Our observer's trouble was that he was watching it through a narrow slit, and couldn't see the whole cat at once.“ The cat wasn't born as a head which, sometime later, caused a tail it was born all of a piece, a head-tailed cat. This absurd and confusing gobbledygook comes from his failure to see that head and tail go together: they are all one cat.
Thereupon he reasons that the event head is the invariable and necessary cause of the event tail, which is the head's effect. Yet again, the cat turns round, and he witnesses the same regular sequence: first the head, and later the tail. This sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he sees the head, and a little later the tail. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. Here is someone who has never seen a cat. Take away the crest of the wave, and there is no trough. The point is that they are different but inseparable, like the front end and the rear end of a cat. But the mistake in the beginning was to think of solids and space as two different things, instead of as two aspects of the same thing. Then it appeared that space was no mere nothing, because solids couldn't do without it. We supposed that solids were one thing and space quite another, or just nothing whatever. „The problem comes up because we ask the question in the wrong way. According to the critic Erik Davis, his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity." Wikipedia
Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. He considered Nature, Man and Woman to be, "from a literary point of view-the best book I have ever written." He also explored human consciousness and psychedelics in the essay "The New Alchemy" and in the book The Joyous Cosmology.
In Psychotherapy East and West, Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion.
Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen, one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Alan Wilson Watts was a British writer who interpreted and popularised Eastern philosophy and religion for a Western audience.