The Way Of Zen Alan W Watts by Alan W Watts 9781473590878, 1473590876 instant download after payment.

During the past twenty years there has been an extraordinary growth of
interest in Zen Buddhism. Since the Second World War this interest has
increased so much that it seems to be becoming a considerable force in the
intellectual and artistic world of the West. It is connected, no doubt, with
the prevalent enthusiasm for Japanese culture which is one of the
constructive results of the late war, but which may amount to no more than
a passing fashion. The deeper reason for this interest is that the viewpoint of
Zen lies so close to the “growing edge” of Western thought.The more alarming and destructive aspects of Western civilization should
not blind us to the fact that at this very time it is also in one of its most
creative periods. Ideas and insights of the greatest fascination are appearing
in some of the newer fields of Western science–in psychology and
psychotherapy, in logic and the philosophy of science, in semantics and
communications theory. Some of these developments might be due to
suggestive influences from Asian philosophy, but on the whole I am inclined
to feel that there is more of a parallelism than a direct influence. We are,
however, becoming aware of the parallelism, and it promises an exchange of
views which should be extremely stimulating.Western thought has changed so rapidly in this century that we are in a
state of considerable confusion. Not only are there serious difficulties of
communication between the intellectual and the general public, but the
course of our thinking and of our very history has seriously undermined the
common-sense assumptions which lie at the roots of our social conventions
and institutions. Familiar concepts of space, time, and motion, of nature and
natural law, of history and social change, and of human personality itself
have dissolved, and we find ourselves adrift without landmarks in a universe
which more and more resembles the Buddhist principle of the “Great Void.”
…