The Marginalian’s 2012 piece centers on a short animated film built around a lecture by Alan Watts, in which the philosopher asks what dying will be like.
Watts, born January 6, 1915, and died November 16, 1973, is best known for writing The Way of Zen and for popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West alongside John Cage.
The animation was produced by Luke Jurevicius and directed by Ari Gibson and Jason Pamment. It was created as the music video for “Sometimes the Stars” by the Australian band The Audreys, with Watts’s voice carrying the meditation.
In the lecture, Watts first clears away common images of death. It will not be like being buried alive, he says, and it will not be like being in darkness forever.
Instead, he suggests, death is going to be “as if you never had existed at all.” Not only you, but everything else as well. There was never anything, no one to regret it, and no problem.
“Well, think about that for a while,” he says. “It’s kind of a weird feeling when you really think about it, when you really imagine.” The post notes that Watts explores nonexistence more fully in his book The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, where he frames it as “the necessary consequence of what we call being.”
The article also links to related material: Watts on the illusion of separateness, his question of what you would do if money were no object, and rare footage from the 1950s in which he discusses how death and life imply each other.
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