Beyond Words to Experience

 Each of us is an aperture through which the universe is observing itself.  

Alan Watts

I listened to Alan Watts today and it was a very useful transaction of words...that helped me to understand conceptually that which goes beyond words. Both videos spoke to this idea that the understanding we are truly seeking cannot be described in words yet as conditioned humans when we seek to understand something , Watts reminds us, we are often just looking for a translation of that something, the going ons of the physical world, into language and words.  As long as the words are there, however, they are in the way of us truly experiencing that 'something' we are trying to understand.  

When we first attempt to go deeper and try to 'define' who we are and what God is...it gets even more confusing.  We cannot define ourselves and we can not define God with words! When we do this, it becomes even more confusing and counterproductive to us 'knowing' and 'experiencing' that which we are attempting to know and experience. Duality, that which comes with language, gets in the way of understanding: we see a knowing and a known, a doing and a doer and a giver and a receiver etc.  This duality  gets in the way. 

The most important thing we can do to understand at the experience and feeling level is to clear our head of thoughts.  Of course, we cannot stop thinking  but we can stop losing ourselves in the thought process and instead... experience life in the present moment. The more we do this, the more we touch or fall into that spacious emptiness, that shunyata, that oceanic view , that yoga...that truth of who we really are is 'experienced' and 'felt'. 

The thing is we are that which we are seeking to understand. "Tat Taum Asi: You are that",  are great words that speak the ultimate truth and can be "felt" in the experiential realm of Life but mean nothing to the conceptual mind. They are just words.   These words have great limits but the truth that is the space behind these words can set us free.  We need to access that space behind the words.

Watts tells us that through meditation we can become aware of what is without naming or labelling it...just experiencing it, sensing it, feeling it and allowing it to be as it is.

For example we can,

Listen to the sounds of the world in the same way you would listen to classical music...without asking what it means. 

We just listen, allow, feel and experience without words.  For sure shootin the mind is going to do what it does...it is going to think.  Thoughts and memories and judgements will pop into our minds but we do not need to bother with what is said.  Just listen to the sound of the voice in our heads.  I personally like to group all thoughts that come into my mind under a big cloud of "thinking" without labelling, analyzing, or explaining but I never thought to pay much attention to the sound of my internal voice at those times...to note its texture and tone. We can just allow all sound, even our own internal noise, to be a part of the symphony. as we experience what is now. 

I often ask in my personal and guided meditations, "Who is listening?" to help myself and others to connect with the observer but Watts said that too gets us all tangled up in the duality of language. He suggest that we simply notice instead that "There is a watching". And as we focus our attention on our breath we can ask, "Are you doing that or is it happening to you?" Then we can simply realize, "There is breath in and there is breath out."

We also need to release our "effort", our striving to attain this realization of Tat Taum Asi.  He tells us if we can simply "be" mindful or meditate for the sheer de-light of it, adopting an attitude of "it doesn't matter" we can become like surgeons with a steady hand...much more effective in our practice and in our approach to Life. We need to realize we are incarnations of that which we seek ( God) otherwise we will spend our lives putting great effort and strain into trying to be God...changing, fixing, attempting to alter the "what is" of that which is occurring around us or to us. 

Peace is all about letting go of our words, our striving, and our opinions of how "it should be" so we can fall into the spaciousness of what is. 

All is well in my world. 

Alan Watts / The Spiritual Library( ) When you stop talking to yourselfhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDg2ko4HYos

Alan Watts/UCLA CommStudies ( ) Alan Watts Speaking at UCLA 2/21/1973 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro0bjhfg4mg