There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to "get c… - Alan Watts

[A]wareness of time ceases to be an asset when concern for the future makes it almost impossible to live in the present[.]

This wave phenomenon is happening on ever so many scales — the fast wave of light, the slower waves of sound — and there are all sorts of other wave processes, such as the beat of the heart; the rhythm of breath, waking, sleeping; the movement of human life from birth to maturity to death. And the slower the wave goes, the more difficult it is to see that the crest and trough are inseparable, and this is how we become persuaded in the game of hide-and-seek. So we see the trough go down, down, down and think it keeps going forever — that it will never rise back up again into a crest. We forget that trough implies crest, and crest implies trough. There is no such thing as pure sound — sound is sound/silence. Light is light/darkness. Light is pulsation — between every light pulse there is the dark pulse.

Thus the “brainy” economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse — providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect “subject” for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-with-out-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity — shock treatments — as “human interest” shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings.