Transcription
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 people who aren't content with an answer like that. Not that I'm trying to find something 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 demur, because this makes me think of two other things. This state of nothingness makes me think, first of all, the only thing 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 galaxies. 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 "eye." 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 must therefore locate the center of me, my eyeing, at a deeper level than my ego, which is my image or idea of myself. But how deep do we go? We can say the body is the eyee. But the body comes out of the rest of the universe. Comes out of all its energy. So it's the universe that's eyeing. And the universe eyes in the same way that a tree apples, or that a star shines. And the center of the appling is the tree. The center of the shining is the star. And so the basic center or self of the eyeing, which is called in this case Alan Watts, which is only a name for this particular physical organism flowering from shining out of this particular environment, makes the center of all this eyeing the eternal universe. Or eternal. The thing has existed for 10,000 million years and will probably go on for at least that much more. So we won't worry about how long it goes on. But repeatedly, it eyes. So that it seems to me absolutely reasonable to assume that when I die, and this physical body evaporates, and the whole memory system with it, then it will be all over once again. The awareness that I had before, not exactly the same way, but of a baby being born. There will, of course, be myriads of babies born. Not only baby human beings, but baby frogs, baby rabbits, baby fruit flies, baby viruses, baby bacteria. And which one of them am I going to be?