Alan Watts
S.S. Vallejo, P.O. Box 857,
Sausalito, California 94965
September 17th 1970
Dear Sam:
Thanks so much for sending me copies of your interesting letters—and it was good to meet you the other day at Elsa’s. You look so much better with long hair!
So I think some things should be clarified. I do not disagree at all with the things you say, and no one can doubt that you are extremely well-informed on most matters of Asian culture.
But why carry around such a huge chip on your shoulder? Understand that I am not moralizing; I am merely stating a personal prejudice. Truly, “you might be more the man you are with striving less to be so.”
However, you are doing great things for the young people who study with you, and I keep hearing reports of their enthusiasm. Especially, please, keep up the Sufi way; it is important. And, incidentally, have you read Rabbi Herbert Wiener’s book Nine-and-a-Half Mystics? I think you would love it.
Love, peace, and all good wishes,
Alan
September, 22, 1970
Mr. Alan Watts
S.S. Vallejo P. 0. Box 57
Sausalito, Calif. 94965
Dear A1an,
Murshid is very glad you accept what he says; he accepts everything that you do! Period.
He is off for the East Coast this weekend for an extended trip. Things are opening up for him at Cambridge, New York City, and Washington to name the principle places.
Our Dances and Praise of Allah are spreading with people like wild fire, all around the country. Baba Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) is doing them in New Hampshire; others are doing them in Arizona and New Mexico and New York. What is the world coming to?
You are welcome to come to the Dances and meetings—which will continue in Murshid’s absence. These are being held in Sausalito on Wednesday nights at 8.00 p.m. at the Art Center.
Love and Blessings,
Wali Ali
secretary to Samuel L. Lewis
410 Precita Ave.,
San Francisco, Calif.
September 25, 1970
Alan Watts,
Box 857, Sausalito, Calif. 94965
My dear Alan:
I had had no intention to reply to your letter of the 17th, so busy, but some of the of the activities touch what you are doing. In contradiction both to those who have preached about karma and those who do not believe in it, it seems to be very operative and I have strong reasons to believe the Sri Aurobindo movement will go exactly the way of the earlier Roerich endeavor. And this game of a priori rejecting little people sooner or later gets its come-uppance.
There is a great deal of difference between “resenting” opposition and forever sitting in calmness at a priori rejections. The greatest of all the a priori rejections came to my very close friend, the late Robert Clifton who died of a broken heart. He lived many years in Vietnam and the entire culture—all camps—refused to accept his in situ appearances and we are paying billions of dollars therefore.
But this is the usual and any endeavor on the part of any person to change this is an invitation to martyrdom. I have one friend who wrote twenty articles on what was happening in Laos, Cambodia, Ghana and Algeria, rejected by the American press, all camps; and published by every Asian paper to which they were submitted. But this is the usual. And the madness of presuming that 300 communists could surround and terrify a Cambodian army of 10,000-20,000 men is acceptable only—by the American press.
Well I am about the sixth on the list of the a priori rejecters, chiefly for Vietnamese report. I gave those up when I re-contacted my old associate, the now retired American General Edward Lansdale, and my papers were almost immediately accepted by the University of California, Department of Southeast Asian Studies.
I then turned my attention to the Near East. One Gunner Jarring said he thought I had the best program he had ever heard of. His associates agreed. The Americans, especially les religieuses, and humanists, and peace groups, dissented, mostly with the good democratic a priori rejections. But halleluiah, there is now a publisher who wants especially those things previously rejected—and I have oodles of them. So I put on pretense but laugh at the “Liberty, democracy, humanity and peasants, shut up!” groups which dominate the cultures. But not for long, not much longer,
Well I taught dancing to a thousand young Hippies, yesterday and some were guilty. Of course they are guiltily. We have excellent Lewis Carroll logic and even the semanticists agree with it.
I have completed my lectures on “The Three Body Constitution of Man According to St. Paul.” It will be accepted either by my publisher or by some leading divines whom I am not supposed to know. But since our daring venture to a real summit meeting at Geneva, we have been prospering in all directions, too many to relate and besides the approaches are so different and totally successful.
You must know that all “universal” societies are dominated entirely by Americans Englishmen and Hindus. Other people just don’t count. They are never on the boards of directors.
So I am by open prejudice behind everything you are doing because the other camps are firm in their rejections of factual evidences and in their rights to personality judgments.
I have just read “Understanding in a World of Words.” published by the I.S.G.S. I do not understand it. I thought I understood Korzybski and his teacher (and mine) the late Cassius Keyser, thought I understood A.K. But we were in hopeless minority.
I shall visit Columbia University again and soon, perhaps as guest. Everything is coming “right,” everything and I am deluged with appointments and opening of doors and apologies from so many “good” people, which is something.
My “Peace Scholarship” has started at the University of California, Department of West Asian Languages, or rather Near East Languages. They once offered me a PhD. Degree for a paper which was laughed at with scorn by each of the three men who followed you at the so-called “American School of Asian (?) Studies.” Well that is past. Everything is different, experience of A which B has not had.
Faithfully,
Sam