The Illusion of MONEY, TIME & EGO - Alan Watts - YouTube

well i have a sort of suggestion

and that is this

that before we decide either to save the planet or to destroy it

we pause for a moment of silence

i don't mean that kind of grim silence which one observes

when somebody says such and such a famous person has just died and we'll

observe a moment of silence in his honor and everybody frowns and thinks very

serious thoughts that's not silence at all.

I mean real silence

in which we stop thinking

and experience reality as reality is

because after all if i talk all the time i can't hear what anyone else has to say

and if i think all the time and by that i mean specifically

talking to yourself some vocally inside your skull

if i think all the time i have nothing to think about except thoughts

and so i'm never in touch with the real world now what is the real world

some people have the theory that the real world

is material or physical i say it's made a kind of a stuff

other people have the theory that the real world is spiritual or mental but i

want you to point out that both those theories of the world

are concepts

of words

and the real world is not an idea it is not words reality is

you will find therefore that if you get with reality

all sorts of illusions disappear and i will mention several illusions

that have not this kind of existence

let's begin with some very down-to-earth ones

like money

money is a very useful method of accounting

it is a measure of wealth in the same way as

inches are measures of length and grams measures of weight

you cannot eat money you could have a fantastic

quantity of dollar bills and stock certificates

on a desert island they would be useless to you

what you would need would be food and animals

and companions

money simply represents wealth in rather the same way

that the menu represents the dinner

only we are psychologically perverted in such a way

that we would some of us would rather have money than real wealth

but you know you cannot drive in five cars at once

even though they be cadillacs you cannot live simultaneously in six houses

or eats 12 roasts of beef at one meal there is a limit to what one can consume

so that's one of the sort of confusions i'm talking about

another

is that we confuse ourselves as living organisms

with our idea of ourselves

that is to say with the conception of myself which is called

the personality or ego

we that is what we have been told we are

and it's an extremely crude and limited conception of oneself

of the actual unique living organism

and we get unhappy

because we're thinking of ourselves in this way because we

think well gee i'm going to die

i once talked to a woman who came to me and said she was afraid of death

and uh we went into it in a long conversation i said what are you really

afraid of

and she thought it over and thought it over and he said you know what i'm going

to be afraid of is what other people are going to say

they're going to say poor old gert she couldn't last it through

because you see who you think you are is entirely dependent on

who people have told you you are

you're not that then another thing that bothers bothers

us is time

most people nowadays say i have no time of course you don't

because you are not aware of the present you know the present is represented on

your watch by a hairline that is as thin as possible as is

consistent with visibility and so everybody thinks the present is

instead of

now the present is the only real time there is no past and there isn't a

future

and there never will be

we think ordinarily of the present as an infinitesimal point

at which the future changes into the past

and we also do a terrible thing we imagine ourselves to be results of the

past and we're always passing the buck over

our shoulders like when god approached adam in the garden

of eden and said hast thou eaten of the fruit of the tree

whereof i told thee thou shouldst not eat

and adam said this woman thou gave with me she tempted me and i did eat

and god looked at eve and said hast thou eaten of the fruit of the tree whereof i

told thee thou shalt not eat and she said the serpent beguiled me and

i did eat and god out of the corner of his eye looked at the serpent

serpent said nothing

so you see we're always passing the buck you don't realize that the past

is caused by the present as the wake of a ship

flows back from the prowl now the wake doesn't drive the ship any

more than the tail wags the dog but we've all got excuses

my mother had a fit while she was carrying me in the womb

uh they didn't bring me up right and then they go to the mother and say how

is it that you could have been so irresponsible with your children and

she says well it was my parents didn't bring me up right either and so

everybody passes the buck

but the truth of the matter is it all begins here

this is where the creation begins

and you're doing it and won't admit it because of course you're all god in

disguise jesus found that out and they crucified

him for saying so

so you would this is a very odd thing for westerners to understand and

particularly for americans because we are so fixated on the future

when we say want to put something down we say it has no future

well do you much better to have a present

because if you don't it's useless to make plans

because when they work out you won't be there to enjoy them you'll be thinking

of something else

so we don't we realize that we are living out of now

and throwing the past behind us

you