This microsite is the result of a 2 day Archival Club workshop facilitated by Mindy Seu and Jon Gacnik with California College of the Arts and the Berkeley Art Museum (April 1-2, 2017).

The site contains selected quotes from This Is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience by Alan Watts
in the collection for Hippie Modernism, The Struggle for Utopia (Feb 8 - May 21, 2017) in juxtapozition with roughly scanned images of Islamic prayer carpets from How to Read Islamic Carpets by Walter B. Denny in the collection for Architecture of Life (Jan 31 - May 29, 2016).

The exhibitions Hippie Modernism and Architecture of Life were held at the Berkeley Art Museum and cited references are located in the Koret Reading Room.

The world is not formed as it were inert clay responding to the touch of the potters hand; the world is form, or better, formation, for upon examination every substance turns out to be closely knit pattern.

But the gains of action by intelligence are brought at a price which at times seems so heavy that we might ask whether they are worth it. For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase - oddly enough - to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.

As we now know him, the human being seems to be a trap set to catch himself.

The realization of the unswerving rightness of whatever happens is no more manifested by utter lawlessness in social conduct than by sheer caprice in art.

Power and freedom can never be safe. They are dangerous in the same way that fire and electricity are dangerous.

There is a standpoint from which human affairs are as much right and wrong as the stars, and from which our deeds, experiences and feelings can be no more judged then the ups and downs of a range of mountains.