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The Joyous Cosmology
Alan W. Watts
Preface
In The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley has given us a superbly
written account of the effects of mescaline upon a highly sensitive
person. It was a record of his first experience of this remarkable
transformation of consciousness, and by now, through subsequent
experiments, he knows that it can lead to far deeper insights
than his book described. While I cannot hope to surpass Aldous
Huxley as a master of English prose, I feel that the time is ripe
for an account of some of the deeper, or higher, levels of insight
that can be reached through these consciousness-changing "drugs"
when accompanied with sustained philosophical reflection by a
person who is in search, not of kicks, but of understanding. I
should perhaps add that, for me, philosophical reflection is barren
when divorced from poetic imagination, for we proceed to understanding
of the world upon two legs, not one.
It is now a commonplace that there is a serious lack of communication
between scientists and laymen on the theoretical level, for the
layman does not understand the mathematical language in which
the scientist thinks. For example, the concept of curved space
cannot be represented in any image that is intelligible to the
senses. But I am still more concerned with the gap between theoretical
description and direct experience among scientists themselves.
Western science is now delineating a new concept of man, not as
a solitary ego within a wall of flesh, but as an organism which
is what it is by virtue of its inseparability from the rest of
the world. But with the rarest exceptions even scientists do not
feel themselves to exist in this way. They, and almost
all of us, retain a sense of personality which is independent,
isolated, insular, and estranged from the cosmos that surrounds
it. Somehow this gap must be closed, and among the varied means
whereby the closure may be initiated or achieved are medicines
which science itself has discovered, and which may prove to be
the 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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