You Are Playing A Game - Alan Watts On Reality

we have an absolutely extraordinary attitude to the new member of human society instead of saying frankly to Children how do you do welcome to the human race we are playing a game and we are playing by the following rules we want to tell you what the rules are so that you'll know your way around and when you've understood what rules we're playing by when you get older you may be able to invent better ones but instead of that we still retain an attitude to the child that he is on probation he's not really a human

being he's a candidate for Humanity and therefore to preserve the role of parent or to preserve the role of teacher you have to do what they do in the Arthur marray School of dancing which is that they string you out they don't tell you all the the story about dancing because if they tell you you'll learn in in a few weeks and go away and you'll know it but instead they want to keep you on and in just this way we have a whole system of preparation of the child for life which always is preparation

and never actually gets there in other words we have a system of schooling which starts with grades and we get this little creature into the thing with a kind of come on kitty kitty kitty and we get it always preparing for something that's going to happen so you go into Nursery School as preparation for kindergarten you go to kindergarten as preparation for first grade and then you see you go up the grades till you get to high school and then comes a time when uh maybe if we can get you fascinated enough with the system

you go to college and then when you go to college if you're are smart you get into graduate school and stay a Perpetual student and go back to be a professor and just go round and round in the system but in the ordinary way they don't encourage quite that they want you after graduate grate school or after graduation commencement as it's called beginning to get out into the world with a capital W and so you've been trained for this and now you've arrived but when you get out into the world at your first sales meeting

they've got the same thing going again because uh they want you to make that quota and if you do make it they give you a higher quota and come along about the 45 years of age maybe your vice president and you suddenly Dawns on you that you've arrived with a certain sense of having been cheated because life feels the same as it always felt and you are conditioned to be in desperate need of a future so the final goal that this culture prepares for us is called retirement when you will be a senior citizen and

you will have the wealth and the Leisure to do what you always wanted but you will at the same time have impotence and uh false teeth and no energy so the whole thing from beginning to end is a hoax you uh are involved very by and large in a very strange business system which divides your day into work and play work is something something that everybody does and you get paid to do it because nobody could care less about doing it in other words it is so abominable and boring that you can get paid for

doing it and the object of doing this is to make money and the object of making money is to go home and enjoy the money that you've made when when you've got it you see you can buy pleasure and that this is a complete fallacy money never can buy by Pleasure because all pleasures depend upon not putting down a symbol of power money but upon disciplines in other words now in sorito where I live we have pure after peer full of fine boats motor Cruisers sailing boats all sorts of things which nobody ever uses because

they've been bought on the uh falling for the ad line that if you buy this thing you will have pleasure you will have status you will have something or other but then they suddenly discover that having a boat requires the art of seamanship which is difficult but rewarding therefore nobody has time for it and all they do with the boats is have cocktail parties on them at the weekend and in myriads of ways you see you go home you we're the wealthiest people in the world and you would think that having earned your money uh

you would have a great banquet and an orgy and so on but nobody does they eat a TV dinner which which is just a warmed over airline food and then they spend the evening looking at an electronic reproduction of life which is divided from you by a glass screen you can't touch it you can't smell it and you you have a strange feeling you see that the whole procession of grades that was leading to Something in the future to that goodie that gorgeous goluptious goodie that was lying at the end of the line never quite

turns up and this is because from the beginning we condition our children to a defective sense of identity and this I think is the most important feature in the whole thing that a child grows into our culture and this is not only Western culture it's equally true in Japan we condition the child in a way that sets the child a life problem which is insoluble and therefore attended by constant frustration and as a result of this problem being insoluble it is perpetually postponed to the Future so that one lives one is educated to live in

the future and one is not ever educated to live today now I'm not saying that you know the philosophy of carpedm let us drink today for tomorrow we die and not make any plans what I am saying is that making plans for the future is of use only to people who are capable of living completely in the present because when you make plans for the future and they mature you are if you can't live in the present you are not able to enjoy the future for which you have planned because you will have in you

a kind of syndrome uh whereby happiness consists in promises and not in directed in immediate realizations so long as you feel that tomorrow it will come you see on a dollar bill it always says promise to pay it's a promissary note and uh nobody ever can come across because the promise is tomorrow and as the we say in common speech tomorrow never comes but everything is based on the idea you see that you will get it tomorrow and you can enjoy yourself today so long as tomorrow looks bright but confucious once said a man who

understands the da in the morning can die contentedly in the evening that is to say if you have ever lived one complete moment you can be ready to die you can say well that was it that was the good that I've had it you see but if you never live that complete moment death is always a guy who like comes into a bar at 2:00 in the morning and says time Gentlemen please and you say oh please one more drink not yet because you haven't really have the feeling that you ever had it you ever

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