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Alan Watts - Money

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    author, philosopher, and self-proclaimed spiritual entertainer
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    Alan Watts
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    In the West,
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    we inherit the idea of law
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    from those ancient conceptions of God
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    and it is even passed down into science!
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    Where we discuss Laws of Nature
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    but one recognizes more and more in the sciences
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    that what we call Laws of Nature
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    are simply observed regularities
    in the way things behave
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    And you,
    in order to observe regularities
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    you must look at things
    through something regular
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    that is to say
    you must lay a ruler alongside them
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    or compare their behavior with the regular behavior of a clock
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    But clocks and rulers
    are human inventions!
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    They are regular measures
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    which we use for comparing
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    the rates of change,
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    say a clock
    is a measure of a rate of change
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    It's quite arbitrary!
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    But we very easily compare our
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    regulation measuring devices
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    with what makes things happen.
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    As if the sun rises
    because it's 6 in the morning!
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    And that's being
    completely backwards in one's thinking
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    And we get into the same confusion
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    when we imagine for example
    that money is wealth!
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    Here we have fantastic wealth
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    and we have the technological possibility
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    of making everybody on Earth
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    the enjoyer of an independent income.
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    We can't do it
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    because people say where is the money gonna come from?
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    Because they think money makes prosperity
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    it's the other way around!
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    It's physical prosperity
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    which has money
    as a way of measuring it
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    But people think
    money has to come from somewhere
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    like hydroelectric power
    or lumber or iron
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    and it doesn't!
    Money is something we invent!
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    Like inches
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    So you remember
    The Great Depression?
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    When there was a slump
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    and what did we have a slump of?
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    Money
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    There was no less wealth,
    no less energy
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    no less raw materials
    than there were before
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    but it's like you came to
    work on building a house one day,
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    and they said "Sorry!
    You can't build this house today,"
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    "no inches."
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    What you mean "no inches"?
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    "Ah just inches! We don't mean... We got inches of lumber, yes"
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    "we got inches of metal,
    we even got tape measures!"
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    "But there is a slump in inches!"
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    And people are that crazy!
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    They can have a depression
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    because they have no inches to go around
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    or no dollars
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    It's all a load of nonsense
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    But you see,
    because we got thinking backwards
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    And making the
    metaphysical tail wag the dog
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    making the law rule things
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    where it doesn't, it's merely a way of measuring what happens
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    And so, you see,
    when you get into Buddhistic thought
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    you don't get that confusion.
Title:
Alan Watts - Money
Description:

The following is from another speech given by Alan Watts entitled "From Time & Eternity".

*"Do you remember the Great Depression? One day everything was going all right. Everybody was pretty wealthy and had plenty to eat. The next day everybody was in poverty. What had happened? Had the fields disappeared; had the dairy vanished into thin air; had the fish of the sea ceased to exist; had human beings lost their energy; their skills and their brains?

No, but on the morning after the Depression a man came to work building a house and the foreman said to him "Sorry chum you can't work today, there ain't no inches." He said "What do you mean there ain't no inches?" "Yeah" he said, "Yeah, we got lumber, we got metal, we even got tape measures." The foreman said "The trouble with you is you don't understand business. There are no inches. We have been using too many of them and there's not enough to go around."

Because what happened in the Great Depression was a slump in money. Human beings are so unbelievably stupid, that they confused money with wealth. They don't realize that money is a measure of wealth, in exactly the same way that meters are a measure of length. They think it is something that is valuable in and of itself. And as a result of that get into unbelievable trouble, in exactly the same way time is nothing but an abstract measure of motion.

And we keep counting time. We have the sensation time is running out, and we bug ourselves with this as we sit and watch the clock. Supposing you are working, are you watching the clock? If you are, what are you waiting for? Time off? Five o'clock, we can go home and have fun? Yeah, fun. What are you going to do when you get home? Have fun? Or are you going to watch TV, which is an electronic reproduction of life which doesn't even smell of anything and eat a TV dinner which is a kind of a warmed over airline nastiness until you just get tired and have to go to sleep. You know, the great society.

This is our problem you see. We are not alive, we are not awake. We are not living in the present."

*This speech was slightly edited for clarification.

Full Speech: http://www.scribd.com/doc/5468658/FROM-TIME-TO-ETERNITY-By-Alan-Watts
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Video Language:
English
Duration:
03:35

English subtitles

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