Last year’s poverty
was not real poverty.
This year’s poverty
is poverty indeed.
(an old Zen poem)

I’d like you to stay with this talk (below) by Alan Watts through to the end and try to address his questions within yourself. It is about business, so no matter how you make your living — and even if you’re unemployed like me — I suspect you’ll get a lot out of it. After you’ve listened to Watts, you can read some of my commentary below, though that is far less essential.

For me, the entire career and work of Watts was about Time. From that, everything else of which he wrote and spoke arose: death, transformation, cosmic consciousness, God, Tao, Brahman, human psychology and its enemies, and even such seemingly ordinary yet crucial things like business. In virtually all his discussions of these topics, he comes back again and again to Time.

The illusion of the past is created not by direction but by distance. Imagine some alien species contemplating our world as they see it from their own: does the moment in which they perceive us depend on their directional relationship to us — whether, for instance, they see us from Perseus or Orion? No, the moment is determined by the distance, how far the light emanating from our sun must travel to reach the eyes of those aliens. No matter what direction you look to in the sky, you are viewing some past — light that was there long ago and is now finally visible here.

The point, of course, is that time is directionless, or at least in no way direction-dependent. Why, then, do we imagine it to ourselves as an arrow with one direction, one flow, whose movement has no fluidity, no potential for transformation? Turn wherever you like tonight, and the arrow of that past touches you in your present. Turn around, then, and follow it further into the sky: will you then see into the future of the light of that star whose prior light has just touched your moment? Do you imagine that’s how it really works? According to one increasingly popular theory, the universe is an arrowless grid of mathematical art, a kind of computer simulation.

If, from such a perspective, direction has no ultimate meaning, no reference beyond the ephemeral position of a solitary observer located on an ephemeral planet in an ephemeral galaxy within what astronomers tell us is an ephemeral universe — what then of distance? What if, on the other hand, Watts was right in his colloquialization of the Sanskrit Tat Tvam Asi to “you’re It!” Well, what did he mean by It?

Now, for a moment, simply as a thought experiment — or, if you will, an imagination experiment — suppose that we remove the observer, the perceiver. Let’s remove our alien from his, her, or its distant world and leave not a single conscious entity there. Let’s take ourselves off the porch to a starlesss point indoors and leave it to the patio furniture or the barbecue grill to witness the light of a distant star. What becomes of Time?

Watts taught that Time is a convention, a social institution, a system of movement and exchange in human action, just as money is an informational system of human economy that merely symbolizes wealth in the same way that nouns symbolize things. “Time is money” goes the old bromide. Of course they are identical, in that they are both illusions. This is the core of the critical error that Watts saw in our society — that we too often, in our institutions and our private lives, reify the symbol. That is, we mistake the sign for the destination. We see money as wealth, and its measurement as the meaning — it’s as foolish and surreal a notion as if we were to define ourselves according to our height or weight: “I am 68 inches” or “I am 189 pounds.” And so we let ourselves be identified by our status rather than by our real wealth, our uniquely personal expression of It.

Similarly, we tend to reify the convention of Time — especially in our spiritual notions of it. We speak of the Eternal and of Forever as if they were just stretched out versions of Time: the familiar and often ominous arrow that goes on and on infinitely. We may thus have either eternal damnation or eternal salvation; one would be tempted to call such thinking infantile if only for the obvious fact that infants wouldn’t dream of such an aberrant level of thought, for they haven’t yet been conditioned to think that way. In reality, I suspect that Eternity stands in the same relationship to Time as matter does to measurement. For just as we feel compelled to define ourselves by the ruler’s lines or the bank account’s balance, so do we become obsessed with tracing the wrinkles on the face of the Eternal.

Yet we draw our line of Time and divide it dualistically, into the Past and the Future, with some vague and blurry line drawn between them that we call the Present. The past has substance to us — it can be studied and either regretted and condemned or celebrated and relived. The future is a barge docked amid fog, onto which we cast hope and expectation. So much of our life’s energy is misspent in this Janus-faced bidirectional longing; we have little left for now, for all the fulfillment and potential of presence.

The big bang — presumably the event from which Time as we know it was born — is, according to some scientists, a mere illusion whose reality is something far more interesting than a mere explosion. They ask us to imagine a supra-universe of sorts with a fourth spatial dimension, whose membranous layer is the 3D universe that we live in and study. In such a cosmos there would presumably be communication or transactional activity between the apparent and the inherent, the temporal and the eternal, the timeless spring and the time-worn sprung.

Curiously, this all takes us back to business. For if there is a transactional relationship between our lives and that from which it arose, then it seems we had better re-conceive or, perhaps more effectively, re-experience the basis or true nature of that relationship. Watts repeatedly urged his students and audiences to drop or at least suspend the prejudice that we are born into this world, this universe, and try instead the experience of having been born out of or grown from the Earth and the cosmos. It is the difference between imagining yourself as strange and separate (“born into”) or as an essential product of the web of being.

Can you see the implications of that distinction? When you remove the assumption of estrangement, you annihilate the seeds of suspicion. If I am not, after all, some alien fish fallen into the net of this strange and indifferent universe, but rather its natural growth, an exhalation of its breath — in that case I have established or discovered the foundation of a successful business, which is trust. How we experience ourselves gives all the meaning to how we conceive others.

From here, we can revisit an old question: do I tell time, or does Time tell me? The answer is, “both and neither”; or, as the old Zen masters used to say, “Mu.” This expression is usually translated as “No,” but that is a poor or at least incomplete translation. As another remarkable 20th century philosopher told us, Mu really is saying, “ask again, but from your total intelligence rather than your mere intellect.” The philosopher I have in mind is Robert Pirsig, and his discussion of Mu comes from his classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

Mu means “no thing.” Like “Quality” it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, “No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no.” It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. “Unask the question” is what it says.…

You are living on a membranous child-universe wrought within Time, whose parent from which it and you arose is pure, timeless space. That membrane is permeable, just as the membranes of your body’s cells. That is, the membrane is built for transaction, for communication, for taking in and letting out. It is not a wall of division, but a portal for the business of being.

Thus, the desire for the attainment of Eternity is like the notion of spending Wealth. You spend your money, but you enjoy (and hopefully share) your Wealth. Wealth cannot be diminished through expenditure, for it is what you have in the present; it is not a separate entity. So too, Eternity: time can be spent, but the Eternal’s realm has no coin.