Alan Watts

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (18) – Alternative Methods of Meditation - Questioning

AW: So then, this state of complete unity of mind and nature (what’s going on) without the intervention of thought is the state of meditation. It may be called dhyana, it may be called samadhi, and you may make certain subtle differences between these two states, but forget it for the moment. Now, the way of arriving at this is, of course: there is no way. Because that’s the way your mind is working anyway. But you have to find that out. You have to find out that you don’t need to accept yourself by trying to accept yourself. It doesn’t mean anything to accept yourself because who accepts what? But you don’t know that at first. You think there is a “who” who has to accept “what.” And you can only do this by trying to do the impossible. This is the method of reductio ad absurdum. So then, in the beginning of meditation there are alternative methods you can use. You can use the questioning method: “Who am I?” and “Who is it that wants to know?” “Who is asking who it is that is asking?” You can—that’s the method of interiorization; look within: thou art Buddha.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (19) – Alternative Methods of Meditation - Concentration

AW: Then there’s the method of concentration: a method of banishing the interior stream of chatter by watching your breathing. Or by focusing your attention on a small point of light or upon a single sound. If you have a tape recorder, all you have to do is you make a loop tape with one sound on it. And you turn your tape recorder on, and that practices meditation for you. And you just listen to that sound. Or—easier still—you hum a sound like om. And you take a long, long, easy, deep breath, and you hum “om, om, om.” And just keep it going. And that’s a great method. It’s one of the best ways if you are an auditory kind of character.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (20) – Alternative Methods of Meditation - Mandala

AW: Then you can also do it by looking into a crystal ball or by using a mandala. You see, the way a mandala is constructed with circles, you eventually get the feeling from looking at a mandala that you’re dropping into it. And you’re going in, in, in, in, in to that circle. Always in, in. And that brings you altogether in one place, and you go in, in, in to the heart of it. The radii—or whatever they may contain—simply have the function of being, as they were, slides which bring you into the center. And you go in, in, in to that, and you get the same effect, visually, as when you do when you listen into a sound. And you go in, in, in to the sound. You get down to the basic, basic, ungh—you know?—which everything is. And then, when you get that basic ungh, you stay there, see? And you dig that. And eventually you see that that’s what there is, and always was, and always will be. In fact, there isn’t any time in meditation; time completely disappears. You discover there is only the present.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (21) – Alternative Methods of Meditation - Walking

AW: And that brings up another form of meditation that you can practice, and it is a good one for practicing while being active. You see, sitting isn’t the only way of meditation. There are actually four types of meditation. Sitting meditation (called zazen), walking meditation, standing meditation, and lying down meditation. So it’s also good to lie flat on your back for these things—except that you may easily go to sleep that way. Walking meditation has long been practiced both by Christian monks and by Buddhist monks. And in the satipatthana method of meditation that is practiced today—in Burma, and Thailand—they do a great deal of it walking. It’s a very good way because you certainly don’t go to sleep that way. And it’s a rhythmic movement, and therefore is peaceful: you just walk slowly up and down. This is the way I use mostly.

So in those various ways of posture, shall we say, you can concentrate on sight, on sound. Nobody has done much with touch, but people have done meditation on bodily motion—as in dancing or mudra. That is another thing. Mantra is sound, mudra is gesture. And in Huston Smith and Elda Hartley’s film of Tibetan Monks you’ll see them doing the mudra method of meditation: constantly moving their hands. This is the same kind of a thing.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (22) – Alternative Methods of Meditation - Witnessing

AW: Or another method is the letting everything alone, where you allow all your psychic processes and sensuous processes free reign to do anything they want to do. And you will find, for example, that—let’s, supposing that, at this very moment, you are all hearing the sound of my voice. Now, if you turn your conscious attention from the meaning of what I’m saying simply to the sound of the words, you will be surprised to discover that you don’t have to make any effort to understand what I’m talking about because your brain will take care of that. And you can just listen to the noise. It’ll all go into you and you’ll understand. But you can just concentrate on the flow of sound. American Indians often do that when they’re encountering a stranger, because they can tell more about him by the tone of his voice than what he says. He may be lying. So you can listen to the tone of my voice and find out whether I’m putting something over on you.

It’s the tone that is important, you see? Fundamentally. It’s the music that finally counts in life. As I was explaining, one may regard the universe as a musical phenomenon. That it is a huge system of extremely complex vibrations which is playing. And that’s what it’s all about. Just, you don’t ask what does Mozart mean? You just listen to Mozart. It’s great. So you don’t ask what the universe means.

Now, in a way, this meditation method of just letting your mind alone and let it go where it wants to go has the same disadvantage as lying down on the floor: you may go to sleep. But don’t worry about that too much, especially if you do it early in the morning. And, on waking, immediately, is the easiest time. You’re just in that moment between sleeping and waking. You will find you are in a very fascinatingly clear state of mind. That’s the ideal hour of the day for having an experience of cosmic consciousness. And you can move right into it at that point—don’t get up immediately, just lay flat out. You may want to do something or other to refresh yourself a little, like taking a drink of water or something, but right at that moment you find you can have extraordinary clarity. And then you see—as you go on—it begins to become clear to you that there really is no one separate from this changing stream of feelings who’s having them; they’re just there. And in that moment the problem of what to do about yourself vanishes because there is no separate self.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (23) – Alternative Methods of Meditation – Flow of Thinking

AW: Thereafter, the most fascinating thing that follows from this is that you can keep up meditation while thinking. This is why a Zen master can also be a scholar and an intellectual: because the way he does his thinking is exactly the way as he sweeps a floor or meditates. There is no illusion of the thinker doing the thinking, there is just the thinking process. And therefore, he doesn’t get misled and bamboozled by his thoughts. It’s very important to emphasize this because the process of meditation is not anti-intellectual. In fact, it is—I would say—a basic requisite for leading the intellectual life because the person who lives the intellectual life is, of all people, the most liable to be bamboozled with words. And that’s the besetting danger of all academicians. That’s why they get so stuffy and doubty, and they suffer from intellectual porcupinism. They’re always prickly and querulous, and so on. So the reason is they’re starved. They don’t have anything to think about except thoughts, and they write books about books. And they don’t, therefore, have any first-hand experience of life to use for thinking; to think about.

So—of all places—in a university is the place where meditation should be practiced; of getting out of thought for some time of the day. This refreshes the intellectual life. This gives it a zip and a quality so that, as you begin, like Suzuki—old D. T. Suzuki—he was a great intellectual. But he practiced scholarship in the same natural way that one would sail a boat, or watch clouds. So that he was never (in his pursuit of scholarship) cantankerous and pretentious, he was never pedantic. So, in this way you can sit light to intellectuality. It’s a very good thing, because otherwise you become hopelessly ponderous. You become a sort of mechanical, tick-tock being. It’s like you put fish in your mouth, and the whole thing were very small bones with no meat on them at all. And that’s the sort of feeling you finally get from being over-intellectual.

[Reefs]

The Veil of Thoughts (24) – Using the Intellect correctly

AW: So, really, I do want to make this plain, because so many people think that the domains of the intellect and the domain of intuition are mutually exclusive. They’re not. It’s only: people keep saying, “I understand what you say intellectually, but I don’t really feel it.” And, therefore, seem to think that an intellectual understanding may even be an obstacle. And a lot of teachers sometimes give that point of view. They say, “The more you think about it, the further you are from it.” But I don’t think that’s true. At least it’s oversimplifying the matter. If you’ve got an intellect, you must use it. It’s a divine gift. It’s a talent. And nobody can make the sacrifice of the intellect unless they’ve got one to sacrifice.

A lot of fanatics think they’ve made the sacrifice of the intellect and say, “I’ve given up my private opinions, and I’m purely obedient to holy scripture”—or whatever; authority. And that’s a lot of—if I may say so—bullsh!t! Either they haven’t thought it through, or else they are concealing from themselves that their obedience to scripture is, at root, their own personal opinion. So there isn’t this antagonism. If you’ve got an intellect at all, it’s very important that you think things through as far as they can be thought through. But, you see, your intellect will eventually tell you its own limitations. It will—in other words—say, “I have a certain function (as intellect) just like the dial on the telephone has a certain function.” And if you spell out questions about the existence of God on the dial of the telephone, you’ll be told to go to hell! That’s not its function! And so you can easily see—as I’ve tried to explain to you—that the thought process has limitations; that there are things it will not do. It is the symbolizing of the world, but it is not the real world—except insofar as: thoughts are, themselves, vibrations. That’s (as I was explaining earlier) that you can say words, and listen to the words simply as sounds. Then you’re getting in closer contact with the real world; with the vibration that’s at the basis of everything.

So thought itself tells you that it can’t go all the way. And then, when you understand that, thought naturally gives up. And you become quiet. Let it go. Let all the senses go. And eventually you find you’re quiet, and you’re centered, and still. But don’t make an exercise of it! Dōgen, the great Japanese Sōtō Zen master, always told his students, “Do not practice zazen to attain satori. Sit just to sit. This, already—practicing zazen—is being a Buddha.” This is sitting like a Buddha. And if you do it with an ulterior motive, you’re not doing it. There is nowhere to go. So, likewise, if you practice centering on the present, you can’t do it with an objective, because you’re off it. And so: in action. And you try to do what Gurdjieff calls self-remembering, and you’ve always got your mind on the present, and you’re fully aware of what you’re doing all the time—see?—then, eventually, you will discover that there is nothing else you can do. Because if you think about the past, that’s happening now. Think about the future—that’s happening now. There is nothing else but now! So then, when you discover that, meditation becomes automatic. You’re always in it. Only: you have to be stupid and exercise a little folly in order to find it out; that is: to try to be there. You see? That’s putting legs on a snake, or a beard on a eunuch. Or we would say gilding the lily. But somehow, to wake up, that has to happen.

So it’s a most marvelous discovery when you’ve been working to try and center, to be present, to be alert and awake, and be just here. And you work at it, and work at it, and one day you go boing! There is nowhere else to be! And then you get a very strange sensation. It seems that the now and you are all the same. And it’s like a stream which is moving along, carrying you, but not going anywhere. It moves and doesn’t move. It’s like looking at a blot, like a Rorschach blot, and seeing the blot running—but into the place where it is. Everything is moving into where it is. And this is state called eternal now. This is the meaning of eternity. Eternity isn’t static. So, this is the meaning of the Zen poem which says:

I walk over the bridge, and it’s the bridge flow, not the water.
I’m walking on foot, and yet riding on the back of an ox.
I’m empty-handed, and yet a spade is in my hand.

[Reefs]

The "Left-Hand Path" (1)

AW: All the forms of Buddhism that are associated with the Vajrayana are called Tantric. The word Tantra means “web structure,” warp and woof. Tantra, in the Hindu context, is a discipline that is sometimes called the fifth Veda. There are four Vedas that are basic holy scriptures of Hinduism. The fifth Veda is the esoteric one. According to the four Vedas, in order to be liberated you have to give up physical life. You must not eat meat. You must not have sexual intercourse. You must not take alcohol or any kind of consciousness-changing substance. There are various other things; I forget them all. But in Tantra the whole idea is that liberation comes through contact with forbidden things. It comes through belonging to the world, participating in it. Sometimes this is called the left-hand path.

In a Hindu story, Brahma was asked, “Who will gain to communion with you first, he who loves you or he who hates you?” And Brahma replied, “He who hates me, because he will think of me more often.”

In other words, you can attain to liberation by complete altruism, and also by total selfishness. If you are completely and consistently selfish—if you push selfishness to an extreme—you will discover that your self is the other, that you do not really experience yourself at all except in terms of others. That is the point of the left-hand path, to push oneself to an extreme. However, the left-hand path is a very dangerous way of going about things, because nobody approves of it.

Alan Watts, Buddhism - the Religion of No-Religion, Chapter 5

[Reefs]

The "Left-Hand Path" (2)

AW: In my distant past my father and I once witnessed a stage comedy. A man was asleep in a highly Victorian bedroom filled with all kinds of fancy furniture. The alarm clock went off and he woke up in a total rage. He immediately picked up his shoe and smashed the alarm clock. He got out of bed in a fury. He ripped the sheets to pieces, overturned the bed, found a hammer somewhere and started breaking up all the crockery and the windows until the place was totally demolished, except that in one corner there remained one of those enormous stand-up lamps. It’s the only unbroken thing in the room. The man becomes furious when he sees it just standing there innocently. He rushes across the room and picks it up over his head and flings it to the floor. And it bounces. It doesn’t break. It was made of rubber.

That’s the surprise I was talking about earlier. Satori. Sudden awakening. It bounced. This is the whole thing about Buddhism. We all think we are going to crash. We must think that, because otherwise it wouldn’t be a surprise when we bounce.

In other words, if you press your selfishness, follow that left-hand path, explore all the sensations you can imagine—all the delights of pleasure, all the ecstasies, all the drunks, all the orgasms—what will you want, finally, after all that? You will say, “I want to bounce. I want to be let out of myself.” When you are selfish and you are let out of yourself, that selfishness becomes altruism. “He that would save his life shall lose it. He that loses his life”—or loosens it—“shall find it.” Whether we take the right-hand path or the other, we all arrive at the same destination.

In the same way, the painful path of meditative discipline or concentration—where the disciple is being watched over and threatened by somebody with a stick—will lead to the same goal. There are certain kinds of people who ought to take that path. They do not know they exist unless they hurt, and therefore the painful path is the right way for them. We should not condemn them or the path.

Tantra is an attitude that is common to both Hinduism and Buddhism. It means the web, the warp and woof, the yes and the no. It is the comprehension of the unity of opposites, of good and bad, of life and death, of love and hate, of all extremes in the whole spectrum of our emotions and our sensations.

Alan Watts, Buddhism - the Religion of No-Religion, Chapter 5

[Reefs]

The "Left-Hand Path" (3)

AW: This is not a teaching for children. You must have some maturity to understand this lesson. A child hearing this teaching would cease paying respect to rules or constraints because a child would see only that anything goes. There is no way of doing wrong if you are everything there is, forever and ever. You can die, forget everything altogether; what would it matter? There is always light on the other side of the darkness. You can always begin anew. This would be a child’s reaction to this teaching. But the adult would understand that even after everything was new again, the same patterns would unfold. Everything would be once again exactly as it was before, just as the physical forces in things repeat their fundamental laws and patterns. As it is in the outer world, so it is in the inner.

Buddhist enlightenment consists simply in knowing the secret of the unity of opposites—the unity of the inner and outer worlds—and in understanding that secret as an adult rather than as a child. It means, really, to finally grow up. To misunderstand this teaching is to fall into a trap. Just as in our own culture there is an attitude among many of our religious people of being against life, there is in Buddhism the trap of following the teachings without understanding them. As Saraha, a Tantric teacher who lived about 1000 A.D., said in critique of both the Hindu and Buddhist orthodoxy, “The Brahmans who do not know the truth recite the four Vedas in vain. With earth and water and kusha grass they make preparations. Seated at home they kindle fire. From the senseless offerings they make they burn their eyes with the pungent smoke. In lordly garb, with one staff or three, they think themselves wise with their Brahmanical law. Vainly is the world enslaved by their vanity. They do not know that the dharma is the same as the non-dharma. With ashes these masters smear their bodies. On their heads they wear matted hair. Seated within the house they kindle lamps. Seated in the corner they tinkle bells. They adopt a posture and fix their eyes, whispering in ears and deceiving folk, teaching widows and bald-headed nuns, and taking their fees.

“The Jain monks mock the way with their appearance, with their long nails and their filthy clothes. Or else naked and with disheveled hair they enslave themselves with their doctrine of liberation. If by nakedness one is released, then dogs and jackals must be so. If from absence of hair there comes perfection, then the hips of maidens must be so. If from having a tail there comes release, then for the peacock and yak it must be so. If wisdom consists in eating just what one finds, then for elephants and horses it must be so. For these Jain monks there is no release. Deprived of the truth of happiness, they do but afflict their own bodies.”

Saraha continues, “Then there are the novices and bhikshus”—meaning Buddhist monks—“following the teachings of the old school of Theravada Buddhism, renouncing the world to be monks. Some can be seen reading the scriptures. Some are withering away while concentrating on thought. Others have recourse to the Mahayana, the doctrine which expounds the original text, they say. Others just meditate on mandala circles. Others strive to define the fourth stage of bliss. With such investigating they fall from the way. Some would envisage it as space, others endow it with the nature of voidness, and thus they are generally in disagreement. But whoever seeks nirvana while deprived of the innate by attachment to any of these vehicles, these methods, can in no way acquire the absolute truth. Whoever is intent on method, how may he gain release? Will one gain release abiding in meditation? What is the use of lamps or offerings? What is to be done by reliance on mantras? What is the use of austerities or of going on pilgrimages? Is release achieved by bathing in water? No. Abandon such false attachments and renounce such illusions:” And that is the wisdom of the mountains.

Alan Watts, Buddhism - the Religion of No-Religion, Chapter 5

[Reefs]

Feb 4, 2022 15:18:44 GMT -5 laughter said:

Feb 4, 2022 8:28:10 GMT -5 Reefs said:

In a Hindu story, Brahma was asked, “Who will gain to communion with you first, he who loves you or he who hates you?” And Brahma replied, “He who hates me, because he will think of me more often.”

kant .. stop ... laughing .... please ..... send ....... Neil Cassidy!

This actually reminds me of something Meister Eckhart once said, that even blaspheming God would be praising God:

In the bull In agro dominico ("In the field of the Lord") of March 27, 1329, Pope John XXII condemned 28 theorems of Meister Eckhart. This ended the inquisition proceedings against Eckhart, who had died before the bull was published...

Sextus articulus: Item, Deum ipsum quis blasphemando Deum laudat.

Article Six: Likewise, Even he who blasphemes against God praises God.

[laughter]

Feb 6, 2022 9:37:30 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Feb 4, 2022 15:18:44 GMT -5 laughter said:

kant .. stop ... laughing .... please ..... send ....... Neil Cassidy!

This actually reminds me of something Meister Eckhart once said, that even blaspheming God would be praising God:

In the bull In agro dominico ("In the field of the Lord") of March 27, 1329, Pope John XXII condemned 28 theorems of Meister Eckhart. This ended the inquisition proceedings against Eckhart, who had died before the bull was published...

Sextus articulus: Item, Deum ipsum quis blasphemando Deum laudat.

Article Six: Likewise, Even he who blasphemes against God praises God.

Yes, as a Taoist might observe, an atheist defines himself by the notion of God, after all. .. or, as a narrative magician might say .. "there's no such thing as bad publicity".

[Reefs]

Pointers - Non-duality and the problem of language (1)

AW: As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and basic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it a Hintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our minds which we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence “I” am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.

The difficulty in realizing this to be so is that conceptual thinking cannot grasp it. It is as if the eyes were trying to look at themselves directly, or as if one were trying to describe the color of a mirror in terms of colors reflected in the mirror. Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or “ground” of our existence and our awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known. We are forced, therefore, to speak of it through myth—that is, through special metaphors, analogies, and images which say what it is like as distinct from what it is. At one extreme of its meaning, “myth” is fable, falsehood, or superstition. But at another, “myth” is a useful and fruitful image by which we make sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air. Yet “myth,” in this second sense, is not to be taken literally, just as electricity is not to be confused with air or water. Thus in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road.

Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Chapter 1

[inavalan]

Feb 7, 2022 10:09:20 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Pointers - Non-duality and the problem of language (1)

AW: As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and basic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it a Hintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our minds which we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence “I” am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.

The difficulty in realizing this to be so is that conceptual thinking cannot grasp it. It is as if the eyes were trying to look at themselves directly, or as if one were trying to describe the color of a mirror in terms of colors reflected in the mirror. Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or “ground” of our existence and our awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known. We are forced, therefore, to speak of it through myth—that is, through special metaphors, analogies, and images which say what it is like as distinct from what it is. At one extreme of its meaning, “myth” is fable, falsehood, or superstition. But at another, “myth” is a useful and fruitful image by which we make sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air. Yet “myth,” in this second sense, is not to be taken literally, just as electricity is not to be confused with air or water. Thus in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road.

Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Chapter 1

It is presumptuous to believe and to emphatically claim that something can't be understood, or it can't be put in words. You can only state that you can't!

Ironically, his use of "Hintergedanke" is an example that proves this point. The translation is simply "ulterior motive", but he made it seem something obscure or ineffable. This is like, I have an "ulterior motive" to show my finger, and claim (even to myself) that it can't be understood, and even I (who I am so smart that I can understand it, my finger) can't describe it in words (in spite of being such a wordy guy) ... 

Masses of followers, in awe, accept being inferior and consequently being told about a truth that they can't comprehend ... And the prize is: they start believing that they too grasp that truth that can't be comprehended, nor can be expressed in words, and start explaining it emphatically to non-believers.

This is reminds also of Taleb's "black swan": you've never seen it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

[laughter]

Feb 7, 2022 13:43:43 GMT -5 inavalan said:

Feb 7, 2022 10:09:20 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Pointers - Non-duality and the problem of language (1)

AW: As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and basic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it a Hintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our minds which we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence “I” am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.

The difficulty in realizing this to be so is that conceptual thinking cannot grasp it. It is as if the eyes were trying to look at themselves directly, or as if one were trying to describe the color of a mirror in terms of colors reflected in the mirror. Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or “ground” of our existence and our awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known. We are forced, therefore, to speak of it through myth—that is, through special metaphors, analogies, and images which say what it is like as distinct from what it is. At one extreme of its meaning, “myth” is fable, falsehood, or superstition. But at another, “myth” is a useful and fruitful image by which we make sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air. Yet “myth,” in this second sense, is not to be taken literally, just as electricity is not to be confused with air or water. Thus in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road.

Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Chapter 1

It is presumptuous to believe and to emphatically claim that something can't be understood, or it can't be put in words. You can only state that you can't!

Ironically, his use of "Hintergedanke" is an example that proves this point. The translation is simply "ulterior motive", but he made it seem something obscure or ineffable. This is like, I have an "ulterior motive" to show my finger, and claim (even to myself) that it can't be understood, and even I (who I am so smart that I can understand it, my finger) can't describe it in words (in spite of being such a wordy guy) ... 

Masses of followers, in awe, accept being inferior and consequently being told about a truth that they can't comprehend ... And the prize is: they start believing that they too grasp that truth that can't be comprehended, nor can be expressed in words, and start explaining it emphatically to non-believers.

This is reminds also of Taleb's "black swan": you've never seen it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Well, the only presumption in what can't be put into words is the concept of the ineffable, which simple puts one on notice. As far as the notion of something that intellect can't grasp, there's an interesting metaphor for this, say, trying to teach calculus to a cat.

Anyone who "accepts being inferior" has missed the pointing entirely and is fixating on a misinterpretation. Notice how Watts refers to the apprehension as in the back of everyone's mind. This is the unknown known, that everyone already "knows". It is a simple, subtle commonality, and there is a very great and genuine humility in the realization, as it is the birthright of even those who scoff at the notion. It is not an achievement, nor a reward for hard work, and as such can never put one above or below another, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't yet realized it.