Doing Cancer with Buddha

 

Photo by Ravi Palwe on Unsplash

 The study of philosophy has been an interest since discovering Alan Watts* in the early 1970s, when I stumbled upon The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. In the half-century since then I have read or read about all the most famous thinkers, but it was Alan Watts who had the greatest influence on my thinking. Not Nietzsche, not Hegel, not Hume: Watts.

I’ve often wondered why he is not listed in philosophy tomes as one of their own. I understands that he was something of a populist, and his thinking centered on religion—especially Asian religions—but other philosophers have centered their thoughts on religion. Ah, but there it is: We focus on western philosophers and the principle western religion, Christianity. Those who write about the eastern religions are shut out of the west.

Mr. Watts’ 1966 classic has something to teach us in the western world about death. As any adult cancer patient knows, death is always around the next corner, the next day, the next month. Death stalks the cancer patient like a specter from the future.

After the cancer diagnosis I picked up The Watts book again and experienced the flashes of insight again that changed my life in 1973, but this time with a death sentence interpreting the words. I saw death as a black wall. I saw the death of my ego, my sense of self, and an uncaring universe that would continue without me. But I also saw, in Reading The Book, a universe that lives through the senses of those who live, have lived, and will live. I saw every new life as a realization of a universe that can know itself only through its people, its animals, its rocks, and oceans. It is a universe in which every new life is us, a blank slate through which the universe us as we experience the universe.

 

[*] Yes, I know. I’ve heard it before: Alan Watts is not a Real philosopher. He merely reports on what other philosophers.have said? I’m not so sure. Much of his interpretations of Asian religions and philosophies looks original to me.