Here’s a passage from Alan Watt’s, The Wisdom of Insecurity which has really got my head spinning. Or maybe it’s the whole book that’s doing it. His whole argument seems to be that there’s nothing that exists (literally, not metaphorically) besides the present moment, and that we must try to live in that moment as much as possible. I’m still wrapping my head around the whole thing and have a bunch of other things I want to correlate this with, but I think this passage is a real kicker, from page 83:

Can you, at the same time, read this sentence and think about yourself reading it? You will find that, to think about yourself reading it, you must for a brief second stop reading. The first experience is reading. The second experience is the thought, “I am reading.” Can you find any thinker, who is thinking the thought, “I am reading?” In other words, when present experience is the thought, “I am reading,” can you think about yourself thinking this thought?

Once again, you must stop thinking just, “I am reading.” You pass into a third experience, which is the thought, “I am thinking that I am reading.” Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into the feeling that you think them all at once.

But what has happened? Never at any time were you able to separate yourself from your present thought, or your present experience. The first present experience was reading. When you tried to think about yourself reading, the experience changed, and the next present experience was the thought, “I am reading.” You could not separate yourself from this experience without passing on to another. It was “ring around the rosy.” When you were thinking, “I am reading this sentence, you were not reading it. In other words, in each present experience you were only aware of that experience. You were never aware of being aware. You were never able to separate the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known. All you ever found was a new thought, a new experience.

To be aware, then, is to be aware of thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires and all other forms of experience. Never at any time are you aware of anything which is not experience, not a thought or feeling, but instead an experiencer, thinker or feeler. If this is so, what makes us think any such thing exists.

Where he is taking all that is essentially that no such thing as the “mind” exists apart from experience. To try to retreat from experience into the mind just triggers a chain of different successive experiences. It all sounds sort of convoluted when you isolate out this passage, but I’m really intrigued by the book as a whole. It’s a quick read too, so it’s a nice thing to just read all at once and let it sort of percolate down through you.

This topic also calls to mind a bit that Daniel Pinchbeck said in my interview with him of last year:

Steiner noted that the thought that there is a material world separate from a conceptual world within our own minds was, in itself, only a thought, and therefore had no more essential substance or validity than any other thought we might like to hold.

Anyway, more on this in the near future. I have some other quotes from Alan Watts that I’d like to share, as well as some related items from R.D. Laing as well. And I think it would be fun to contrast these ideas of “no mind” to other ideas such as metaprogramming. Stay tuned!