The Lie We Live – Alan Watts on the Illusion of Time

thank you my goodness don't you remember when you went first to school you went to kindergarten and in kindergarten the idea was to push along so that you could get into first grade and then push along so to get into second grade third grade so on going up and up and then you went to high school and this was a great transition in life and now the pressure is being put on you must get ahead you must go up the graves and finally be good enough to get to college and then when you get to college you are still going step by step step by step up to the great moment in which you're ready to go out into the world and then when you get out into this famous world comes the struggle for success in profession or business and again there seems to be a ladder before him something for which you're reaching all the time and then suddenly when you're about 40 or 45 years old in the middle of life you wake up one day and say huh I've arrived and by Joe I feel pretty much the same as I've always felt in fact I'm not so sure that I don't feel a little bit cheated because you see your food you were always living for somewhere where you aren't and while as I said it is of tremendous use for us to be able to look ahead in this way there is no use planning for a future which when you get to it and it becomes a present you won't be there you'll be living in some other future which hasn't yet arrived and so in this way one is never able actually to inherit and enjoy the fruits of one's action you can't live at all unless you can live fully now and because now is never satisfactory because we're never really living in it we get more and more Avid to go ahead and pursue the future we develop our technology to a fantastic ability where we can more and more fulfill our desires for the future almost immediately working towards a sort of push-button world but have you ever stopped to think what the world would be like if you could fulfill every wish the moment you wished it suppose for example I'm going to bed at night you could always dream whatever you wanted to dream what would happen after a while of course I suppose at first you would dream fantastic Pleasures wonderful adventures fulfillment of all the things you ever wished then as time went on don't you think you'd want to be oh a little bit surprised to have a little bit less control over what was happening to you and after you'd experimented with this for some months or years you might even want dreams in which you suffer because there is no real Delight no real fulfillment without delay doesn't every child know on a hot day you think I'm terribly thirsty and I'd like an ice cream soda haven't you tried the experiment of putting off drinking it putting off so to get thirstier and thirstier and it's so much fun when you finally get to it so in the same way in patience with time always wanting the future is frustrating Maya which generally has the meaning of Illusion or rather Illusions brought about by the acceptance of certain conventions of which perspective was an example when we are not aware that certain things which we take for granted like the separateness of each of the things from each other when we are not aware that this is a matter of convention we are apt to be fooled now I think one of the conventions by which we tend to be fooled more than almost any other is time and for all human beings time is a matter of extraordinary importance and perhaps this is one of the principal ways in which we differ from animals because man has been called a Time binding animal that is to say a creature who is vividly aware of the fact that his life moves as it were along a line from the past through the present and into the future animals apparently live pretty much Moment by moment they don't appear to have very strong memories but because man has a strong memory he is able to Bear the past in mind and as it were cast It Forward into visions of the future based upon what has happened in the past and therefore although this facility gives man the most extraordinary ability to plan his life to prepare for future eventualities at the same time there is a very heavy price which he pays for it and especially if he takes this ability too serious in other words if he doesn't realize that the true reality in which he lives is the present moment now for example the animal probably doesn't concern itself very much with problems of future disease death or starvation and things of that kind if an animal sees another dead animal lying around I don't suppose he thinks to himself well one day that's going to happen to me rather he just sees the dead animal sniffs it see if it's whether it's good to eat and wanders away but for human beings it's entirely different because we actually spend most of our time and a great deal of our emotional energy living in time which is not here living in an elsewhere which is not concretely real so much so that although we may be quite comfortable and happy in our present circumstances if there is not a guarantee not a promise of a good time coming tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow we are at once unhappy even in the midst of pleasure and affluence and so we develop a kind of chronic anxiety about time we want to be sure more and more because of our sensitivity to the feeling of time we want to be sure more and more that our future is assured and for this reason the future Becomes of more importance to most human beings than the present and in this sense we are hooked taken in by Amaya because it is of very little use to us to be able to control and plan the future unless we are capable at the same time of living totally in the present and so when in civilized societies we spend so much of our time living for the future we become very much like those celebrated donkeys you know that have uh carrot fastened on a stick that's tied to the neck you know behind here and it comes over and there's the carrot dangling in front of him they pursue it Pursuit pursue it but could never reach it and so in exactly the same way it's that way with us but when one can come to realize that the present is the only place in which you live and that the past and the future are now no more than useful delusions still useful but useful only if one can live in them then as I say one can settle into full participation will the momentary reality of life as it goes along Just Like Music Buddha one of the wisest of the sons of Asia his real name was gotima but he was called Buddha because Buddha means the awakened one the man who woke up now in what sense was he awake he was awake in the sense that he was completely all here after all we say about a person who's nuts he's not all here he's not all there but our whole culture our whole civilization in so far as it is involved with time and living only for a future is nuts it's not all here we are not awake we are not completely alive now and consequently we are so hungry and so greedy becaus