Choice thoughts: Alan Watts

One cannot act creatively, except on the basis of stillness. Of having a mind that is capable from time to time of stopping thinking. And so this practice of sitting may seem very difficult at first, because if you sit in the Buddhist way, it makes your legs ache. Most Westerners start to fidget; they find it very boring to sit for a long time, but the reason they find it boring is that they're still thinking. If you weren't thinking, you wouldn't notice the passage of time, and as a matter of fact, far from being boring, the world when looked at without chatter becomes amazingly interesting. The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture of shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things, without being named, and saying 'that's a shadow, that's red, that's brown, that's somebody's foot.' When you don't name things anymore, you start seeing them.

Thought has identified itself, in recent months, as a necessary but quite accidentally destructive tool in my armory. But I suppose I've written on the damage caused by thought gone astray before. I recoil somewhat at the potential conclusion that I must choose to think less sometimes, but so be it.

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[John Smith]

It's not so much about thinking less, but rather of understanding the limitations of thought.