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Q: Talk by Alan Watts ( No Answer,   1 Comment )
Question  
Subject: Talk by Alan Watts
Category: Relationships and Society > Cultures
Asked by: apteryx-ga
List Price: $2.80
Posted: 06 Mar 2004 18:37 PST
Expires: 05 Apr 2004 19:37 PDT
Question ID: 314161
Sometime in the latter half of the 1990s I happened to hear part of a
lecture by Alan Watts on a local PBS radio station.  I was busy doing
something else and only half listened until I heard an arresting line
that I wrote down verbatim:

?It was apparent to many cultures but not to ours that mind and space
are the same thing.?

I took a few more notes (not necessarily direct quotations) as I
listened to the rest of the talk:

- The head is in the mind and not vice versa--inside an enormous
network of relationships.  No one head is of any use without the
others and communication among them.

- The mental life of one organism is a node in the network.

- The space in which the network <missing verb> we basically ignore. 
Ignoring of the space between is why we don?t see connections among
events and things.

By now it's probably time to throw away the piece of paper on which I
wrote those notes.  Yet I'm curious after all this time:  where and
when was this lecture given, was it an isolated talk or part of a
series, and is a tape or a transcript in some written medium available
to the public?  My notes say nothing about that, although it sticks in
my head that this was talk number three of a series.  I am hoping that
perhaps a GA researcher is actually familiar with this lecture.

A search on the verbatim line plus his name did not turn up a useful answer.

I am not looking for links to Watts's publications in general or to
others' writings on these and related subjects.  I just want to know
about this specific lecture, which obviously must have existed in some
stored medium because it was not a live broadcast by Watts, who died
in 1973.

Thank you,
Apteryx
Answer  
There is no answer at this time.

Comments  
Subject: Re: Talk by Alan Watts
From: voila-ga on 07 Mar 2004 09:21 PST
 
There's a short excerpt from "Swimming Headless and Wisdom of the Ridiculous" here:

Search:  "Alan Watts" "mind" "node"
(cached view)
http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:3ZaypDec-6wJ:fusionanomaly.net/alanwatts.html+%22alan+watts%22+%22mind%22+%22node%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

"There isn't a knower FACING the known. It would be more like, say,
that if there is any knower at all, it contains the known.   Your
mind, if you have one, is not in your head.  Your head is in your
mind.  Because your mind understood from the standpoint of vision, his
space.  The Chinese use this word 'ku' which means 'sky', 'space', and
sometimes 'emptiness'... and there is a saying that form, or shape and
color, and this, are said to be identical.  Space or emptiness is
precisely shape/color and shape/color is precisely emptiness.  This is
actually a Buddhist saying from the Treidia Sutra..."
http://www.audiobooksdownload.com/Books/SP_ELEC_000005.htm

***************

Something a little similar from the 'look inside' feature at Amazon:
The Book : On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
by Alan Watts 
p. 69
"Thus the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the
soul is the entire network of relationships and processes which make
up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing."

***************

You might also email the wattstapes folks.  Perhaps they have a global
search mechanism for his lecture material.  I thought this sounded
like something from his Nature of Consciousness series but I'm not for
certain.

M.E.A. (Mastering Enlightenments Arts)
P.O. Box 303
Olema, CA USA 94950
1-800-75-WATTS (toll free number for placing orders)
e-mail:  webmaster@wattstapes.com
World Wide Web:  http://www.wattstapes.com

Best of luck,
V

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