Alan Watts and the Problem of Integration

“Alan Watts was perhaps the most philosophically sophisticated observer of the psychedelic experience in the 1950s and 1960s. He also drank himself to death. Stevens is careful about what this means.”

Alan Watts appears in Storming Heaven as a counterpoint and a caution. He was the most intellectually rigorous popularizer of the psychedelic experience in the early era, his 1962 book The Joyous Cosmology provided the philosophical framework that made psychedelic experience legible in terms of Eastern philosophy, process philosophy, and phenomenology. He understood, better than almost anyone, what the experiences were pointing toward.

He also drank heavily, struggled with his personal relationships throughout his life, and died in 1973 at 58 of heart failure, an outcome his biographers have associated with his alcoholism.

Stevens includes Watts because the juxtaposition is honest and important: intellectual understanding of what the psychedelic experience reveals is not the same as living that understanding. Watts articulated, with great precision, the insight that the self is not a separate entity but a pattern in a process, that the ego's isolation is a kind of cognitive error that the psychedelic experience corrects. He articulated it in books, in lectures, on the radio. In his personal life, the insight was evidently harder to maintain.

This is the integration problem that runs through the clinical literature of the era and through the current psychedelic renaissance: the experience can reveal something. What it reveals is not automatically incorporated into how a person lives. The work of integration, of taking the insight from the session into ordinary life and habit, is a separate project from having the insight.

Watts knew this. He wrote about it. He did not, by the available evidence, fully solve it. His presence in Storming Heaven is a reminder that the philosophical understanding of the psychedelic experience and the practical incorporation of that understanding are different achievements, requiring different kinds of work.

Sources

• Stevens, Storming Heaven (1987)
• Watts, Alan. The Joyous Cosmology (1962)
• Wikipedia, Alan Watts