Alan Watts talks about the art of meditation and why it is important to practice it, especially in the civilized world. Too much mental chatter can trap you in a world of illusion.
I’m not saying that thinking is bad. Like everything else, it’s useful in moderation. A good servant, but a bad master.
All so called civilized peoples have increasingly become crazy and self-destructive, because through excessive thinking, they have lost touch with reality. That’s to say we confuse signs, words, numbers, symbols and ideas with the real world.
Most of us would rather have money than tangible wealth and a great occasion is somehow spoiled for us unless it is photographed. And, to read about it the next day in the newspaper is oddly more fun for us than the original event. This is a disaster
Alan Watts talks about how our society conditions children to live with constant frustration and worry about the future, and never learn how to live in the present. Society, A Perpetual Cycle by The Omega Point Project
We have an absolutely extraordinary attitude in our culture and in various other cultures, high civilizations, to the new member of human society. Instead of saying frankly to children, ‘How do you do, welcome to the human race, we are playing a game! And we are playing by the following rules, we want to tell you what the rules are so that you’ll know your way around, and when you understand what rules we are playing by, when you get older you may be able to invent better ones.
But instead of that, we still retain an attitude to the child that he is on probation, he is not really a human being, he is a candidate for humanity, and in just this way we have a whole system of preparation of the child for life, which always is preparation, and never actually gets there.
We condition the child in a way that sets the child a life problem which is insoluble, and therefore attended by constant frustration, and as a result of this problem being insoluble, it is perpetually postponed to the future. So that one is educated to live in the future and one is not ever educated to live today.
Now im not saying that let us drink today for tomorrow we die, and not make any plans. What i am saying is that making plans for the future is of use only to people who are capable of living completely in the present.
Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our personal perception of time affects our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we interact with the world.
Time Zones of Time Perception
So what we have discovered in 30 years of research is there are six main time zones that people live in: two focus on the past, two on the present, and two on the future.
Focusing on the Past
The people that focus on the past remember the good ole times, successes, happy birthdays, and nostalgia. These are the people who keep the family records, family books and have the family rituals.
There are other people who focus only on regret, only on failure, only on all the things that went wrong; so we call those focuses past positive or past negative.
Focusing on the Present
There are two ways to be present-oriented: the obvious one is to be hedonistic, that you live for pleasure and avoid pain; you seek knowledge, you seek sensation.
There are other people who are present-oriented because the say it doesn’t pay to plan: my life is fated, fated by my religion, fated by my poverty, fated by the conditions that I’m living under.
The closer you are to the equator the more present orientated you are; the more you’re in an environment that doesn’t change it gives you a sense of sameness rather than change.
Focusing on the Future
Most of us are here because we are future-oriented; we have learned to work rather than play, to resist temptation.
But there is another way to be future-oriented. Depending on your religion, life begins after the death of the mortal body. To be future-oriented you have to trust that when you make a decision about the future it’s going to carry up. If you have inflation you don’t put money in the bank because you can’t trust the future. If there is instability in your family, adults can’t keep their promises to you.
The Pace of Life in Relation to Health
So he has a bunch of these measures and it turns out you can identify cultures as having different paces of life, and now cities. And he shows that in America you can rank 60 cities according to high pace of life and low pace of life. The ones with the highest pace of life, men have the most coronary problems. It becomes part of your whole way of life.
