The Radicalism of Assimilating a New Idea

Meditations on Alan Watts and the importance of a deep learning orientation

I’ve been on a Watts wave lately.

I love Alan Watts, not only because I thought he was extremely handsome in his younger adult years (accentuated only by the depth of his understanding!) but also because he was such a key figure in translating Eastern philosophy to so many in the West. He began to challenge the dominant paradigm in the West (as a British man), and opened a gateway for people to understand softness and suppleness.

This softness and suppleness isn’t just external, though. It is a fundamentally different approach to life that imbues the way the mind operates as well. Watts, along with others in the philosophical space such as Iain McGilchrist and Ra Uru Hu, the messenger of the Human Design system, all spoke about left hemisphere thinking by different names. Watts talked about what the mind leaves out, McGilchrist has devoted volumes to the right brain, and Ra has lectured extensively about the emergence of the right brain and right mind, which are completely passive—that is, they take in everything. Even mainstream authors such as Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future, wrote about this shift.

Watching this shift happen on a global scale has forced me to really see how difficult it is for many people to drop what they’ve known and enter into the unknown. Before enlightenment there is frequently a period of extreme chaos and suffering, as we’ve seen with the Buddha and with Jesus. The thing about our times right now is that nature is forcing our hand, yet most people’s minds and egos are fighting to maintain control because the idea of not knowing creates fear and terror, not only about where we might go from here (hint: it’s something to look forward to) but about the possibility that many people’s lives have been built on sand, as Jesus says, or as Ra would say, they’ve lived their whole lives as not-self, on a falsehood.

When I teach about the goddess Eris, I talk about how this goddess creates disruptions when the cosmos is imbalanced. Imbalances usually occur when we welcome and privilege certain ideas to the exclusion of others, and disruptions or shifts are usually nature working in a way to restore itself. But because society has become so conditioned to think or understand in one direction (in this case, in the style of left-hemisphere thinking or what Ra calls the “strategic left”), many fail to understand that that entire way of relating to things was just that: a way of relating to things that is undergoing a massive rebalancing, transfiguration, and transmutation.

It’s interesting to notice how assimilating a new idea or expanding one’s perception and understanding is such a scary prospect for people. But if you haven’t been through it and practiced these things, how could you not be? If you were a wave about to crash onto shore, and you understood yourself as separate from other waves, you would be terrified of crashing, for it would be the end of your life. But if you understood that you were part of the ocean, then how could you not feel invincible and infinite? Maybe this sounds silly to the ego or rational mind, but if you think deeper, you’ll find it’s this very limitation that is now undergoing a shift.

Here’s what Alan Watts says about new ideas. In one of his lectures, he says:

There are certain ideas, and beyond these ideas, certain feelings, that are difficult to get across not because they’re intellectually complicated, but because they’re unfamiliar, estranged. We haven’t been brought up to accommodate it, in exactly the same way that in past times, people knew that the planets were supported in the sky because they were embedded in spheres of crystal, and if they weren’t embedded in spheres of crystal, they would fall down on the Earth. Now, when astronomers finally suggested that there were no crystal spheres, people felt unbelievably insecure, see? They had a terrible time assimilating this idea.

That is precisely what’s happening now. A new way of being has been pushing its way into the envelope of reality, yet the vast majority of humanity continues to resist in fear and terror. We’re entering the end of one era, but it’s not so much a death as much as it is an evolution. If people can understand that, then we can all move more gracefully through this time period and step into a more holistic paradigm on earth.

Assimilating new ideas is a radical practice, but it is completely achievable. What it requires is a deep learning orientation. When I say that, I do not mean that a person who simply pores through books day and night will come to understanding. There are many who are supposedly “erudite” but live their entire lives from unconsciousness (though an earnest searcher will be helped by many great texts). A deep learning orientation requires you become truly metacognitive in your process, to give up everything you thought you knew and allow the truer reality beneath that to emerge.

If you’re reading this, it’s because you’re searching for answers about how the planetary consciousness might change or are curious about how new ideas can emerge. It really begins with this quiet place that you can drop into. That is where realization comes from, and after realization follows an invitation to actualization. Stay on the journey and the new ideas won’t seem so radical at all.

Here’s Alan Watts. Feel free to join me on the Watts wave.