“When you die, you’re not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existance, because that’s not an experience. A lot of people are afraid that when they die, they’re 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.”
– Alan Watts death quotes.
Death is a natural part of life. It is the end of a journey but can also be a gateway to a new journey. It is the final step of a lifetime. It can be a time of reflection, or it can be a time when you have to deal with your legacy and what kind of life you have left behind. According to Allan Watts “Dying should be one of the great events of life.”
Alan Watts, an American philosopher who died in 1973 at the age of 58, was well-known for his doctrines of Buddhism, Taoism, and karma. He is often considered one of the most influential figures in contemporary philosophy. He often spoke about the concept of death and you will get
to read a lot of his speeches and talks.
In this post, QuotesGeeks shared some of Alan Watts quotes about death that will help you to think about the subject.
Top 14 Alan Watts Death Quotes:
1.
“The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the I out of the experience…
Sanity, wholeness and integration lie in the realisation that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate I or mind can be found …. [Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”
– Alan Watts
2.
“If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over – fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don’t die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.”
– Alan Watts
3.
“Nothing is more creative than death, since it has the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that ‘I’ cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds it.”
– Alan Watts
4.
“Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death…to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up-never. That is a most gloomy thing for contemplation; it’s like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creating life. You’ll get wonderful things out of that.”
– Alan Watts
5.
“What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained – though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.”
– Alan Watts
6.
“If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon.” We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die. If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.”
– Alan Watts
7.
“If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.”
– Alan Watts
8.
“When death comes, it’s just like winter. We don’t say, “There ought not to be winter.” That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.”
– Alan Watts
9.
“We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers.”
– Alan Watts
10.
“Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.”
– Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.61, Souvenir Press
11.
“If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death – or shall I say, death implies life – you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.”
– The Nature of Consciousness”. Book by Alan Watts, 1960.
12.
“But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death – or shall I say, death implies life – you can conceive yourself.”
– Alan Watts
13.
“The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery. We do not realize that our so-called love and concern for the individual is simply the other face of our own fear of death or rejection. In his exaggerated valuation of separate identity, the personal ego is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting, and then getting more and more anxious about the coming crash!”
– Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.56, Souvenir Press
14.
“To perceive that form reveals the void, and to see that the void reveals form, is the secret for the overcoming of death. To the extent that one is unaware of space, one is unaware of one’s own eternity — it’s the same thing!“
– Alan Watts
Conclusion
In conclusion, Watts death quotes give an idea of the man and his life. Watts was an influential thinker and commentator on consciousness and has been quoted extensively throughout his life.
His quotes show that Watts was a passionate advocate for the importance of consciousness and its connection to everything in life. He notes that when people die, they leave behind a lasting legacy that can be felt for many centuries. This can come in the form of physical or emotional damage.
Hope you enjoyed these death quotes from Alan Watts. Please share them with your friends and family.
You might also like:
- Helen Keller Death Quotes That Can Change Your Mind
- Oscar Wilde Quotes About Death That Illustrates His Thoughts
- George Carlin Quotes On Death That Will Make You Think!
- Socrates Quotes On Death That Has Withstood The Test Of Time
- Rumi Quotes On Death That Helps You Better Understand The Concept Of Death
- Marcus Aurelius Quotes Death That Are Still Being Studied Today.
- Bob Marley Death Quotes Highlight The Importance Of Living Life!
- Shakespeare Quotes On Death That May Provide Comfort During Difficult Times
- Mother Teresa Quotes On Death That Is Thought-Provoking!
- Top Edgar Allan Poe Quotes About Death
Other Resource:
www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1501668.Alan_W_Watts
