I’m reading Watts’ autobiography. I’ve been browsing it, really, picking out a chapter here and there. In the beginning of the book, he recommends that we take a free-flowing attitude, because there is no linear story in the words. So far, here are some things I have picked up while floating down his “way.” I’ll start with a piece from his earlier life:

“Meanwhile (this was when I was about seventeen), I was still reading Suzuki on Zen and trying to practice some form of Buddhist yoga, za-zen or satipatthana – and simply couldn’t make up my mind which specific method to follow, or exactly what state of mind or consciousness was satori . . . I was a shaman, on my own in a religious jungle. When, at Canterbury, I had become the head-boy, or captain, of my house, The Grange, I had the priviledge of going off by myself to study and meditate in an ancient Elizabethan room, where one could light a fire and stay up until late at night. It was in aitumn of 1932- windy, with fallen leaes skittering along roads and fields – and I was trying desparately work out this problem: What is THE EXPERIENCE which these oriental masters were talking about? The different ideas of it which I had in mind seemed to be approaching me like little dogs wanting to be petted, and suddenly I shouted at all of them to go away. I annihilated and bawled out every theory and concept of what should be my properly spiritual state of mind, or of what should be meant by ME. And instantly my weight vanished. I owned nothing. All hang-ups disappeared. I walked on air. Thereupon I composed a haiku:

All forgotten and set aside– Wind scattering leaves Over the fields.”

That Elizabethan room sounds cozy, and ever-reminiscent of Descartes meditations. Eliminating theory by theory, cast it all away! Yet, could you imagine what Descartes would have written, had he experienced sudden enlightenment that fireside evening?

He describes his education, in both bitterness and insight:

“In a world of flowers, birds, butterflies, clouds, stars, music, friendly boys, and lovely girls, I did not want to waste my consciousness on such textureless, tasteless, and colorless figurations. IF you need them you can always look up multiplication tables in a book, or use a slide rule or an adding machine. But that was considered cheating. So many would-be students of astronomy have lost interest when bogged down in the mathematical analysis of spectra, because the doubtlessly informative calculations of the science screened out its poetry. I wonder, therefore, whether minds fully conditioned to look at the stars through mathematical screens may not have blinded themselves to other aspects of the science. They look at the world through lattices whose mullions block the view of interconnections between objects and patterns which they are designed to measure. Seeing it thus, they are Venetian blind.”

I can relate to his critique of formal education, as I went to a catholic school, and am currently attending a Jesuit university. He also offered a remembering quote here:

“On the whole I dislike formal games– bridge, chess, Monopoly, and even Japanese go. Yes, it is all right to play poker on a large tabled covered with bright green felt with a convivial company drinking beer. But, on the whole, formal games are a way of getting together with other people without meeting them.”

Good way to put it…

This one does well to wrap up the topic of education;

“It is now becoming obvious that the same may be said of almost all schools, and of universities as well. They are production lines turning out stereotyped personnel and consumers for the industrial machine– a machine which is more and more subservient, not to human needs, but to the abstract purposes of technological expansion for its own sake, of the money game and of competition for the hollow rewards of status.”

And so the book meanders on, touching on things from seeing a Krishnamurti talk to favorite recipes. It’s really something you just have to dig through. When I discover more gems along the way, I’ll post them up here.