Later scholars and spiritual teachers tend to relate to Watts as a brilliant popularizer and creative synthesizer whose work opened doors, but also required later refinement. In academic religious studies and comparative philosophy, he is often praised for making Asian nondual ideas intelligible to Western audiences, yet simultaneously critiqued for oversimplifying or blurring important doctrinal distinctions. Scholars of Buddhism and Hinduism have challenged the perennialist undercurrent in his work, noting that his language of a “cosmic self” can soften the sharp contrast between concepts such as Advaita’s ātman/Brahman and Buddhism’s anattā or emptiness. This has led to more historically grounded and technically precise restatements of nonduality, which retain his central intuition about interconnectedness while subjecting it to stricter textual and philosophical scrutiny. In this way, his synthesis becomes a starting point rather than a final word, inviting both appreciation and correction.

Among spiritual teachers, especially in Western nondual and contemplative circles, his influence is evident in both content and style. Many later teachers echo his insistence that the separate ego is a useful but ultimately provisional construct, and that what is usually called “self” is an expression of a larger living process. They often adopt his relaxed, conversational, non‑sectarian way of speaking about awareness or Being, while placing greater emphasis on systematic practice—meditation, ethical discipline, and sustained inquiry—than he typically did. Some teachers and Zen practitioners acknowledge the inspirational power of his “sudden insight” rhetoric, yet caution that without a stable container of practice and community, such insights can remain superficial or destabilizing. His work thus functions as both a gateway and a foil, inspiring more practice‑oriented and tradition‑rooted presentations of similar insights.

In psychology and therapeutic spirituality, his ideas about the ego as a functional construct rather than ultimate reality have been extended into models of self‑transcendence, peak experience, and expanded states of consciousness. Humanistic and transpersonal approaches have drawn on his portrayal of ego‑death and unity as potentially healing, rather than pathological, and have integrated this with developmental and clinical perspectives that he largely left implicit. Mindfulness‑based therapies and contemplative psychotherapies likewise resonate with his emphasis on presence, acceptance, and the fluidity of self, while grounding these themes in methodical practice and attention to psychological safety. In these contexts, his metaphors of interconnectedness and “the universe looking at itself” are often retained, but placed within more rigorous frameworks.

Cultural and historical reassessments situate his work within the rise of countercultural and “spiritual but not religious” sensibilities, where direct experience is prized over institutional authority. Scholars and practitioners have noted that his playful, anti‑authoritarian spirituality helped normalize a form of nondual discourse that is relatively detached from traditional ritual, community, and ethical structures. At the same time, some critics argue that this contributed to spiritual consumerism and a decontextualized appropriation of Asian traditions, prompting later Asian and Asian‑diaspora teachers to reinsert cultural and ethical context into similar teachings. Across these varied engagements, his central themes—non‑separation, the conventional nature of the ego, and life as a kind of divine play—have been absorbed, sharpened, and sometimes challenged, but rarely ignored.