Monday, 12th October 2015

Words to the improvised song I performed with 2 friends, taken from the Alan Watts biography:

"A year or so before he died he had a stroke which impaired the peripheral vision of his left eye. When I saw him the day after, he said, "Alan, I am afraid to tell this to most of my friends because they will think that I am crazy. But I was quite sure I was going to die, even that I was dead. It was astonishing! An apotheosis! I found myself where I and everything were transformed into a warm, golden light, where there were formless presences welcoming and assuring me, like angels. How can I say it? All this was much more real than ordinary life, which now seems like a dream, so that I can't be possibly afraid of death any more. Can you understand that I knew for sure that this golden light, this divinity that I became, is the real thing? That this world in which you and I are talking is just a shadow? That we haven't anything to worry about at all-ever? And my God, how can this have happened to me? Alan, you know I am a scoundrel and a lecherous man. Tell me, what do you think? Am I nuts? Was I hallucinated? If they wouldn't think I was quite mad I would recommend everyone to have a stroke." Several months later he went to La Paz in Baja California to spend the winter in the sun. In January 1971 he took off for Mexico City, and before leaving, treated a group of friends to drinks in the bar at the airport. But when he got off at Mexico City, seven thousand feet above La Paz, the change of altitude was too much. He dropped dead of a heart attack. Six hundred people attended his funeral.
We mourned, not for him, but for ourselves that this radiance, this colossal joie de vivre, had left us. The Gate Five community of the Sausalito waterfront has been dreary ever since. The hippies have been replaced by "freaks", who look like peasants from a depressed area of Hungary. Perhaps they are not to be blamed, for the industrial system offers few jobs that any self-respecting person wants to do, and the intelligent young are sick to death of a way of life that wastes and squanders material for the production of baubles and bombs. But consider that Yanko, too, had no job and nothing to mention in the way of money. Nevertheless, he has left waves. He did more than anyone else to release me from pomposity, from submitting to false modesty, and from knuckling under to the general fear of the colourful and all that it signifies.
To go back. A year after Jano and I moved onto the boat, we and a group of friends created the Society for Comparitive Philosophy to sponsor my own work, and to use the spacious studio for seminars and for a library to shelter my thousands of books. Over the years we also raised funds to assist others working along the same lines, and brought in, to conduct seminars, the Lama Anagarika Govinda, Charlotte Selver, Krishnamurti, Douglas Harding, and the Lama Chogyam Trungpa. I have a mild ambition to create something which will carry on, in some respects, where the Bollingen Foundation left off, since most of the great foundations are stuffy and unimaginative and do not support weird scholars investigating Amerindian mysticism or Tibeten iconography. But this may well change, for the new decade is seeing a remarkable revival of interest and magic witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, mysticism and mythology which is invading even the universities and creating the suspicion that the worldview of modern science may itself have been a peculiar form of myth. Science itself, by investigating alpha-waves, anti-matter, holes in space, psychopharmacologym and the dynamics or waves and cycles, may be hoisted by its own petard to the confrontation of a universe very different from what we now imagine, and its pandits may say with the Los Angeles entomologist first hearing of von Fritsch's discovery of bee language, "I have the most passionate reluctance in accepting this evidence." For it does indeed seem that many scientists have a religious fervor and a vested interest that nature is only a rather inefficient machine-to which they must paradoxically ascribe their own boastedly superior intelligences. My own interest, however, remains with the mystical rather than the occult, for having seen what we have done with ordinary technology I am troubled by what black magic we might commit with psychotechnology.
I have said, however, that my ambition for creating a philosophical foundation is mild, for it has become by strong impression that human institutions and collectivities, as distinct from individual people, are impervious to grace. This is no more than a tentative opinion, but I feel that nations, churches, political parties, classes, and formal associations of all kinds operate at the lowest level of intelligence and moral sensibility. This is, in part, because they are not organised as an individual is organised. They act upon rules and verbal communications which, when compared with the organic nervous system, are of extreme crudity. It is this which gives us the feeling that most social problems are too complicated, for, in the same way, the human body would seem too complicated were it not that the nervous system-as distinct from conscious attention and memory-can handle an immense number of variables at the same time. Societies, insofar as they are restricted to linear, strung out, forms of communication, can handle very few variables. Therefore governments and corporations, in attempting to keep up with the infinitely varied and multidimensional process of nature, resort to words on paper-to laws, reports, and other records-which would take lifetimes for any intelligent being to read, much less assimilate. Yet for all these mountains of paper covered in small print, only a tiny amount of natural process has been described, and we do not  really know whether what we select for description are actually the most important features of the process. In other words, our social organisations are not organic.
As they become more complex and computerised they become less organic, because their code of communication-however fast and complex-rests on a basic confusion of symbol with reality, of words and numbers with natural events. When natural process is respresented in words, it appears that there are separable things and events which may be dealt with individually, one by one. There are not. In nature each event implies, or "goeswith," all other events in varying degrees of relevance, and we have only the sketchiest notions of how those degrees may be measured-for how often do the most momentous events arise from the most trivial? A chance meeting precipitates a marriage, and an accident in a laboratory touches off a major scientific discovery. I feel, therefore, that we have long been involved in an unworkable and destructive method of managing both the social order and the natural environment, and that our main hope of finding something better will be through study of the nervous system itself-and by some other way than representing it as a mechanical process. Until we find some such alternative (and I may be saying that we must learn to develop our intuitive rather than our intellectual faculties) I have little hope for constructive, large scale social changes. Society will remain a swamp redeemed only by some relatively few individual plants of fruitful beauty.
Yet it is not difficult for me to be in a state of consciousness where all such problems dissolve. I see that nature makes no real errors; that man and his institutions are as natural as anything else; and, furthermore, that my complaints about any situation are as natural as the idea that I have no reason to complain. Of course this curiously exhilarating feeling implies no specific course of action, and may therefore be dismissed as worthless philosophy, a set of general principles of laws, which does provide adequate rules for action, without first having to be modified into chaos with exceptions. And the sharper one's intellect, the faster one finds reason to take exception to any general principle. Thus we begin the study of Greek in school by learning the conjugation of regular verbs, only to discover that the verbs most common used were irregular. As a language becomes rich with usage and idiom it strays from grammar, or rather from description by grammarians, and must be learned by ear. So, too, life must be played by ear-which is only to say that we must trust, not symbolic rules or linear principles, but our brains or natures. Yet this must bring one back to the faith that nature makes no mistake. In such a universe a decision which results in one's own death is not a mistake: it is simply a way of dying at the right moment.
But nothing can be right in a universe where nothing can be wrong, and every perception is an awareness of contrast, of a right/wrong, is/isn't, bright/dark, hard/soft situation. If this is the very nature of awareness, any and every circumstance, however fortunate, will have to be experienced as a good/bad or plus/minus in order to be experienced at all. By such reflections I think myself into silence and, by writing, help others similarly spellbound by thoughts and words come to silence-which is the realisation that a linear code cannot justly represent a nonlinear world. But this intellectual silence is not failure, defeat, or suicide. It is a return to that naked awareness, that vision unclouded by commentary, which we enjoyed as babies in the days when we saw no difference between knower and known, deed and happening. This time, however, we are babies reborn-babies who remember all the rules and tricks of human games and can therefore communicate with other people as if we were normal adults. We can also feel, as just-born baby cannot, compassion for their confusions.
Now, from the standpoint of the wise-baby the confusions of the normal adult world cannot be straightened out without becoming even more confused. There is no solution but to regain the baby's vision and so to realise that the confusions are not really serious, but only the games whereby adults pass the time and pretend to be important. Seen thus, the world becomes immeasurable rich in colour and detail because we no longer ignore the aspects of life which adults pass over and screen out in their haste after serious matters. As in music, the point of life is its pattern at every stage of its development, and in a world where there is neither self nor other, the only identity is just This-which is all, which is energy, which is God by no name"

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A song I wrote when I was 16



A wooden box with flowers on is floating down a stream
A requiescat is being said but I cannot be seen
I only went to her flat 'cause she was my phenelzine
And the people were narcomaniacs
They didn't know me
 
Count up all my good deeds place white pebbles on the sand
The black stones represent the bad deeds that I've done to man
The robot lord of death judges me with his hand
But he don't own me, were narcomaniacs
We're so lonely, we're narcomaniacs

I shall take my imago to Shangri La with you
There we'll lay in almandines and swim in skies of blue
I wish i could speak to soothe you but i am scared too
And my invocations have not been answered i don't know what to do
My prayers to God have not been answered, fatalism lies with you

I would tear you open but I'm scared to look inside
I believe you're empty and that's the reason you have died
I wish i could talk to move you but my tongue is tied
And my thoughts are with the people you deserted and left behind
My thoughts are with the people you loved but left behind