Stillness · “Stillness Reveals”
Meditation as Listening
To enter the meditative state by simply listening to all sound — including one’s own mental chatter — as just more sound, without trying to stop or fix thought.
Watts’ listening meditation in 5 lines: Sit comfortably and stop trying to do anything. Listen to all the sound around you as pure sound, without naming it. Don’t try to silence your mind. When thoughts arise, hear them as just more noise — like birds outside the window. Let inside and outside merge into one happening, and simply watch it.
What it is
This is Alan Watts’ entry point to meditation: instead of fighting your mind into silence, you listen. You sit quietly and simply take in all the sound around you — traffic, birds, voices, the hum of the room — without naming or judging it.
Then comes the distinctive move: when thoughts arise, you treat them as just more sound, part of the same general noise. You do not try to get rid of thinking; you listen to your own mental chatter exactly as you would listen to birds chattering outside the window.
Watts taught this as the easiest doorway into the meditative state, because it asks you to stop doing anything and merely receive. It operationalizes present-moment awareness (Everything Happens in the Now), the felt collapse of the inside/outside divide (All Is One), and non-resistance to thought (The Inner Creates the Outer).
The Method
From Watts’ recorded talk on meditation. A faithful protocol:
- Sit comfortably and stop trying. Watts is deliberately un-fussy about posture — the point is to relax and cease effort, not to achieve a perfect position. Let the body settle.
- Begin by listening to sound. Watts held that “one of the easiest ways to enter the meditative state is to start by listening to the sounds around us.” Simply hear everything — near and far, pleasant and ugly — as pure sound, without labelling it (“car,” “bird,” “annoying”).
- Don’t try to silence your mind. This is the crux. You are not trying to stop thinking. Watts: don’t fight the chatter.
- Hear your thoughts as just more noise. As thoughts come up, “you simply listen to them as part of the general noise going on, just as you would be listening to the sound of my voice, or just as you would be listening to cars going by or to birds chattering outside the window.” Watts’ instruction: “look at your own thoughts as just noises.” 5. Let the inside and outside merge. When you stop treating thoughts as a separate, special inner stream to manage, Watts says “the so-called outside world and the so-called inside world come together. They are a happening” — and “all you’re doing is watching it.”
- Rest in the watching. There is nothing to attain and nowhere to get to. Watts: the point of meditation “is always arrived at in the immediate moment.” Stay as the listening awareness; when you notice you’ve been pulled into a story, simply return to hearing. (Sourcing note: quoted phrases reflect standard transcriptions of Watts’ recorded meditation talk, attributed; the protocol is a faithful description, not a reproduction of the full talk.)
Source & Lineage
Alan Watts (1915–1973) was a British populariser of Zen, Taoist, and Vedantic thought for Western audiences. He was less a method-teacher than a translator of nondual insight, but in his recorded talks on meditation he gave this simple, repeatable listening practice.
It is steeped in Zen (the “just sitting” / receptive-awareness lineage he wrote about in The Way of Zen, 1957) and in Taoist non-effort (wu wei). The talk circulates under titles such as “Meditation,” Still the Mind, and Alan Watts Teaches Meditation.
The Traditions' versions
Zen shikantaza (“just sitting”) — objectless, receptive sitting; let thoughts come and go without chasing.
- Krishnamurti’s “choiceless awareness” — passive, non-selective attention to whatever is present.
- Mindfulness of sound — hearing as a meditation object, sounds arising and passing.
- Dzogchen / Mahamudra — resting in open awareness in which all experience self-arises and self-liberates.
- Taoist zuowang (“sitting and forgetting”) — letting the self dissolve into the flow of what is.
Common refinements
Trying to stop thoughts. The whole method is the opposite: you let thoughts sound and merely listen. Effort to silence the mind reintroduces the struggle.
- Labelling the sounds. Naming (“dog,” “fridge”) pulls you back into the thinking you’re trying to relax. Just hear the raw sound.
- Treating thoughts as more important than birdsong. The shift is to demote inner chatter to the same status as any other noise — neither special nor in need of management.
- Hunting for a result or a “state.” There’s no prize. The point is the present moment itself; reaching for an experience is just more thinking.