Playing Kooee With God

People see his pleasure-ground; him no one sees at all.
– Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

When I was a boy in my ancestral home in South India, the children used to play a game called kooee. One little boy or girl would run and hide in a room of the labyrinthine building. Then he would call out “kooee,” and we would hear “kooee” echoing from all corners. “Kooee” would be coming from upstairs and downstairs; from the ceiling “kooee” would reverberate. We would race through the halls, tear through each room in search of the one who was crying “kooee.” Then at last we would catch her, and the game would be over.

This is the game we are all playing. Some people hear the call coming from the bank. Others hear the call from the haunts of pleasure. Many hear it coming loud and clear from status and prestige. Still others, tragically, seek power that calls to them with a loud voice.

We need to open our ears, so that when we hear the elusive call we will say, “Oh, that is Krishna playing on his flute. That is Jesus beckoning to us to follow him. That is the Divine Mother calling us home. That is the Buddha trying to wake us up.” Finally, we learn how to trace the sound to its source and say, “Caught you at last!”

--Eknath Easwaran

Alan Watts Revealed and Reconsidered

There are those who maintain that Alan Watts' self-destructive alcoholism, marital infidelities and failures, and other personal shortcomings or, at least, questionable behaviors completely undermine any glowing claims that might be made for his greatness as a philosopher-sage, spiritual authority, or just plain self-described "philosophical entertainer." These idealistic critics would argue that Watts' numerous books and innumerable audio lectures--charming and eloquent though they may be--should be blithely ignored because they are the empty words of a man who knew not of what he spoke or wrote, or were verbal potions peddled by a charlatan or spiritual pretender.

But I watch this video, and I say that not only was Alan Watts no charlatan (for no charlatan could walk and talk like the man in that video), but that he also expressed certain profound truths with such extraordinary eloquence and brilliance that it overrides his faults or, in Wilberian-integral terms, the unevenness of his lines of development. Alan Watts was a flat-out genius of a philosophical entertainer, and this video segment, along with the other segments comprising the entire video, are more impressive and inspiring to me than all of the words I've ever heard uttered by Ken Wilber, Thich Nhat Hanh, Krishnamurti and all of the other spiritual sages I've ever heard in person or on "record" put together, with all due and genuine respect to these remarkable persons in their own right.

Alan Watts was one of a kind whose likes will probably never come our way again. But THANK GOD we have videos like this to remember him by and benefit from. Moreover, if he was a fake, he was probably the most, in his own words, "genuine fake" one could ever hope to be, and that may have more to do with genuine "spirituality" than Watts' critics will ever realize as they pretend to be what they aren't and labor, like Sisyphus, to accomplish what they can't.