This is Audible.
 New World Library presents "Still the Mind" by Alan Watts, read by the author.
 A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts.
 So, he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.
 By thoughts I mean specifically chatter in the skull,
 perpetual and compulsive repetition of words, of reckoning and calculating.
 I'm not saying that thinking is bad.
 Like everything else, it's useful in moderation.
 A good servant, but a bad master.
 And all so-called civilized peoples have increasingly become crazy and self-destructive
 because through excessive thinking they have lost touch with reality.
 That's to say, we confuse signs, words, numbers, symbols and ideas with the real world.
 Most of us would have rather money than tangible wealth
 and a great occasion is somehow spoiled for us unless photographed.
 And to read about it the next day in the newspaper is oddly more fun for us than the original event.
 This is a disaster.
 For as a result of confusing the real world of nature with mere signs,
 such as bank balances and contracts,
 we are destroying nature.
 We are so tied up in our minds that we've lost our senses.
 Time to wake up.
 What is reality?
 Obviously, no one can say because it isn't words.
 It isn't material, that's just an idea.
 It isn't spiritual, that's also an idea, a symbol.
 Reality is this.
 [Music]
 Do you realize that anybody whom you consider in matters spiritual, psychological and so on, has an authority?
 Has this authority because of your opinion that he has or she has?
 How do you know?
 If you say, for example, like a Protestant fundamentalist,
 that you believe in the Bible, that the Bible is inspired,
 or you may say as a more liberal kind of Christian that Jesus Christ is the greatest being that ever lived on earth,
 how do you know?
 It's your opinion that that is so.
 Lots of people may have told you so, and you may be very impressed by those people, but you bought it.
 And so therefore, if you say, well, I would like to become like that,
 that's an expression of the way you are.
 You couldn't feel, I would like to become like that, like the authority, like the Christ,
 except as an expression of the way you are now, and the way you are now is the quaking mess.
 And therefore, your emulation, your desire, your idealism to become like Christ,
 is merely one of the appetites of your quaking mess.
 It's an expression of you as you are.
 Don't fool yourself.
 I'm not trying to put you down by talking about the quaking mess.
 The quaking mess may be in fact something very, very natural,
 the way we are, the state of affairs, and we shouldn't be ashamed of it.
 I'm not ashamed of it. I told you all the tragic.
 But it is important not to fool oneself about this.
 But there does, doesn't there, seem to remain a problem about existence, about being alive.
 Now let's go into what is that problem, at the sort of nitty-gritty level.
 Very basic in our thinking is that we, as they say, one must live.
 We need to survive to go on.
 We need, therefore, money for food, for this, that and the other.
 We must go on.
 And we know that we're not going to get away with it for very long.
 That after a certain number of years we're going to die, that the thing that's going to end,
 the thing that we call "I" is going to be as it is in sleep, deep sleep, with no dreams.
 But that between now and that hour, there may be the most ghastly pains.
 Not only perhaps the pains of physical disease, or being wounded, or hurt,
 but the pains of worrying about our failure of responsibility to people who depend on us.
 And we suffer other people's sufferings simply because we're sensitive in our imagination
 and participate in their sufferings, and our adrenaline and our chemicals respond
 simply by imagination to the sufferings of other people.
 And what about that?
 And so we can look at these problems and say, now, quite obviously,
 all these problems cannot be solved in a physical way.
 That is to say, we do not expect in our lifetime that medical skill will make us exempt from death.
 We do not seriously expect that human beings will all learn to be nice to each other,
 and will refrain from war and horrors of that kind, racial prejudice and so on.
 We don't seriously expect to find a method of being protected
 by taking some sort of drug against all possible disease and pain.
 So therefore we say, now, maybe there's another way around.
 Maybe that instead of solving these problems at the technical level,
 we could solve them at the psychological and spiritual level by so disciplining ourselves,
 by so doing something with ourselves, that we wouldn't be afraid of it anymore.
 And so, in accord with that motivation, we seek out spiritual teachers, psychological teachers,
 this, that and the other.
 Could we somehow be made over so that we don't worry about the quaking mess
 via spiritual discipline or whatever.
 And you see, if you examine that,
 that this wanting to overcome the quaking mess and not have it anymore,
 that precisely is the quaking mess.
 The thing that we object to,


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