The easiest way to get into the meditative state is to begin by listening. If you simply close your eyes and allow yourself to hear all the sounds that are going on around you, just listen to the general hum and buzz of the world as if you listen to music. Don’t try to identify the sounds you are hearing, don’t put names on them, simply allow them to play with your eardrums. Let them go. In other words, let your ears hear whatever they want to hear. Don’t judge the sounds: there are no proper sounds nor improper sounds, and it doesn’t matter if somebody coughs or sneezes or drops something — it’s all just sound.
As you pursue that experiment you will very naturally find that you can’t help naming sounds, identifying them, and go thinking, talking to yourself inside your head, automatically. But its important that you don’t try to repress those thoughts by forcing them out of your mind because that will have precisely the same effect as if you were trying to smooth rough water with a flatiron — you’re just going to disturb it all the more.
What you do is this: as you hear sounds coming into your head, thoughts, you simply listen to them as part of the general noise going on just as you would be listening to cars going by, or birds chattering outside the window. So look at your own thoughts as just noises. And soon you will find that the outside world and the inside world come together. They are a happening. Your thoughts are a happening just like the sounds going on outside, and everything is simply a happening and all you are doing is watching it.
Alan Watts (c)
