Alan Watts Profile

Alan Watts Profile

Mar 28, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Profiles, Spiritual Teachers

I began reading the work of Alan Watts when I was in high school; his books had a profound impact on me, and the late philosopher came up in a number of conversations that I’ve had with Carolyn over the years.

Born on January 6, 1915 (the same day and year that John Lilly was born) in Chislehurst, England, Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, who helped to bring Eastern philosophical thought to the West. Watts was a master at interpreting Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy, and also at being able to clearly and simply explain it to a Western audience. His prolific writings and eloquent talks have a signature clarity, insight, and logic to them, which helps to make the sometimes seemingly paradoxical concepts of Eastern philosophy more accessible to the Western mind.

As a child, Watts experienced a “mystical dream” while he was ill with a fever, and his mother introduced him to artwork from the Far East; these influences were to affect the development of his life. He began writing original works at the age of 14, and as a teenager, Watts met D. T. Suzuki, the esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism, which was also an important influence. When Watts was 15 he declared himself a Buddhist, joined the Buddhist Lodge, and became an active member.

In 1936 Watts attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, where he studied the fundamental concepts of Indian and East Asian philosophy. During the 1930s he became particularly interested in Zen Buddhism, which he saw as a synthesis of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. In 1936 Watts published his first book, The Spirit of Zen, which he wrote when he was 19. Watts was working as a freelance writer by the time the book was published, and he moved to the United States in 1938 for Zen training in New York.

Watts never finished his Zen training— because “the method of his teacher didn’t suit him”— and left before being ordained as a Zen monk. He then entered Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, an Episcopal school in Evanston, Illinois, where he studied Christian scriptures, theology, and church history, attempting to blend Christian and Asian philosophy. His master’s thesis was published as a book, Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion, and he was an Episcopal priest in Chicago for six years.

In 1951 Watts moved to San Francisco, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies, and taught there until 1957. During this period, Watts also began broadcasting a weekly radio program at Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley, where he attracted a following of regular listeners. Throughout his life, the station continued to broadcast many of his recorded lectures, talks, and seminars, and they continue to broadcast them to this day.

In 1957 Watts published The Way of Zen, which became one of his most popular books. The book was unique in that it combined Eastern philosophical thought with Western ideas from general semantics and cybernetics. Watts suggested analogies from cybernetic principles that could be applicable to the Zen tradition. The book sold well and Watts began lecturing more widely.

In 1958 Watts toured parts of Europe with his father and met with the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. During the 1960s Watts became good friends with Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, and he spent time at the legendary Millbrook estate in New York during its heyday, from 1963 to 1968. Watts had profound mystical experiences during this time, which are recorded in his book The Joyous Cosmology.

Watts died in 1973 in Mill Valley, California. Although I never got to meet him, Carolyn and I heard a lot of great stories about Alan from our beloved friends Nina Graboi and Oz Janiger; Oz was Alan’s physician and Nina had a close relationship with him.

Watts’ audio library consists of nearly 400 talks, and he wrote more than 25 popular books, including This is It, Cloud Hidden Whereabouts Unknown, Does it Matter?, and The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. An important theme that runs through his work is that humanity’s feeling of isolation and alienation is an illusion because all of creation is an interconnected whole. In his autobiography, In My Own Way, Watts said that the essential message of his life was to “integrate the spiritual with the material,” and he described himself as a “rascal.”

Some of the quotes that Alan Watts is remembered for include:

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

The menu is not the meal.

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.

by David Jay Brown

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Rumi Profile

Rumi Profile

Mar 28, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Profiles, Spiritual Teachers

I began reading Rumi’s mystical poetry in the late 1990s when I first encountered a translation of his work by Coleman Barks, and he is someone that both Carolyn and I have been deeply inspired.

Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī was a 13th Century Sufi mystic and Persian poet, who lived from 1207 to 1273. His poems have been widely translated into many languages, and he is one of the most popular and bestselling poets in the U.S.

Rumi was born to Persian-speaking parents, originally from the Balkh, which is now in Afghanistan. Rumi’s birthplace isn’t known for certain; scholars think that he was either born in Wakhsh, a village on the Vakhsh River in present-day Tajikistan or in the city of Balkh, which is in present-day Afghanistan. Rumi’s father was an eccentric Muslim teacher— a theologian, jurist, and mystic— who had a great influence on his son’s development.

When he was five years old, a young Rumi reportedly saw angels. Scholars have to tease apart legend from historical fact about Rumi’s past, but it is known that at the age of twenty-five, Rumi inherited the position of an Islamic teacher, when his father, the previous holder of the position, died.

For nine years, Rumi practiced Sufism as a disciple of Burhan ud-Din, and he became an Islamic Jurist, issuing legal rulings and giving sermons in the mosques of Konya. (Sufism is a branch of Islam that sees the religious practice as a means to oneness with God, and Sufis have traditionally infused their devotion with poetry and music.)

Rumi was known for his personal charm, as well as his great religious knowledge, and he brought musical instruments into prayer and practiced a whirling dance, that he believed helped the human soul to connect with the divine.

In 1244 Rumi met a member of the Sufi religious order named Shams-e Tabrizi (who had taken vows of poverty and austerity) that completely changed his life, and he became an ascetic.

Then, one fateful night in 1248, as Rumi and Shams were talking, Shams answered a mysterious knock at the back door. Shams went out the door and was never seen again. It was thought that he was murdered, and Rumi’s love for, and his bereavement over the death of Shams was expressed in a creative outpouring of lyric poems, known as the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, and this is when Rumi began to seriously write poetry.

Rumi went on to write over 3,000 lyrical, rhymed poems called “ghazals,” and over 2,000 four-line rhyming poems called “robaiyat,” which often deal with themes of love and mystical union with God. Although his works were written mostly in Persian, he sometimes also wrote in Greek, Turkish, and Arabic.

In December 1273, Rumi fell ill, predicted his own death, and composed one final poem. He gave his followers special instructions to treat the night of his death like they would “a joyous wedding night,” and he planned his own funeral, with singers, musicians, and dancers. Rumi’s body was entombed beside that of his father, and a shrine was erected over his place of burial.

Rumi’s epitaph reads:

“When we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth, but find it in the hearts of men.”

Rumi’s work lives on and many people know his quotes from memes commonly passed around Facebook and Instagram, as his spiritual wisdom transcends culture, religion, and time. Some of the quotes that Rumi is remembered for include:

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.

Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.

This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.

As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.

What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle.

There’s a field somewhere beyond all doubt and wrongdoing. I’ll meet you there.

by David Jay Brown

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Carl Jung Profile

Carl Jung Profile

Mar 21, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Profiles, Psychologists

I began reading Carl Jung’s writings when I was in high school, and when I first met Carolyn, Jung’s work came up in our discussions a lot.

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who helped to revolutionize the field of psychology. Born in 1875, Jung has been described as a solitary and introverted child, with early aspirations to become a preacher or minister. However, after studying philosophy as a teenager, Jung decided against those religious aspirations and decided to pursue a career in psychiatry at the University of Basel instead.

In 1900 Jung moved to Zürich and began working at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, where he developed a relationship with the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Jung and Freud became close friends and built a strong professional association; for six years they cooperated in their work. However, in 1912 a split between these two intellectual titans developed when Jung published a manuscript titled Psychology of the Unconscious. This historic book created a theoretical divergence between the two men; after this their personal and professional relationship was damaged, and over the years they became increasingly bitter toward one another.

In a nutshell, Jung believed that there was more to the unconscious mind than Freud. According to both Freud and Jung, the unconscious mind is the mental reservoir of emotions, memories, and brain processes that are outside of our conscious awareness; yet influence our thoughts, desires, dreams, and actions. One basic difference between Freud’s and Jung’s theories of the unconscious mind was that Freud believed that it is purely the result of our personal development, while Jung believed that there was also a transpersonal dimension to it, what he called “the collective unconscious,” that was shared by all of humanity.

Jung saw evidence for the collective unconscious among the common elements found around the world in dreams, visions, myths, fairy tales, art, and other forms of cultural expression— what he called “archetypes.” Archetypes are those images, figures, character types, settings, and story patterns that, according to Jung, are universally shared by people across cultures.

In mainstream psychology, Jung is known for introducing many commonly used concepts to the field, and that have also been adopted by the culture at large — such as his models of psychological types, and his notions of the anima and animus, the Self, the shadow, and introversion and extroversion. Another idea that Jung developed that Carolyn and I have both found useful is the notion of “synchronicity.”  Synchronicity is the coincidental occurrence of events that seem meaningfully related but cannot be explained by conventional mechanisms of causality. Synchronicities are those magic moments of strange association that just seem too personally meaningful to be mere coincidence — implying that we have some deep, psychic interconnection with the universe that can’t be easily explained through mechanistic science.

In addition to his work in psychology, and his prolific writing, Jung was also an artist, a builder, and a skillful craftsman. He built a small castle with 4 towers on the shore of Lake Zürich, known as the Bollingen Tower. Jung was known to have mystical, visionary, and psychic experiences. His psychological experiments between 1915 and 1930, where he engaged his mind with what he called the “mythopoetic imagination,” resulted in a series of “visions” or “fantasies” that were recorded as art and text in an illuminated calligraphic volume that became known as The Red Book. Hidden for years in a Swiss bank vault, this legendary manuscript was published posthumously in 2009. I’ve spent many an hour spellbound by this remarkable book; it’s a beautiful artwork and powerful spiritual insights.

Jung died in 1961. The last book that he wrote, Man and his Symbols, was published 3 years after he died. Princeton University Press published a 20-volume set titled The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, which contains Jung’s dissertation, essays, lectures, and letters from 1902 until his death. A number of his books weren’t published until after he died, and some of Jung’s manuscripts remain unpublished to this day.

Jung’s influence can be seen throughout Carolyn’s work. For example, an entry in Carolyn’s Alchemy of Possibility oracle is titled “Synchronicity,” and Carolyn’s painting Reflecting on my Shadow expresses Jung’s concept of the shadow — that dark side of the unconscious mind, the self’s emotional blind spot, which is composed of repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts, and shortcomings.

Some quotes that Carl Jung is remembered for include:

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.

A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood it becomes a living experience.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

by David Jay Brown

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Herman Hesse Profile

Herman Hesse Profile

Mar 20, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Profiles, Writers

I was systematically reading through Hermann Hesse’s novels when I first met Carolyn in 1983, and we have both really enjoyed his inspiring books and other creative output.

Hesse was a brilliant German-Swiss novelist, poet, and painter who lived between 1877 and 1962. Some of his most well-known books include Siddhartha, Demian, Steppenwolf, and Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game, which are my favorites as well. Each book explores a similar theme, of an individual’s efforts to break free from the established modes of civilization, and begin a quest for self-knowledge and spiritual understanding.

Hesse was born in Calw, Germany and he later became a citizen of Switzerland. Hesse began working in a bookstore in Tübingen as a teenager, and at the end of his twelve-hour shifts, he worked on his own writing. His first publication came in 1896, with his poem Madonna in a Viennese magazine, and later that year this was followed by the publication of a small volume of his poetry titled Romantic Songs. Hesse’s first poetry collection wasn’t met with much success— it only sold 54 copies in two years— and Hesse’s mother didn’t like the poems, calling them “vaguely sinful,” which was upsetting to Hesse.
In 1899 Hesse began working at another bookstore in Basel, and spent much time alone, engaged in self-exploration. Due to an eye condition, in 1900 he was exempted from compulsory military service, and he suffered from nerve disorders and persistent headaches throughout his life.

In the early years of the last century, Hesse published more poems and some short prose in journals. In 1904 Hesse’s novel Peter Camenzind was published, and this was a breakthrough novel for him, as from this point on, Hesse could now earn a living as a writer. The novel became popular throughout Germany, and the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud praised Peter Camenzind as one of his favorite novels.

Hesse’s parents had a profound influence on his spirituality, and he said of his parents that, “their Christianity, one not preached but lived, was the strongest of the powers that shaped and molded me.” Self-exploration and spiritual development became important themes in many of Hesse’s writings. There was a ‘quest for enlightenment or self-realization’ theme in his books Siddhartha, Journey to the East, and Narcissus and Goldmund, and he often drew from Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Eastern philosophies in his novels. Hesse saw value in the varied forms of spiritual expression, and said, “For different people, there are different ways to God.”

Hesse is the author of 29 books. He also began painting when he was in his early 40s, and he created a legacy of around 3000 beautiful watercolors. The book Trees: An Anthology of Writings and Paintings collects Hesse’s poems and essays on the subject of trees and is accompanied by 31 of his watercolor illustrations, and the book Hesse as Painter collects 20 of his watercolors.

In 1946 Hesse received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his book Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game. However, despite Hesse’s status as a Nobel laureate, when Hesse died in 1962, his work wasn’t very well known in the United States. In fact, in the obituary that The New York Times published after Hesse’s death, said that his work was largely “inaccessible” to American readers.

This all changed in the mid-1960s when Hesse’s books suddenly became bestsellers in the U.S., and within the span of a few years, he became the most widely read and translated European author of the 20th century. The revival in popularity of Hesse’s works has been credited to their association with some of the popular themes of the 1960s counterculture, and according to Bernhard Zeller’s autobiography on Hesse, “in large part, the Hesse boom in the United States can be traced back to enthusiastic writings by two influential counterculture figures: Colin Wilson and Timothy Leary.”

Hesse’s work has had a considerable cultural influence. The band Steppenwolf took its name from Hesse’s novel with that title, and there is also a theater in Chicago called The Steppenwolf Theater. Throughout Germany, many schools are named after Hesse. Hesse’s novel Siddhartha required reading in my high school English class, which is how I first discovered his work.

Some quotes that Hermann Hesse is remembered for include:

“I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.”

Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else … Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.

I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
“Some of us think holding on makes us strong but sometimes it is letting go

Carolyn and I have both seem evidence of Hesse’s influence in one another’s writings. On the back cover of my first book, Brainchild, Carolyn wrote. “Brown is the Hesse of our time.”  Similarly, in the introduction to Carolyn’s book The Alchemy of Possibility, I wrote, “Following the tradition of William Blake and Hermann Hesse, The Alchemy of Possibility is a poetic blend of mysticism and imagination.”

by David Jay Brown

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John Lennon Profile

John Lennon Profile

Mar 20, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Musicians/Composers, Profiles

Carolyn and I both really enjoy John Lennon’s powerful and magical songs and have been inspired by his life.

Born in Liverpool, England in 1940, Lennon achieved international fame as a singer, songwriter, musician, visual artist, and peace activist. He is best known as the founder, co-songwriter, co-lead vocalist, and rhythm guitarist of The Beatles, which is regarded as the most influential rock band of all time, and Lennon’s songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in music history.

Lennon had a difficult childhood. His mom died when he was a teenager, he failed his pre-university examination in school, and he was known for his rebellious nature. However, he was accepted into the Liverpool College of Art after his aunt and headmaster intervened on his behalf. At the age of 15, Lennon formed a folk music band called The Quarrymen with several school friends. At The Quarrymen’s legendary second performance, Lennon met fellow musician Paul McCartney, who had also lost his mother as a boy, and asked him to join the band. The Quarrymen evolved into The Beatles in 1960, with George Harrison and Ringo Starr.

Lennon’s top-of-the-chart songs about peace and love were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement and the counterculture of the 1960s. In 1969, to many people’s dismay, Lennon quit the Beatles to embark on a solo career. That same year he started the Plastic Ono Band with his second wife, multimedia artist Yoko Ono, and they collaborated on many songs over the years. Lennon composed the song Come Together, as a campaign song when Timothy Leary announced that he was running for governor of California in 1969, and Lennon and Ono held nonviolent protests against the Vietnam War, called “the Bed-ins for Peace.”

Lennon was also an author and visual artist. In the mid-1960s, he wrote In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, two collections of creative writings and line drawings. A beautiful selection of his delightful drawings, which have a Zen-like quality in their simplicity and elegance, can be found in the book, John Lennon: The Collected Artwork.

Lennon’s songs tap into something deep within the human spirit and have broad appeal across generational and cultural boundaries. He recorded 12 albums with The Beatles, and eight albums afterward. As a performer, writer, and co-writer, Lennon had 25 number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and he received numerous awards, including the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year, for his best-selling album Double Fantasy.

Lennon died tragically in 1980 when he was shot outside his Manhattan home, but his music and spirit live on. In 1997 he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, as a member of the Beatles in 1988, and as a solo artist in 1994. A year after Lennon died, his song Imagine hit number one in the U.K., and his song Happy Xmas peaked at number two in the charts.

Some quotes that John Lennon is remembered for include:

Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.

Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

by David Jay Brown

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William Blake Profile

William Blake Profile

Mar 20, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Poets, Profiles

Carolyn and I both appreciate William Blake’s divinely inspired artwork and magnificent poetry.

Born in London in 1757, Blake was an English poet, painter, prophet, and printmaker known for his extraordinary visionary paintings, lithographs, drawings, and numerous volumes of beautiful mystical poems.

Blake attended school just long enough to learn how to read and write. He read widely on his own and was exposed to many bound books and prints by his parents. At the age of ten, his parents arranged for him to take drawing classes, and he went on to become a professional engraver. In 1779 he enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where he studied for six years.

From a young age, and throughout his life, Blake claimed to see visions of a spiritual nature. The visions were often associated with religious themes and imagery; he claimed to see angels too. As a Romantic artist and poet, Blake stressed the primacy of individual imagination and inspiration to the creative process. He believed that imaginative insight was the only way to remove the veil of rational thought that obscures the true nature of reality, claiming that “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Blake’s extraordinary paintings depict powerful biblical and literary scenes, glorious angels, and radiant illuminated beings, while his poems speak out against social injustices and express mystical visions. Blake illustrated his poems and created beautiful books, such as Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, by integrating writing and painting into a single creative process and using innovative production techniques that combined image and text in single compositions.

Blake’s spiritual visions and insights were central to his creativity, and in his work, he created a complex and unique mythology, with a pantheon populated by deities such as Orc, Urizen, and Enitharmion. Blake illustrated spectacular grand narratives of his own design that were played out in a universe that seemed to exist in a separate reality.

Blake didn’t have it easy. His contemporaries considered him insane, and his lack of commercial success meant he lived in relative poverty. But today he is appreciated as a seminal figure in the history of poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. Blake died in 1827, with his beloved wife by his side.

Some quotes that William Blake is remembered for include:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

by David Jay Brown

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