TOWARDS the end of the last decade, the English imagination was running wild over media reports that somebody in the part of South London where I grew up was apparently decapitating local cats.
Yes, one of the things depressed me most about my undergrad students was their focus on the need to get a job as a life project. A few clicked momentarily when I played a lecture by Alan Watts describing the futility of the normal Amnerican's trajectory through life, never getting to where they were satisfied. But what is there? Indigenous ideologies prclaim that the individual is not only part f the band, clan or tribe - but of the universe itself. Thus Jung realised one of the reasons for the extraordinary way Am Indians" all felt imoprtant when they each did something like the Navajo, who believed each person had to contribute to keeping the universe alive - can end up with Aztec sacrfices to the sun etc. but also the Hasidic idea that until each of us fulfils our unique task in the world, the messiah cannot come.
Interesting, I experienced this same attitude myself when I was at university as a mature student. I ended up there after being one of the long-term unemployed and was finally offered one of two places in Kent for an access course. I had been forced to attend a so-called 'Jobplan Workshop,' but the course leader there recognised that I was something of an autodidact and offered me a place. When I got to university in 1994, I would be waiting outside a seminar room and hear my fellow students - all considerably younger than I was - discussing how bored they were with the course and how they were only interested in obtaining a degree to get a job. Once the seminar got under way, they would transform themselves into fascinated swats who were hanging on the lecturer's every word and hoping for high marks in their forthcoming essays. It disgusted me.
I have a lot of time for Alan Watts and tend to wander around quite often with his lectures in my ears, and obviously sympathise with the idea that there is more to life than getting a career. What a breath of fresh air you must have been to your students, at least to those capable of thinking outside the box.
I am not sure if it was more like an arctic wind - one student dropped out in first year and came back 3 years later and told us he had a complete melt down as result of our lectures and set texts! But he climbed up again, and rejoined us. He was a real stoic, had been a champion diver, injured his back and was in permanent pain. Had a few stoical students I admired so much. One Mexican young woman, very slight, who had a bad leg that meant walking was painful, but she insisted on walking with the rest of us on our walking tours even though I offered a taxi for her. Sometimes my heart went out to them, and I felt so ashamed of my lifelong hypochondria.
Yes, one of the things depressed me most about my undergrad students was their focus on the need to get a job as a life project. A few clicked momentarily when I played a lecture by Alan Watts describing the futility of the normal Amnerican's trajectory through life, never getting to where they were satisfied. But what is there? Indigenous ideologies prclaim that the individual is not only part f the band, clan or tribe - but of the universe itself. Thus Jung realised one of the reasons for the extraordinary way Am Indians" all felt imoprtant when they each did something like the Navajo, who believed each person had to contribute to keeping the universe alive - can end up with Aztec sacrfices to the sun etc. but also the Hasidic idea that until each of us fulfils our unique task in the world, the messiah cannot come.
Interesting, I experienced this same attitude myself when I was at university as a mature student. I ended up there after being one of the long-term unemployed and was finally offered one of two places in Kent for an access course. I had been forced to attend a so-called 'Jobplan Workshop,' but the course leader there recognised that I was something of an autodidact and offered me a place. When I got to university in 1994, I would be waiting outside a seminar room and hear my fellow students - all considerably younger than I was - discussing how bored they were with the course and how they were only interested in obtaining a degree to get a job. Once the seminar got under way, they would transform themselves into fascinated swats who were hanging on the lecturer's every word and hoping for high marks in their forthcoming essays. It disgusted me.
I have a lot of time for Alan Watts and tend to wander around quite often with his lectures in my ears, and obviously sympathise with the idea that there is more to life than getting a career. What a breath of fresh air you must have been to your students, at least to those capable of thinking outside the box.
I am not sure if it was more like an arctic wind - one student dropped out in first year and came back 3 years later and told us he had a complete melt down as result of our lectures and set texts! But he climbed up again, and rejoined us. He was a real stoic, had been a champion diver, injured his back and was in permanent pain. Had a few stoical students I admired so much. One Mexican young woman, very slight, who had a bad leg that meant walking was painful, but she insisted on walking with the rest of us on our walking tours even though I offered a taxi for her. Sometimes my heart went out to them, and I felt so ashamed of my lifelong hypochondria.