Category: Uncategorized

Writing on the Internet is like taking a long walk through a great city: You can be visible to millions, and seen by none. Monday, 3AM. It winds down, this chasm of time, these funhouse mirror days of recurrent, spasmodic pandemic lockdown. I was always taught the linear order, and felt — as little as…

I picked off just over 6 minutes of audio from a ca. 1965 talk by Watts on Jesus as a revolutionary: someone who challenged the monarchical tradition of Judaism and introduced democracy to the kingdom of heaven. But as Watts points out, his revolutionary act was suppressed via a trick of translation on the part…

You can learn anything you want in Alphabet-Google’s video labyrinth, YouTube. You can get tips on making Word, Excel, or Powerpoint work better for you, or you can dive into C++ or Java programming. You can learn anything from basic arithmetic to quantum mechanics. You can study office etiquette or political activism. But YouTube can…

“The master potter leaves no trace.” — Taoist proverb 9/12/2020 The goal of any genuine spiritual practice is the same as that of any effective psychotherapy: to draw unconscious and preconscious content into awareness, through a gradual and naturally measured process of opening, realization, and release.  In the literature of psychotherapy, I learned much that…

“Who are you?” It’s another of those questions addressed, with varying degrees of urgency, by spiritual practice and psychotherapy. It’s a question that deserves attention before its answer becomes a weak inscription, fading on a stone worn down by decades or centuries of weather, above the debris that was once your physical body on this…

 February 9, 2014  Forced or manufactured sound is everywhere. Music, traffic, video, phones, web noise, advertising, small talk, argument, television. When sound becomes compulsion or consumption — the expression of some deep-seated but displaced emotional need — it turns into noise. But a life grounded in silence actually makes better use of sound, in the…

 November 3, 2011  Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the revolution, to the great renewal, to the natural social order. Welcome to the America that you were taught as a child to love, to revere, to treasure, and, if necessary, to die for. Welcome to Democracy… _____________________________________ These are some notes I scribbled down after visiting…

Perhaps you’ve encountered this headline in some of your recent World Weird Web wanderings: Scientists find that consciousness continues after death. If not, click, read, and make of it what you will (or won’t). I have no particular conclusion to draw from that research; first, because it’s founded on the same flawed probability theories that I’ve criticized…

 April 19, 2014  Alan Watts taught that our consciousness — thoughts, memories, feelings, actions — do not survive our physical deaths. Yet he also taught that something does; the aspect of ourselves that Lao Tzu called “the nameless essence,” the inviolable connection and identity with the All. Therefore, to die well requires the same inner action as…

 February 4, 2014  I have some respect for corporate America, based mainly on the utter honesty of much of its language. For example, if you would like to teach something in a corporate environment, you won’t get very far if you tell management that you’d like to teach, and what. No: what you must say…