Why Most People Get Contemplation Wrong
Most people treat contemplation like a productivity hack. They sit down, close their eyes, and try to achieve a result. That is not what Alan Watts was talking about. He spent decades explaining something far simpler and far more difficult. Contemplation is not an activity you do to get somewhere. It is the suspension of the habit of interpretation. You stop translating experience into words and just let it be there. I learned this the hard way after three years of trying to force meditation into a schedule, which just gave me anxiety and a headache.The Art Of Contemplation Alan Watts
Watts drew heavily from Zen Buddhism and Daoism, but he stripped away the religious scaffolding so the practice could stand on its own. The core idea is that thinking is a tool, not an identity. When you catch yourself narrating everything you perceive, you are not contemplating. You are reading a commentary over your life instead of living it. His famous analogy of the menu versus the meal captures this. Reading about contemplation will not make you contemplative. It will just give you more thoughts about not having thoughts. The actual method is deceptively straightforward. Pick something present in your immediate awareness. It could be the sound of traffic outside, the sensation of your breath, or the visual field in front of you. Instead of naming it or analyzing it, let it arrive without your mental commentary attaching itself. The difficulty is not in the technique. It is in recognizing how relentlessly your mind tries to turn everything into a story. You notice a color and immediately think about where that color exists in your memory. You hear a sound and label it as good or bad. Contemplation is the practice of staying with the raw input long enough for the labeling apparatus to run out of things to grab onto.
How It Actually Feels In Practice
When you first attempt this, nothing dramatic happens. Your mind races. You feel restless or bored or sleepy. These are not signs that it is not working. These are the withdrawal symptoms of a brain accustomed to constant narrative processing. I used to think that if I was not achieving some mystical state within twenty minutes, I had failed. That expectation was the main obstacle. The breakthrough came when I stopped treating it as a performance metric and just showed up without an agenda. After maybe six or eight months of consistent, unglamorous practice, I noticed a shift. Not a dramatic one. Just a gap between stimulus and reaction that used to be nonexistent. A half-second pause where I could actually hear a sound without immediately categorizing it. The edge case that nearly made me quit entirely involved practicing during periods of acute emotional distress. Contemplation in that state often backfires because the mind uses it as an avoidance mechanism. I spent two weeks trying to "transcend" a breakup by sitting in silence, which only made me more dissociated and numb. The workaround was to pair contemplation with movement. Watts himself emphasized walking meditation and even suggested that active engagement with the world could be contemplative if approached with full attention. I started walking without headphones and just letting sounds and sights hit me without the internal monologue. It was easier to sustain and far less prone to turning into spiritual bypassing.
Common Pitfalls That Beginners Miss
The first trap is the belief that you need to empty your mind. You cannot empty it. You can only stop feeding it. Thoughts will arise. The practice is not to push them away but to stop engaging with them. Think of it like watching cars pass on a street. You do not run into traffic and stop each car. You sit on the porch and watch them go by. The second trap is confusing relaxation with contemplation. Lying down with your eyes closed listening to ambient noise is rest, not contemplation. The difference is awareness. In contemplation, the attention is sharp and awake, not drowsy or drifting. You can practice this while fully alert and engaged with whatever you are doing. Another counter-intuitive point is that contemplation is not reserved for quiet environments. Watts frequently argued that the chaos of daily life provides the richest material for practice. The hum of a refrigerator, the pressure of your feet against the floor, the temperature of the air on your skin. These are always available. You do not need to retreat to a monastery. What you do need is the willingness to find boredom intolerable. Most people reach for their phone the moment something uneventful happens. That reaching is the opposite of contemplation. Staying with the uneventful is the whole point.
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What This Approach Cannot Do
It is important to be blunt about limitations. Contemplation as Watts described it is not a cure for clinical depression, anxiety disorders, or trauma. If you are dealing with those conditions, therapy and professional support come first. The practice can complement treatment, but it should not replace it. Some people with certain neurological profiles, particularly those with severe ADHD or a history of psychosis, may find that prolonged silent contemplation triggers more distress than relief. In those cases, structured mindfulness programs with a trained instructor are a safer entry point. There is also a time ceiling. For most people, sustained contemplative states beyond twenty to thirty minutes at a time require significant practice. Trying to force longer sessions usually leads to frustration or zoning out. I found that two short sessions of ten minutes each were more effective than one marathon session. Consistency matters more than duration. The accumulated effect of daily practice compounds slowly over years, not hours.
The Art Of Contemplation Alan Watts and Where to Go From Here
Watts recorded hundreds of lectures on this topic. His BBC talks from the early 1960s remain the most accessible entry point. The video recordings at the British Library and the YouTube channel of his foundation have reliable versions. His book The Wisdom of Insecurity contains a chapter specifically on contemplation that is worth reading after you have some practical experience, not before. Reading it first will just give you concepts to think about instead of something to do. If you want a single practical starting point, begin with five minutes a day. Sit or stand comfortably. Pick one sense to focus on. Let it receive whatever it receives without naming, judging, or narrating. When you notice the narration starting, note that you noticed and return to the raw sensation. That is it. Nothing more complicated than that, and nothing easier to do badly. The value is in showing up repeatedly without expectations. The rest takes care of itself over time.
