In My Own Way: An Autobiography

Brief Summary

In My Own Way: An Autobiography by (Watts, 2007) is an unusual autobiography, written in a roundabout style but loaded with practical advice.

Key Takeaways

• Build your own library and find a mentor: The most beneficial form of education is one with no form, that is, formal schooling as we know it comes with massive downsides. For instance, Charles Johnson and Francis Croshaw were Alan’s best teachers out in the real world. There were school teachers who dis-served Alan by forcing memorization rather than teaching the fundamentals.
• Have a look at these books: Suzuki (2021) and Suzuki & Barrett (1996)

Miscellaneous Notes

• p.4: I’m not quite sure whether this is simply a function of growing older or growing wiser – so many writings in the fields of philosophy, psychology, etc. now seem to me to be meaningless.
• p.5 : I set myself the impossible task as the poet: to say what cannot be said.
• p.5: Poets value the sounds of words above their meanings and images above arguments.
• pp. 65-66: Charles Johnson, an architect and designer who was reputed to be vaguely insane, introduced Alan to a proper way of drinking tea (no milk, weak, with a slice of lemon). Charles could give him more education in five minutes than his brothers in five years. Charles wasn’t trying to teach, he was simply following his own weird and allowing Alan to watch. (Alan was, in a way, apprenticing as Charles worked).
• p. 70: The second teacher: Francis Croshaw opened his library to Alan. They spent a lot of time drinking and discussing in a free-and-easy atmosphere. This was worth more than any amount of formal education. (Books Alan read were about the Orient in general and Buddhism in particular).
• p. 80: Paul Goodman is George Bernard Shaw’s American parallel. See Goodman & Blake (2012). also see Hall (2005).
• p.104 Acute differences positively manifest unity and that you cannot conceive the one without the other. (the mutual interdependence of all things and events).
• p.125: The present is just a constant flow and there’s simply no way of getting out of it. (That is good for your mind (and soul) so long as you don’t clutter your present with your memories and thoughts about the future). Alan said “with that remark my whole sense of weight vanished, you could have knocked me down with a feather”.
• p.127: At weddings, people were bumptious and puffed up but at funerals they were human and rea. And the ceremonies were decent and in order, provided that one could make the morticians stay out of the act.
• p.134 (footnote): Buddhism is a school from China, in the 6th to 8th century, passed on to Japan in the 12th century. Practice of Buddhism is to free the mind from habitual confusion of words, ideas and concepts with reality; and from all emotional disturbances and entanglements. • Ego • Time • The body • Life • Death are all concepts having neither more nor less reality than abstract numbers and measures. The Zen School holds that this freedom has to be found by an intuitive leap rather than a gradual and cumulative process of learning. Although this leap may not be possible until one has tried through long periods of meditation to let the mind settle into clam clarity, silencing the perpetual chatter in the skull.
• p.136: The I Ching (pronounced Ee Jing or Yi Jing) or Book of Changes is a commentary on 64 hexagrams, each composed of six lines, positive or negative in value, and therefore consisting of any two of eight possible trigrams. The I Ching presupposes a philosophy of nature based on polar vision of the universe; an electrical system in which a single energy manifests itself through two mutually arising poles, the yang (+) and the yin (-). The eight trigrams represent the basic life principles of • heaven ☰ and earth ☷, • fire ☲ and water ☵, • mountain ☶ and lake ☱, • thunder ☳ and wind ☴. As in throwing dice, various methods are used to select a hexagram at random - in answer to a specific question or to determine the general character of the total pattern of events as centred in the here and now - on the assumption that the random casting will of necessity be in accord with it.
• p.134: I decided to change my approach and study with Sokei-an without his knowing it. I wanted to observe a Zen master in his personal everyday life.
• p.137: By studying Latin translation of the I Ching, Leibniz invented the binary system whereby all numbers can be represented by combination of 0 and 1, which is the system used by digital computers.
• p.139: What is the function of yoga, of Zen meditation, of Christian contemplative prayers and of psychotherapy? All these disciplines seem to be systematic ways of self-realization.
• p.140: Sokei-an made no bones about it and once said that if he had any ideal at all it was just to be a complete human being.
• Make no bones about something: not to try to hide your feelings: (He made no bones about his dissatisfaction with the service.)
• p. 305: Social organizations are not organic. As they become more complex and computerized, they become less organic, because their code of communication, however fast and complex, rests on a basic confusion of symbol with reality, of words and numbers with natural events. When a natural process is represented in words, it appears that there are separable things and events which may be dealt with individually, one by one. There are not. In nature each event implies, or “goeswith” all other events in varying degrees of relevance, and we have only the sketchiest notions of how those degrees may be measured - for how often do the most momentous events arise from the most trivial? A chance meeting precipitates a marriage, and an accident in a lab touches off a major scientific discovery.

References