This Will Give You Goosebumps – Alan Watts on Death

isn't it incredible that out of the nothing that is your past here you [Music] are as far back as I can remember into earliest childhood I've always been absolutely fascinated with the idea of [Music] death now most reasonable people just dismiss the thought they say you can't imagine that they shrug their shoulders and say well that'll be that but I suppose I'm one of those or people who aren't content with an answer like that not that I'm trying to find something else beyond that but that I'm just absolutely fascinated with what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up I mean uh lots of people think it would be like going into the dark forever or being buried alive but obviously it wouldn't be like that at all because we know darkness by contrast and only by contrast with light I have a friend a girl who's very intelligent and articulate and she was born blind and she hasn't the faintest idea what darkness is the word means as little to her as the word light so if you went to sleep you're not aware of darkness when you're asleep and so if you went into sleep into unconsciousness for always and always and always it wouldn't be at all like going into the dark it wouldn't be at all like being buried alive it would be as if as a matter of fact you had never existed at all not only you but everything else as well you would be in that state as if you had never been and there of course there would be no problems there would be no one to regret the loss of anything you couldn't even call it a tragedy because there would be no one to experience it as a tragedy it would be simple Nothing At All Forever and For never because not only would you have no future you would also have no past and no present now you would think that that was the point where we'd say well let's talk about something else but I'm not content with that I Demmer because this makes me think of two other things this state of nothingness makes me think first of all the the only thing I I get anywhere in my experience that's close to nothingness is the way my head looks to my eyes because I seem to feel that there is a world out there as it were confronting my eyes and then behind my eyes there isn't a black spot there isn't even a hazy spot there's nothing at all I'm not aware of my head as it were as a black hole in the middle of all this luminous visual experience it doesn't even have very clear edges because the field of vision is an oval and if I run my fingers along my field of vision it's like this and this is the point where my fingers just disappear from sight vague edged but then behind this oval of vision there is nothing at all just from the sense of sight of course if I use my fingers and touch I can feel something behind my eyes but if I use the sense of sight alone there's just nothing there at all nevertheless out of that blankness I see well that's the first thing it makes me think of now the next thing it makes me think of is this if when I'm dead I am as if I never ever had been then that's the way I was before I was born because just as if I try to go back behind my eyes and find what is there I come to a blank if I try to remember back and back and back and back I've got my earliest memories and then behind them nothing total blank but just as I know there's something behind my eyes by using my fingers on my head so I know through other sources of information that before I was born there was something going on there were my father and my mother and their fathers and mothers and the whole material environment of the earth and its life out of which they came and behind that the solar system and behind that the Galaxy and behind that all the galaxis and behind that another blank space [Music] so I reason that if I go back when I'm dead to the state where I was before I was born couldn't I happen again you know what has happened once can very well happen again if it happened once it's extraordinary and it's not really very much more extraordinary if it happened all over again so in other words I do know for certain because I've seen people die and I've seen people born after them that at any rate after I die not only somebody but myriads of other beings will be born that I know we all know that there's no doubt about it [Music] but what worries us is that when we're dead there could be nothing at all forever as if that was something to worry about before you were born there was the same nothing at all forever and yet you happened and if you happened once you can happen again now what does that mean well we'll get at it first in its very simplest way and to explain myself I must invent a new verb this is the verb to I and in the first place we'll spell that with the letter i but instead of having it as a pronoun we'll call it a verb the universe eyes it has eyed in me and it eyes in you now let's respell the word e ye when I talk about to eye something it means to look at something to be aware of something so we'll change the spelling and we'll say the universe eyes it becomes aware of itself in each one of us and it keeps on eyeing and every time it eyes every one of Us in whom it eyes feels that he is the center of the whole thing and that I know that you feel that you are I in just the same way that I feel that I am I and we all have the same background of nothing we don't remember having done it before and yet it has been done before again and again and again not only before in time but all around us everywhere else in space is everybody is the Universe eyeing now look let me try and make this clear in this way when I say it's the universe eyeing who is eyeing what do you mean by I well there are two things you can mean by it on the one hand you could mean what's called your ego your personality but that's not your real eyeing because your personality is your idea of yourself it's your image of yourself and that's made up of how you feel yourself how you think about yourself thrown in with what all your friends and relations have told you about yourself so your image of yourself however obviously isn't you any more than your photograph is you or any more than uh the image of anything is it all our images of ourselves are nothing more than caricatures they contain no information for most of us on how we grow our brains how we work our nerves how we circulate our blood how we secrete with our glands and how we shape our bones that isn't contained in the sensation or the image we call the ego so obviously then the ego image is not myself so my self contains all these factors that we could say the body is doing the circulation of the blood the breathing the electrical activity of the nerves all this is me but I don't know anything about it I don't know how it came together I don't know how it's constructed and yet I do all that if it is true also to say I breathe I walk I think I am conscious I don't know how I manage to be but I do it in the same way as I grow my hair so I 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