Oct 6, 2026 · 9 min · 4 segments
Alan Watts (1915 – 1973) was a British and American writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer",known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a…
There really isn't anything radically wrong with being sick or with dying.
Who said you're supposed to survive? Who gave you the idea that it's a gas to go on and on and on? And we can't say that it's a good thing for everything to go on living from the very simple demonstration that if we enable everybody to go on living, we overcrowd ourselves, that we're like an unpruned tree.
And so therefore, uh, one person who dies in a way is honorable because he's making room for others.
And the panic that all life everywhere must be saved, although each one of us individually will naturally appreciate it when anybody saves our life, if we apply that case, you see, all around, we can see that it's not workable.
We can also look further into it and see that if our death could be indefinitely postponed, we would not actually go on postponing it indefinitely because after a certain point, we would realize that that isn't the way in which we wanted to survive.
Why else would we have children? Because children arrange for us to survive in another way by, as it were, passing on a torch so that you don't have to carry it all the time.
There comes a point where you can give it up and say, "Now you work." It's a far more amusing arrangement for nature to continue the process of life through different individuals than it is always with the same individual because as each new individual approaches life, life is renewed, and one remembers how fascinating the most ordinary everyday things are to a child because they see them all as marvelous, because they see them all in a way that is not related to survival and profit.
When we get to thinking of everything in terms of survival and profit value, as we do, then the shapes of scratches on the floor cease to have magic, and most things, in fact, cease to have magic.
So therefore, in the course of nature, once we have ceased to see magic in the world anymore, we are no longer fulfilling nature's game of being aware of itself.
There's no point in it anymore, and so we die.
And so something else comes to birth, which gets an entirely new view.
And so nature's self-awareness is a game worth the candle.
There really isn't anything radically wrong with being sick or with dying.
Who said you're supposed to survive? Who gave you the idea that it's a gas to go on and on and on? And we can't say that it's a good thing for everything to go on living from the very simple demonstration that if we enable everybody to go on living, we overcrowd ourselves, that we're like an unpruned tree.
And so therefore, uh, one person who dies in a way is honorable because he's making room for others.
And the panic that all life everywhere must be saved, although each one of us individually will naturally appreciate it when anybody saves our life, if we apply that case, you see, all around, we can see that it's not workable.
We can also look further into it and see that if our death could be indefinitely postponed, we would not actually go on postponing it indefinitely because after a certain point, we would realize that that isn't the way in which we wanted to survive.
Why else would we have children? Because children arrange for us to survive in another way by, as it were, passing on a torch so that you don't have to carry it all the time.
There comes a point where you can give it up and say, "Now you work." It's a far more amusing arrangement for nature to continue the process of life through different individuals than it is always with the same individual because as each new individual approaches life, life is renewed, and one remembers how fascinating the most ordinary everyday things are to a child because they see them all as marvelous, because they see them all in a way that is not related to survival and profit.
When we get to thinking of everything in terms of survival and profit value, as we do, then the shapes of scratches on the floor cease to have magic, and most things, in fact, cease to have magic.
So therefore, in the course of nature, once we have ceased to see magic in the world anymore, we are no longer fulfilling nature's game of being aware of itself.
There's no point in it anymore, and so we die.
And so something else comes to birth, which gets an entirely new view.
And so nature's self-awareness is a game worth the candle.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.