Alan Watts, Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking...

Alan Watts

..."Now, if you want to find an intelligent solution to a problem, your brain can do the work. You have all the necessary intelligence inside the bone in your skull. However, most people never use their brains; they use their minds instead, and they use their minds the same way they use their muscles. You can strain your head just as if it were a muscle, and work very hard trying to arrive at an answer, but it doesn’t really work that way.

When you really want to find an answer to something, what you need to do is contemplate the problem. Visualize your question as well as you can, and then simply wait. If you don’t, and if you instead try to find the solution through brute mental strength, you may be disappointed, because any solution that comes in that way is likely to be wrong. But when you have waited for a while, the solution will come of itself.

That is how to use your brain, and it will work for you in the same way your stomach will digest your food for you without your having to supervise it consciously. Our attempts to supervise everything consciously have all led to consequences that aren’t too good for our stomach, and the reason for that is quite simple. Conscious attention, which employs words, cannot think of very much. We are forced, therefore, to ignore almost everything while we are thinking. We think along a single track, but the world doesn’t proceed along a single track. The world is everything happening altogether everywhere, and you just can’t take all that into consideration because there isn’t time. However, your brain can take it all into consideration because it is capable of handling innumerable variables at once, even though your conscious attention cannot...

Following the watercourse way argues always for a high order of intelligence, for it is more intelligent to sail a boat than to row it, even though sailing is a lazier way of doing it. Technologically it is easier to use the wind than to work against it, but in the West we haven’t really awakened to the fact it would be much more intelligent for us to use the sun, the wind, and the tides as sources of energy rather than using fossil fuels. And so we live in a state of foolish ignorance." ~Alan Watts, Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking...