Living In The Eternal Now - Alan Watts

When we say to ourselves, you must go on, the reason is, you see, that we are not living

in the eternal now, where reality is. We are always thinking that the satisfaction of life will be coming later.

Don't kid yourself. Only suckers put hope in the future.

There isn't much of a future, you're going to die. So therefore this hope for the future is a hoax, it's a perfect hoax because you're not fully alive now, you think maybe someday you will be.

Look, supposing I ask you, what did you do yesterday?

Most people say, well, I got up at 7.30 and I brushed my teeth and I read the newspaper over a cup of coffee and then I looked at the clock and dressed and got in the car and

drove downtown and did this and that in the office and so on and you go on and on and

you suddenly discover that what you've described has absolutely nothing to do with what happened.

You've described a fleshless list of abstractions, whereas if you were aware of what went on, you could never describe it.

Because nature is multidimensional, language is linear, and language is scrawny, therefore if you identify the world as it is with the way the world is described, it's as if you were trying to eat bills and expect a nutritious diet or eat numbers.

A lot of people eat numbers, people play the stock market and do nothing but eat numbers and they're always unhappy, absolutely miserable because they never get anything. So therefore they always hope more is coming because they believe that if they eat enough bills, eventually something satisfactory will happen. So eating abstractions all the time, we want more, more, more time.

Confucius very wisely said a man who understands the Tao in the morning may die with content in the evening.

Because when you understand, you don't put your hope in time. Time won't solve a thing.

When you are fully aware and not thinking, you will notice some amazing absences. There is no past.

Can you hear anything past incidentally? Can you hear anything future?

They're just not there to the plain sense of one's ears.

So do not worry about tomorrow saying, what shall we eat? What shall we drink?
Or how shall we clothe ourselves?
All the rabble seeks after these things.
Sufficient to the day is the worry of it.
Nobody ever preaches a sermon on that text.
Never.

Lots of people in India know this perfectly well. When you get to be a certain age and after you've started long enough with a certain guru, then and then only may you realize this, if you've put in the time, they finally let you in.

A lot of people say, well, I'm not ready.

What do you mean you're not ready?

Why do you have to be ready?

I'm not good enough.

I'm perhaps not old enough, not mature enough. Still, I'm frightened of pain.

I'm still dependent on material things.

I have to, you know, eat a lot and drink a lot and I better get all that under control

first. Oh, you want to be able to congratulate yourself for having gone through the discipline, which is rewarded with realization. That is trying to quench fire with fire. Wouldn't it be great to have no fear, no attachments, no hangups, to be as free as the air?

Wouldn't it be crazy to have that courage and you look into yourself honestly, you find

that inside you're a quaking mess of sensitivity, running away from the quaking

mess escaping.

You never can.

There's nothing you can do to transform your nature into unattached selflessness because we have a selfish reason for wanting to do it.

What does it mean that you can't do anything about it? It's singing loud and clear.

The reason you can't do anything about it is that you don't exist. You as you conceive yourself to be, that is your ego, your image of yourself isn't there.

It doesn't exist. It's an abstraction.

Well, when you understand that, you're liberated. There's the happening, the suchness, yes, sure, you bet, but it's not pushing you around because there's no you to be pushed around.

This illusion of the persecuted ego who is pushed around by fate has altogether disappeared.

And so, likewise, the illusion of the ego who pushes fate around has also disappeared.

There's a happening by dying to yourself, by having become completely incompetent and

found that you don't exist, you're reborn.

You become everything.

In the words of Sir Edwin Arnold, forgoing self, the universe grows