Alan Watts - Memento Mori - The Aversion to Death and Willing to Die

In the Out of Your Mind lecture series Alan Watts covers the concept of Memento mori in at least two chapters, one titled ‘Willing to Die,’ and the other titled ‘The Aversion on Death.’  

Pics are from Wright's Beach on the Sonoma Coast in Northern California.

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"You can’t hang onto yourself, you don’t have to try to not to hang on to yourself.  It can’t be done, and that is salvation.  Memento mori: be mindful of death.  Gurdjieff says in one of his books that the most important thing for anyone to realize is that you and every person you see will soon be dead.  See it sounds so gloomy to us because we have devised a culture fundamentally resisting death."

-Willing to Die

"We all know we’re going to die, but it’s sufficiently far off that we can put it out of our minds.  And anybody who does put it into our minds in the ordinary way is taken to be a skeleton at the banquet, a Cassandra, and gloomy.  So that the old fashion preacher of bygone days who preached about death, and those monks who kept skulls on their desk and all that sort of thing is regarded as very morbid.  Why, in the baroque times there was a fashion for a while of making tombstones with marvelous sculptures with skeletons and bones all over them.  And on the Via Veneto in Rome there is a Capuchin church where down in the crypt there are chapels where the altar furnishing and everything are made entirely from the bones of departed monks.  Then we have among Tibetan and Buddhists graveyard meditations, and they have trumpets in Tibetan Buddhism made of human thigh bones, and they have cups…ritual cups made of the domes of human skulls.  And we say all that is very morbid."

-The Aversion to Death

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