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

the flimsy systems it imposes on the world, suspends its own rigid
control, and overthrows the domination of cognitive experience.

We speak here (and Alan Watts speaks in this book) about the politics
of the nervous system---certainly as complicated and certainly as
important as external politics. The politics of the nervous system
involves the mind against the brain, the tyrannical verbal brain
disassociating itself from the organism and world of which it is a
part, censoring, alerting, evaluating.

Thus appears the fifth freedom---freedom from the learned, cultural
mind. The freedom to expand one's consciousness beyond artifactual
cultural knowledge. The freedom to move from constant preoccupation
with the verbal games---the social games, the game of self---to the
joyous unity of what exists beyond.

We are dealing here with an issue that is not new, an issue that has
been considered for centuries by mystics, by philosophers of the
religious experience, by those rare and truly great scientists who have
been able to move in and then out beyond the limits of the science
game. It was seen and described clearly by the great American
psychologist William James:

. . . our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we
call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it,
parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of
consciousness entirely different.. We may go through life without
suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a
touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of
mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and
adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final
which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How
to regard them is the question,-for they are so discontinuous with
ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they
cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a
map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with
reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge toward a
kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical
significance.

But what are the stimuli necessary and sufficient to overthrow the
domination of the conceptual and to open up the "potential forms of
consciousness"? There are many. Indian philosophers have described
hundreds of methods. So have the Japanese Buddhists. The monastics of
our Western religions provide more examples. Mexican healers and
religious leaders from South and North American Indian groups have for
centuries utilized sacred plants to trigger off the expansion of
consciousness. Recently our Western science has provided, in the form
of chemicals, the most direct techniques for opening new realms of
awareness.