The Alan Watts Organization is dedicated to preserving Alan’s legacy through webcasts, lecture-based courses, archival efforts, and creative partnerships. Our goal is to make his work accessible digitally as well as through traditional educational media, and to help spread his insights and scholarship to future generations.

The AWO expands upon the work of the Alan Watts Electronic University, which Alan and his son Mark Watts co-created in 1972, and first offered ‘courses on cassette’ in 1975 shortly after passing. Our goal is to preserve and perpetuate the Alan Watts legacy by providing definitive online resources and a hub for information about Alan’s written and recorded works.

We maintain and curate the vast collection Alan Watts’ audio and video productions. There recordings were created by Alan Watts, and recorded by Alan, Mark Watts, and American sound artist Henry “Sandy” Jacobs, and then distributed widely on public radio. In addition to compiling the original lectures, Mark and his father crafted audio courses to guide listeners through Alan’s recordings on the philosophy and psychology of religion in an organized way. These collections have been recently expanded and remastered, and we are presently working to complete the digital archive by converting reels, cassettes, VHS produced by the original Electronic University in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and preserving media from other sources that come to us.

Our team is continuously in the process of making Alan’s legacy contributions more accessible by developing public transcripts, robust search functionality, and digital audio of his recordings. Overall we continue to make Alan’s work more widely available, and to further enhance access to the archive that has been maintained since the 1970’s through remastering and creative derivative works.

About Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts was a scholar and philosopher (amongst many other things) who was a very adept “translator” of Eastern wisdom for a Western audience. His ideas about the cosmos and the individual, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and other religions, philosophies, and psychologies, and everyday life were at once deeply profound, yet entirely approachable by non-scholars and scholars alike. Find out more about him HERE.

AWO’s Mission

The Alan Watts Organization is dedicated to disseminating Alan’s works through webcasts, lecture-based courses, archival projects, and creative partnerships. Our goal is to make his work accessible online, in print, and through educational audiovisual media, and to spread his insights and scholarship to future generations.

The efforts of the Organization have made Alan’s invaluable work more accessible through the development of webcasts (Being in the Way) transcripts of the audio and freely available samples of recordings (our transcripts page), in video posts (on YouTube) and through audio courses (shop link) Since the founding of the Electronic University in 1973, and with the resurgence of interest in Alan’s work over the past few years, this has proven more important than ever.

We have been busy establishing a trusted repository of the current digitized works of Alan Watts, and through a new streaming channel will continue to offer new material as the digitization efforts and mastering of the unreleased material progresses. Given the hundreds of hours of media (originally recorded on everything form lacquered disks to record masters and magnetic reels), the archival/digitization effort is a substantial technical undertaking. Alan Watts was not only a prolific speaker, but with the help of his son, Mark Watts, and guidance of close friend and audio pioneer Henry “Sandy” Jacobs, he became a diligent recorder of his work. From the 60’s to the early 70’ are hundreds of hours of Alan speaking recorded by himself and his son that have not been released, and are the focus of our current efforts.