Observations placeholder
Watts, Alan - Of twigs and tangles
Identifier
002765
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
The Joyous Cosmology – Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness – Alan W. Watts and Timothy Leary
I am looking at what I would ordinarily call a confusion of bushes – a tangle of plants and weeds with branches and leaves going every which way. But now that the organising, relational mind is uppermost I see that what is confusing is not the bushes but my clumsy method of thinking.
Every twig is in its proper place, and the tangle has become an arabesque more delicately ordered than the fabulous doodles in the margins of celtic manuscripts.
In this same state of consciousness I have seen a woodland at fall, with the whole multitude of almost bare branches and twigs in silhouette against the sky, not as confusion, but as the lacework of tracery of an enchanted jeweller. A rotten log bearing rows of fungus and patches of moss becomes as precious as any work of Cellini – an inwardly luminous construct of jet, amber, jade and ivory, all the porous and spongy disintegrations of the wood seeming to have been carved out with infinite patience and skill.