The Waterfall
The Teaching
The whole problem is that it really is no other problem than to go over that waterfall when it comes — just as you go over any other waterfall. Just as you go on from day to day. Just as you go to sleep at night. Be absolutely willing to die.
If you understand that your disappearance as the form in which you think you are — your disappearance as this particular organism — is simply seasonal. That you are just as much the dark space beyond death as you are the light interval called life. These are just two sides of you.
Nirvana means breathe out — let go of the breath. Don't resist change. It's all the same principle.
If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it. Let it take over — fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise: you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.
Commentary
Every tradition on this map has been building to this moment. The waterfall is not a departure from the river. It is the river, intensified. The water that has been flowing quietly for miles does not change its nature when it goes over the edge.
Watts's comparison to sleep is the most practically useful thing ever said about death. Every night consciousness dissolves. Every night the self you were all day is set aside. Every morning something reconstitutes. You have practiced this dissolution every night of your life.
The Buddhist teaching is stated in the word Nirvana itself. It does not mean annihilation. It means exhale. Breathe out. Let go of the breath. The Tao Te Ching's 'returning to the root' is the same movement.
'You don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.' This is the Upanishadic teaching in Watts's Western vernacular. What appeared as a person was always the Brahman, the ground of all consciousness, temporarily organised into this particular form. The form passes. The ground remains. You had just forgotten who you are.