Dealing with Death – Alan Watts Jason Silva

[Music] the human condition is characterized characterized uniquely by our awareness of our mortality in other words we're the only species that is aware that we are mortal beings and this causes a tremendous amount of anxiety we have this capacity to ponder the infinite were seemingly capable of anything we can mainline the whole of time through the optic nerve with our astronomy and with our space telescopes and yet we're housed in these heart pumping breath gasping decaying bodies so to be godly yet creaturely is just impossibly cruel we would go mad if we hadn't come up with solutions to the death problem and throughout history you know Ernest Becker identifies three main solutions to the problem of death the first one was the religious of solution to the problem of death you create a narrative in which you will your soul will live forever in the kingdom of God and it gets rid of the death issue because everything will be taken care of in the end now as technology has increasingly Science and Technology increasingly made religion sort of more difficult to believe we've had to come up with other solutions to the death problem the second main solution to the problem of debt that Ernest Becker identifies is the romantic solution you turn your lovers into deities she's like the wind she's my salvation it's the lyric to every pop song he is the Sun but of course no relationship can ultimately bear the burden of godhood your gods reveal their clay feet and all of a sudden we can't be saved by our lovers and the anxiety about our mortal coil kicks in again when one gets to an extreme that is to say to the point where you realize that there is nothing you would do about life nothing you could not do about life then you're the mosquito biting the iron bull well so in the same way he said look you heard a bomb coming at you you could hear it whistle and you knew it was right above you and headed straight at you and that you were finished and you accepted it and suddenly there was a strange feeling that everything is absolutely clear you suddenly see that there isn't a grain of dust in the whole universe that's in the wrong place did you understand completely absolutely totally what it's all about so you see this is always the opportunity presented by Death that if one can go into death with eyes open and have some body help you if necessary to give up before you die this extraordinary thing can happen so that from your standpoint in that position at that time you would say I wouldn't have missed that opportunity for the world now I understand why we die the reason we die is to give us the opportunity to understand what life's all about by letting go because then we come to a situation that the ego can't deal with we can also look further into it and see that if our death could be indefinitely postponed we would not actually go on postponing it indefinitely because after a certain point we would realize that that isn't the way in which we wanted to survive why else would we have children because children arranged for us to survive in another way by as it were passing on a torch so that you don't have to carry it all the time there comes a point where you can give it up and say now you work it's a far more amusing arrangement for nature to continue the process of life through different individuals than it is always with the same individual because as each new individual approaches life life is renewed and one remembers how fascinating the most ordinary everyday things are to a child because they see them all as marvelous because they see them all in a way that is not related to survival and profit and when we get to thinking of everything in terms of survival and profit value as we do then the shapes of scratches on the floor cease to have magic and most things in fact cease to have magic so therefore in the course of nature once we have ceased to see magic in the world anymore we are no longer fulfilling nature's game of being aware of it there's no point in it anymore and so we die and so something else comes to birth which gets an entirely new view and so nature's self-awareness is a game worth the candle you