Alan Watts Quotes and speeches

Wholeness

Now, if you get with yourself and you find out that you are all of yourself, a very strange thing happens. You find that your body knows you are one with the Universe, because your physical organism is one continuous process with everything else that's going on. Just as the waves are continuous with the ocean; your body is continuous with the total energy system of the Cosmos. And it's all you.  So then, let me connect this with the problem of birth and death, which puzzles people enormously, of course. When you die, you're not going to have to put up with everlasting nonexistence, because that's not an experience.

A lot of people are afraid that when they die, they are going to be locked up in a dark room forever. 

Try and imagine what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up? Think about that; children think about it. It's one of the great wonders of life. What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born. You see, you can't have an experience of nothing. So after you're dead the only thing that can happen is the same experience, or the same sort of experience, as when you were born. In other words, we all know very well that after people die, other people are born. 

And they're all YOU. 

Only, you can only experience it one at a time. Everybody is I, you all know you are you. And wheresoever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn't make any difference. You are all of them. And when they come into being, that's you coming into being. You know that very well. Only you don't have to remember the past, you don't have to know how to shine the sun, you just do it; like you breathe. 

If this doesn't really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing; and that you're doing all of this and you never had any education on how to do it.