Alan Watts | Discovering the Power of the Present

I was discussing this morning the way in which time which is a measure of motion involves Us in certain Illusions principally what I call the historical illusion that is to say that the meaning of human life lies in living through a progression of events which culminates and Finds Its satisfaction in a future and trying to show you how in various ways the illusion of History has been extremely destructive to people how for example it fascinates us with symbols they may be symbols of wealth such as money or symbols of status so that the people who

are in our world highly successful cannot understand why their lives are so empty because they lack presence they lack uh the full Rich relationship to the physical world in the here and now and because they don't understand why they're so miserable they think they can cure their situation by more of the same that is to say by bigger and better Futures more money more power more status and so they go on compounding the problem and still failing to understand why they're increasingly miserable and uh they don't know what they want because their wants have as

it were grown to Dimensions where they're inconceivable and so they also don't know who they are because they have confused their true organic living being with the mask the Persona the role constellated around the ego which they have uh been taught to believe themselves to be none of this is to underrate the real uses of time that is to say of clocks because all time is a matter of clock there is no time in nature there is rhythm in nature yes there is motion in nature but the clock as a measure of motion is a

human artifact the world as it spins on its axis doesn't tick and I also pointed out that the calibration of the clock whereby we have hair lines to designate the point at which a certain second occurs is symbolic of the emptiness of our moments when the moment is reduced to a hairline you feel that it's here and gone that you can't ever really be now because it's all flying away all flying away and you can never sit down and be there this was F's problem you see when he attains His Highest moment and his calling

are still delay Thou Art so fair see uh the moment is very curious thing uh it isn't fleeting at all it looks as if it is but it isn't the moment is always with you and this is the point uh to understand this is the point of all those spiritual exercises which are concerned with concentrating on what you are doing now and keeping your mind on on it for example in the practice of the Japanese tea ceremony the entire art of it is to have complete presence of mind to be completely with doing just this

thing so likewise in um all sorts of yoga uh exercises try and be completely now the whole training of a Zen monk day in and day out throughout his discipline whether it's meditation or whether it's work or sweeping or cooking or eating or whatever it is they they keep insisting do what you're doing eat when you're hungry sleep when you're tired and do that but the point of that exercise is uh that after you practice it for a while it suddenly occurs to you with a great shock which is a sort of Satori that there

is nowhere else to be but the moment you cannot be anywhere else it doesn't Flow Away it's always here maybe a lot of things flow through it uh forms change experiences change rhythms change and so on but it's always there so you have plenty of time in the sense of real time which is the moment to have time is to have the moment you remember the story that flry told at the end of last session where the the uh D Lama's brother says that yes it was very nice to come to the United States but

the problem the difference between here and Tibet was that uh here you have all sorts of uh Power and whatnot but you have no time in Tibet you have a very primitive existence and lots of time and uh it's so interesting to get into a culture that is so-called primitive it's very easy because you can now take a jet plane to pu a Vata uh in matter of a very short time you can be uh in touch with a culture that is Ageless because you only have to go from Puerto Vata down North or South

to the Indian Villages along the coast which you can only reach by boat or by a jeep through jungle roads which are just Terri and you get out to these people and suddenly everything stops you know where are they going they doing the things they've always done and it's sort of a it we we we always say it's a sleepy Village not very exciting so actually Zen is the art of combining an exciting life with living in the complete present very curious It's not sleepy at all it's not like you would think of a sleepy

Village when you watch uh Zen monks walking they don't dawle they're like cats you know how a cat crosses a road it has a complete kind of it knows where it's going it just goes like that and that's like a Zen monk walking it's the most curious combination of what you would call the virtues of economy of expertness in doing what you do and at the same time not being any hurry in any hurry this zen master in San Francisco Suzuki roshi uh is particularly admired by his students for achieving an enormous amount of work

uh without ever seeming to make the slightest effort and he can move they've just been uh working down at tasahara Springs and they have rearranged a rocky stream to make it look more natural and he can move bigger rocks than any of the tough young men who are working along with him simply fantastic but it's all based on a real relationship to the material especially to the material moment and working in such a way that you never strain yourself because you never rush you don't have in mind the goal and being wanting to get there

in the greatest possible hurry you have in mind simply that every phase of doing the work which will eventually arrive at that goal is as much worth doing as when you're playing music you are involved completely in the production of the sounds as they go along without hurrying them to reach the end it's the same with sex a lot of people are in a hurry to reach the end and therefore they don't they never have sexual satisfaction because they have nothing but orgasms and uh although people have talked a great deal about the importance of

the orgasm and that's true and right and perfectly proper it's worth nothing without the buildup uh you know it would be the same thing as taking dietetic pills where you have a few pills which contain all the essential nutrition throw them down get on with real life or by having some substitute for sleep that you could take in a pill and not have to sleep incidentally I just want to put in a parenthesis here about the importance of sleep there is a very special kind of sleep which the Hindus call sushupti sleep without dreams and

very deep and uh it's isn't isn't sleep funny that you go to bed and time is totally eliminated until you wake up and you seem to wake up immediately after you went to sleep and yet something happened now uh there there is a way of getting into completely profound sleep which I call I don't know where I got the word I call it a temple sleep and it I found it best uh in a protected area out of doors on a sunny afternoon or at night where you get under a tree and uh you get

a suitable pad and you lie on your back and you simply open up like a cat does or a dog does sometimes you stretch in every direction like this and you surrender to the Earth and you sink you let go you imagine your body is extremely heavy so that it's dropping into the Earth and you just let yourself go to the night with the kind of feeling that uh you are uh being moved through by immensely powerful Life Energy healing energy or whatever and you give give give give to this letting go of everything letting

go of all control of all consciousness of all uh anxiety of all care about anything and if you go right down into this immense depth and then you wake up uh a little before Dawn and the sky is a deep deep blue and you can see the stars through the leaves you know and that feeling that you get when morning comes and everything is uh Awakening and there's a kind of extraordinary freshness to the world then you really uh thoroughly get with the dawn it's a magnificent experience but you see it's it the trouble is

that sleep strikes our whole culture as a waste of time why have to take this out you see why have to uh cut it out but what I'm indicating by giving you this little imagery is how it's possible to enjoy unconsciousness and what restorative value unconsciousness can have in just the same way a death you know um Stevenson's poem under the wide and Starry Sky dig me a grave and Let Me Lie glad did I live and gladly die and I laid me down with a will uh if you can see death in that way

as the just as when you went to sleep you abandoned all the cares and uh so on so in death you abandon all responsibilities people in the moment of death have had great uh marvelous experiences with this if they got with it just think you don't have to pay any more bills you don't have to watch the clock anymore you're not responsible for anyone you don't have to solve anybody's problems you don't have to solve your own problems you don't have to avoid evil you don't have to do good nothing the whole thing the whole

uh strain of being somebody is abandoned and when that happens some people people before they die have this enormous exess of delight and suddenly see the point of everything and so for that reason all forms of initiation in every place I can think of have invariably been connected with the art of dying in the middle of Life die now and give up give up the compulsion to go on give up protecting yourself looking for security looking for uh all those things which when you get them hurt don't you know that that when you get security

it hurts because you're worried you're going to lose it this is terribly true and so when you die in the middle of Life they used to have of course in some uh religions ceremonies where you underwent a ritual death you were put in a coffin you went down into a deep pit some symbolism of death in Christianity you were drowned it's called baptism and uh that's supposed to be but they've forgotten you see what it was all about and uh then when you come up you would think now I have been relieved of all responsibility

I I've been relieved of all necessity to be anything because I become nobody so they give you a new name but they give you a nobody name instead of a somebody name in Christianity when they baptized somebody they gave him the name of one of the archetypal Angels or disciples so that you were no longer um say uh leous you became Peter and Peter is one of the nobodies the great nobodies you see so uh I've noticed recently I've met a few young people who have abandoned the ordinary idea of naming themselves I met a

young man just the other night when we said what is your name he said it's you and uh I remember a story about Dr spiegelberg when uh he visited my son-in-law when my son-in-law was very young and uh he got this formidable Professor Friedrich spiegelberg and said uh I don't know what to call you and Spielberg said just call me ha you so this kid's name was you and I found a very there's a there's a man going around who calls himself the Plastic Man and that's all anybody knows him by somebody came by the

other day and suggested that it would really Disturbed the whole nation if an enormous number of young people all changed their names to Harry Krishna so that their driver's license you go what you do is you just go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and you say I've changed my name would you isue this license to Harry Krishna everybody would be Harry Krishna but this you see is the thing of of this death death to the role that you thought you playing giving up all these UH responsibilities to amount to anything to be something now

here then comes this absolutely critical point which is why uh in every initiatic discipline there is a discipline other words uh the the individual is in some way uh nurtured for that moment because obviously the moment you have given up all the cares and responsibilities you get an immense access of psychic energy as all the energy which you've been expending defending yourself is available for something else so you become quite potentially dangerous and so always the society has been concerned about what will become a free people uh will they use the energy destructively or const

destructively but I the first thing to realize to understand if one is concerned about this is that there is a great deal of energy attached to this one normally supposes that human beings are naturally lazy they're not people we call Lazy are just tired or they're undernourished or they're uh their organism isn't working properly for reasons of that either they've been fighting themselves too much uh and they can't stand it or else they're don't have the right vitamins or something a human being is not lazy naturally the human being is a very strange creature it

has an enormous amount of surplus energy also does the stickle back fish this particular fish dances a great deal to get off its get rid of its Surplus energy and uh so in the same way human being beings have all this energy at their disposal and uh the the question is how to canaly it in such a way that they don't cause trouble with it so then uh you have in other words to be ready with something to do with it so as to canaly it and not just uh blow it all off but it

it is it's all contingent upon this huge gamble let me put it in this way it is a the the initiation death is a gamble will you bet me that if you completely abandon uh all control you know where you the the ordinary kind of ego control will control give it up completely see you're not responsible for anything will you bet me that if you make that gamble you will suddenly discover that you are full of uh great great stuff great energy and a lot of people will not accept that gamble under any circumstances they're

scared to death of it some people will make the Gamble and then be like the guy who won the Irish sweep steak and was ruined for life because they don't know how to handle it and this is one of the great problems of today when uh mystical experiences and things like that are so easily and readily available uh through for all sorts of reasons that a lot of people who are very immature get hold of this kind of experience and don't know what to do with it because they don't have uh the skills with which

and in terms of which this kind of exper experience can be beautifully and creatively used it isn't just a matter of Good Will the proverb says the road to hell is paved with good intentions it isn't enough to be a person of Good Will it isn't enough to be gentle as a dove you also have to be wise as a serpent so I say this in a general preface about getting out of History uh this is the real Dropout situation uh a Buddha for example in a certain way of talking is a Dropout because he

dropped off the wheel of ssara the the rat race of birth and death where you are always living for a future but you see nature of pause a vacuum if you drop out of one situation you drop into another and so observe where you drop in when you drop out well now that brings me then to this point that I will call the great Diversion the future is something you cannot work for for exactly the same reason that you cannot work to be happy happiness it's always said is a byproduct and it will acre to

you uh through becoming absorbed in something else altogether in some other Quest altogether the Quest for vision the Quest for uh doing something anything may bring happiness and so in exactly the same way the good future the Great Society the grand tomorrow is never going to be attained by working for it directly when you've got that idea uh which is embodied just as much in The Five-Year Plan as it is in the Great Society of working for that thing you will never make it the only way you can get the good future is by a

diversion from time altogether at right angles to the course of history so what is important now today is to create a diversion of such Splendor that people will forget about the things they think are important all their squabbles all their ridiculous projects for destroying the planet in the name of progress and give it up because they see something else is going on which is a great deal more fun it's like you know you would have gambling tables at Las Vegas and in some great Casino there's been a terrible game going on all night where people

are getting more and more emotionally upset and they're all involved and there are tremendous stakes and there's a huge crowd gathered around it and oh what if that doesn't come out and so on suddenly somewhere over in another corner of the casino something starts up and all the people here are threatening to shoot each other and so on they over there they're all laughing and someone's sitting at the back of the crowd a few characters the big crowd you know the big serious game going on they're all looking over suddenly hear this thing going on

they start turning over and looking at the other table and they get to peel off and go over there and start joining in that game and finally just at the moment when the immense crash is going to come out and these two great gamblers have gambled the whole universe on what they were doing as if they owned it and they're about to we've got the bomb ready to blow each other up they suddenly look around huh nobody's watching they start looking over there what's going on over there you see so this is the only way

in which we can um do anything about the future at all is to create a diversion of doing things and living in a way that is non-historical and that is instead of preparing to uh live the great life as a result of all sorts of preparations use what capacities you now already have for living the Great life to do it don't wait and this will create a a fantastic diversion from history then you see um man can attain sanity once again by becoming non-historical like the bees like the ants like the birds now we look

at ants and say oh ants we don't want to be like that that reminds us of Communism but that's only because we are not close enough to ants to see their different personalities if there are a bunch of ants sitting around and they're apparently to us doing very very simple things like nurturing eggs and milking greenfly but the ants themselves are all look different to each other they have slightly different colorings slightly different Wiggles on their antenna which are just as important to them as our facial differences are to us and they have ways of

communicating and they think that this is the very very good life I mean they have occasional troubles and wars and so on but they don't they they've lived that way so far as we know for millions and millions of years without any progress now you would say that could be very dull yes it would be dull if you kept keeping records and reading them because then you would say oh well you would get too much memory now one this is a very important thing again let me warn you that I always exaggerate and therefore you

must take it with certain reservation which we call a grain of salt a memory is a good thing sure but it equally important is a forgettery we have in the human organism fortunately and mercifully a hole at each end one for nutrition and one for elimination and people don't pay enough attention to the problems of elimination uh at least they pay it in a certain way they pay attention to whether they're constipated or not but that's not really the thing disposal has become one of the major problems of modern civilization as a practical problem for

the city of San Francisco where to put the garbage is becoming quite critical mountains and mountains and mountains of garbage are arising uh and it is almost as if the human being could be eventually crowded off the Earth by his own waste that's because uh we we haven't really thought about elimination and the problems of elimination we've only really thought about the problems of keeping storage and the things we store the I'm appalled by the files that I'm I'm required to keep by the correspondence by the increasing accumulation of Records this thing I don't know

why I make these tapes some people like to listen to them I never listen to them because it would take me as long to listen to them as it does to make it and I would simply be repeating the experience why do that if some student wants to go through something more carefully fine but you can read a book so much faster than you can listen to a tape so there is a thing going on now called the information bomb which is the proliferation of records and this has reached such a pitch that it is

plainly absurd let me give you some examples from a field that I'm well acquainted with Oriental studies and then you know this is a small field of relative unimportance but today to be a serious scholar in the field of Oriental studies you have to make like you're a very very meticulous scientist because if you publish an article in the Journal of the American Oriental society which is one of the dullest journals ever conceived and you make a slight mistake with a diacritical mark on a Sanskrit character or a little line wrong in a Chinese character

you will next month be demolished in a footnote by some pesky scholar and uh here they all are they they've got so much detail in their head they know so much so much information has been acquired it would take nobody can possibly Master it the articles come pouring out if it's that way in Oriental studies you should imagine how it is in electronics it comes and comes and comes and comes and I was talking the other day to a man who's done a great deal of work in this and he spent 15 or more years

acquiring some Tibetan prints and he could out of this material compile two enormous volumes to be published by University press with every kind of commentary on these prints and what would happen they would be bought by a few big libraries and one or two Scholars and nobody would ever read it so he said to me I am through with that game I am an old man I have seen enough I have attained all the academic honors I ever could want and I am now going to have fun and I am going to publish these Tibetan

Graphics as far out posters [Laughter] but you see what happens after a certain point um this method of intellectual analysis which was always good and useful in the beginning and did some very lovely things after all when you you study uh let's say you take a course on Renaissance painting from somebody who really knows what it it's all about or on uh Baroque music or on leader or something like that it's fascinating to see how those things were put together and why it's extremely beautiful but if you go One Step Beyond that it's like cooking

the sule just a minute too long the whole thing disintegrates into dust and as it is then in the academic world today where you have an intellectual Market going on to do this thing to turn out graduate students to turn out professors who have to put the new graduate students through the paces and all the field has been covered so they give them more and more minute and ridiculous things to do and all the information because some of it is information piles in and piles in and piles in everybody including the scholars suddenly get around

one day and say what on Earth are we doing especially if it's in a sort of historical humanistic subject that has no particular technical application when Aldis Huxley graduated from bail at Oxford his tutor took him aside and said Mr Huxley you have a very distinguished record as a student uh he was in English literature said you should very seriously consider an academic career in English literature you would make a very fine professor and all sues that's most extraordinary cuz I always thought literature was something to be enjoyed not to be [Laughter] studied and so

it is you see that the capacity for the enjoyment of scholarship is not really known to these frantic Scholars terrified that they will be demolished in a footnote and having to make that thing and keep this thing going you realize that the word schola uh a school means a place of leisure it was where the the phrase a scholar and a gentleman a gentleman meant somebody who didn't have to earn a living cuz he owned land or something and therefore he could devote his time to scholarship and so a scholar and a gentleman would acquire

gradually a beautiful library and he would go into that library and read at an easy Pace no deadlines no thesis to present at a certain time he studied for the love of learning and all those beautiful like like Bernard berenson's library at itati in Florence is a gentleman Scholars Library where he uh loafed away many many good hours studying a subject that he loved and got to know a great deal about it you cannot produce scholarship by this method across the bay it doesn't work it produces simply increased harassment piling up of enormous quantities of

irrelevant facts yes but a fact isn't the sacred thing just because it's a fact so you see in this way how a graded education system with goals with aiming at God only knows what aiming at a professorship of a higher rank aiming at a higher salary what whatever it is all that is irrelevant to the actual scholarship and so as a result uh the academic world is a a lot of political games with I say again some notable exceptions one knows certain still absolutely genuine Scholars who are trying to avoid committee meetings and uh grading

papers and all that kind of thing because they still love learning for its own sake but there are not many of them and they have amazing put Downs if you love learning for its own sake and you're not um worried about all the fine little points that you could get caught up on they say you're a popularizer you're a dant and above all an amateur and you know what an amateur is that's distinct from a pro we've come to use the word Pro the man who's M who's very competent and amateur the dabbler amateur meant

the man who does It For the Love of it from the gr root ammo in Latin the professional the man who earns his living at it it's curious how these things change so you see uh what we must be looking for is a diversion from that whole tendency which makes the professional instead of the amateur that that whole compulsion to use whatever it is that you do for some other end altogether in other words I'm baking bread not because I'm a vocation to be a baker but because it is me making money if the as

soon as you do that you see you lose track you lose the point so the diversion this way instead of going on with the course of history Robert Oppenheimer shortly before he died said it is quite obvious that the whole world is going to hell and the only thing that could possibly prevent this is not trying to prevent it the minute you get meshed with that contest of uh you see there's nothing more nobody I know in this world is more hostile than a pacifist on the Rampage the bitterness the the vitriolic once I got

in an argument with Margaret me and she was talking about she was in a very very highly emotional stateus was perfectly understandable about the bomb I said I am a little worried that uh we could get so excited about this and so violently try to stop the bomb that we might inadvertently blow it off and she said you are a fake Swami you have no consideration for your children and your children's children you have absolved all responsibility for the course of Destiny of History [Laughter] uh well this is you see today a a very big

question whether to take part in trying to save the world or whether to mind your own business and to uh do something else I must say I wrestle with this question because there's still enough um of the old conditioning in me say you really ought to get out there and do something about it after all you're responsible you and you youve got a hearing and all that kind of thing and I have to tell you it takes an enormous effort to be lazy to say now wait a minute go back to ler and never forget

it that when I see a man getting ready to put the world in order I know there will be great [Laughter] trouble govern a great state as you cook a small fish M you see the puzzle in connection with all this is the problem of The Sorcerer's Apprentice you remember in this story which uh what's his name duah who was that musician who made this thing um he used the magic to try and save the work and it got out of control and when the broom wouldn't stop fetching water he didn't know how to stop

the spell he chopped it and immediately it turned into two brooms bring twice as much water see and as he hit at them the fragments turned in each one into a new broom bringing more water and that's the situation we're in see we're in an economy which has to expand or collapse we talk about uh a growing business it means one that's making more and more and more and more and more every so everybody has got to be be incited to want more and more and more products and if you don't do it you're a

bad consumer and there are all kinds of ways of pressuring you into being a good consumer you come around here and you live on a house boat well we don't pay taxes because we're a boat and uh well that worries people and they say oh don't you have a sewage here and uh says no well I said that's a serious health problem well it that's just isn't because everybody who lives around here is very healthy and uh the main problem in the bay is Industrial Waste chemicals kill the fish fish like our waste especially mackerel

they thrive on it all you got to do is bring a big shipment of mackerel and dump and then what about the the birds you know they they deposit their excrements in the bay and at certain times of year you can hardly see the water for Birds what are they going to do have posies going around shooting the birds because they're fing the bay what they want in this Bay is um distilled water with a 10% saline additive for realistic [Laughter] effect so the thing is then if you live in this sort of thing eventually

somebody says well we won't insure you or um you doing this regulation's wrong and that regulation's wrong the real reason is that you're not being a good consumer you don't own the right kind of appliances the right kind of car the right kind of anything and so you're considered a bad consumer and you've got to go on owning somebody uh made a fantasy a little while ago about the future where everybody uh is required by law to possess enormous flashy cars and fantastic expensive things and only great business tycoons will be able to get away

with driving jalopies and wearing old clothes so but you see in that situation where you must you must you must increase increase increase increase increase like this you're simply not viable what's happening to you is the way you kill poison oak you feed certain hormones which you paint on the leaves and this promot the growth so excessively that it just blow up and we're in a situation like that where our progress is cancer we're going to blow up by she unless unless you see we stop stop the future time must have a stop and create

a diversion for