Keeping this here. will do something with it soon.
ALAN WATTS: Most of us think compulsively all the time. That is to say we talk to ourselves. I remember when I was a boy; we had a common saying, “talking to you is the first sign of madness.”
Now obviously, if I talk all the time, I don’t hear what anyone else has to say. And so in exactly the same way, if I think all the time, that is to say if I talk to myself all the time, I don’t have anything to think about except thoughts. And therefore I’m living entirely in the world of symbols, and I’m never in relationship with reality.
Alright, now that’s the first basic reason for meditation. But there is another sense, and this is going to be a little bit more difficult to understand, why we could say that meditation doesn’t have a reason or doesn’t have a purpose. And in this respect, it’s unlike almost all other things that we do except perhaps, making music and dancing.
Because when we make music, we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music, to get to the end of the piece, then obviously the fastest players would be the best.