Don't Waste Your Life - Alan Watts On The Present Moment

to live for the future is a an indefinite postponement of [Music] life you um go through in your education a whole series of steps the word in Latin gradus means a step so we have first grade second grade third grade grus grus grus finally become a graduate you know you've gone along the steps but you're still doing it so that when you become finally successful as the president of your corporation you have a funny feeling of being cheated you've climbed the stairway and you've got to the top and there's nowhere else to go and since

you've never been taught to live in the present you don't know how to so an insurance salesman comes around and says listen I've got the very thing for you uh retirement program because when you're 65 you'll drop out of the system and then you'll really be able to enjoy yourself see despite your prostate trouble menopause false teeth and everything else and uh the art of living in the in the Eternal now is not taught in our educational system and it's not taught because it's thought of as being feckless irresponsible it isn't irresponsible at all it

is everybody's Duty I can put it that way to enjoy themselves because if you don't do that you become a nuisance you become aggressive you become a robber you become a thief you become a uh somebody who's trying to uh organiz the rest of the world that is to say a power Maniac simply because you haven't learned the very simple inexpensive art of living in the present moment it really doesn't take an awful lot of energy to maintain a human life if you really consider what you need to eat what you need to wear how

much housing you have to have it comes down to something quite simple and the simpler the more you have the capacity to enjoy watching a raindrop crawl down a window but if you watch a raindrop crawl down a window and you think my look at that everybody says you're crazy you watching a raindrop fall down a window can't you find something more important to do that means can't you make more trouble than that so uh the the mentality that doesn't recognize the importance of watching a raindrop crawl down a window is the one that is

creating the trouble in the world today say you are of no value you're not even human unless you're changing things unless you're interfering unless you're progressing we confuse growing with progressing unless something is happening and great operation a new project is going on and you're busy with it we say well you're you you're you're lazy you're good for nothing because you are not working for the future but they say if you're working for the future you're quite mad so they don't work for the future just like uh a Chinese Works long enough to make some

money then he knocks off work and he goes to the Gam joint and he gambles or he smokes opium or just generally wanders around and digs the scene and we say well that's awful that's irresponsible you can't do that that's not maintaining the world properly what do you think maybe that is maintaining the world properly maybe it's we who think that everything should be progressing who are destroying the world of course we are by by our uh Protestant ethic by our notion of um keeping everything in charge it's true we have a great initial success

we destroy diseases we keep people alive but on the end is the hbomb to get rid of it all entirely so uh these uh non-political people are saying to us the trouble with you is you don't know what you want you have a future which you're working for but you're all wret and no vomit you uh you promised yourselves that a good thing is going to happen you keep promising promising promising promising even your money is a promise it says on the dollar bill that uh the treasury of the United States will promise to pay

a dollar what are you going to get if you deliver this and say come on now I want whatever it is this dollar is and they just can give you credit cuz it's paper it's all symbolism so all these myriads of so-called primitive people like um Amar Indians Mexican Indians Africans don't communicate with with us and we don't communicate with them because they don't want what we think is the desirable good Society well some of them do of course so in Japan for example the Japanese have been thoroughly conned into the idea that uh the

Western way of life is a great thing and so uh they are by and large frantic industrialists and so as a result the cities of Nara Osaka Kobe are covered in smog Tokyo is a is just a mad house they're getting it so the whole point is the future is an illusion the basic ideas in Hindu cosmology that in the course of time you go through the series of yugos or the uh epochs and you begin with a great State of Affairs and it gradually deteriorates is a way of saying to people in the course

of time things only fall apart therefore get out of time get off the wheel of Sara the Rat Race So this underlies my idea of what I call the politics of diversion divert Western man from history from the notion that he is in a historical process which is leading to something always better and better and better but which in fact only leads to more and more destruction divert people from Time by living a style of life which is timeless and which is therefore more attractive than life devoted to time that doesn't exclude our technological power

part of the whole point of technology is that through technology we have the power to obliterate poverty completely but this must not be looked at in a historical way while it is looked at in a historical way it will not work that is to say the whole problem of money and the distribution of the wealth of the world as produced by technology is a psychological problem and not a material problem people are hypnotized with money which is the symbol of wealth as if it were something that was valuable in its own right that's the confusing

money with gold when when ramach Krishna said that one of the evils of the world was gold he was I think perhaps unconsciously quite correct there's a story that once upon a time all the banks in the world got tired of shipping gold from country to Country and so they decided to open an office in an island in the Pacific where all the banks had their headquarters and all the gold was put together there so that all they needed to do when they had to exchange some gold was to trundle it across the street and

operations proceeded beautifully for about 10 years then all the heads of the banks from the different countries came with their wives and their children to visit the island and have a great convention and so they inspected the books and the transactions and everything was in perfect order the last the children said Daddy want to see the gold so the bank president said to the managers take our children down to the Vault so that they could see the gold and so all those managers said um well uh it's sort of difficult and a little problematic and

it takes a lot of time and then and the president said well don't be stupid what's the matter can't they see the gold so they hummed and ho and said well we're sorry to report that 7 years ago there was a disastrous Subterranean earthquake and all the gold was swallowed up but of course we all knew how much we had at that time and so we've kept the books accordingly so it's a joke uh people don't realize in other words that that money is bookkeeping nothing but bookkeeping and therefore the whole idea of Taxation for

example is a complete anachronism the the thing that is stopping the flow of the actual wealth of the world is this fixation on money what you need to do is actually reverse Taxation and uh issue instead instead of charging taxes issue credit then uh but but you have to keep the credit balanced to the gross national product in some form of figuring and then everybody can circulate what they're making otherwise you're in this ridiculous situation where people Starving in India and we are hoarding uh Food Supplies and burning them and trying dumping them in the

ocean which is a sheer insanity but it's all based on a psychological block about money so uh this kind of psychological block is what in Indian philosophy would be called aaya it is an illusion and it's the same kind of Illusion as that of the future of um the idea that the future is when we are really going to live and if that's the way you operate when you get there you're never going to be able to handle it because you still want a future ahead of you you're a Perpetual donkey with a carrot suspended

from your collar on a rod like this pursuing you [Music]