Still The Mind

This recording is a short excerpt from Alan Watts's book Still the Mind, in which he warns that a mind given over entirely to thinking has nothing left to think about but its own thoughts, a compulsive chatter of words and calculations he calls a good servant but a bad master. He argues that so called civilized peoples have grown crazy and self destructive because excessive thinking causes them to confuse signs, words, numbers, symbols, money, photographs, and news reports, with the tangible reality those signs are meant to represent. He gives everyday examples: people who would rather have money than tangible wealth, an occasion that feels spoiled unless it is photographed, an event that becomes more enjoyable to read about the next day than to have actually experienced. This confusion of sign for substance, he warns, is not merely an intellectual error but a disaster with real consequences, since treating nature as bank balances and contracts is what allows it to be destroyed. The recording breaks off mid sentence, just as Watts begins to describe how far this thinking has separated people from their own senses.