Subject: on Death and Bereavement

Watts and Me on Death

Watts On Death

... with a slight shift of viewpoint, nothing is more obvious than the interdependence of opposites. But who can believe it? Is it possible that myself, my existence, so contains being and nothing that death is merely the “off” interval in an on/off pulsation which must be eternal—because every alternative to this pulsation (e.g., its absence) would in due course imply its presence? Is it conceivable, then, that I am basically an eternal existence momentarily and perhaps needlessly terrified by one half of itself because it has identified all of itself with the other half? ....

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RobinStuartMiddleton (thats me - full name) I was re-reading Watts book at the time of my fathers death ... Watts handles death philosophically.

The personal experience of death, of someone you love, can be so shattering that most people dont seem to have a clue how to cope with it and must repress their feelings and simply get back to work as soon as possible.

Yet exactly this shattered feeling ... this totally knocked out, open fragile feeling, ,... opens me up and allows me - more than that - I can not avoid seeing life new, and the new vision offers new hope, ... I automatically reassess my priorities in life with new depth, perspective and understanding.

This great and even magnificient moment of death knocked me out for weeks ... and I have no great understanding of death – but also even no questions about it – Im just truly amazed – and it seems this is fully human and fully my reality and fully common sense, and there is nothing more or less that I should feel ... - It really makes me feel the need for an old fashioned month of mourning and peace when someone important dies ... just to let yourself be truly astounded.

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AlanWatts continues Consider death as the permanent end of consciousness, the point at which you and your knowledge of the universe simply cease, and where you become as if you had never existed at all. Consider it also on a much vaster scale—the death of the universe at the time when all energy runs out, when, according to some cosmologists, the explosion which flung the galaxies into space fades out like a skyrocket. It will be as if it had never happened, which is, of course, the way things were before it did happen. Likewise, when you are dead, you will be as you were before you were conceived. So—there has been a flash, a flash of consciousness or a flash of galaxies. It happened. Even if there is no one left to remember. But if, when it has happened and vanished, things are at all as they were before it began (including the possibility that there were no things), it can happen again. Why not? On the other hand, I might suppose that after it has happened things aren’t the same as they were before. Energy was present before the explosion, but after the explosion died out, no energy was left. For ever and ever energy was latent. Then it blew up, and that was that. It is, perhaps, possible to imagine that what had always existed got tired of itself, blew up, and stopped. But this is a greater strain on my imagination than the idea that these flashes are periodic and rhythmic. They may go on and on, or round and round: it doesn’t make much difference. Furthermore, if latent energy had always existed before the explosion, I find it difficult to think of a single, particular time coming when it had to stop. Can anything be half eternal? That is, can a process which had no beginning come to an end? I presume, then, that with my own death I shall forget who I was, just as my conscious attention is unable to recall, if it ever knew, how to form the cells of the brain and the pattern of the veins. Conscious memory plays little part in our biological existence. Thus as my sensation of “I-ness,” of being alive, once came into being without conscious memory or intent, so it will arise again and again, as the “central” Self appears as the self/other situation in its myriads of pulsating forms—always the same and always new, a here in the midst of a there, a now in the midst of then, and a one in the midst of many. And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light.

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(Watts wrote more ideas about death - which I wasnt so impressed by, but they are included at the end of the "10page taboo")