A Quote by Alan Watts
No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
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No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.
I'm hoping there's cohesion in these tracks. Some of them were made weeks ago, some were made in 2010, but they've all stood out as one big thing I want to give to everyone. The concept behind No Plans references a few of concerns: having no plans with school, no plans with jobs, and no plans for the future. I'm hoping these songs can help you forget about those concerns, at least for 30 minutes of your day.
Our plans for the future made us laugh and feel close, but those same plans somehow made anything more than temporary between us seem impossible. It was the first time I'd ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with.
That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.
Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.
In Korean, the word 'future' is made up of two parts. The first part means 'not,' and the second means 'to come.' In that sense, 'future' means something that will not come. This is to say the future is now, and our now is us living our future.
Living in the past or living in the future - those aren't real. The moment is now, and that's where safety and comfort and all that good stuff is.
We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.
Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn't commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music... we'd still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings' capacity to 'waste time' is a miracle - but that's exactly what art is for.
My mother and her plans for my future. She had it all worked out. I would attend a nice college, then get a job in advertising. "You'll be one of those smart-looking fellows in their Madison Avenue suits." And I rebelled against [my mother] and her values and her plans for my future at every opportunity.
Let's have a merry journey, and shout about how light is good and dark is not. What we should do is not future ourselves so much. We should now ourselves. "Now thyself" is more important than "know thyself." Reason is what tells us to ignore the present and live in the future. So all we do is make plans. We think that somewhere there are going to be green pastures. It's crazy. Heaven is nothing but a grand, monumental instance of future. Listen, now is good. Now is wonderful.
But the proclamation, as law, either is valid, or is not valid. If it is not valid, it needs no retraction. If it is valid, it can not be retracted, any more than the dead can be brought to life.
Intelligence is the capacity to be in the present. The more you are in the past or are in the future, the less intelligent you are. Intelligence is the capacity to be here-now, to be in this moment and nowhere else. Then you are awake.
Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.
I haven't really made plans for the future; I'm just enjoying the moment, going with the flow. I haven't really had time to mortify myself thinking about the future.
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