Challenge your Mind with 9 Fragments of Alan Watts

Book — A Mountain’s Journal, Cloud Hidden “Whereabouts Unknown”

Do you think you have an open mind? Think again.

Reading this book was a strange but beautiful journey. Over and over again I observed myself reading a few pages while constantly taking breaks to meditate or write new thoughts that arose as a result. I don’t think I ever read more than 10 pages without distracting the process. This is the problem with this book. I always end up meditating or dreaming. Like telling to a 5 years old human being that a country is 2000 years old. You just have to stop and think about it.

Of course, a problem can always work as a solution.

Destroying and reconstructing your brain is utterly a healthy exercise for the mind and I think it’s of value to spread knowledge of this nature. Even if you have listened to countless lectures from Alan Watts on Youtube, reading his books is a whole different story.

I have chosen some parts that felt challenging for my mind to give them structure and put them into a linear context. And, since I am always in a quest for these ideas that can dispel my mind to pieces and force me to reconstruct it from the beginning, this book worked like a miracle. At the same time, I could satisfy our primordial desire and thirst for creating new connections and concepts in our minds.

Think about this quote for example:

“There are some infinities bigger than others”

Your mind has to question its most fundamental principles in order to create a structure out of this argument. In addition, in this article, the challenge is not abstract and this is not its only purpose. Alan Watt’s Philosophy is astonishingly practical and the individual who is exposed to this can gain precious insights for the future.

ARE YOU READY?

— You better be, abstract headlines are on your path. :)

1. “Linear failure”

“We are simply not used to the idea that there are forms of intelligence that do not use the linear, time bound methods of conscious attention and scanning. Just as we do not confuse a televised image of the president with the president himself, we should not confuse our linear models of the world (in terms of words, numbers, or other strung out signs) with the world itself”

2. “Intellectual Dogmatism”

“What is intellectually respectable is often a matter of academic fashion”

3. “Knowing so much about nothing at all”

“Although it would be technically impossible to show a fast-motion picture of the courses of myriads of human lives between, let’s say, 10,000 BC and the present, it would not be unreasonable to think that, if it could be done, we could recognize connections of pattern between separate courses. We could see a series of lives running from 10,000 to 9,930 from 8,500 to 8,430 and from 8,300 to 8,249 in which three different individuals were tracing out a coherent pattern of behavior. At that speed, they would seem just as much three appearances of one individual as someone you met successively at perhaps seven-year intervals. For the coherent continuity of any one individual is much like a whirlpool in a river; it is “there” day after day, although the water itself never stays put. You could even say that there is no such thing as a whirlpool, but that the river is “whirlpooling” in the same way that the universe “eyes” and the plant “flowers”

4. “The Endless Symphony”

“Some understanding of Tantra is, therefore, a marvelous and welcome corrective to certain excesses of Western civilization. We over accentuate the positive, think of the negative as “bad”, and thus live in frantic terror of death and extinction which renders us incapable of “playing” life with an air of noble and joyous detachment. Failing to understand the musical quality of nature, which fulfills itself as an eternal present, we live for a tomorrow which never comes — like an orchestra racing to attain the finale of the symphony. But, through understanding the creative power of the female, of the negative, of empty space, and of death, we may at least become completely alive in the present”

5. “A Primitive Revenge”

“Much as we despise “primitives” for their animalistic beliefs which regard mountains, rivers, trees, and animals as they were people, they are on the right track because the animation of nature (rather than machinery) is a step in the direction of owning it as we own our brains and bodies, our appetites and dreams, for nature is our own unconscious activity. But almost every educated person has been trained to believe that everything outside the human skin is stupid and that air, water, earth, and fire are simply dead and witless substance. At the same time, he has been trained to feel this whole dimension of “things that happen” as entirely disconnected from his own inner workings”

6. “Blind With Healthy Eyes”

“Patterns are not only configurations in space but also rhythms in time and, as such, are things, forms and events just as real and solid as anything else that we can experience. Solid steel is a pulsating gyration of electrons and positrons separated by relatively colossal spaces, and physicists cannot quite make up their minds whether they are particles or waves”

7. “The Betrayal of a Language”

“For it could be said, in the rather clumsy language of nouns and verbs which arbitrarily distinguishes things from events, that the individual is something which the whole thing is doing, and that the whole is something which the individual is doing simultaneously. This relationship is not ordinarily felt or recognized in human consciousness, fascinated as it is by the apparent independence of the individual from the whole — and also frightened by it”

8. “Elimination of Logic”

“Warfare is, and has been for many reasons, the major waste of earth’s resources, and, as time goes on, people fight each other for less and less sensible reasons. Although I have a very slight suspicion that we are fighting in Vietnam to gain control of the world’s best supply of opium, no competent strategist would completely obliterate the flora, fauna, and woman of a country which he intends to possess. He might indeed be greedy — but he should not compound this vice with stupidity. The energy and the material that we have all squandered for making war since 1914 could have warmed, fed and clothed everyone on earth, but we go about this atrocious squandering in the name of such immaterial and irrelevant fantasies as religion, honor, ideology, progress, racial purity, and patriotism — The last being not love of one’s country but of the idea of one’s country, of the mere image, the flag, the crown, the icon of Lenin, Mao’s little red book, the cross, the crescent, the swastika, and other such absurd bubbles”

9. “Fighting Monotony”

“Although we all realize that monotony is boring, almost every form of industrial work — banking, accounting, mass-producing — is monotonous, and most people are paid simply for putting up with monotony, for arranging things in boxes, for recording these arrangements on squared and columned sheets of paper, or for welding and drilling innumerable I-beams together for making colossal concrete, or glass-walled boxes wherein myriads of others can pursue these dreary routines. For what? For absolutely necessary but abstract and in-edible money, wherewith to purchase a box in which to live, another box in which to go about (look at almost any brand or car from above), and to acquire boxed food which tastes more and more as its constituent particles were boxes instead of cells”

Dear Alan Watts,

Thank you for everything.

Kind regards,

— S.S.