Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/05/alan-watts-on-the-illusion-of-time-money-and-ego.html
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Thanks, I didn’t know about the Ram Dass Documentary.
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I do enjoy his interpretation of our reality.
By the way, I picked up the book below from a used bookshop many earth years ago that elaborates on the ideas shared in the video. My reading inspired me to look up a few more from Alan Watts. And I should probably add this one to my list of books that really messed up my worldview at that moment–and will try not to use it as an excuse for any present action.
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When he says, “you can’t drive 5 cars at once”, it makes me want to take the idea further: Excess wealth beyond what one person or family can consume, inevitably gets invested in changing the lives of other people.
With a steadily increasing income, there’s only so much you or I can improve our own lives, before we are forced to change the lives of those around us. But this “improvement” is from the subjective point of view of the one spending the money.
When you let this go unchecked for long enough, there’s this ridiculous confusion about what the economy is good for: Does the economy exist to help human beings, or do human beings exist to help the economy?
We may be able to stop Trump from metaphorically shoveling human lives into the firebox to continue to fuel his slice of “the economy”… but Biden is not going to help us sort out the underlying confusion…
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I discovered Alan Watts while driving around weekend afternoons with KKUP on the radio. Who is this?, I’d wonder. I have to learn more. Can’t say I did much beyond that, but when I do encounter his words, I stop and listen.
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thanks, that video wow. I’m lost for words.
Am I the only one that feels like america is going thought a dark night of the soul. Realising we can’t let people be sucked into radicalization networks.
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Any place I’ve worked at that I had to maintain any sort of timesheet or similar, it lived in a directory called “Lunchtime and other illusions”.
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When scientists say something like, “all models are wrong, some models are useful”, they’re not calling out hypocrisy or corruption, so much as urging a responsible use of these tools.
In a similar way, there’s a rule of thumb in some workshops, that states if someone can’t identify at least three ways of misusing or abusing a power tool, then they have no business using that tool.
In this snippet, Watts is talking about several aspects of models that are wrong, yet useful. Models that we can only feel confident using, if we also understand how they can be abused. Buddhists call it Māra sometimes… it’s a powerful antagonist, but it’s not intrinsically evil.
I feel it’s important to be able to call out the limitations of these tools like money and time, without hating on them… because that sets us up for yet another trap.
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