The Marginalian returns to a 1967 Alan Watts lecture collected in the posthumous volume Talking Zen: Reflections on Mind, Myth, and the Magic of Life, edited by his son Mark. Its subject is the way language both opens and limits our contact with reality. Watts begins from a problem many people recognise: the most important experiences in life seem to resist being put into words. William James made the same point when he listed ineffability as the first of the four features of transcendent experiences. Everything beautiful and meaningful, the essay notes, is irreducible to words and slips through the fingers of language as we try to capture it.
Human beings can stretch the reach of any single language by borrowing or inventing words, but there remains a fundamental limit to all language. Not everything in the world can be worded, and not everything in our experience can be named. Learning to name is learning to see, but unlearning to name can lift the blinders of language and allow a clearer, deeper view into the nature of reality. The essay describes those regions of experience as places we cannot begin to understand, because understanding depends on explanation, and explanation is language squared: the if/then logical language of mathematics merged with the narrative language of storytelling.
The text also draws on Ursula K. Le Guin's observation that words are events: they do things and change things. Yet sometimes, it argues, the eventlessness of pure being is what allows us to reach the space within us where the most durable truths dwell, truths about ourselves, about the world, and about what it means to be alive.
Watts describes the deepest knowledge as very different from what is learned in school or from books. It is a knowing in which, he says, there is nothing to be remembered and nothing to be formulated. He calls this knowing 'suchness' and says it is achieved only through being completely here. For this, one thing is necessary, and it is among the most difficult for the human animal to do: stop thinking. Watts is careful about what he means. He uses the word think to mean talking to yourself, the subvocal conversation, the constant chitchat of symbols, images, talk and words inside the skull.
His argument is simple and direct. If you talk all the time, you will never know what anyone else has to say, and then all you will have to talk about is your own conversation. The same is true for people who think all the time. If you do that all the time, you will find that you have nothing to think about except thinking. Just as you have to stop talking to hear what others have to say, you have to stop thinking to find what life is about.
The reward for that stopping is immediate contact with what Alfred Korzybski called, as Watts puts it delightfully, 'the unspeakable world': the nonverbal world. Some people would call it the physical world, but words such as physical, nonverbal and material are all conceptual. Watts insists that it is not a concept. It is simply this.
This points to a larger misunderstanding about Zen and about the search for meaning. Watts says that if you really understand Zen, the Buddhist idea of enlightenment is not comprehended in the idea of the ordinary, nor in terms of the infinite, the finite, the eternal or the temporal. These are all concepts. When you are awake to the world, the apparent differences between self and other, life and death, pleasure and pain are conceptual and are not there. They do not exist at all in the world that simply is.
The essay therefore frames the search for meaning not as an attempt to gain another concept or to accumulate more explanations, but as a turn toward direct contact with life as it is before the internal narration begins. For Watts, the pulse of life is touched not by adding words but by putting them down.
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