We at Yakrider are greatly indebted to the written and taped works of Alan Watts, who in his lifetime made Eastern thought more accessible to the Western mind (that's us) in a brilliant and entertaining manner.  We are also grateful to his son, Mark Watts, who has made these works available, publishing collected talks and providing excellent and fascinating audio and video tapes of Alan Watts teachings.  Many of these are listed in our resources section.  Please also visit AlanWatts.com and discover some of these works.

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    When St. Augustine of Hipo was asked "What is time?" he replied, "I know what it is, but when
you ask me I don't." And funnily enough, he is the man most responsible for the average
commonsensical idea of time that prevails in the West. The Greeks and the East Indians thought
of time as a circular process. And anyone looking at his watch will obviously see that time goes
around. But the Hebrews and the Christians think of time as something that goes in a straight
line. And that is a very powerful idea which influences everybody living in the West today. And
this, you see, is a one directional process. And so we have got the idea that the universe of time
is a unique story which had a beginning and it is going to have an end, and which will never never
never happen again. And so although most Westerners do not believe in this story anymore,
although a great many of them think they ought to believe in it, but they in fact do not.

    They still retain from this way of thinking a linear view of time, that we are going in a single direction.
We will never again go back over the course which we have followed. And we hope that as we go on
in time, things will get better and better. And this version of time lies in very strange and fascinating contrast
to the view of time held by most other people in the world.

     Time is a measure of energy, a measure of motion. And we have agreed internationally on the speed
of the clock. And I want you to think about clocks and watches for a moment. We are of course slaves
to them. And you will notice that your watch is a circle, and that it is calibrated, and that each minute,
or second, is marked by a hairline which is made as narrow as possible, as yet to be consistent with
being visible. And when we think of a moment of time when we think what we mean by the word "now,"
we think of the shortest possible instant that is here and gone, because that corresponds with the hairline
on the watch. And as a result of this fabulous idea, we are a people who feel that we don't have any
present, because the present is instantly vanishing - it goes so quickly. It is always becoming past.
And we have the sensation, therefore, of our lives as something that is constantly flowing away from
us. We are constantly losing time. And so we have a sense of urgency. Time is not to be wasted.
Time is money. And so because of the tyranny of this thing, we feel that we have a past, and we
know who we are in terms of our past. Nobody can ever tell you who they are, they can only tell
you who they were. And we think we also have a future. And that is terribly important, because we
have a naive hope that the future is somehow going to supply what we are looking for. You see, if
you live in a present that is so short that it is not really here at all, you will always feel vaguely frustrated.

    And also, when you ask a person "What did you do yesterday?" they will give you a historical account
of the sequence of events. They will say "Well, I woke up at about seven o'clock in the morning. I got
up and made myself some coffee, and then I brushed my teeth and took a shower, got dressed, had
some breakfast and went down to the office and did this and that," and so on. And they give you a
historical outline of a course of events. And people really think that is what they did. But actually that
is only the very skeleton account of what you did. You lived a much richer life than that, except you
did not notice it. You only paid attention to a very small part of the information received through your
five senses. You forgot to say that when you got up first thing in the morning and made some coffee,
that your eyes slid across the birds outside your window. And the light on the leaves of the tree. And
that your nose played games with the scent of the boiling coffee. You didn't even mention it because
you were not aware of it; you were in a hurry. You were engaged on getting rid of that coffee as fast
as possible so that you could get to your office to do something that you thought was terribly important.
And maybe it was in a certain way - it made you some money. But you, because you were so absorbed
with the future, had no use for the money that you made. You did not know how to enjoy it. Maybe you
invested it so that you would be sure that you would have a future in which something finally might happen
to you, that you were looking for all along. But of course it never will because tomorrow never comes. The
truth of the matter being that there is no such thing as time. Time is a hallucination. There is only today.
There never will be anything except today. And if you do not know how to live today, you are demented.

    And this is the great problem of Western civilization, not only of Western civilization, but really all
civilization, because what civilization is, is a very complex arrangement in which we have used symbols -
that is to say words, numbers, figures, concepts to represent the real world of nature, like we use money
to represent wealth, and like we measure energy with the clock. Or like we measure with yards or with
inches. These are very useful measures. But you can always have too much of a good thing, and can so
easily confuse the measure with what you are measuring; the money with the wealth; or even the menu
with the dinner. And at a certain point, you can become so enchanted with the symbols that you entirely
confuse them with the reality.

    And this is the disease from which almost all civilized people are suffering. We are therefore in
the position of eating the menu instead of the dinner, of living in a world of words, symbols and
are therefore very badly related to our material surroundings.

    Also, we are in a hurry about many things. Going back to this account of one's day - you got up
in the morning and you made yourself some coffee. I suppose you made instant coffee because
you were in too much of a hurry to be concerned with the preparation of a beautiful coffee
mixture. And so your instant coffee was a punishment for a person in too much hurry. This is
true of everything instant. There is something about it that is phony and fake. Where were you
going? What do you think the future is going to bring you? Actually you don't know. You see,
the truth of the matter is, there is no such thing as time. Time is an abstraction. So is money.
As so are inches...

    In exactly the same way time is nothing but an abstract measure of motion. And we keep counting time.
We have the sensation time is running out, and we bug ourselves with this. And as we sit and watch the clock,
supposing you are working, are you watching the clock? If you are, what are you waiting for? Time off.
Five o'clock. We can go home and have fun. Yeah, fun. What are you going to do when you get home?
Have fun? Or are you going to watch TV, which is an electronic reproduction of life which doesn't even
smell of anything. And eat a TV dinner which is a kind of a warmed over airline nastiness until you just
get tired and have to go to sleep. You know, the great society. This is our problem, you see. We are
not alive, we are not awake, we are not living in the present.

    Let's take education. What a hoax. You get a little child, you see, and you suck it into a trap and
you send it to nursery school. And in nursery school you tell the child "You are getting ready to go
on to kindergarten. And then wow-wee, first grade is coming up, and second grade, and third grade."
You are gradually climbing the ladder towards, towards, going on towards progress. And then when
it gets to end of grade school, you say "high school, now you're really getting going." Wrong.

    But on towards business, you are going out into the world and you got your briefcase and
your diploma. And then you go to your first sales meeting, and they say "Now get out there and sell
this stuff," because then you are going on up the ladder in business, and maybe you will get to a good
position. And you sell it and then they up your quota. And then finally about the year 45 you wake up
one morning as Vice President of the firm, and you say to yourself looking in the mirror "I've arrived. But
I feel slightly cheated because I feel just the same as I always felt. Something is missing. I have no longer
a future." "Uh uh" says the insurance salesman, "I have a future for you. This policy will enable you to
retire in comfort at sixty five, and you will be able to look forward to that." And you are delighted.
And you buy the policy and at sixty five you retire thinking that this is the attainment of the goal of life,
except that you have prostate trouble, false teeth and wrinkle skin. And you are a materialist. You are
a phantom, you are an abstractionist, you are just nowhere, because you never were told, and never
realized that eternity is now. There is no time. What will you do? Can you discover for me the pop of
a champagne cork that popped last night? Can you hand me a copy of tomorrow's Dallas Morning Herald,
whatever it is? It just isn't here. There is no time. This is a fantasy. It is a useful fantasy. It is a convenience
so that I can arrange to meet you at the corner of Main and lst, or whatever it is, at 4 o'clock. Great. But let
us not be fooled by it. It is not real.

    So people who do not live in the present have absolutely no use for making plans. Because, you see,
ordinary people who believe in time, and who believe that they are living for their future, they make
plenty of plans. Yeah. But when the plans mature, and they come off, the people are not there to
enjoy them. They are planning something else. And they are like donkeys running after carrots
perpetually that are attached to their own collars. And so they are never here, they never get there,
they are never alive, they are perpetually frustrated, and therefore they are always thinking. The future
is the thing with them. Someday it is going to happen. And because it never does, they are frantic to
survive. They want more time, more time please, more time. They are terrified of death because death
stops the future. And so you never get there. You never have it. It is always somewhere around the corner.

    Now please, wake up. I am not saying, you see, that you should be improvident, that you shouldn't have
an insurance policy, that you shouldn't be concerned about how you are going to send your children to
college or whatever other thing may be useful for them. The point is, there is no point in sending your
children to college and providing for their future if you don't know how to live in the present because
all you will do is to teach your children how not to live in the present, and to keep dragging on for the
alleged benefit of their own children who will drag on in a boring way for the alleged benefit of their children.

    In the beginning of the regime of communism in Russia, when they had five year plans, and everything
was going to be great at the end of the five year plan, and you got through that and they had another one.
[They were] making everybody into [support pillars] for a floor upon which posterity shall dance. But of
course they never get around to it. Posterity also is the pillars holding up another floor. And they hold up
another floor. And they hold up another floor, forever and ever and nobody ever dances. But you see our
philosophy and the philosophy of the communists is exactly the same. In fact we, our system is their system.
And increasingly we become more alike because of this lack of perception of reality. We are obsessed with
time. And so it is always coming.

    So Mao Tse Tung can say to all the Chinese, "Let's live a great boring life and everybody wear the
same clothes and work and carry around a little red book so that one day, some day perhaps it
will be great." But we are in exactly the same situation. We are the richest people in the world,
and most of our males go around looking like undertakers. We eat Wonder Bread which is
styrofoam injected with some chemicals that are supposed to be nutritive. We do not even know
how to drink. In other words, living, we live in the abstract, not in the concrete. We work for
money, not for wealth. We look forward to the future, and do not know how to enjoy today.
Now you see is the meaning of eternal life. When Jesus said "Before Abraham was," he didn't say
"I was," he said "I am." And to come to this, to know that you are and there is no time except the present.
And then suddenly, you see, you attain a sense of reality. You have to find it now. And so really, the aim
of education is to teach people to live in the present, to be all here. As it is, our educational system is
pretty abstract. It neglects the absolutely fundamentals of life, teaching us all to be bureaucrats,
bankers clerks, accountants and insurance salesmen; all cerebral.

    It entirely neglects our relationships to the material world. There are five fundamental relationships to
the material world: farming, cooking, clothing, housing and lovemaking. And these are grossly overlooked.
So I think it is a great time to get back to reality, that is to say, to get back from time to eternity, to the eternal
now, which is what we have, always have had, and indeed always will have.

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