The Torch
The Teaching
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 is a ghastly thing to go on and on?
If we could go on living indefinitely, we would realise 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 always with the same individuals. Because as each new individual approaches life, life is renewed. One remembers how fascinating the most ordinary everyday things are to a child — because they see them all as marvellous, 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, the shapes and scratches on the floor cease to have magic. And once we have ceased to see magic in the world, we are no longer fulfilling nature’s game of being aware of itself. There is no point in it anymore — and so we die. And so something else comes to birth which gets an entirely new view.
Commentary
This teaching is for the householder, the parent, the person with a family, with children, with responsibilities that cannot be dropped. The monastic tradition points toward awakening through renunciation. Watts is pointing at something different: the ordinary stream of life IS the awakening, if it is seen clearly.
The torch image reframes mortality entirely. The fear of death is, at its core, the fear of the torch going out. But the torch is not going out. It is being passed. The parent who watches a child see magic in the shapes on the floor is watching the cosmos renew its capacity to know itself through fresh eyes.
Watts’s most startling point is that if we could live indefinitely, we would eventually choose not to. The desire for immortality is, on examination, not a desire for endless sameness. It is a desire for the torch not to go out. And the torch doesn’t go out when a life ends.
This connects to the Jewish concept of L’dor v’dor, from generation to generation, and to the Indigenous practice of decision-making for the seventh generation. And to the Buddhist Bodhisattva vow: to remain available, across whatever it takes, until all beings are free. The torch, in each tradition, is the same torch.
This is Shiva the Renewer scaled all the way down to the kitchen table. The death of the old way of seeing is exactly what makes the freshness possible; if the same eyes looked forever, the world would go stale and stay stale. Destruction and renewal are one motion, whether danced at the end of an age or enacted quietly by one generation handing the world to the next.
Themes
Connections 23
Unsure
No documented reading of Judaism by Alan Watts.
Unsure
No documented reading of Greek thought by Alan Watts.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Confucianism.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Confucianism.
Unsure
No documented reading of Indigenous tradition by Alan Watts.
Unsure
No documented reading of Sikhism by Alan Watts.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Buddhism.
Unsure
No documented reading of Sufism by Alan Watts.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Christian mysticism.
Unsure
No documented reading of Sufism by Alan Watts.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Hinduism.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Taoism.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Hinduism.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Hinduism.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Hinduism.
Unsure
No documented reading of Judaism by Alan Watts.