Alan Watts - Stop Talking to Yourself (Meditation, Motivational No Music)

now it's amazing what doesn't exist in the real world for example in the real world there aren't any things nor are there any events that doesn't mean to say that the real world is a perfectly featureless blank it means that it is a marvelous system of wiggles in which we describe things and events in the same way as we would project images on a rorschach plot or pick out particular groups of stars in the sky and call them constellations as if they were separate groups of stars well they're groups of stars in the mind's eye

in our system of concepts they are not out there as constellations already grouped in the sky so in the same way the difference between myself and all the rest of the universe is nothing more than an idea it is not a real difference and meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe and what that requires is that we shut up that is to say that we become interiorly silent and cease from the interminable chatter that goes on inside our skulls because you see most of us think

compulsively all the time that is to say we talk to ourselves i remember when i was a boy we had a common saying talking to yourself is the first sign of madness now obviously if i talk all the time i don't hear what anyone else has to say and so in exactly the same way if i think all the time that is to say if i talk to myself all the time i don't have anything to think about except thoughts and therefore i'm living entirely in the world of symbols and i'm never in relationship with

reality all right now that's the first basic reason for meditation but there is another sense and this is going to be a little bit more difficult to understand why we could say that meditation doesn't have a reason or doesn't have a purpose and in this respect it's unlike almost all other things that we do except perhaps making music and dancing because when we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point such as the end of the composition if that were the purpose of music to get to the end of the

piece then obviously the fastest players would be the best and so likewise when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as we would be if we were taking a journey when we dance the journey itself is the point when we play music the playing itself is the point and exactly the same thing is true in meditation meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment and therefore if you meditate for an ulterior motive that is to say to improve

your mind to improve your character to be more efficient in life you've got your eye on the future and you are not meditating because the future is a concept it doesn't exist as the proverb says tomorrow never comes there is no such thing as tomorrow there never will be because time is always now and that's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking we find there is only a present only an eternal now so it's funny then isn't it that one meditates for no reason at all except we

could say for the enjoyment of it and here i would interpose the essential principle that meditation is supposed to be fun it's not something you do as a grim duty the trouble with religion as we know it is that it is so mixed up with grim duties we do it because it's good for you it's a kind of self-punishment well meditation when correctly done has nothing to do with all that it's a kind of digging the present it's a kind of grooving with the eternal now and brings us into a state of peace where we

can understand that the point of life the place where it's at is simply here and now the easiest way to get into the meditative state is to begin by listening if you simply close your eyes and allow yourself to hear all the sounds that are going on around you just listen to the general hum and buzz of the world as if you were listening to music don't try to identify the sounds you're hearing don't put names on them simply allow them to play with your eardrums and let them go in other words you could put

it let your ears hear whatever they want to hear don't judge the sounds there are no as it were proper sounds or improper sounds and it doesn't matter if somebody coughs or sneezes or drops something it's all just sound and if i am talking to you right now and you're doing this i want you to listen to the sound of my voice just as if it were noise don't try to make any sense out of what i'm saying because your brain will take care of that automatically you don't have to try to understand anything just

listen to the sound as you pursue that experiment you will very naturally find that you can't help naming sounds identifying them that you will go on thinking that is to say talking to yourself inside your head automatically but it's important that you don't try to repress those thoughts by forcing them out of your mind because that will have precisely the same effect as if you were trying to smooth rough water with a flat iron you're just going to disturb it all the more what you do is this as you hear sounds coming up in your

head thoughts you simply listen to them as part of the general noise going on just as you would be listening to the sound of my voice or just as you would be listening to cars going by or to birds chattering outside the window so look at your own thoughts as just noises and soon you will find that the so-called outside world and the so-called inside world come together they are a happening your thoughts are happening just like the sounds going on outside and everything is simply a happening and all you're doing is watching it now

in this process another thing that is happening that is very important is that you're breathing and as you start meditation you allow your breath to run just as it wills in other words don't do at first any breathing exercise but just watch your breath breathing the way it wants to breathe and notice a curious thing about this you say in the ordinary way i breathe because you feel that breathing is something that you are doing voluntarily just in the same way as you might be walking or talking but you will also notice that when you

are not thinking about breathing your breathing goes on just the same so the curious thing about breath is that it can be looked at both as a voluntary and an involuntary action you can feel on the one hand i am doing it and on the other hand it is happening to me and that is why breathing is the most important part of meditation because it is going to show you as you become aware of your breath that the hard and fast division that we make between what we do on the one hand and what happens

to us on the other is arbitrary so that as you watch your breathing you will become aware that both the voluntary and the involuntary aspects of your experience are all one happening now that may at first seem a little scary because you may think well am i just the puppet of a happening the mere passive witness of something that's going on completely beyond my control or on the other hand am i really doing everything that's going along well if i were i should be god and that would be very embarrassing because i would be in

charge of everything that would be terribly responsible position the truth of the matter as you will see it is that both things are true you can see it that everything is happening to you and on the other hand you're doing everything for example it's your eyes that are turning the sun into light it's the nerve ends in your skin that are turning electric vibrations in the air into heat and temperature it's your eardrums that are turning vibrations in the air into sound and in that way you are creating the world but when we are not

talking about it when we are not philosoph philosophizing about it then there is just this happening this uh and we won't give it a name so then let me connect this with the problem of birth and death which puzzles people enormously of course because in order to understand what what the self is you have to remember that it doesn't need to remember anything just like you don't need to know how you work your thyroid gland so then when you die you're not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existence because that's not an experience

a lot of people are afraid that when they die they're going to be locked up in a dark room forever and sort of undergo that but one of the most interesting things in the world this is a yoga this is a way of realization try and imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up think about that children think about it it's one of the great wonders of life what will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up and if you think long enough about that something will

happen to you you will find out among other things that uh it'll pose the next question to you what was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep that was when you were born you see you you can't have an experience of nothing nature reports a vacuum so after you're dead the only thing that can happen is the same experience or the same sort of experience as when you were born in other words we all know very well that after people die other people are born and they're all you only you could

only experience it one at a time everybody is i you all know you're you and wheresoever beings exist throughout all galaxies it doesn't make any difference you are all of them and when they come into being that's you coming into being you know that very well only you don't have to remember the past in the same way you don't have to think about how you work your thyroid gland or whatever else it is in your organism you don't have to know how to shine the sun you just do it like you breathe isn't it doesn't

it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing and that you're doing all of this and you never had any education in how to do it you never learned but you're this miracle well the point is that from a strictly physical scientific standpoint this organism is a continuous energy with everything else that's going on and if i am my foot i am the sun only we've got this little partial view we've got the idea that no i'm just something in this body the ego that's a joke the ego is nothing other than the

focus of conscious attention it's like a radar on a ship the radar on a ship is a troubleshooter is there anything in the way and conscious attention is a designed function of the brain to scan the environment like a radar does and note for any trouble making changes but if you identify yourself with your troubleshooter then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety and the moment we cease to identify with the ego and become aware that we are the whole organism you realize as the first thing how harmonious it all

is because your organism is a miracle of harmony all this thing functioning together even those copper schools and creatures that are fighting each other in the bloodstream and eating each other up if they weren't doing that you wouldn't be healthy so what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at a higher level and you begin to realize that and you begin to be aware too that the discords of your life the discords of people's life which are a fight at one level at a higher level of the universe are healthy and harmonious

and you suddenly realize that everything that you are and do is at that level as magnificent and as free of any blemish as the patterns in waves the markings in marble the way a cat moves and that this world is really okay and can't be anything else because otherwise it couldn't exist but the reality underneath physical existence or which really is physical existence because in my philosophy there's no difference between the physical and the spiritual these are absolutely out of date categories it's all process it isn't stuff on the one hand and form on the

other it's just it is pattern life is pattern it is a dance of energy so i will never invoke spooky knowledge now that is to say that i've had a private revelation or that i have sensory vibrations going on a plane which you don't have everything is standing right out in the open it's just a question of how you look at it so you do discover when you realize this the most extraordinary thing to me that i never cease to be flabbergasted at whenever it happens to me i hope you got some value from this

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