Mike Gilleland quotes one of my early influences: Alan Watts, an Englishman who did much to bring Zen Buddhism to the West. Watts's books had a deep effect on my young mind. Read Gilleland's post here.
Years after ooh-ing and aah-ing at Watts's profound insights, I had the occasion to read Zen Effects by Monica Furlong, a sort of unofficial biography of Watts, which made the point that the man was actually kind of a shit person. He would drop acid while visiting Buddhist temples in Japan, and he was an inveterate womanizer. The quote at Gilleland's blog seems to reveal a level of candor I didn't realize Watts possessed, but maybe Watts was truly honest enough with himself to recognize just what a dog he actually was, even if he did dress his base appetites up in pretty language.
Self-honesty doesn't come easily for any of us because we are all prone to fooling ourselves. That's not necessarily a bad thing: being the hero of our own personal narrative is a necessary condition for getting through life, according to psychologist Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death). Suicide, according to this theory of personhood, happens when we cease to see ourselves as heroic within our own narrative. Of course, the danger is that we might see ourselves as heroes while actually being villains—something that far too many of us are guilty of doing. Hence the need for constant introspection.
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