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

sacraments of its religion.

For a long time we have been accustomed to the compartmentalization of
religion and science as if they were two quite different and basically
unrelated ways of seeing the world. I do not believe that this state of
doublethink can last. It must eventually be replaced by a view of the
world which is neither religious nor scientific but simply our view of
the world. More exactly, it must become a view of the world in which
the reports of science and religion are as concordant as those of the
eyes and the ears.

But the traditional roads to spiritual experience seldom appeal to
persons of scientific or skeptical temperament, for the vehicles that
ply them are rickety and piled with excess baggage. There is thus
little opportunity for the alert and critical thinker to share at first
hand in the modes of consciousness that seers and mystics are trying to
express-often in archaic and awkward symbolism. If the pharmacologist
can be of help in exploring this unknown world, he may be doing us the
extraordinary service of rescuing religious experience from the
obscurantists.

To make this book as complete an expression as possible of the quality
of consciousness which these drugs induce, I have included a number of
photographs which, in their vivid reflection of the patterns of nature,
give some suggestion of the rhythmic beauty of detail which the drugs
reveal in common things. For without losing their normal breadth of
vision the eyes seem to become a microscope through which the mind
delves deeper and deeper into the intricately dancing texture of our
world.

Alan W. Watts

San Francisco, 1962

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Prologue

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SLOWLY it becomes clear that one of the greatest of all superstitions
is the separation of the mind from the body. This does not mean that we
are being forced to admit that we are only bodies; it means that we are
forming an altogether new idea of the body. For the body considered as
separate from the mind is one thing---an animated corpse. But the body
considered as inseparable from the mind is another, and as yet we have
no proper word for a reality which is simultaneously mental and
physical. To call it mental-physical will not do at all, for this is