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

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!

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.

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.

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.