Nobody in his Senses

SS Vallejo

I first read Alan Watts' The Way of Zen (1957) in the early 1980s. I was alerted to Alan Watts by my then future father-in-law who kept a picture of the SS Vallejo on the wall of his bedroom in Minnesota.

The Vallejo is a legendary ferry that was converted to a houseboat and moored in Sausalito. Alan Watts inhabited the Vallejo from 1961 to 1969. The epicenter of the 1960's counter-culture was centered around San Francisco, if not this venerable but dilapidated houseboat.

The Way of Zen became a seminal book that introduced a burgeoning youth culture to Eastern Philosophy, and specifically to Buddhism, throughout the decades of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

The teachings of Alan Watts, and of my father-in-law, continue to guide me.

The video of Awareness Meditation (below) is from a KQED TV program called The Silent Mind  (1960 © KQED).

‎If we live in entirely in a world of thought, all the things we pursue in life tend in a way to become arid and unsatisfactory because we are living in an abstract world. In other words, nobody in his senses is going to eat a menu instead of dinner.
~Alan Watts (23:40)

Flower Power Ain't So Cool Anymore

The venomous Tea Bagging nincompoops of 2010 have give us a better understanding of American politics in the 1960s.

The radical, counter-culture movement of 1960s was grounded in, and driven by, personal freedoms and exceptionalism, and less so on the philosophy progressives hold dear, like human interdependence and the tacit recognition of innate human flaws.

Forgetting about personal heroes, and legendary pop figures, like Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young, the often lionized politics of the 1960s, when examined, is disappointingly me-centric:

• Don't let me be drafted, and
• Don't let the government dictate my personal habits;

rather than a generational plea for fundamental fairness, or a generational acceptance of the pragmatic logic of collectivism.

Personal Freedoms Over Collectivism

Through this lens, Flower Power ain't so cool anymore.

Many hippies were no more than over-indulgent, self-centered libertarians, who might just have devolved into the bitter tea baggers so prominently featured on the Ninny-News-Channel.

The music of the 1960s was insanely good, though.


Joe Cocker - Woodstock 1969.