"Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Alan)

The Joyous Cosmology

Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness

Alan W. Watts Foreword by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert

"To the People of Druid Heights"


Contents

Foreword Preface Prologue The Joyous Cosmology Epilog



The Joyous Cosmology й1962 by Pantheon Books, a division of Random
House.

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Foreword

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The Joyous Cosmology is a brilliant arrangement of words describing
experiences for which our language has no vocabulary. To understand
this wonderful but difficult book it is useful to make the artificial
distinction between the external and the internal. This is, of course,
exactly the distinction which Alan Watts wants us to transcend. But Mr.
Watts is playing the verbal game in a Western language, and his reader
can be excused for following along with conventional dichotomous
models.

External and internal. Behavior and consciousness. Changing the
external world has been the genius and the obsession of our
civilization. In the last two centuries the Western monotheistic
cultures have faced outward and moved objects about with astonishing
efficiency. In more recent years, however, our culture has become aware
of a disturbing imbalance. We have become aware of the undiscovered
universe within, of the uncharted regions of consciousness.

This dialectic trend is not new. The cycle has occurred in the lives of
many cultures and individuals. External material success is followed by
disillusion and the basic "why" questions, and then by the discovery of
the world within---a world infinitely more complex and rich than the
artifactual structures of the outer world, which after all are, in
origin, projections of human imagination. Eventually, the logical
conceptual mind turns on itself, recognizes the foolish inadequacy of