Still the Mind

To say Still the Mind is a book about meditation, or how to meditate, is to say that language is an arrangement of words: it misses the point entirely. Although there’s some repetition from other Watts books, such as the idea of existing between two eternal darknesses or the question of where each of us was before we were born, there’s plenty of additional material to ponder.

Some of the ideas are small – the pinch of rascality that imbues each (interesting) person on the planet. The idea that technology may not be an improvement in the long run (hahahaha – again, a man ahead of his time). The repeated illusion to the butterfly effect, or what Watts refers to as the unintended consequence of turning glass to gold. (For what it’s worth, the butterfly effect has been one of the guiding principles of my life, and for many years was the principle that allowed me to hold any surging regret into place. For as tempting as the notion that we can change one wee little aspect of life and otherwise hold the remainder steady is, it’s also a fallacy, one strong enough to allow me consistently to find my feet.) 

As I read though, a curious shape shift occurred in my mind and somewhere before the half way point the reading morphed from the enlightenment and reassurance I felt with my introduction to Watts to, essentially, thought porn. That is, I transformed from a person seeking new ideas and perspectives to a red-stater seeking reassurance of my worldview from the talking heads on Fox.

This shift was as unexpected as it was surreal and I trace it to the eloquent statement that there is nothing anyone can do to be anyone else than who they are, or to feel any other way than the way the feel at this moment. These words crystallized an idea that has been bouncing through my head for ages, that the world contains but two types of people, the curious and the incurious. This delineation might be said to largely account for my divorce…from an inherently good but genuinely incurious man, to whom it would never occur, as Watts writes, that you swim to experience the water rippling past you and for the shifting net of sunlight underneath. (I have not been swimming in four months now, which is undoubtedly the longest stretch in my life. While I can dissect what I miss ad nauseum, it boils down to “what he said.”) Obviously then, when Watts avers “sometimes life is telling you that the course you are on is not the way to go, and the message underlying all of this is that you cannot transform yourself,” it feels a little too confirmational, a little too much like hearing, say, that facemasks are ineffective against coronoavirus, if that is what you really believe. (But you, dear reader, do not believe that, I'm certain. My God, don’t get me started.)

Yes, yes, Watts does ultimately come around to the mechanics of meditation, although – blessedly – his methods are far more palatable than those of the Japanese monks to whom I have taken my students for years. He does mention both sitting zazen and the big stick with which meditators are not-so-gently prodded back to the proper form – but disdainfully, it must be said. Here again, I felt a natural alignment with Watts’s thinking – meditation, for him, largely boils down to the quiet space where one feels the gentle brush of air current upon the skin, where birdsong fills space that active thought normally occupies, where clouds and contrails move through the mind.

When I was 15, a childhood friend was killed in a car crash. The funeral program ended with a poem, which has long seared itself into my subconscious, and has – perhaps not so subtly influenced my views on death. The poem was not written by Alan Watts, but it is in the same vein of thought:

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

In other words, we are each of us, an integral part of the universe, born of starlight and sunlight; gentle breeze and pounding rain. We can but return from whence we came.

Five stars.