From Time To Eternity: A Speech

by Alan W. Watts

This is Alan Watts' speech on the elements of Western civilization we take for granted, it's buddhist interpretation and possibilities for the redemption of the West.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

13 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 6, 2016

About the author

Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer and speaker, who held both a Master's in Theology and a Doctorate of Divinity. Famous for his research on comparative religion, he was best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Asian philosophies for a Western audience. He wrote over 25 books and numerous articles on subjects such as personal identity, the true nature of reality, higher consciousness, the meaning of life, concepts and images of God and the non-material pursuit of happiness. In his books he relates his experience to scientific knowledge and to the teachings of Eastern and Western religion and philosophy.

Reviews

[Todd Nesbitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye opening and mind blowing! One question I had on this discourse is it's relation to suffering and death. Will be reading more on his existential writing in the future.

[Raul · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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. 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."

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first publication of Watts' that I've been able to read, thought I've listened to some of his presentations before. It seems a good introduction to his philosophy--perhaps because it's so short--and has some wonderful points to ponder. What I am wrestling with is his proposition that there is both ONLY the present, and there is also NEVER the present. "Nobody can tell you who they are, they can only tell you who they were." We are in a state of becoming, more than in a state of being. None of us ever is who we will be, and at the same time, we only ever are what we've been, and oh no I've gone cross-eyed...

[Hieu Do · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here and now.