Sources / 1 quote, saved February 2015
The Zen Teachings Of Alan Watts: A Free Audio Archive Of His Enlightening Lectures | Open Culture
The movie her and alan watts
If you watched Spike Jonze’s new movie Her, you probably also spent a few subsequent hours listening to Alan Watts (1915–1973) interpreting Eastern thought. Late in that futuristic tale of the intersection between handheld computing, artificial intelligence, and pure romance, a philosophical “club” of self-aware operating systems band together to resurrect none other than the English Zen educator himself. Or rather, they put together a digital simulation of him, but one with a very convincing voice indeed. While the characters in Her could actually converse with their Watts 2.0, we’ll have to settle for listening to whatever words of wisdom on thought (or the freedom of it), meditation, consciousness, and the self (or the unreality of it) the original Watts, born 99 years ago this past Monday, left behind. Fortunately, having come to prominence at the same time as did both America’s interest in Zen and its alternative broadcast media, he left a great deal of them behind, recorded by such receptive outfits as Berkeley’s KPFA-FM and San Francisco public television station KQED.