Alan Watts ~ Smiling at the Great Illusion

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Episode 210

Imagine a voice—calm, curious, playful—asking you whether you are the universe pretending to be a person.

In the chaotic swirl of 20th-century thought, where science clashed with religion and the East met the West in coffeehouses and lecture halls, one man emerged not with answers, but with questions that made the answers irrelevant. He wore tweed jackets, quoted Lao Tzu with a cigarette in hand, and turned philosophy into a performance. He spoke of Zen, Tao, the ego, and illusion—not as abstract concepts, but as tools to dismantle the walls of the self.

A priest who stopped believing in the pulpit. A philosopher who laughed at philosophy. A mystic who didn’t quite believe in mysticism. For some, he was a prophet. For others, a dropout with charm. But for millions of listeners then and now, his words cracked open a space in the mind.

This is the story of a man who didn’t claim to know the way—because he said there was no way to know.

This is a short history of... the man who made the West think again.

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