Isn’t it remarkable that from the vast nothingness of what you don’t remember—your past before memory, before birth—you find yourself here, alive, conscious, watching, listening, being?

Alan Watts, in one of his most haunting and poetic monologues, delves deep into the mystery that most people avoid thinking about: death. But rather than fear it, deny it, or gloss over it with vague spiritual assurances, he confronts it head-on, not with dread, but with a kind of profound wonder.

Watts was never one to accept simple answers. Where most people say, “You can’t imagine what death is like,” or “It’ll just be nothing,” he leans into that very nothingness. He doesn’t resist it—he explores it.

The idea of going to sleep and never waking up fascinates him. Not like being buried alive, not like eternal darkness—because that’s still something. We only know dark by contrast to light. One of Watts’ blind friends, he tells us, has no concept of darkness at all. To her, the words “light” and “dark” are equally meaningless. So too, real nothingness isn’t a place with dimness or cold or stillness. It’s the absence of any experience or contrast. It would be as though you never existed at all—not just you, but everything.

And in that space, there would be no regrets, no tragedy, no loss—because there would be no one to experience those things. It would simply be… nothing, forever. Or perhaps more aptly, for never.

But Watts isn’t content to stop there. Because if death is a return to that pre-being state, isn’t it exactly like where we all came from? Before you were born, you didn’t exist. There was no awareness. And yet—you happened.

This is the pivot point of his thinking.

If out of that vast void of nothing you emerged, once, why not again?

It’s not a stretch, he says, to reason that what has happened once can happen again. After all, the universe didn’t just spin you into being as a one-time accident. It eyed through you—it became aware in you. It can do it again. Not necessarily the same you, with the same memories and identity, but the same kind of being-ness. The same spark of I.

To describe this process, Watts invents a new verb: to I.

“The universe eyes,” he says. And every time it eyes, it does so through someone—it becomes aware through them. Through you. Through me. And every single being who has ever existed.

He explains that we each feel like the center of our own experience—and rightly so. Because each of us is the universe eyeing from a different angle. We might call it consciousness. Or awareness. But at its core, it’s the act of being—the act of perceiving. And this I is not our personality, not our ego. That’s just an image, a collection of labels and impressions others have given us, and we’ve accepted. Our ego doesn’t grow our hair, circulate our blood, or fire our neurons. We don’t even know how we do that. And yet—we do.

So, clearly, the self runs deeper than the ego. It’s not just the idea of “me,” but the whole system of being. The body. The processes. The awareness that’s doing all of it.

And since the body and all its processes come from the universe, it follows that the universe itself is the one eyeing. Just as trees apple, just as stars shine, the universe eyes—and it does so through you.

Watts beautifully ties this back to death. When your body dies and the ego dissolves, what ends is the current expression of that eyeing—but the capacity for it remains. After all, new beings are born every second. Human babies, frog babies, rabbit babies, fruit fly babies, bacteria babies.

And his question echoes quietly, tenderly:

Which one of them am I going to be?

This isn’t reincarnation in the traditional sense. It’s not about memory carrying over, or souls being reborn with karmic lessons. It’s something simpler, and perhaps more profound.

You are the universe becoming aware of itself. You are the act of eyeing. And that act doesn’t belong to your name, your face, your story. It belongs to existence itself.

So perhaps death is not the end of being, but merely the end of this particular way of eyeing. And just as you came forth from the great blankness once, so too might the universe open its eyes again, through someone new, and feel once more like the center of it all.

And that, Alan Watts would say, is not a reason to fear—but a reason to wonder.

Credits:
This blog is inspired by a monologue from philosopher Alan Watts, known for his work in interpreting and popularizing Eastern philosophy for Western audiences. His lectures and writings continue to provoke thought about the nature of existence, death, and consciousness.