Varanasi // Beyond Life
Varanasi, The spiritual capital of India - a place where people come from all over the country to breathe their last, and immerse the ashes in the holy Ganges for the beginning of a new life.
There really isn’t anything radically wrong with being sick or with dying. We can’t say that it’s a good thing for everything to go on living. In a very simple demonstration that if we enable everybody to go on living, we overcrowd ourselves. So therefore, one person who dies in a way is honourable because he’s making room for others…
It’s a far more amusing arrangement for nature to continue the process of life through different individuals then it is always with the same individual, because as each new individual approaches life is renewed. And one remembers how fascinating the most ordinary everyday things are to a child, because they see them all as marvellous.
It is not, therefore, natural for us to wish to prolong life indefinitely. But we live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing.
Alan Watts
