Chapter Twenty Two -The Last Days of Alan Watts

Chapter Twenty Four- The Life of Alan Watts:

The Passing

Watts’ Mandala House in Druid Heights

Watts continued to use the Vallejo for seminars and meetings but made his home the Mandela House at Druid Heights, built by Ed Stiles in the woods.  At this time he was talking to, or corresponding with, such spiritual and psychological luminaries as Thomas Merton, RD Laing, Fritz Perls and Abraham Maslow.

Watts and Jano seemed happy there. Watts said that he ‘found a new self’. Druid Heights was somewhere ‘where we could strip to the waist, bang on drums, dance and chant through most of the night.”  He wrote that on arrival at Mandela House he knew what it was to ‘feel like a snake contemplating his former skin.

After that, Watts quickly became a fixture on Druid Heights,

Ed Stiles:

“He was an impressive looking man, much older than me (I was in my 20s) an imposing character. He used to stalk around here with his rosewood staff with jangles on top of it.  He’s always wearing, in my mind, Zen looking robes and carrying staff which I made for Baker Roshi at the Green Gulch Centre. Alan inherited it after Baker Rosh died. (The Green Gulch centre was The Zen centre to which Watts was informally attached).

“He would walk in the woods, with that staff, you could hear it in the distance.  He looked very much like an Anglican monk.  Black robes with a band.  He looked good, he was a handsome man.  He looked the part. “

Not everybody, however, was impressed by scene at Druid Heights

Ed Stiles: “My brother who was from the East Coast would come out and say ‘these people are just so incredibly shallow.  How can they be so shallow?’

Meanwhile, Alan and Jano were becoming increasingly codependent on alcohol.  When one of them managed to break the habit, the other one dragged them back into it again.

Ed Stiles:

“Watching Alan and Jano pull each other back down - it was like one of them would try to clean up and the other would just keep right on drinking in front of the other one…we watched that happen…Alan would pull Jano down and vice versa.

Mark Watts:

“By the 70s he had become physiologically dependent upon drink, but I don’t think mentally he was ever an alcoholic.  He ruled it, it didn’t rule him.  When we went on trips along the coast, something new and different, he would drink just a minimum amount of alcohol. 

“Mary Jane was an alcoholic and was a heavy drinker when they met. He picked it up in the context of her as a way of dealing with her.  Jano would drink 2-3 times what he would drink. By ‘71 she was a complete lush. By 72 their relationship was not functioning. She would basically get up drink herself into a stupor and go to sleep. That was her life.

“Alan wasn’t passing out at 8.30 in the evening (like Jano).  He was entertaining everybody. He was a happy drunk.”