Alan's Unspeakable World

Unspeakable World, Alan Watts

But you know if you talk all the time You will never hear what anybody else has to say And therefore, all you’ll have to talk about is your own conversation The same is true for people who think all the time

That means, when I use the word, “Think”, talking to yourself Sub-vocal conversation The constant chit-chat of symbols and images And talk and words inside your skull

Now, if you do that all the time You’ll find that you’ve nothing to think about except thinking And just as you have to stop talking to hear what I have to say You have to stop thinking to find out what life is about

And the moment you stop thinking You’d come into immediate contact with what Korzybski called, so delightfully, “The unspeakable world”

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

Because say when a person says, “I see a leaf” Immediately, one thinks of a spearhead-shaped thing Outlined in black and filled in with flat green No leaf looks like that

No leaves, leaves are not green That’s why Lao-Tzu said, “The five colors make a man blind The five tones make a man deaf” Because if you can only see five colors, you’re blind And if you can only hear five tones in music, you’re deaf

You see, if you force sound into five tones You force color into five colors, you’re blind and deaf The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound And it is only by stopping fixing conceptions on the world of color and sound That you really begin to hear it and see it

So, let me say again I’m not talking about the ordering of ordinary everyday life In a reasonable and methodical way as being “Schoolteacherish” I’m saying, be nice, if you were nice people, that’s what you would do

For heaven’s sake, don’t be nice people But the thing is, that unless you do have that basic framework Of a certain kind of order, and a certain kind of discipline The force of liberation will blow the world to pieces It’s too strong a current for the wire