[...]

...this tremendously important to think about.

We put it off. Death is swept under the carpet in our culture.

In the hospital they try to keep you alive as long as possible, in utter desperation

They won't tell you that you are going to die.

They...when relatives have to be informed that it is a "hopeless" case, they are say

don't tell this to the patient. And all the relatives come around with hollow

grins and say "Well, you'll be all right in about a month, and then we'll go and have

a holiday somewhere by the sea and listen to the birds." And the dying person knows this is a mockery.

Well of course We have made death howl with all kinds of ghouls.

We have invented dreadful afterlives.I mean, the Christian version of heaven is as abominable

as the Christian version of hells [audience's laughs].

I mean,nobody wants [claps from the audience] to be in church forever!

Children are absolutely horrified when they hear these hymns which say

"Prostrate before Thy throne to lie and gaze and gaze on Thee."

They can't imagine what this imaginary dreams mean.

So the idea of what what might happen after death

where you going to be faced with yourjudge,

the one who knows all about you,this is Big Papa

who knows you were a naughty boy or a very naughty girl, specially girl [laugh from audience]

from the beginning of things. He is going to look right through to the core

of your inauthentic existence

- and what kind of heebie-jeebies may come up! [audience's laughs]

Or you may believe in reincarnation and you think that your next life will be the rewards

and the punishments for what you have done in this life.

and you know you got away with murder in this life [audience's laughs], and the most awful

things are going to happen next time around. You look upon death as a catastrophe [audience's

laughs].

Then there are other people who say "Well, when you're dead, you're dead."[laugh's audience]

Just as though nothing is going to happen at all.

So what do you have to worry about?

Well, we don't quite like that idea, because it spooks us.

You know what it would be like... to die?.

To go to sleep and never, never, never wake up?.

There are a lot of things it is not going to be like.

[Alan & audience's laughs]

It is not going to be like being buried alive. It is not going to be like being in the darkness

forever. I tell you what, it is going to be like...

as if you never had existed at all. Not only you, but everything else as well.

There just never was anything, and there is no one to regret it.

And there is no problem.

But think about that after a while.

It is kind of a weird feeling you get, when you really think about that.

Really imagine it.

Just to stop altogether, and you cannot even call it stop, because you cannot have stop

without start.

And there was any start,

there was just...

no-thing.

Well, I mean, you can just to think that is the way it was before you were born.

I mean,if you go back in memories as far as you can go, you get to the same place.

As you go forward in your anticipation of the future, is to what it is going to be like

to be dead. then you get this funny ideas...

That this blankness is the necessary counterpart of what we call being.

Now we all think we are alive, don't we? I mean, we are really here? That there is

something we call "existence"? You know the existencialist, the "Science...

[ something inaudible ] Aghh.. you know !! Here we are !!

But, how could you, would you experiencing that as a reality unless you had once been

dead? How,what gives us any ghost of a notion that

we are here, except by contrast with the fact that we once were not?

And later on, won't be?...

BUT THIS THING IS A CYCLE ...!!!