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Trey Parker, one of the creators of South Park, was raised in Colorado, where his father attempted to teach him Buddhism. Now, years later, Parker and his animation pal Matt Stone have brought to life the teachings of Alan Watts, the comparative religion expert and philosopher. Under the FurryCarlos Productions banner, the two tapped South Park animators Chris Brion and Todd Benson to keyframe three of Watts’ recordings, which can be viewed below.

Source:

http://coldhardflash.com/2007/07/flash-animated-philosophy-from-south.ht...

Our other website is alanwatts.org, and a new alanwatts.com site is in the works.

1. What is behind this recent outreach of encouraging people to re-mix your father's material?

It came out of the Southpark project originally, and the enjoyment of authentic responses to my father's works that have been appearing on YouTube and elsewhere. I'm not talking about someone posting a picture or two over our audio, but about the sincere dialogs that result when one takes his ideas in and they resonate and something fresh comes out. Personally I view every authentic response regardless of the cultural framework as vital to his work, and I'm very encouraged by the creative response that has sprung up around YouTube. Back when I was studying film and photography in the 70's this forum would have been a dream come true.

2. What are the copyright restrictions on the use of the material? (Creative Commons; Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License?) Do people need permission to re-mix, mashup, etc.and should people contact you?

People say that Americans are materialists, but nothing is further from the truth.The entire American enterprise is dedicated to the transformation of material into junk as rapidly as possible. We have no idea of how to enjoy material wealth, and instead destroy it so we can bulldoze it into landfill

You cannot live at all unless you can live fully now

I wonder, I wonder, what you would do if you had the power to dream at night any dream you wanted to dream. And you would of course be able to alter your time sense, and slip seventy-five years of subjective time into eight hours of sleep. You would I suppose start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You could design for yourself what would be the most ecstatic life: love affairs, banquets, dancing girls, wonderful journeys, gardens, and music beyond belief. And then after a couple of months of this sort of thing at seventy-five years a night, you’d be getting a little taste for something different, and you’d move over to an adventurous dimension, where there were certain dangers involved, and the thrill of dealing with dangers. And you could rescue princesses from dragons, and go on dangerous journeys, and eventually get into contests with enemies. And after you had done that for awhile, you’d think up a new wrinkle, to forget that you were dreaming, and think that is was all for real.

You see, many of the troubles going on in the world right now are being supervised by people with very good intentions whose attempts are to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The more we try to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. Maybe that is the way it has got to be. Maybe I should not say anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right but simply, on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise.

So the question we come to now, is well, how do you go about knowing the field of forces in which you live? How do you know which way the wind is blowing so you can sail properly, when it isn’t as simple a matter of wetting your finger and holding it up to see which side gets cold first, and that’s where the wind’s coming from. Or is it as simple as that? We know, or think we know, that nature is extraordinarily complicated, and so very difficult to understand. And if you can’t understand an immensely complicated situation it’s very difficult to make decisions about it.

I suppose most of you have heard of Zen, but before going on to explain any details about it I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist. I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I’m not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I am an entertainer. That is to say in the same sense that when you go to a concert and listen to someone play Mozart he has nothing to sell except for the sound of the music. He doesn’t want to convert you to anything. He doesn’t want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart’s music as opposed to Beethoven’s. And I approach you in the same spirit, as a musician with his piano or violinist with his violin, I just want you to enjoy a point of view which I enjoy.