Alan Watts

 Alan Wilson Watts (06 January 1915 - 16 November 1973) was an English writer, speaker and "philosophical entertainer". Watts is most well recognized for his ability to communicate and promote Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist and Chinese traditions to an Western public. Watts was born in Chislehurst in England and relocated to New York in 1938 to start Zen training. He completed a master's degree in theology from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and was ordained as an Episcopal priest by the church in the year 1945. In 1950, he resigned from the priesthood and relocated to California and joined the American Academy of Asian Studies' faculty. Watts was a programmer volunteer for the KPFA radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on the philosophy of religion and. He was the first to introduce the hippie counterculture, and The Way of Zen (1957) that became the best-selling book about Buddhism. He made the argument in Psychotherapy East and West (1961) that Buddhism could be viewed as an alternative form of psychotherapy. Nature, Man and Woman (1958), was his most favored book. The works he wrote on psychedelics and human consciousness include "The New Alchemy", (1958), and "The Joyous Cosmology" (1962) as well as examine his research into the human mind.