Alan watts on why to meditate in detail
Alan Watts presents meditation as a way of getting “into touch with reality,” because most civilized people are “out of touch with reality” when they confuse the world as it is with the world as they think about it and describe it 1. In that sense, the point of meditation is not to build up more ideas about life, but to see past the “whole system of symbols” that usually stands between us and direct experience 1.
He also suggests that meditation is not mainly a technique for achievement. In one passage, he says he avoids overemphasizing formal Asian methods for Westerners because they can become “aids” to ego-display rather than genuine concentration 2. He says many people become “self-conscious” about meditation and are “so preoccupied with the idea of doing it that they never really do it at all” 2. Relatedly, he reports Krishnamurti’s challenge to the whole project of trying to meditate as a method for getting somewhere: “why do you want to meditate?” 3. In that same spirit, Watts quotes the idea that there is “nothing… that you can do to improve, transform, or better yourself,” and that true meditation comes only after abandoning that ambition 4.
For Watts, meditation is valuable because it is a way of stopping the mind’s constant interference. He describes it as “watching everything that is happening, including your own thoughts and your breathing, without comment” 6. When that happens, “thinking, or talking to yourself, drops away” and you discover that there is no separate “yourself” apart from “everything which is going on, both inside and outside the skin” 6. He says consciousness, breathing, feelings, wind, trees, insects, water, and city sounds are all “a single many-featured ‘happening’” in “a perpetual now without either past or future” 6.
Watts also emphasizes that meditation is not about forcing the mind into blankness or trying to control experience 7. Instead, it is a “non analytic mind” and a “non probing mind,” where you stop creating problems by trying to control what you see, hear, or feel 7. He says that if you try to control experience fundamentally, you run “around in a circle,” because what you are experiencing is yourself 7. That is why he calls meditation “the one thing in which you are completely here and now, with no reason for it with nothing in mind as a result or a consequence” 15.
He even frames meditation as a kind of passive receptivity. In one talk, he says “passivity is the root of life” and that by simply sitting and “not doing anything,” one can slowly become aware of everything that is happening 12. So, for Watts, meditation is not chiefly about producing a special state on command; it is about becoming receptive to reality, ceasing to over-manage experience, and recognizing the ever-present “now” 61215.
If you want, I can also summarize Watts on:
- meditation as a path to “no-self”
- why he distrusts forced techniques
- meditation versus prayer or concentration
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