This short talk really has very little to do with Carl Gustav Jung and everything to do with a philosophy of social reality. In his painstaking way, Watts does two things - points out the essential absurdity of the way most Westerners interested in Eastern traditions latch on to them without understanding their purpose in those cultures and raises issues, perhaps indirectly at times, about how we evade our own social reality (he calls it social hypnosis) in terms that some gentle souls might find almost cynical. The last few minutes are perfectly applicable to the mess we have got ourselves into over the Ukraine, less excusable because Russia and The West are Yin and Yang in precisely the terms that he discusses. My own view is that we do not need the slow approach of round-the-houses Eastern liberation. We are in a position just to seize the day, to grab the opportunity of our individuated liberation from social hypnosis if only we had the determined will to undertake the operation. We have encouraged our own children in this liberation (Watts is good on the stories for children aspect of our ordering myths and absurdities) and we are prepared to take the consequent risks. If enough people took those consequent risk in their stride, then that risk disappears like a fog before the sun ... this would be an Aufklarung that needed no Sanskrit gobbledygook.
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 16:53:21 +0000
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