Customer Reviews

Gifts of Unknown Things: A True Story of Nature, Healing, and Initiation from Indonesia's Dancing Island

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While exploring the uncharted islands of the Javanese Atoll, Dr. Watson's boat is unexpectedly caught in a typhoon of incredible ferocity. When the storm abated, Dr.Watson and his crew discovered they had been carried nearly four hundred miles off their original course. With their boat badly damaged they headed for the first land they saw and discovered not only a refuge from the sea, but an island whose inhabitants possess an exceptional connection to the environment that surrounds them. Here were a people whose primary language is dance, who interpret sound as color, and who displayed a profound understanding of the power within everything that surrounded them; whether it be rock or tree, wind or sea. This is a journal of a personal odessey that changed the life of the author and will influence the life of everyone who reads it. The power of this book is not in its words but in the understandings that will resonate within the reader as the story of this incredible experience unfolds.

Biologist Lyall Watson travels to Indonesia in search of magic... and finds a 'dancing island' and a girl who comes of age to become a shaman and healer. For those who simply enjoy a good story, this is an excellent book. For those who realize that the magic described in this book is real, it's even better. Watson is a first-rate story-teller, and I would give this book ten stars if such a thing were possible!

Thank you Destiny Books for reprinting this extraordinary meditation by the iconoclastic scientist Lyall Watson! First published in England in 1976, Watson's ideas are just now beginning to surface in the mainstream. Read it for the beauty of its language and structure. Read it for the thoughts that will suddenly stream into your consciousness. Read it for the sense of wonder a truly great book can bring to your life.

I read this for a psychology Senior Seminar class at Univ. Maine @ Farmington... The intersection of scientific knowledge and inexplicable phenomena was awe inspiring... It is amazing how the natural world has yet to be sufficiently explained by science. This book was extremely easy to read, as I read most of it backwards (the chapters are broken down into sections). This is one of those books you can easily read twice!

This is a profoundly important book and one which I feel privileged to have read. How appropriate that Watson's travels should bring him to the island of Nus Tarian since his voice and his vision possess a similarly sublime and mystical beauty. This book speaks in a rare and essential language. Watson acts as translator and interpreter for the miraculous in nature, in ourselves and everything around us. And he does so through story telling and passionate observance, not through preaching.

This book is a gift. Its relevance to simultaneous events in my own life was precise, rhythmic and uncanny, lending a kind of mystical cadence to the experience of reading it. I couldn't put it down, and its contents have deeply affected the way I see myself and the world. Thank you to a great man and a great mind.

I first read this book about twenty years ago and fell in love with the stories in it. I have re-read it many times since and have recommended it to people over and over again. Watson is a great storyteller and the tell itself has great magic to it. Read it for yourself, you'll like it.

This is an incredable little book on the "magic" of other lands. I like the writings of Lyall, but this was a late comer to my list. It has absolutely captivated my imagination and heart. I am one of those that believe that what is narrated is "real" - is just that is in that other realm of "other ways of knowing". I constanly quote it and suggest it as reading for others. It is an eye and mind opener. It is a book that challenges our "Western" ways of knowing. It is a book that easily can be denied as true, but if one has read other books impossible to believe or has had similar "weird" experiences in life, then it has that intuition that it might be true and it can then be accept it as patentable possible.
I highly recommend it to anyone, you will be surprised!

I read this book when first published - and it has remained one of the most interesting, thought provoking and passionate books I have ever read.

With the recent interest in quantum physics (What the Bleep do I Know) and the resurgance of interest in application (the Secret) - it fascinates me that in this book - written a full 30 years before either of these two recent phenomena achieved cult following - Watson wrote about his observations as a scientist, of things he could not quite explain, and which make perfect sense after exposure to quantum physics and the power of intentional thought.

Best of all, Watson writes in a clear, easy prose - with beautiful descriptions, gentle humor and an ability to express himself without attemping to convert the reader towards thinking 'his way'.

You draw your own conclusions - and yet - this book also dares you to dream.

Tia , the primary character in The Gift of Uknown Things, would be about 50 years of age today. I hope she and her neighbors have refined and expanded their startling quiver of data transceiving talents.

Lyall Watson was a trained scientist and artful writer whose outputs were a bit fringey when this book first manifested in 1976. Today - to some of us who survived the pre-internet Dark Age, disco and George Effingbush - Watson now seems a wildly successful prophetic visionary. To find out about the near future - in broad strokes - it still might be advisable to pick up this book and read it.

See, not all of Watson's ideas have come to light in the wider world...yet. But enough of his cutting edge speculations - many about personal & group human powers which were long taken for granted in remote island societies for centuries - have indeed been scaled up to achieve global significance. They are now common, enriching and wildly profitable practice.

Example: Tia and her fellow islanders had a proto internet and social media thing up and running, about the time internet "inventor" Timothy Berners-Lee was being potty trained. Not only that, Tia's technology requires no monthly fees or modems.

Lyall Watson's decades old near-prophesies have thus set up an expectation. And expectations - we now know - can go viral. Human expectations are genuine force fields. Thus many MORE of the human potentials Watson re-discovered in late 20th century Indonesia may be realized by us all to powerful and liberating effect. Standby for a change of frequencies. And after that, prepare to heterodyne your frequencies.

I would love to know how readers under age 20 judge The Gift of Uknown Things. I suspect that so much new has happened in their first decades and that so much unspoiled "magic" remains in them, that they may find the book quite unexceptional. They make shake their heads and wonder why we oldies are making such a fuss.

And that would be a very good sign of progress, IMO.

If you bought this book when it was new in the 70's, please take it down and read it again. It will bring you the gift of smiles and kindly aspirations. I further predict that you'll smile at different places now.

Watson has written a compelling narrative that is both down to earth and magically uplifting. The book alternates between Watson's scientific musings on the supernatural phenomena taking place around him on the "Dancing Island"; and the true story of an eleven-year-old girl, whose ability to connect with the rhythms of the earth and other invisible energies, results in her healing and poltergeist type powers.

I love Watson's view of the extraordinary phenomena he experiences. When speaking of the powerful influences occurring at places such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid at Giza he writes:
"I am satisfied that all these structures were created by people who possessed an astronomical awareness and a mathematical expertise that we have only recently rediscovered. But I am unhappy with the manic attempts now being made to deify these builders as masters of an arcane and intergalactic order to whom all the secrets of the universe were known. They were people. Born of this earth and , like all things living here, imbued with a natural sensitivity to its cycles and rhythms."

Highly recommended for those seeking to learn more about what it means to be human.