Still the Mind

by Alan Watts

  WATCHING BREATH

  Breath is a curious operation, because it can be experienced as both a voluntary doing and an involuntary happening. You can do a breathing exercise and feel that “I am breathing” in just the same way as you can feel “I am walking.” Yet on the other hand, you breathe all the time when you are not thinking about it, and in that way it is involuntary. You must breathe — and so it is the faculty through which we can realize the unity of the voluntary and involuntary systems.

  In Buddhism, this is called mindfulness of the breath, or watching breath. And watching breath is fundamental in meditation because, like sound, it is easy to see the happening in it, as distinct from what we thought of as the doing of it. Breath happens, but the curious thing is that you can get with the breath, and in getting with it, extraordinary things can happen.

  Anyone who swims knows this, and anyone who sings knows that breathing is important. In archery, in any athletic discipline, the alignment of body and breath is critical. The synchronization of what you are doing with your breathing is the whole art. But powerful breath is not accomplished through muscle power. It is accomplished by gravity, by weight.

  A MEDITATION EXERCISE

  I would like you to sit upright, either in a comfortable chair or on the floor on a cushion or pillow. The reason for sitting straight is so the part of your body in which the breathing is occurring is unencumbered. Also, when you sit upright on the floor you are slightly uncomfortable, and you won’t go to sleep, because in any peaceful and quiet state of mind it is very easy to go to sleep.

  Now in this position, simply become aware of your breathing, without trying to do anything about it at all. Let it happen, and watch it.

  At the same time, let your ears hear whatever they want to hear. In other words, let them hear in the same way you are letting your lungs breathe.

  Now beyond this, you can breathe out by letting the breath fall outward without pushing it, and as you get to the end of the out breath, let go with the same sort of feeling that you have when you let your body drop into a very comfortable bed — let it drop out and fall. Let the weight of the air do it. Don’t push, drop. Then after a while, the breath will return. But don’t pull it in, let it fall back in. The breath will drop in until you’ve had enough; then let it drop out again.

  It’s a good idea in this exercise to breathe in through the nostrils and out through the lips, allowing there to be a slight sensation of moving air on your lips so that you know you are breathing. Never force anything — just have the feeling of going this way and that way by virtue of weight, and of gravity.

  ADDING SOUND

  Then, if you wish, as you let the breath fall outward, you can simply float a sound on it. First, you can just do this mentally. Think of a sound that pleases you, a note that seems agreeable to your voice. As you breathe out heavily, imagine that sound to yourself, whatever sound you feel like. Now if you’ve got a humming sound in mind, on the next round of the out breath, hum it out loud, and keep it going.

  At first you may be a little short-winded and uneasy about something like this. As well as allowing the sound to hum and happen with the breath that is falling out, you can, as it were, simply request it to increase in volume without forcing it.

  And when your sound ends, bring it in again quite softly, and then allow the volume to rise. You will get an almost continuous sound, and if you do this in a group, the sounds will run together.

  Try it now, if you wish, picking your own note.

  Try it again, once more.

  Now ask it to increase its volume. Listen a moment. What we are working into is the completely liberated, yet soft and gentle, act of letting sound happen through us without the slightest sense of strain, so that you are not singing it, but it is singing with your voice.

  Don’t premeditate a tune, but let it come, so that it’s almost as if you were talking nonsense. Let it play gently with your voice. You are simply preoccupied with it, like easy humming to yourself.

  Hmmmm....

  Or, Ahhh....

  Or, Oooommmm....

  When you are thus absorbed in sound, where are you?

  You are in a state of consciousness that is, even at first, at least a primitive form of samadhi; that is to say, we are happily absorbed in what we are doing, and we have forgotten about ourselves. You can’t very well do that and still worry or think about anything serious.

  Notice that there is a special way of doing it. We can get wild with it and do a kind of Native American chant or one of the more vigorous and forceful Tibetan Buddhist chants, but that form of chanting can be straining, unless you’re in a large group and can soar on the group’s energy. If you keep it down to a soft tone, you will find the floating feeling of the voice. If you feel any sound that is uncomfortable, you can instantly avoid it. Slip down if you are going too high, or slip up if you are getting too low. If your voice tends to change, follow its change, so that you are just going along with it.

  THE DIVINE ELEMENT

  This is why, from ancient times, people have discovered humming and singing, and everybody used to sing while they worked. But you’ll notice that today very few people sing at all; you have to make a point of it. People are afraid of their voices — that is, their melodic voices as distinct from the spoken voice. I know an enormous number of people who never sing at all.

  In India to this day when the scriptures — the Upanishads and the Sutras — are read, they are invariably chanted, because as soon as you bring a note into it an extra dimension is added to the voice. That is the divine element, which is symbolically the singing sound of the universe.

  This is a form of what I would call free mantra chanting, which isn’t used much. But as you do it, it will give you a very good idea of what the meditative state is. It isn’t just letting things going on around you happen, it is inside you as well. In free mantra, as distinct from prescribed mantra, each spontaneous chant has a different feeling to it.

  The Tibetan monks go down to an extraordinarily deep sound — they go as deep as one can get. There is a reason for this, but it is very difficult to explain because you have to do it to understand it. But when you get as deep down into sound as you can go, you are going to an extreme of the vibration, and you feel naturally that what is deep is part of the underpinnings, the foundation. When monks go into that deep sound, they are literally exploring the depths of sound, going into it deeply. They will get down somewhere on an Om, and take it to what feels like the center of the earth.

  When you try the meditation we have just been t h rough with sound, you might sometimes find that you hear your voice go wrong, but you always get a sensuous feeling of the breath, and of course it is very enjoyable to breathe. You will find this enjoyment will help in the quality of the sound you produce — although we have to get away from some of our musical prejudices when we do this. You can make up your own nonsensical mantras, and there are lots of traditional mantras as well. But to make one up, just absorb yourself in a vibration that gets you going and then play with it.

  Play with the sound you are making, and when you stop you will still feel the pulse going through you. These sounds are easy to run along with.

  DEEP LISTENING

  Some people think that to spend a lot of time gently humming nonsense to yourself is a waste of time. But ask yourself, What are you going to do with the time that you save?

  With all this, the first thing we have to understand is what I call deep listening. Very few people ever really listen, because instead of receiving the sound, they make comments on it all the time. They are thinking about it, and so the sound is never fully heard. You just have to let it take over, let it take you over completely, and then you get into the samadhi state of becoming it.

  This also means that you abandon your socially nervous personality. One of the reasons why people don’t sing is that they hear so many masters performing on records that they are ashamed of their own voices. You may think there’s n
o point in singing unless you are good at it, but that is like saying there is no point in doing anything at all unless you are particularly gifted at it, which is ridiculous. Of course singing is very good for you, but we won’t dwell on that because it brings too much purposiveness into it — having to fulfill a conscious purpose and design.

  ANY SOUND FROM THE SOURCE

  Instead we are like children making noises because of the absorbing sound they produce. Children make all sorts of noises to explore the possibilities of what they can do with their voice. But you don’t see adults going a round humming and burbling, even though it is tremendous fun. All of this is perfectly at home within meditation.

  Joshu Sasaki, a Zen master from Los Angeles, tells his students to stand up and laugh for five minutes every morning because that’s a better form of meditation than sitting for a long time getting sore legs. It embarrasses the hell out of some people to even try it, and instead when they see someone doing it they ask, “What are you laughing at? You know I don’t see any point in laughing unless there’s something funny.”

  I had a friend, a very fat friend, and he was a theological student. He used to take the elevated train that went from Evanston into Chicago and sit in the middle of the car where everybody could see him. He would sit there with a kind of vacant look and chuckle to himself. And slowly he’d work it out, laughing louder and louder with all his flesh vibrating. By the time they got to Chicago, the whole car was inevitably hysterical with laughter.

  I tell you this story to illustrate that any sound you feel coming from the inside can be used as mantra meditation, and the deeper the source, now matter how ridiculous, the better.

  PART III

  STILL THE MIND

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CONTEMPLATIVE RITUAL

  FOR A LONG TIME, the kind of religious celebrations that we have conducted in the West have been filled with the spoken word and impossibly didactic. Almost all our religious observances are nothing but talk and consist of telling God what to do, as if He or She did not already know, and telling the people what to do, as if they were able or even willing to change. All of this is throwing the book at people, and telling them the Word, and I think we have had enough of it.

  The history of religion in the West is nearly equivalent to the history of the failure of preaching. By and large, preaching is a kind of moral violence that excites people’s sense of guilt, and there is no less creative sense than that. You cannot love and feel guilty at the same time, any more than you can be afraid and angry at the same time.

  A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

  What seems to me to be lacking in our Western religious observances is some sort of ritual that gives us an opportunity for spiritual experience. By a spiritual experience I am referring to a transformation of the individual consciousness so that, in one way or another, the individual is able to realize his oneness with the eternal energy behind this universe, which some people call God and others prefer not to name or to conceive.

  When Western people hear that an Asian practices meditation, they ask, “What do you meditate on?” But that question puzzles a Buddhist or a Hindu, because you do not meditate on anything, any more than you breathe on anything. You breathe, and in the same way, you meditate. The verb is in a way intransitive. Meditation is the act of allowing one’s thoughts to cease.

  COMING INTO TOUCH WITH REALITY

  In the beginning of the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali described yoga — which means union — as spontaneously stopping the agitation of thinking. Thinking is talking to yourself, or figuring to yourself, and it is habitual for most of us. If I talk all the time, however, I do not hear what anyone else has to say. Equally, if I talk to myself all the time, I will not have anything to think about except thoughts.

  There is no interval between thoughts during which I can come into touch with reality — that is to say, the world my thoughts represent, in the way words represent events, or money represents wealth. If I am never silent in my head, I will find myself living in a world of total abstraction divorced from reality altogether.

  You may ask, “What is reality?” People have various theories about what it is, but it is important to remember that they are all theories. Those who believe that reality is material are projecting upon the world a certain philosophical theory about it, and those who say that it is mental, or spiritual, are doing likewise.

  Reality itself is neither mental nor spiritual, nor any other concept that we can have of it; reality is simply the present moment.

  YOU CANNOT MEDITATE

  Words are reality insofar as they are noises, but even that is saying too much. To meditate, you might think that you should attempt to suppress thought, but you don’t do that because you cannot meditate. Let me repeat that emphatically: you cannot meditate. You, your ego image, can only chatter, because when it stops, it isn’t there.

  When you are not thinking, you have no ego, because your ego is nothing more than a habitual concept. The thinker behind the thoughts and the feeler behind the feelings are only thoughts; each of these is an idea of some reference point to which all our experiences happen. That thought, however, cuts us off from what we experience and creates the illusion of a gap or gulf between the knower and the known.

  This in turn is responsible for the feeling of alienation we have from the world, and as a result we suffer from conflict and hatred. The spirit of domination arises from that basic division that has been constructed in thought, and modern societies are typically obsessed with this highly destructive illusion.

  When you come to an end of thought, you don’t know how to meditate, and you don’t know what to do with your mind, and nobody can tell you. But still, thinking comes to an end naturally, and you just watch.

  You don’t have to ask who watches because that question merely arises from the fact that in grammar every verb has to have a subject by rule — but that is not a rule of nature, it is a rule of grammar. In nature there can be watching without a separate watcher.

  AND SO YOU BEGIN TO MEDITATE

  When you realize that you have come to your wit’s end, you can begin meditation. Or meditation happens, and that happening is simply the watching of what is, of all the information conveyed to you by your exterior and interior senses, and even the thoughts that keep chattering on about it all.

  You don’t try to stop those thoughts, you just let them run as if they were birds twittering outside, and they will eventually become tired and stop.

  But don’t worry about whether they do or don’t. Just simply watch whatever it is that you are feeling, thinking, or experiencing — that’s it. Just watch it, and don’t go out of your way to put any names on it. This is really what meditation is.

  You are in meditation in an eternal present, and you are not expecting any result. You are not doing it to improve yourself, because you found that you can’t. Your ego can’t possibly improve you because it is what’s in need of improvement, and your ego can’t let go of itself because it is a complex of thoughts called “clinging to one’s self.” When it is finally understood that it is unable to achieve a transformation of consciousness, or the vivid sense of union of individual and cosmos, it just evaporates.

  ONE OF THE EASIEST WAYS TO ENTER IN

  One of the easiest ways to enter into the state of meditation, there fore, is listening to what is, and experiencing the qualities of sound.

  Curiously enough, sound is a sense that bores us less easily than sight. When you hear it, just listen to the random sounds that you know are going on in the room, or in the street. Listen as if you were listening to music, without trying to identify its source, to name it, or to put any label on it at all. Just enjoy whatever sound may be going on, whether it is outside or in the area where you are sitting. That is part of the ritual: just listen.

  LETTING SOUND HAPPEN THROUGH US

  We can go on from that listening to making sound ourselves while also listening to it. But instead of making sound, we will get th
e knack of letting it happen t h rough us.

  Once, a great choirmaster in England was rehearsing a choir in the presence of the archbishop of Canterbury, who was then William Temple, a great theologian. And this was a rather raw choir that didn’t really know much about singing. The master gave them a hymn to sing that they knew very well, and to impress the archbishop they sang it with gusto, and it sounded forced and terrible.

  Then the choirmaster asked them to sing a little-known hymn and had them go over it several times until everybody got the hang of it. “Now,” he said, “I want you to sing this hymn again, but there’s one very important thing: don’t try to sing it. You mustn’t try. You must think of the melody and let it sing itself.” And they sang it very well.

  Afterward he turned to the archbishop and said, “ Your Grace, that’s good theology, isn’t it?” And it obviously was, since the archbishop told me the story.