A Message from the Universe — Through Alan Watts

This afternoon I followed a cascade of links and ended up watching a half hour interview with Alan Watts from a 1971 television program. His message is important and well worth sharing.

I'm not a Zen Buddhist, but being raised in the High Sierras and spending many a time going back to nature for guidance and counsel allows his message to resonate deeply. It's assumed in our times that things are speeding up. But sometimes I wonder, especially when I listen to reflections like this one. The challenges we face today have long, long antecedents in human's invention of language and our ability to separate ourselves from nature with our abstractions, models, measures, and technologies. Alan's message is a call to come back to our true selves. He does a masterful job suggesting what that might be. My hope is a growing number of people are evolving to the perspective he advocates.

I found this reflection by reading a blog post about the new World Cafe Community website my friend Amy Lenzo created with a team of buddies. She said they researched 15 social networking platforms and chose NING as the most fitting for the World Cafe. I was interested because The Grove is working with the new Institute at the Golden Gate at Fort Baker (just north of Golden Gate Bridge) to help them grow their environmentally oriented Guild communities. We will most likely help them develop an on-line platform. The World Café site had links to other NING sites, like the Presencing Institute Community, so I went there to see how they had designed that site.  It featured a couple of videos, one of which was this one of Alan!

I felt like I had dropped into Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole, and time as we know it compressed. Could he really be talking 38 years ago in such a relevant way? I believe he can. See what you think!!

Comments

[Sue Thomas]

Hi David, the Watts piece seems to require a password. Can you help?

(I enjoy your blog very much, btw!)

[Emerson Martlage]

David,
Thank you for that video. I was blown away when he disclosed the year!
Emerson Martlage