Successful
Alan Watts For When You Need To Stop Thinking
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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 chit chat 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 Kojibsky called, so delightfully, the unspeakable world, the nonverbal world. Some people would call it the physical world, but these words, physical, nonverbal 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 Joe, 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 really are not going anywhere. You're just doing pure action. But if you act with a thought in mind that as a result of action, you are eventually going to arrive at some place where everything will be all right. Then you are on a squirrel cage, hopelessly condemned to what the buddhist calls samsara, the round or rat race of birth and death. Because you think you're going to get somewhere, you're already there. The point is that one cannot act creatively except on the basis of stillness, of having a mind that is from time to time capable of stopping thinking. And so this practice of sitting may seem very difficult at first because if you sit in the buddhist way, it makes your legs ache. Most 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 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 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. See if you force sound into five tones, you force color into five colors, you're blind and deaf. The world of color is infinite as is the world of sound. 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, shall I be so bold as to use the word discipline of meditation or Zazan, lies behind the extraordinary capacity of Zen people to develop such great arts as the gardens, the tea ceremony, the calligraphy and the grand painting of the Song Dynasty and of the Japanese Sumi tradition. They found in the very simplest things of everyday life, magic. In 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. Comes a point when the sound is taken away and you're wide open. Now, at that point there will be a kind of preliminary so-called satori and you will think, wow, that's it. You'll be so happy, you'll be walking on air. When Suzuki Daisets was asked, what is it like to have satori, he said, well, it's like ordinary everyday experience except about two inches off the ground. From this standpoint of Buddhism there is no fundamental difference between the transcendental world and this everyday world. The Bodhisattva, 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 doesn't come back because he feels he has some sort of solemn duty to help mankind and all that kind of pious camp. He comes back because he sees the two worlds of the same. He sees all other beings as Buddhas. He sees them to use a phrase of G.K. Chesterton's. But now a great thing in the street seems any human nod where move in strange democracy is the million masks of God. The world has seen in an ordinary everyday state of 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 your 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 mandala appearing, this great sun, and beyond the violet there's black, black, like obsidian, not flat black but transparent black, like blacker. And again blazing out of the black as the yang comes from the end, 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 ills, but then along with the colours the sound goes down the scale, and 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 yui yui yui yui dancing like this, and naturally the sound starts going waving to 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, and 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 yui yui yui like this, we're going to do little curly cues, we're going to go yui yui yui yui like this, and then suddenly you see in all the little details it becomes so intense, with all kinds of little subfigures that 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've gone out of your mind and suddenly it turns into, why us sitting around here. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] A new law is helping me save more money on prescription drug costs. You may be able to save too. With Medicare's extra help program, my premium is zero and my out-of-pocket costs are low. Who should apply? Single people making less than $23,000 a year or a married couple who make less than $31,000 a year. Even if you don't think you qualify, it pays to find out. Go to ssa.gov/extrahelp paid for by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Hey guys, it is Ryan. I'm not sure if you know this about me, but I'm a bit of a fun fanatic when I can. I like to work, but I like fun too. And now I can tell you about my favorite place to have fun.