[Music]
 Hello, I'm Bill Hartley, publisher of Audio Renaissance, and I'm very pleased to introduce you to
 "Alan Watts Teaches Meditation," the most recent addition to our library of Alan Watts tapes.
 The material for this program has been made available to Audio Renaissance
 through our association with Alan Watts' son, Mark Watts,
 and the vast archival collection of recordings of Alan Watts maintained by the Electronic University.
 Portions of the material used in this recording were previously available under the title
 "Why Not Now," produced by Gary Usher for Ascension Records.
 The Electronic University wishes to acknowledge Mr. Usher's contribution
 and to thank him wherever he may be.
 And now, may I introduce Alan Watts, teaching meditation.
 [Music]
 The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality.
 And the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality
 because they confuse the world as it is with the world as they think about it,
 and talk about it, and describe it.
 For on the one hand, there is the real world,
 and on the other, a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds.
 These are very, very useful symbols. All civilization depends on them.
 But like all good things, they have their disadvantages.
 And the principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality,
 just as we confuse money with actual wealth,
 and our names about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, our images of ourselves with ourselves.
 Now of course, reality, from a philosopher's point of view, is a dangerous word.
 A philosopher will ask me, "What do I mean by reality?"
 Am I talking about the physical world of nature?
 Or am I talking about a spiritual world? Or what?
 And to that I have a very simple answer.
 When we talk about the material world, that is actually a philosophical concept.
 So in the same way, if I say that reality is spiritual, that's also a philosophical concept.
 But reality itself is not a concept. Reality is...
 [Bell rings]
 And we won't give it a name.
 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.
 Now, 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.
 Well now, in the art of meditation there are various props, supports.
 One thing that we are going to use as a means of stilling chatter in the mind is pure sound.
 And for that reason, it's useful to have a gong.
 This is a Japanese Buddhist gong, made of bronze and shaped like a bowl.
 If you don't have one of these, you can get the rounded end of an oxygen tank.
 Have a machinist saw it off roughly into the shape of a bowl and use that.
 Or you can use your own voice, chanting.
 Another prop in meditation is the use of incense.
 And that is because the sense of smell is our repressed sense.
 And because it's our repressed sense, it has a very powerful influence on us.
 And therefore we associate certain smells with certain states of mind.
 And so the smell of incense is associated with peace and contemplation.
 And so it's advantageous to burn incense in meditation.
 The other prop is a string of beads.
 And these beads are used in meditation for an unconscious method of timing yourself.
 Instead of looking at a watch, you move a bead each time you breathe in and out.
 So that at a certain rate, you see there are always 108 beads on a rosary.
 And when you get to slow breathing, halfway around the rosary is about 40 minutes.
 And that is the usual length of time for which one sits in meditation.
 Because otherwise you get uncomfortable and you get stiff legs and problems of that kind.


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