Dick doth schriebble:
>
> Try reading the book about him [Watts] written by a
> member of his own family, the book is called – The Genuine Fraud.
> So once again assumption is on the rampage here as I have already
> pointed out. Do some reading friend. Watt’s NEVER KNEW the things
> he was preaching about – and he died trying to find them by way of
> drugs. Moreover, what Watts led people to believe that he knew was
> not even a fraction of what exists to be known and experienced.
> Ipso Facto.
And why would we be interested in a hack-job cobbled together by some
disgruntled nitwit family member capitalizing on the notoriety of Watts
in order to grab a few seconds of the limelight they couldn’t possibly
achieve except by whinging about him? Typical low-class bigot roundhead
gambit, spreading gossip about their betters in a feeble attempt to make
themselves seem more substantial than the straw dogs they’re waving
around.
But, as it happens, there is no book called _The Genuine Fraud_ penned
by some disgruntled nitwit family relation of Alan Watts.
It’s just more of Dick’s crack-brain illiterate ad hominem having a
spot of fun with a biography written by one of Alan’s dearest friends
and supporters, Monica Furlong:
Genuine fake : a biography of Alan Watts
London : Unwin Paperbacks, 1986.
by Monica Furlong
http://makeashorterlink.com/?G62525786
Also available as:
Zen Effects : The Life of Alan Watts
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
by Monica Furlong
http://www.skylightpaths.com/books/322.htm
Here’s the blurb from the biography:
“Through his widely popular books and lectures, Alan Watts (1915-1973)
did more to introduce Eastern philosophy and religion to Western minds
than any figure before or since. Watts touched the lives of many. He was
a renegade Zen teacher, an Anglican priest, a lecturer, an academic, an
entertainer, a leader of the San Francisco renaissance, and the author
of more than thirty books, including The Way of Zen, Psychotherapy East
and West and The Spirit of Zen.
Monica Furlong followed Watts’s travels from his birthplace in England
to the San Francisco Bay Area where he ultimately settled, conducting
in-depth interviews with his family, colleagues, and intimate friends,
to provide an analysis of the intellectual, cultural, and deeply
personal influences behind this truly extraordinary life.”
Monica Furlong is an author and journalist living in London. She is the
author of many books, including Merton: A Biography; Therese of Lisieux;
Visions and Longings: Medieval Women Mystics; and Women Pray: Voices
through the Ages, from Many Faiths, Cultures, and Traditions
——====oo0oo====——
Dick often admonishes others to read [hypocritical twit that he is],
but it is clear that Dick has never read Furlong’s _Genuine Fake_.
If he had, he would know that it was Alan himself who originally
coined the phrase “Genuine Fake”, in reference to folks who believe they
are ‘spiritually enlightened’ in some sense, and then for self-serving
purposes deem themselves guides or teachers. Such individuals are very
sincere about what they do, but they are, in effect, delusional, and
they spend their lives going about enlisting other people in that
delusion.
Folks like you, Dick.
——====oo0oo====——
“In classical drama the persona was the megaphone-mouth mask worn for
the open-air theater. And by a curious degradation of words, the word
“person” has come to mean the real individual and when Harry Emerson
Fosdick wrote “How to be a Real Person”, the real title of his book
should have been “How to be a Genuine Fake.”
from:
The Relevance of Oriental Philosophy,
a lecture by Alan Watts
http://members.aol.com/chasklu/religion/private/watts.htm
——====oo0oo====——
It is also clear that Dick has absolutely no compunction about
shamelessly misrepresenting Furlong’s work. All in a good cause,
eh, Dick?
In fact, Monica Furlong was herself an advocate of psychedelics,
as we can see by referring to her obituary in The Guardian:
——====oo0oo====——
Monica Furlong (d.2003 at 72),
Christian writer and feminist,
authored her autobiography:
“Bird of Paradise.”
born January 17 1930;
died January 14 2003
A dedicated writer, feminist and Christian, she threw her considerable
moral authority behind the campaign for women priests
Michael De-la-Noy
Friday January 17, 2003
The Guardian
Monica Furlong, who has died of cancer aged 72, would have achieved
distinction through her writings alone. But she was always on the
lookout for good causes to espouse, and once she had thrown in her lot
with the Movement for the Ordination of Women, and with the aims of
secular feminism in general, she became to many women – and to many men
as well, especially homosexuals – not just a beacon of light, more a
flaming torch.
Like many intellectuals, her life was, in some ways, a protracted
search for truth, accompanied by frequent disillusionment, most notably
with the organized structures of society. In her book With Love To The
Church (1965), she wrote, more in sorrow than in anger, of her
disillusion with the apparent inability of the established Church to
touch the hearts and minds of men and women of goodwill.
Very much a child of her time, she experimented with LSD in her late
30s, and had the distinction of seeing her book Travelling In (1971),
describing the experience, banned from Church of Scotland bookshops.
Aware in later life of the dangers of drugs, she nevertheless always
regarded the drug-taking, together with a Freudian psychoanalysis in her
early 50s, as a vital part of her psychological and spiritual growth.
Obituary
Monica Furlong: 1930-2003
An appreciation
http://www.stammering.org/mfurlong.html
——====oo0oo====——
No one is going to formulate anything like an educated opinion
about Watts by way of mere hearsay, regardless.
I at least knew the man as a friend, face-to-face, *and* I have
read his work, and doubt that you can say the same.
Be that as it may, you said that “the hippie movement was originally
founded by such *frauds*”, which is a plural construction, and it will
be rather amusing to see you attempt to dispatch Huxley & Heard & Wilson
using the same chop-logic ( ‘ipso facto’? ) and ad hominem slurs you
employed on Alan. If you dare.
You’ve made your bed, Dick, and you ought at least to show enough
courage and integrity to lie in it. But I doubt very much that you will,
because, hypocritical cowardly yobbo swine that you are, you *have* no
courage or integrity.
Cors in Manu Domine,
~ Khem Caigan
<
Khem@…>
http://profiles.yahoo.com/khemcaigan
——====oo0oo====——
How to be a genuine fake
A double-bind game is a game with self-contradictory rules, a game
doomed to perpetual self-frustration – like trying to invent a
perpetual-motion machine in terms of Newtonian mechanics, or trying to
trisect any given angle with a straight-edge and compass. The social
double-bind game can be phrased in several ways:
The first rule of this game is that it is not a game.
Everybody must play.
You must love us.
You must go on living.
Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role.
Control yourself and be natural.
Try to be sincere.
Essentially, this game is a demand for spontaneous behaviour of certain
kinds.
Living, loving, being natural or sincere – all these are spontaneous
forms of behaviour: they happen “of themselves” like digesting food or
growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural,
contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores – weak and
scent-less like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and
love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.
Faith – in life, in other people, and in oneself – is the attitude of
allowing the spontaneous to BE spontaneous, in its own way and in its
own time. This is, of course, risky because life and other people do not
always respond to faith as we might wish. Faith is always a gamble
because life itself is a gambling game with what must appear, in the
hiding aspect of the game, to be colossal stakes. But to take the gamble
out of the game, to try to make winning a dead certainty, is to achieve
a certainty which is indeed dead.
The alternative to a community based on mutual trust is a totalitarian
police-state, a community in which spontaneity is virtually forbidden.
from
The Book: On the taboo against knowing who you are,
by Alan Watts.
The Life and Work of Alan Watts
http://www.saybrook.edu/app/lg/cr3075.html
The Joyous Cosmology
http://www.lycaeum.org/books/transcribed.shtml
The Egodeath theory 