Still the Mind

by Alan Watts

  Yet people are still bothered, and ask, “Why do it then?” — as if to say, “Why use energy at all? Why not just be still?” But of course that’s the same as asking, “Why does the universe exist?” Why, in other words, is there motion?

  The answer to that is because there is stillness. And why is there stillness? Because there is motion. In this way you reach an end to the question why, because it just goes around in circles.

  Another way to reach an end to the question why is to go back into the past, because when you do you find explanations behind explanations, so that, in the words of a favorite semanticists’ verse:

  Big explanations have little explanations

  upon their backs to bite them,

  and little explanations have lesser explanations,

  and so on infinitum.

  In other words, you can never get there.

  What happens, in fact, when we search the past to try to understand why we are doing what we are doing? What happens is that the track fades away. Look back as far as you may, but you will never find the beginning because the track gives out, just as the wake of a ship vanishes, or the contrail of a plane melts into the air. The past, which we considered to be the push-off point, or the cause, is gone.

  The real reason the past doesn’t work as an explanation, however, is of course very simple: the push-off , the cause, never was in the past, it has always been in the present. It is perfectly obvious that if there was a time when the universe came into being, when it did do so, it was now. And that now is still here, and it is still beginning, right at this moment. So what we call the past is simply the traces, the fade-outs trailing away from the present.

  So there is little point in asking why you are here , because unless you think you are here to resolve some past business — in which case you have been motivated as if you were a billiard ball hit by a cue — the issue is irrelevant.

  Everybody is always talking about motivation and asking why, “Why do it?” But you can always say, “Why not?” And although that sounds a little childish by way of an answer, there is no why, and in a way that is rather splendid.

  We tend to think that things are meaningless and dreadful if we can’t explain why they happen. A policeman who pulls over a motorist who wasn’t going fast enough asks, “Where are you going?” “Nowhere special,” comes the answer. This irritates the policeman because he thinks you must be on the road for some reason, and that you ought to be going somewhere. If you are not, you are suspect because you’re probably crazy or up to no good.

  DESIRES AND DRIVES

  Why do you do anything? Is it because of desire?

  When people refer to their basic desires, they call them instincts, which is simply a way to label desires as drives. We all feel driven — and yet you don’t realize that the energy of a drive is you. When you habitually abstract yourself from what you are experiencing as the experiencer or the knower of the experience, you come to feel like a puppet being driven by your emotions, or by your appetites or desires, whatever they are. But in fact they do not drive you, for there is no you to be driven by them. They are you.

  And so this notion that leads to saying or thinking, “Excuse me, I am driven,” or “Excuse me, I have to eat, I have to work, I have sexual desires” — all this is rubbish. I will not apologize for what is called “my hunger. ” I am very happy to be hungry, and to eat. So instead of saying, “Excuse me, but I must eat,” I eat with pleasure. Look at what a degradation of ourselves that attitude carries with it, and it all comes from this feeling of being pushed or driven by something we believe is greater than we are.

  THE VAST WORKINGS UNDERNEATH

  The reason we feel it is greater than ourselves is because we have a conception of ourselves as nothing more than the superficial scanning mechanism called “consciousness.” Of course, if that is all you are, naturally you feel driven, because you are disconnecting yourself from the vast workings that lie behind consciousness.

  We disown the part of ourselves that we call instinctual, animal, or primitive. We think instead that as human beings we are the garnishing on top of the evolutionary pile. We feel we are much more evolved, not realizing that everything we have by way of consciousness and reason grows out of the primal energy that lies underneath it.

  Therefore, if reason grows out of the primal energy that we are, then it means that the primal energy is at least reasonable, whatever else it may be. You can tell the tree by its fruits — for “by their fruits you shall know them” — and so it is that figs do not grow on thistles, or grapes on thorns, and a stupid universe does not create people. People are a manifestation of the potentiality in the energy of the universe, and if we are intelligent, then that which we express is also intelligent. By logical extension, that in which we express it is our central self. The world is not something external; it is what is most fundamentally you.

  As long as we think we are motivated by something external, however, and therefore feel insufficient, as long as we have that conception of ourselves, we are playing to win, because what we want is to win more, and become more. But as I pointed out, our conception or image of ourselves is only a caricature, and as such is abstract and completely inadequate. It feels as if we’re in sufficient in some way.

  If you ask, “What did you do yesterday?” the average person will consult memory and give you a very attenuated, strung-out chronicle of events, having reduced yesterday’s experience to a thin line of words. What you did yesterday becomes what you noticed yesterday, and what you noticed yesterday was a very tiny part of what happened. It was only as much as you could record in some memory code, in words or in brief impressions.

  If you identify yourself with that skinny little stream of life, it is no wonder that you feel unsatisfied, because you ate the fish bones instead of the fish. And since we think that is what is happening all the time, and that life is only this skinny little thing, we feel hungry for experience, for thrills, and for ecstasy.

  We say, “There must be more coming,” and we need more and more future, because the past is gone, and it was a scraggly past anyway. We have no present, because life looks like an hourglass: It has a big future and a big past, but only a tiny little neck of a present that everything is squeezed through.

  In Buddhist symbology the idea behind the hourglass is represented as a kind of being called a preta. A preta is thought of as a hungry spirit, and these creatures are represented as having enormous bellies but mouths and throats only about the diameter of a needle, so they can never get enough. That tiny mouth and immense belly represents the neck of the hourglass, and the feeling of having no present.

  In fact, our present is enormously rich, and you will realize this if you understand that there is no time except present time. There is only now; there never was any time but now, and there never will be any time but now. It is all now. There is no hurry to gobble life down, and if you do you won’t be able to digest it. We can go on much longer than we suppose without eating, so it’s all right to just sit and be in the present.

  But if you identify with the linear conception of yourself, with your story, and with the abstract ego, you feel inadequate, and there fore it becomes necessary to try to make up for that inadequacy by using energy to attain more in all sorts of ways.

  WANTING MORE CONTROL

  We want more control over what happens, and this leads us through a progression of steps. We start of course by attempting to acquire power in a physical way, through the possession of material wealth, historically of cattle, of slaves, of land, of crops. Then to retain all that and keep command over people’s minds, we construct societies to dole out this material wealth.

  But as everybody who has ever had this kind of wealth knows, it doesn’t stop the feeling of inner frustration. We notice that when wealth has been in a family for a few generations, the descendants of the original robber baron become spiritual, and they go into the arts and into religion because they still feel unsatisfied.
Of course, many people who have never been through the phase of having material wealth have nontheless understood that it is a blind alley, and gone into the arts or religion right away.

  THE FIRST PHASE OF RELIGION: SIMPLE MAGIC

  Religion in its first phase, however, is what we call “simple magic” and is typified by the attempt to control the world not by the violence of arms and muscular strength, but by hypnotizing it and enchanting it. Women sometimes control men by enchanting them, and men try to control women by a similar process — and throughout history, religion has been an attempt to enchant the universe, to enchant the gods by offering sacrifices and through religious dances and rituals. Thus religion becomes magical religion.

  People ask a person who goes to church, particularly if they go to a church where they practice magic, “Why do you do that? Why do you have to do those rituals?” The answer inevitably is, in one way or another, “We perform these rites because we believe they are pleasing to God, and we have been ordered to do these things. This is the way it has been revealed that we should worship, and therefore we do it, hoping of course that God will bless us with long life, health and wealth, and sons and daughters.” In this sense, all of this is still being done out of a feeling of inadequacy.

  THE MORAL PHASE OF RELIGION

  A more sophisticated phase of religion comes into play when the prophet finally says, “Your burnt offerings are an offense to me. Your feast days and your rites are all foolish. What I require is justice and mercy towards other people.” Then religion passes from a magical phase into a moral phase, in which the emphasis is placed on living and loving, the building up of human solidarity and community.

  At this level the teacher of religion becomes primarily the prophetic teacher of morals, but unfortunately you cannot love out of aridity. If you have an arid identity, you have no love to give. If you conceive yourself to be this cut-off plant that we call the conscious ego, you have no roots into a rich and luscious soil, and so all you have to give is just a little surface energy; you have no deep and abiding love.

  As a result, the moral preachings are given to people who are perfectly incapable of observing them. The preachers will tell you how you ought to behave, specifically what you should do and what you should not do, but they never tell you how to become the kind of person who can do those things. And so all they succeed in is making matters worse by making you feel guilty and inadequate. You know you should do what they say, but you can’t figure out for the life of you how to do it, and so you feel guilty.

  A person who feels guilty feels more deprived than ever, and so has to resort to all sorts of measures to assuage their sense of guilt. Naturally this does not work, and then we begin to see that religion must involve more than moral precepts.

  GRACE: THE TRANSFORMING POWER OF THE DIVINE

  Religion must be a way of putting us in touch with what the Christians call “grace” — that is to say, the transforming power of the divine. Of course, they usually turn this around and say you will receive grace t h rough magic, and so they practice the magic ceremonies of Baptism and Holy Communion. It is thought that if you participate in these ceremonies in the proper way, the magical power of God will come through and will change you. But it somehow does not seem to do so. In that situation the Buddhists and Hindus might say that the magic failed because it was not performed properly — because you were in the wrong frame of mind.

  Jesus essentially said the same thing: If you will have faith, it will work. But somehow you have to find faith, and how do you find faith when you don’t have it? If you ask that question of the preachers and the priests, they don’t know how to answer. They may write very clever books to persuade you that God really does exist and that it is quite scientific to believe in God, but they cannot instill faith. The more cleverly you reason it out, the more all this implies doubt, and the very need to resort to clever reasoning assures us there is no genuine expression of faith.

  THE PRACTICE OF MEDITATION

  On this level of religion you find the quest to transform consciousness through the practice of meditation.

  One may have heard that by fasting or by concentrating on breathing there is a way of opening oneself up to higher energies. One may believe that as these energies course through you they produce a magical power — and so therefore we learn what is essentially self-hypnosis, and it can do some very startling things.

  However, we soon come back to the same problem we found with the geneticists, who can also do some very startling things. As all skilled technologists know, the question is, What are you going to do with it? Do you know what to do when you acquire power through meditation? How are you going to use it?

  And the question still is, Who are you? Who is going to decide how to use it? Who is getting this power?

  Of course, at the back of your mind you still have the attenuated and impoverished conception of you and the feeling of chronic tension that holds on tight and is the basis for the feeling of “I,” of ego. There are teachers of sensory awareness who can show you how to relieve that chronic tension so you can relax and let go of the experience of being an ego for a while. That is very nice, of course, but soon afterward you relapse once again into that tension.

  As long as you believe that you are your image of yourself and that you can govern your thoughts and your feelings, you will relapse into the habit of making muscular tensions to control yourself, and you will experience the ego illusion all over again. Then you may feel guilty because you are not relaxing, and the minute you feel guilty you can be certain that the ego is operating very well, although this guilty feeling means it feels injured. The ego’s pride has been hurt, and no amount of guilt will get rid of the underlying problem.

  At this point you may begin to realize that the meditation exercises are still a form of magic done to aggrandize yourself, and that like preachers and teachers who inculcate a sense of guilt, you are simply trying to quench thirst with salt water.

  The problem is that the self-improvement approach is based on an experience of yourself that is completely inadequate. So long as you are the thinker separate from the experience of thoughts, the feeler separate from the experience of feelings, or the experiencer separate from the experience, you will feel strangled like the neck of the hungry spirit, the neck of the hourglass.

  In trying to make improvements, that is the way you’ve defined yourself, and there fore you will not be able to use energy joyously because you will be using it with an ulterior motive. In approaching “the problem, ” you have defined yourself as a motivated and driven being, as a puppet.

  When this illusion dissolves, however, you will discover something very strange — that meditation and religious and spiritual exercises of any kind are not necessary. People always ask if it is necessary to learn yoga breathing, or to practice tai chi, or to be psychoanalyzed. And I always ask, “Necessary for what? Where are you going? What do you want?”

  Yes, if you want to get to New York it may be necessary to take the freeway. But where are you going? And what do you mean by necessary? Is it necessary for becoming a Buddha? Does anybody want to be a Buddha? Do you know what it means to be a Buddha? How do you know you want to be a Buddha if you don’t know what a Buddha is?

  People think it would be nice to have peace of mind, to be serene, to be calm, to be undisturbed by this, that, and the other. But as long as you make all those things objects of desire, you have defined yourself as lacking them, and a person who is looking for peace is obviously in turmoil.

  The person who is looking to end conflict is in conflict, and so the more you strive to stop the interior commotion, the more you are stirring it up. You are trying to smooth the waters with an iron, and it will never work.

  WHY DO YOU MEDITATE?

  Invariably at this point the big question arises: “If you are going to tell us that meditation is not necessary, and that it is all here and now, then why do you meditate? Why do you practice religion, perform ri
tuals, or chant? Why do you even talk about it?”

  My answer is that there is no good reason for it what so ever. This is all a form of joyous energy, and to play with it is a form of dance. It is a great thing to do, and there are all kinds of great things to do, and we are free to explore according to our own tastes.

  You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it. If you really enjoy swimming, you swim not to get to the other side of a river, or to complete a certain number of laps, or to go so far out into the ocean, or to compete in any way with yourself or with other people. You swim to experience the water rippling past you, and to enjoy the floating sensation when you lie on your back and look at the blue sky and the birds circling about. Every moment of it you are simply absorbed in this ripply, luminous world, looking at the patterns and the shifting net of sunlight underneath, and the sand way down below — that’s what swimming is about.

  Some of us like swimming, and in the same way some of us like religion and meditation.

  A MAGNIFICENT ART FORM

  We have gone through all the levels of religion until we arrive at the religion of nonreligion, where we can see that it was all here anyway and there was nothing that had to be done. In the same spirit we can then go back through the rest of life and turn it into an art form — and it is a magnificent art form.

  But if you ask me why you should choose that expression rather than some other, I won’t have an answer for you, except to say that getting together and meditating or chanting is what a lot of people did before they had television to absorb them.