Bedtime Story Conservatory 46 12/05/2020
Hello everybody,
Today I feel nostalgic, and I miss you.
To begin, some brief reflection on this project:
I can be comforted by the fact that in doing this project, I am just pulling some strings together, pulling them through me, and attaching them to you through an email link.
My position as a catalyst of this information comforts me, as a lot of the time the texts I select are read by me for the first time, and I have no prior knowledge of the stuff I am reading. I am discovering as this project continues, which is exciting, and I thank you for that.
I can only hope that these emails provide some sort of respite and discovery for you too.
Again, I am always open to feedback of any kind, and also suggestions, or your own texts.
Today's reading is an excerpt from the first chapter of Alan Watt's The Joyous Cosmology 1962. Watts was an English writer who is known for popularising Eastern spiritualism for a Western audience. The blurb for this book is as follows:
"In describing the effects of mescaline, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception opened a proverbial door for a generation of seekers. Watts walked through it with this classic account of the levels of insight that consciousness-changing drugs can facilitate “when accompanied with sustained philosophical reflection by a person who is in search, not of kicks, but of understanding.” Watts and peers including foreword authors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (then Harvard professors) anticipated physicists’ recognizing the individual’s “inseparability from the rest of the world,” the work of New Age thinkers who combine scientific findings and spiritual experiences, and federally funded clinical trials utilizing psilocybin to treat a variety of conditions. More than an artefact, The Joyous Cosmology is both a riveting memoir of Watts’s personal experiments and a profound meditation on our perennial questions about the nature of existence and the existence of the sacred."
I hope you enjoy.
The song attached to the recording, i'm not sure why it just felt right, is Talking Heads' This Must be The Place 1983.
Link to the reading-
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1V3Warx6ZxzUlJ1o2EToslG8YCv8KV4Vu
Link to all previous readings-
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1t4v042zpGgwI7KN6_ST_tAthqm63J22V
Warm wishes, and lots of love,
Sam
