Everybody is “I” – life, death and being

I only just discovered Alan Watts and it was through Trey Ratcliff’s video titled “Life From Above, and Beyond, with words from Alan Watts”. Ratcliff’s video includes the audio of a talk Watts gave (I don’t know when) and part of it really touched me and I transcribed it:

Nature abhors a vacuum. So after you are 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 could only experience it one at a time. Everybody is “I”. You all know you’re 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 in the same way you don’t have to think about how you work your thyroid gland …. You don’t have to know how to shine the Sun. You just do it. Like you breathe. Doesn’t it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing? And that you are doing all of this and you never had any education in how to do it?

Here is Ratcliff’s video (beautiful aerial footage using quadcopters):

I love this other quote from the Alan Watts website:

The Universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever

Have a good week.

Image credit: Moeraki Boulders at Sunrise by Trey Ratcliff, licensed [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]( Some rights reserved)