A clear and disarming reflection from Alan Watts on what meditation actually is. Not a tool for self improvement. Not a path to becoming something better.
But a release from the need to get anywhere at all. When the effort to improve falls away, something unexpected happens. The energy that was chasing a better version of you becomes available for simply being here.
Full talk, ‘Meditation and Flow’ on youtube and available in the AlanWatts.com store within the ‘Tao for Now’ audio series and The Works full Alan Watts collection.
Transcript: “In meditation the real art of it is to be free, is to be free from concepts. But that implies something else very difficult for Americans to understand, that you are not meditating when you are meditating for a purpose, when you are doing it because you think it’s good for you, because you think you’re going to improve yourself. You can’t improve yourself or anybody else for that matter, just as you can’t lift yourself up by your own bootstrap. And when you give up trying to improve yourself, you have all that energy available for things that can actually be done. So when there’s no thought about self improvement, about going somewhere, about achieving a different state of consciousness, but being simply here, that’s the only place you can be actually. Because when you remember the past, your memories are present experiences. When you anticipate the future, your anticipations are present experiences. There’s nowhere else to be. Where’s your hurry? So the art of meditation is essentially relaxing, the verbal commentary on the world that constantly goes on, and coming to center, which is the present.”
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“Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, Alan Watts had the rare gift of ‘writing beautifully the un-writable’. Watts begins with scholarship and intellect and proceeds with art and eloquence to the frontiers of the spirit. A fascinating entry into the deepest ways of knowing.” — Los Angeles Times
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