Alan Watts For When You Need To Stop Thinking

if you talk all the time you'll never hear what anybody else has to say therefore all you'll have to talk about is your own conversation the same is true for people who think all the time the constant uh chitchat of symbols and images and talk and words inside your skull now if you do that all the time you'll find that you've nothing to think about except thinking and just as you have to stop talking to hear what others have to say you have to stop thinking to find out what life is about and the moment you stop thinking you become into immediate contact with what ksky called so delightfully the Unspeakable world the nonverbal World some people would call it the physical world but these words physical non-verbal material are all conceptual and is not a concept so when you are awake to that world you suddenly find that all the so-called differences between self and other life and death Pleasure and Pain are all conceptual and they're not there they don't exist at all when the old Master yaku Joo was asked what is then he said when hungry eat when tired sleep but they said well isn't that what everybody does aren't you just like Ordinary People oh he said no they don't do anything of the kind when they're hungry they don't just eat they think of all sorts of things when they're tired they don't just sleep but dream all sorts of dreams we have been running around far too much it's all right we've been active and our action has achieved a lot of good things but as Aristotle pointed out long ago and this is one of the good things about Aristotle he said the goal of action is contemplation in other words busy busy busy busy busy but what's it all about especially when people are busy because they think they're going somewhere they're going to get something and attain something there's quite a good deal of point to action if you know you're not going anywhere if you act like you dance or like you sing or play music then you know you're not going anywhere you're just doing pure action but if you act with the thought in mind that as a result of action you are eventually going to arrive at some place where everything will be all [Music] right then you are on a squirel cage hopelessly condemned to what the Buddhists call ssara the round or rat race of birth and death because you think you're going to get somewhere you're already there but the point is that uh one cannot act creatively except on the basis of Stillness of having a mind that is from time to time capable of stopping [Music] thinking and so this practice of sitting may seem very difficult at first because it if you sit in the Buddhist way uh it makes your legs ache most uh westerners start to fidget they find it very boring to sit for a long time but the reason they find it boring is that they're still [Music] thinking if you weren't thinking you wouldn't notice the passage of time and as a matter of fact far from being boring the world when looked at without chatter becomes amazingly interesting the most ordinary sights and sounds and smells the texture of Shadows on the floor in front of you all all these things without being named and saying that's a shadow that's red that's brown that's somebody's foot when you don't name things any longer you start seeing them you see if you if you force sound into five tones you force color into five colors you're blind and deaf the the World of Color is infinite as is the world of sound and it is only through stopping fixing conceptions on the World of Color and sound that you really begin to hear it and see it so this uh shall I be so bold as to use the word discipline of meditation or zazen lies behind the extraordinary capacity of Zen people to develop such great Arts as uh the gardens the tea ceremon the calligraphy and the grand painting of the sun Dynasty and of the Japanese aumi tradition they found in the very simplest things of everyday life [Music] magic and the words of the poet hokoji marvelous power and Supernatural activity drawing water carrying wood the easiest way to stop thinking is first of all to think about something that doesn't have any meaning or listening to a sound that has no meaning because that stops you thinking because you become fascinated in the sound uh comes a point when the sound is taken away and you're wide open now at that point uh there will be a kind of preliminary so-called Satori and you will think wow we that's it you'll be so happy you'll be walking on air when Suzuki diets was asked what is it like to have Satori he said well it's like ordinary everyday experience except about 2 in off the ground from the standpoint of Buddhism there is no fundamental difference between the transcendental world and this everyday world the bodh satva you see who doesn't go off into a Nirvana and stay there forever and ever but comes back and lives ordinary everyday life to help other beings to see through it too he he doesn't come back because he feels he has some sort of solemn duty to help Mankind and all that kind of Pious C he comes back because he sees the two worlds are the same he sees all other beings as Buddhas he sees them to use a phrase of GK chesteron but now a great thing in the street seems any human nod we move in strange democracy of the million masks of God the world as seen in an ordinary everyday State of [Music] Consciousness to find out that that is really no different from the world of supreme ecstasy because here is the light that brilliant blazing energy brighter than a thousand suns which is locked up in everything now imagine this imagine you're seeing it Vivid Vivid light so bright it's beyond light it's so bright and you watch it receding from you and on the edges like a great star that becomes a rim of red and beyond that a rim of orange yellow green blue indigo violet you see this great Mandela appearing this great sun and Beyond The Violet there's black black like obsidian not flat black but transparent black like lacquer and again blazing out of the black as the Yang comes from the in more light going going going and along with this light there comes sound there's a sound so tremendous with the white light that you can't hear it so piercing that it seems to annihilate the ear [Music] but then along with the colors the sound goes down the scale in harmonic intervals down down down down until it gets to a deep thundering base which is so vibrant that in turn it turns into something solid and you begin to get the similar spectrum of textures now all this time you've been watching the kind of a thing radiating out but it says you know this isn't all I can do and the Rays start going dancing like this and naturally the sound starts going waving too as it comes out and then the textures start varying themselves and they say well you've been looking at this thing as I've been describing it so far in a flat Dimension let's add a third dimension it's going to come right at you now see this way and meanwhile it says it's not just that we're going to go y like this we're going to do little curly cues we're going to go you like this and then sudden you see in all the little details have become so intense that all kinds of little subfigures are contained within what you thought were originally the main figure and the sound starts going all different amazing complexities of sound all over the place and this thing's going going going and you think you're going to go out of your mind and suddenly it turns into why us sitting around here [Music] e

Channel: T&H - Inspiration & Motivation

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Id: EVerqpMjYYg

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2024