I recently came across this Alan Watts quote: “If you get the message, hang up the phone.” My first take was simple: once you’ve understood something, let it go and move on to other things. Then I looked up the full quote and found there was more to it. It comes from Watts’ psychedelic era, but the complete version takes a different turn:
“If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eyes permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.”
What I take from this: when something clicks deep inside you — when a real understanding lights up (and I’m convinced this happens without any substances at all) — let it land. Sit with it. Reflect.
I know this from my own life. I think about something for a long time, feel my way into it, but I can’t break through. Then, usually when I let go, the deeper thoughts float to the surface and suddenly everything becomes clear. Only then can I actually do something with it. Only then can I put the lesson to work.
Instead of endlessly listening inward — chewing over the same thing in a hundred variations — I take a step back. I move on. And the real work begins.
Originally published auf Deutsch at reinergaertner.de (est. 1997, older than Google). AI helped translate this. I helped introduce the errors.