| "Out Of Your Mind" Lecture on "The Nature of Consciousness" At a time when the West was just starting to take notice of Eastern spiritual thought, Alan Watts was in the vanguard. A former Anglican priest who dove into an intense study of Buddhism, he explained mystical ideas in terms that an English or American ear could understand. And he combined a profound scholarly knowledge of both traditions with an irreverent sense of humor that was more than just leavening—it was an essential piece of his world view. To take an example that comes from the very beginning of the Out of Your Mind collection, Watts discusses the two Western views of the cosmos. In the "ceramic myth," the universe is created by God as a potter creates the bowl. As created beings, we are fragile and infinitely dependent on our creator. By contrast, the "fully automatic myth" views the universe as a clockwork machine, running by its own laws independently toward the inevitable conclusion. Both, Watts insists, are myths: meant to serve a certain purpose, and reflective of the people who created them. He proposes an alternative, the "dramatic myth," in which we are all players acting on the illusory stage of life, making up the rules as we go. You see how many levels this operates on? On the one hand, we can say that the "ceramic" myth represents the traditional Judeo-Christian world view, and the "fully automatic" myth represents the scientific materialism that has displaced it among Western intellectuals ... |
