1st Final Solo Blog: Alan Watts and Time

         While the majority of our class was focused more so on Western philosophy and their conceptions of happiness, I'd like to take this blog post to focus on the Eastern idea of happiness being found in the present. The idea that there is never a tomorrow and there is never a yesterday. There will only ever be a today. It is this fixation, especially in the Western world, of constantly looking forward to where we're going that leads to such a constant frustration. If we are not looking forward, then we are so consumed by the act of recording our lives on a moment to moment basis, that we lose the precise moment we are attempting to record. By making our field of view even smaller, we miss everything outside of our little electric box, an object of infatuation in this era of technology. To further expound on the Eastern conception of time, I would like call upon renowned Eastern thinker, Alan Watts. While most everything I've stated thus far is an interpretation of Watts, his lectures were similarly only an echo of Eastern thought. However, Alan Watts is credited with bringing Eastern thinking to the Western world's main stream culture in the 1960's and in a series of lectures from 1965-1967, he had this to say about Western culture's idea of time and it's place in life:

" This is our problem,you see. We are not alive. We are not awake. We are not living in the present. Take education. What a hoax. As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade. And then, when you get to the end of grade school, they say, 'You've been getting ready for high school.' And then in high school, they tell you you're getting ready for college. And in college you're getting ready to go out into the business world with your suit and your diploma. And you go to your first sales meeting, and they say, up the ladder in business if you sell it, and maybe you'll get a promotion. And you sell it, and they up your quota. And then, finally at about the age of forty-five, you wake up one morning as vice president of the firm, and you say to yourself, 'I've arrived. But i've been cheated. Something is missing. I no longer have a future.''Wrong,' says insurance salesman. 'I have a future for you. This policy will enable you to retire in comfort at sixty-five, and now you can look forward to that.' And you're delighted. You buy the policy, and at sixty-five, you retire, thinking that this is the attainment of the goal of life. Except that now you have prostate trouble, false teeth, and wrinkled skin. And you're a materialist. You're a phantom. You are an abstraction. You are nowhere, because you were never told, and you never realized, that eternity is now. There is no time."

Alan Watts goes on to elaborate on the convenient illusion of time. In a time when women and African Americans alike were fighting for their rights in a world that didn't have time for them, Mr. Watts made available to the Western world an unfamiliar and uncomfortable way of thinking that rang true in the minds of millions. Time is convenient. Time, some may say, is even necessary to thrive in our modern society, however, we must stay vigilant lest our ticking time pieces turn to handcuffs, barring us from the present, the only true moment we experience.