense poems—for future audiences. Vital in the planning stage was a vision to make the recordings acceptable for professional broadcast. The legendary Nagra motion picture audio recorder became the instrument to document each and every session over a 10-year period from 1963-1973.

Alan introduced me to Sumire, daughter of Japanese artist Saburo Hasegawa, a visiting guest of Alan's. Sumire became the future mother of my three children. Then, many years later, my eldest daughter, Tia, became the wife of Alan's eldest son Mark, and now I have two Wattsian grandchildren.

Watts made magic when he spoke: he knew how to communicate and entertain at the same time. As the internet became a viable communication platform, it was obvious this was the logical avenue for Alan Watts to reach a larger and more international audience. Hopefully these archival broadcasts will continue to find their audience, extending the insights of this outstanding philosophical interpreter.

Listen to an interview with Sandy Jacobs by NPR

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