What Is Wrong With Our Culture ( Alan Watts )

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make community structures work. I’ve been reflecting and meditating on the many possibilities we could create, trying pull together the common limitations and complaints people generally have about our world and how it currently functions, and then find a common thread. What drives us? What do we really want? How much of our displeasure is actually a result of our own thoughts and limitations vs just our external world?

What about people who convince themselves that they don’t need to grow, yet aren’t in the greatest of places within themselves? How do we go about living as a group, community, humanity, etc., when we have all these different ideals? What exactly drives our world to be the way it is? Is it the fact that it is, what appears to be, ‘poorly designed?’ Is it our consciousness and view of the world that makes it this way, and therefore we keep repeating it, since we are still searching for answers?

The State of Our World

Alan Watts draws attention to the state of our world and what we hope to get out of it in a powerful way. He touches on our thoughts as they relate to the world, and looks at how those thoughts drive our creation of it.

In my view, we need a drastic shift in our consciousness and thoughts towards ourselves and our world. We can recognize and see the ‘problems’ around us, but recognizing the solution to them is often a challenge. Is it entirely physical? Do we need to change our minds and perceptions of things? With so many brilliant ideas out there that seem to continue to get suppressed and limited, one has to wonder whether or not the world simply isn’t ready for such a shift yet. By this I mean, maybe as a whole there aren’t enough of us who are ready for such drastic changes – maybe, unconsciously we are holding those changes back. There is no doubt that there is a power structure out there that is also suppressing things, but what is allowing and supporting that power structure to be that way in the first place? Is it perhaps us?

Certainly something to think about.