The Illusion of MONEY, TIME & EGO - Alan Watts

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