#Guidedmeditation #mediation #alanwatts

If we can see the first part, which is that the ego is purely fictitious, that it is a symbol or image of oneself, plus a sensation of muscular strain occasioned by trying to make this symbol an effective agent, to control emotion, to concentrate, to direct the nervous operations of the organism, then immediately it is clear that what we have called ourselves, what we have thought of as ourselves, isn't able to do anything at all. There follows this kind of silence, in which there is nothing to do except watch what happens. But what is happening is watching itself. There is nobody apart from it watching it. And so we get into the state of meditation. So then the next problem that arises is, well, what about all the other illusions? Although they are somehow integrated and centered upon the illusion of ego, nevertheless the whole value system of what is important, what is not important, what is good, what is bad, what is pleasant, what is painful, has to be called into question. Not in order to destroy the whole value system, but in order to see it for what it is. And that's where we will object and say, well, surely that's a colossally difficult task, because we are so long habituated to it. And we have been taught to believe that the longer we have been habituated to something, the more difficult it is to change it. That is true if you believe it. And if you don't, it isn't. That when anything is to be done, it should be done immediately, without thinking it over in advance. Act at once. And you'll find that characteristic of people trained at Zen, they always act immediately. Then we get to this. What we are aware of is a complex of vibrations. The ego is a mere construct. So can you get back again to recollecting from childhood your pleasure in events that from your present point of view you would call entirely meaningless? Because every vibration that's possible implies all the others. And so, likewise, with a candle flame, with a reflection, with grain and wood, anything can, from this child point of view, be completely fascinated. Nirvana means in Sanskrit, blow out. That is, exhale the breath. The opposite, desire, is to breathe in. Now if you breathe in and hold it, you lose your breath. But if you breathe out, it comes back to you. So the principle here is, if you want life, don't cling to it. Let go. But the problem is, if I desire not to desire, is that not already desire? How can I desire not to desire? How can I surrender How can I surrender myself when myself is precisely an urge to hold on, to cling, to cling to life, to continue to survive? I can see rationally that by clinging to myself I may strangle myself. It's here like the air. All you have to do is receive. In the ego there is the atma, the inner self, the inward light, as Quakers would call it, the real self, the spirit, which is substantially identical with God. So you've got to meditate in such a way that you identify with your higher self. How do you do that? Well, you start by watching all your thoughts very carefully, watching your feelings, watching your emotions, so that you begin to build up a sense of separation between the watcher and what is watched. So that you are, as it were, no longer carried away by your own stream of consciousness. You remain the witness, impassively, impartially, suspending judgment and watching it all go on. The religious game is simply a refined and highbrow version of the ordinary game. We're always finding a way to be one up and by the most incredibly subtle means. And you say, I realize I'm always doing that and tell me how do I not do that? I say, why do you want to know? Well, I'd be better that way. Yeah, but why do you want to be better? You see, the reason you want to be better is the reason why you aren't. The ego. Kindly let me help you or you'll drown, said the monkey, putting the fish safely up a tree. Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and of the world. An institutional psychiatry constitutes itself the guardian of sanity and of socially approved experience of reality. And very often it seems to me that reality appears rather much the way the world is seen on a bleak Monday morning. In this official doctrine, I might even say dogma, of what reality is. That our science, such as it is of psychology, is founded in the scientific naturalism of the 19th century. I'd say that psychoanalysis is based on Newtonian mechanics and in fact could be called psycho-hydraulics. When you want to apply that image to the universe itself, to the very nature of life, it has limitations. For one thing, the idea of a difference between matter and spirit. This idea doesn't work anymore. Long, long ago physicists stopped asking the question, what is matter? They began that way. They wanted to know what is the fundamental substance of the world. And so the picture of the world in the most sophisticated physics of today is not formed stuff, potted clay, but pattern. A self-moving, self-designing pattern, a dance. The ceramic image of the world ran into trouble and changed into what I call the fully automatic model or image of the world. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as, Mr. So-and-so, Miss So-and-so, Mrs. So-and-so. I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it. And so one of the, what I would call a kind of a basic problem we've got to go through first is to understand that there are no such things as things. That is to say, separate things or separate events. Now, that is only a way of talking. If you can understand this, you're going to have no further problems.