Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

ive noticed reference to the philopophical entertainer alan watts

whoms else works have you noted he animates in his writings?

Honestly, I don't know. Doctor we need an academic in this thread, Stat.

Carl Jung

Particularly "Collective Unconscious" in Destination: Void.

Give Santaroga Barrier a try. If that is what you are looking for, that one'll keep you busy for days.

Although, Santeroga Barrier It's more of a Collective-alternate Conciousness

i throughly enjoyed the Santeroga Barrier!
read quite a few of him non dune books over the last decade

not sure if your farmiliar with the works of alan watts, the "philosophical entertainer" who spoke wrote and lectured from the 50's into the early 70's. he was a volunteer programmer on the bay area pacifica station from the early 50's and he gained a wide audience.

if youve listened to him speak much, he comes around a few times to wanting to be dumped in a hole with a tree planted over him when he dies. his descriptions of a burial he would want and how modern reverence about the event was foolish is almost identical to odrade describing the practice on chapterhouse to skytale. i suspect that frank was farmiliar with watts works

distrans wrote:ive noticed reference to the philopophical entertainer alan watts

whoms else works have you noted he animates in his writings?

Terence McKenna, in his non fiction book "Food of the Gods" he writes on how the pre-agriculture humans used hallucinogens to erase the boundaries of the ego and to engage in large orgies that helped to cement the tribe, and the resulting children were taken care of and raised by everyone.

McKenna ?

How about K. Dick ?



That was some weird read.

cmsahe wrote:

distrans wrote:ive noticed reference to the philopophical entertainer alan watts

whoms else works have you noted he animates in his writings?

Terence McKenna, in his non fiction book "Food of the Gods" he writes on how the pre-agriculture humans used hallucinogens to erase the boundaries of the ego and to engage in large orgies that helped to cement the tribe, and the resulting children were taken care of and raised by everyone.

Is that an on topic point because the novel you refer to wasn't published till 92.

I did check first to see how much has been said about Alan Watts on the forum as a whole, with a decent search, before launching this post...
Earlier in this thread, Distrans wrote in 2013 that Alan Watts was probably an influence.
It'd be great if there were more direct evidence of that. Certainly it seems like they were both in California around the same time and both did radio work down there.

Comic Book Girl 19 (who prides herself on being 'Dune Lady' and hosts a book club every summer on the Dune books) posted Watts Wave 3 by Akira the Don on her Patreon Page, for Father's Day 2018. Which deals with Time possibly actually flowing backwards from the present instead of forwards, which was a key idea in the view of prescience in the Dune books (at least by the time Leto II takes the spice-essence in Children of Dune, and then forward from there).
Why else is this relevant? See below:

Anyway if you listen to the "watts waves" that Akira the Don has put on YouTube you can catch some of the references that are almost verbatim.
1. Compare in Chapterhouse Dune the jokes of ancient Dune about the wild desert ass going past the slit in the fence and the guy jumping up and saying the nose is the cause of the tail, with a spot in Watts Wave 3 (which deals with Time) except that Alan refers to a snake passing a fence.

[edit of 3-2-2019: the snake passing the fence is in Watts Wave 3 at 15:41:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23pgfpgv_Pg
]

2. Compare in Heretics of Dune the quote where Taraza talks about "more damage has been done by reformers" with a spot about 2/3 of the way through Watts Wave 2 where Alan talks about a Confucius saying, the goody goodys being the thieves of virtue and how doing good to others and even doing good to oneself is amazingly destructive [edit: watts wave 2 at 23:31], because it's full of conceit.

[edit of 3-2-2019: the spot that most closely follows Taraza's chapter heading about damage from reformers is at 35:33 in Watts Wave 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH3eGosOqXU
]
[Between those two spots he talks about genetics which sort of presages the Tleilaxu stuff.]

3. Compare in Watts Wave 4 "What if we made a device that would give you anything you wanted? You would eventually have to make a button marked..surprise." and elsewhere "all perfectly known futures...are past. They have happened--virtually." with any of a number of points in God Emperor of Dune where Leto II says things like "a universe of surprises is what i pray for!"
[edit of 3-2 this is fairly early into Watts Wave 4, at 6:03:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhbAzFw-7xg
]

I will come back later and edit this post, and clean this up with actual minutes and seconds reference ranges to the videos, and page references in the books, assuming Freakzilla doesn't boot me off here for violating the No Advertising rule by mentioning either Comic Book Girl 19 or Akira's stuff (which could be construed as such I guess...).
Maybe he just meant no advertising as in no stupid banner links.

These were the first three, I suspect there is at least a 4th good piece of evidence in the Watts Wave videos that Frank had at least watched Alan's TV shows or listened to the audio of the lectures. Just can't think of it for now.

Thanks! I look forward to your next post on this.

Well it's not necessarily a next post so much as an edit of the earlier one.
So far today I have put the watts waves links up and the minute and seconds references.
I'm not cool enough to make them link to the exact minute/second positions, the links probably just go to the beginnings of each video.
--D

This one's not Akira the Don.
Compare Children of Dune:
"To suspect that you are mortal is to know the beginning of terror. To know irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror."

With

44:05 into this Alan Watts lecture (almost the end of it, its 46 minutes in length)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZTFfyUnEnc

Really at the beginning of it for the first few minutes as well.
He goes into a fair amount of the history of western philosophy in the middle of it (which is kind of a digression or change of subject from what I originally brought this clip to your attention for), but there's another point of pertinence to Dune, about the Pharaonic model.
Compare "I hate this thing, but it saved Ghani and me." (God Emperor of Dune).
And of course any other spot in God Emperor where Leto was talking about kings, like the one who had a pikestaff handy to kill messengers...
with the vivid depiction of kings in their throne room:
8:15 to about 10:00 in the same video