Watts and the Silent Mind

A transcription of sorts...

Roughly fifteen years ago, my philosophical pursuit began, stemming from a personal wonder about life and its ‘truth.’ I think most humans reach this curious stage at some point or another. I happened to be on the brink of adulthood and terrified of what was to come in the real world ahead.

By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity, we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.

-Alan Watts

When I started this pursuit, I encountered the lectures of Alan Watts, a man who had a knack for simplifying the ideas and understandings of Eastern wisdom. He became memorable with his clear and humorous interpretations on philosophical subjects and his voice was the sound of knowledge and wisdom personified that always left me wanting more.

I’m a sucker for a good voice.

I listened to his lectures on and off for years and thought I understood his words. I thought simply listening to him and understanding his words, thinking ‘oh ya, mmhmm, yup, that makes sense,’ made me a little more enlightened than the average Joe. His words were obvious, but I was oblivious.

This was arrogant thinking and the negligence in putting his words to action failed me. I listened, but lacked follow-through. I took his words for granted.

But that was my 20s. I feel as though my last big momentous mindset shift happened in my mid-20s (and upon researching this, it seems about accurate).

So, now in my 30s, I’m trying again.

In an effort to practice his teachings, I wanted to absorb his words. I decided to transcribe several of his lectures because, if being in school for an abundance of years taught me anything, it’s that writing spoken words (and/or re-writing text from a textbook, gah) can help retain information. Physically seeing the words does wonders for my immersion.

So, the following is that. Snippets of a transcription from Alan Watts’ lecture about meditation and silencing one’s thoughts called The Silent Mind.

(Don’t mind the run-on sentences. These are his spoken words.)

The Silent Mind

“[…] Fundamentally, meditation is not so much an exercise as it is a certain way of using one’s mind or one’s consciousness because, normally, most human beings, when they use their eyes or their ears, are constantly and chronically straining to see and to hear.

And when you come to think of it, that’s very odd because our eyes don’t work by effort. They don’t have to go out and get the light, the light comes to them, and in the same way sound comes to our ears and even the sensor of touch comes to our fingertips.

We don’t, for example, have to press a thing hard. If I want in the dark, I’m trying to fumble and feel what this is. I don’t have to press very hard to feel it because the sensation simply of the hard object comes to the nerve ends in my skin. And so it’s strange, isn’t it, that we have acquired the habit of a constant and chronic effort to see clearly and to hear clearly.

Through being taught that we must try to see and try to hear in order to have clear sight and clear hearing that we learn constantly to strain our senses in their use, but as a matter of fact, this impedes the clarity of our senses because, if you will, try staring hard at a book in front of you or staring very hard at the tv screen [you’re looking at right now], you’ll find that it becomes fuzzy.

Also, in the same way, if you’re trying to listen, say to a telephone conversation while the children are running all over the house and screaming, if you try to listen to the telephone, you’ll get very angry and you’ll have to start to yell at the children to make them be quiet. But on the other hand, if you just let the sound come to your ears, you’ll have no difficulty at all in hearing.

While we are seeing and hearing, we are trying to make sense of our world by thinking about it. And the act of thinking also introduces an element of strain into the use of our minds. And I think the reason for this is […] that thought is linear. […] It goes one word after another. It’s strung out in a line. […] Whereas, when we see, we see to what is going on entirely. We take in a volume when we see. We take in a great area.

Nature is a volume rather than something strung out in a line. But when we think, we get one thought after another, and so the process of thought is much slower than the process of seeing and using our consciousness or our mind as a whole. And this then requires a certain effort to make thought keep up with what we are seeing or what we are hearing. Also, you see, thought works by *abstraction.

Abstractions

*a simple image which we can grasp all at once and we have to do that in order to think so that we can use a series of very simple images or grasps of the world.

“It is fundamentally in terms of abstractions that we think.

Thought is slower [than seeing] because it goes in a line: thought after thought. And, also, thought is abstract, that is to say it lacks the full living quality of real life.

The more we tend to live in a world of thought, the more we tend to live in an abstract world that is removed from and has a gap between it and the real world of nature. And as a result of this, we tend to live in a world that is in some ways unsatisfying, lacking in vitality and life. And also, people tend to think all the time, this becomes — for every civilized community, every civilized person — a sort of habit, which is like constantly talking to yourself.

There is a popular proverb which says that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. And there’s some truth in this because constant thinking — as distinct from simply experiencing through our senses, constant thinking about our experiences, coding our experiences into words, into signs, into the symbols of thought — is a buzz that goes on day in and day out inside our heads except when we are sleeping and, as a result of that, we begin to live in a world increasingly divorced from reality.

This is not saying that thinking is a disturbance… is a thing that human beings shouldn’t do. On the contrary, it’s a highly important acquisition of man. But thinking is of no real value to us unless we also can practice non-thinking, unless we can have our mind silent and make immediate contact with the real world as distinct from the world of pure abstraction.

On meditation

“The object is not to cut out all the things that you might be experiencing through your eyes and through your ears, through your nose and your nerve ends on the skin. The object is simply to let one’s mind alone; to experience but not to try and catch hold of one’s experience in thoughts. Simply to think — oh, no, I wouldn’t say think. That’s a word we use very ambiguously. When I use the word think I mean talk to yourself or bring a lot of images before your mind which have nothing to do with what’s right in front of you.

Now as you do this, you begin to notice a rather curious change in your general feeling of life. You notice that there ceases to be what I would call ‘an interruption’ or an ‘interval between your experience and yourself.’

You see, in our ordinary way of using our minds, the chronic sense of strain, the chronic attempt to think about and make sense of what we are feeling is what we call our ego.

If you say ‘I experience my own existence. I am aware constantly of a knower behind and receiving all that is known,’ then you get this chronic sensation of there being an I, a self, who has all these experiences and that I or self is what we call the ego and this chronic sense of strain is our… you might call it our psychological blocking against our experience — the thing that seems to divide us from an external world, from the whole universe.

But when in this way, the interval begins to diminish, we begin to experience our world as ourselves. There is no interval, there is no interruption between the knower and the known.

Just as when we are completely absorbed listening to music or dancing to music, we are not aware of our separation from it. We go right with it. And so, in the same way, when the mind responds instantly to what the senses bring, it seems almost as if the mind and what it experiences were one in the same.

Does what we know depend on there being a knower?

Now, in a way, obviously, it does because when a tree falls in a forest, it certainly makes vibrations in the air, but those vibrations in the air do not become noise unless they vibrate an eardrum. So in the same way, the light from the sun does not become light unless it falls on an eyeball and, too, we can say the external world is full of hard things but nothing is hard except in relation to the soft surface of the human skin. Nothing is heavy except in relation to human muscles.

So if there is not a human organism, the world does not appear to us at all as having any of the characteristics which we attach to an external world. In other words, we could say ‘the sun is light but only because of eyes. Rocks are hard but only because of soft fingers. Falling rocks are noisy, but only because of sensitive human ears.’

We cannot form any idea at all of what the world would be like without an observing mind. Even such things as duration — the span of time — depend up the human mind to appreciate them. Space depends on a human mind to observe the world from a particular position and so know there are things which are distant from it.

Without this mind, there could not be any world that we could think about or conceive or imagine in any way whatsoever and so this shows, in a very clear way, that our mind and the external world go together. They are inseparable differences.

[…] Although there is a difference in a way, between the knower and the known, between man and the world, nevertheless these two go together and they are fundamentally inseparable.

And therefore, when our consciousness is responding instantly, without any interval or interruption, without any, shall we say, stopping to think about it, then we have a situation in which we are actually realizing. We are actually feeling the true physical relationship which exists between man and his environment and this we could call the experience of oneness or unity with the universe which is the function of meditation.

The takeaway

“And so in the same way, if we try to live in the world of pure thought, we begin to feel a strange unsatisfactory quality to the world. And this living in pure thought is not something that is only done by, you know, professors and intellectuals and thinking people. Perfectly ordinary people often live in the world of pure thought.

As for example, when we pursue certain goals in life, when we say ‘I want to be successful, I want to be happy,’ these are really abstractions because supposing you become enormously wealthy and you’re able to afford three cars and six houses. You can’t drive in three cars at once. You can’t live in six houses at once. You have a symbol, which we call ‘prestige of your status,’ but that is an abstract symbol. You can’t eat prestige. You can’t eat success.

And so, to overcome that kind of beguilement by the fantasies of thought, not thinking is an important adjunct to thought. To be able every so often to cease the hubbub going on inside one’s head and to let talking to oneself stop and come to stillness.

Just let your mind alone and stop trying to make sense of the world so that there is really something to think about other than thought itself.

So in this way, through meditation, we come to that kind of profound peace, which is exhibited in the faces of the Buddhas.”

Processing it all

If we live entirely in a world of thought, our expectations in life and about life are false because we aren’t thinking the whole picture. We aren’t seeing the nature of the real world and its reality.

My ultimate undoing is overthinking —and sideways thinking for all intents and purposes. I need to stop. I need to stop trying so hard to stop. The longer my existence, the more I desire to be present instead of in thought and one can’t be present if they’re thinking.

Cheers,

Hannah

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Thanks for taking time out of your day to read this. Hopefully you gained as much insight from these words as I did.

If you aren’t familiar with the teachings of Alan Watts, here’s an archive of his many lectures. He addresses subjects such as anxiety, nothingness, the self, money, materialism, technology, nature, love, music, nirvana, etc.

Feel free to leave a comment, discuss, and if you found this interesting, please consider sharing with friends and family.