“Why Not Now” is an Alan Watts guided meditation from the Zen & Meditation collection (link & details below). Alan Watts discusses how we need silence. Not mere absence of sound, but of the compulsive chattering of words and calculations inside our heads. Only by such silence can we get into firm touch with the real world which our languages, signs, symbols, and mathematics represent (somewhat crudely) but are not. Such silencing of head-chatter is known in the orient as yoga, dhyana, zen or the art of meditation, in which we discover, in direct experience, who or what we really are – by feeling rather than verbal definition. The reason is simply that too much chattering, not only in the head, but also in reading newspapers, listening to radio, watching TV, and interminable discussion of our various political, social, legal, philosophical, and psychological hangups has put us far out of touch with the real world – which isn’t words.
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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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• The Democratization of Buddhism
• Zen and the Controlled Accident (1-2)
• Meditation
• Zenrin Poems
• Art of Meditation
• Why Not Now (contains the above excerpt)
• Introduction to a Contemplative Ritual
• A Contemplative Ritual
Total Length: 5 hours 32 minutes
▶ Learn more about the Alan Watts Org | https://alanwatts.org/
“Everybody is ‘you’. Everybody is ‘I’. That’s our name. We all share that.” – Alan Watts
▶ For more Alan Watts quotes | https://alanwatts.org/quotes/
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