[Alan Watts]
I have a friend
A girl
Who is very intelligent and articulate
And she was born blind!
And she hasn’t the faintest idea what darkness is
The word means as little to her as the word light

So if you were to sleep --
You are not aware of darkness when you are asleep
& so if you went into sleep
Into unconsciousness
For always and always and always
It wouldn’t be at all like going into the dark;
It wouldn’t be at all like being buried alive
It would be as if, as a matter of fact
You had never existed at all

Not only you, but everything еlse as well
You would be in that statе, as if you had never been
And, there, of course, there would be no problems
There would be no one to regret the loss of anything
You couldn’t even call it a tragedy
Because there would be no one to experience it as a tragedy
It would be simple – nothing at all
Forever and for never
Because, not only would you have no future
You would also have no past and no present

Now you would think think that that was the point where we would say
“Well let’s talk about something else.”
But I’m not content with that, I demur

Because this makes me think of two other things
This state of nothingness, makes me think first of all
The only thing I- I get anywhere in my experiences close to nothingness is the way my head looks to my eyes

Because I seem to feel that there's a world out there as it were confronting my eyes
And then behind my eyes there isn’t a black spot
There isn’t even a hazy spot
There’s nothing at all
I’m not aware of my head
As it were
As a black hole in the middle of all this luminous visual experience

It doesn’t even have very clear edges because the field of vision is an oval
And if I run my fingers along my field of vision
It's like this
And this is the point where my fingers just disappear from sight
The edge

But then behind this oval of vision there is nothing at all
Just from the sense of sight
Of course, if I use my fingers and touch I can feel something behind my eyes;
But if I use the sense of sight alone there is just nothing there at all
Now, nevertheless, out of that blankness I see

Now that's the first thing it makes me think of

Now the next thing it makes me think of is this
When I’m dead I am as if I never had been
And that’s the way I was before I was born
Because just as I try to go back behind my eyes
And find what is there I come to a blank
If I try to remember back and back and back and back
I've got my earliest memories and then behind them – nothing
Total blank
But just as I know there’s something behind my eyes by using my fingers on my head
So I know through other sources of information
That before I was born there was something going on
There were my father and my mother
And their fathers and mothers
And the whole material environment of the Earth and its life out of which they came
And behind that the solar system
And behind that the galaxy
And behind that all the galaxies
And behind that another blank – space