a talk on the purposelessness of nature and human life, using a zen death poem, birdsong, and the parable of an ashtray to argue for trusting oneself rather than seeking meaning or

alan watts discusses wu wei, the taoist principle of not forcing action, and the related concept of li, or organic pattern, drawing on chinese poetry and the japanese aesthetic of

a wfmu lecture in which alan watts questions the sense of self as an isolated ego trapped in a bag of skin, tracing it to two western myths of the universe as artifact and as mecha