Outside of Time

"... 'Wait without thought, for you are not yet ready for thought: So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing. For here, where there is neither past nor future, the doors of perception are cleansed, and we see everything as it is—infinite.'

Of course, those who have never let themselves be reduced to this simplicity will feel that it is an arid oversimplification, that there must be much more than this—by way of doctrines, precepts and practices—to an effective religious consciousness. Here, then, will be trotted out all the old objections to the negativity of mystical ideas, to the dissolution of God our Father into the “divine darkness” or “cloud of unknowing” of Western mystics, or the featureless Void of the Buddhists.

One can but reiterate the point that the mystic is negating only concepts and idols of God, and in this way cleansing the doors of perception in the faith that, if God is real, he need not be sought in any particular direction or conceived in any special way. To see the light, it is only necessary to stop dreaming and open the eyes."

~ ALAN WATTS, Sausalito, California 1971

By the late-sixties Alan was living on a ferryboat in Sausalito in a waterfront community of bohemians, artists, and other cultural renegades. Alan’s ferryboat soon became such a popular destination that to maintain his focus on writing, he moved into a cabin on the nearby slopes of Mount Tamalpais. There he became part of the Druid Heights artist community in the late sixties. Continuing to travel on lecture tours into the early seventies, Alan was increasingly drawn to life on the mountain, where he wrote his mountain journals (later published as Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown), penned his monograph The Art of Contemplation, worked on his autobiography In My Own Way, and wrote his final book, Tao: The Watercourse Way. However, soon after returning from a whirlwind lecture tour that took him through the U.S., Canada, and European, Alan passed away in his sleep on November 16, 1973, on the mountain he loved.

Of life on the mountain, he wrote:

“I was filled with that odd sensation the Japanese call yugen: watching wild geese fly and being hidden in the clouds; watching a ship vanish behind the distant island. I feel in some sense that I have lived on this mountain, that the experiences, the meetings, the goodbyes, the smell of food wafting through the trees, encountering wandering mystics on the many wiggly paths to the summit are all a fundamental and basic part of my makeup, which, in a certain sense of the word ‘me,’ they are. When I close my eyes I see faint images of light through the leaves, of cabins and their interiors full of Aztec hangings, singing bowls, prayer rattles, Eastern art, dresses and instruments and strange furnishings. There are some places that seem to, through a collective upsurging in creative joy, find their way to a spot outside of time and from there send waves rippling up against the shores of our own slices of the here and now.”

  – Alan Watts
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   . Photo ~ Artist Jean Varda shared the ferry Vallejo with Buddhist writer/philosopher Alan Watts.