the cosmic joke and the sacred everything

How "nothing matters" and "everything is sacred" might be the same realization

Feb 07, 2026

my recent artwork depicting a dreamscape of the waves sparkling under a full moon on the California coast.

Alan Watts was a British-American philosopher who spent much of his life translating Eastern philosophy (e.g., Zen Buddhism and Taoism) for Western audiences. He had a gift for making the ineffable feel conversational, and his lectures and books became touchstones for anyone trying to think about consciousness, meaning, and the nature of reality.

One of his most enduring ideas is what he called “the cosmic joke.”

Tantra is a much older and broader tradition: a family of practices and philosophies that emerged across Hinduism and Buddhism, primarily in India and Tibet. It’s widely misunderstood in the West, often reduced to something about sex, but at its core, tantra is a radical re-orientation toward experience.

Many spiritual paths try to transcend the material world, but tantra turns toward it. The body, the senses, desire, emotion, these are all sacred.

These two philosophies don’t typically get placed side-by-side. But lately I’ve been playing with overlapping them and I keep finding something unexpected: they seem to arrive at a strangely similar place from completely opposite directions.

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The Cosmic Joke

Watts describes a kind of existential punchline. Most of us spend our entire lives trying to justify our existence. Picking the right career, the right relationships, the right spiritual practice, the self-improvement, the legacy. Striving, optimizing, and worrying, all in service of earning your place in this universe.

And then, if you’re lucky, you realize: you were always enough. Existence never had to be justified in the first place.

It’s a joke because the thing you were searching for was never missing. The effort was real. The anxiety and emotions were real. But the problem you were trying to solve is imaginary.

For some, there’s a deep relaxation in this realization. Sort of like the feeling of finally putting down something unbearably heavy that you forgot you were carrying. Watts invites us to laugh at the absurdity of it.

The universe isn’t asking anything of you. It never was.

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The Tantric Reversal

Tantra (speaking broadly, across a variety of traditions) arrives at something that looks similar from the outside but is built on a radically different foundation.

The tantric perspective is that everything is sacred. Not just the beautiful and transcendent parts, but everything. Pain, confusion, desire, grief, mess, bodies, the whole catastrophe.

Where many spiritual traditions draw a line between the sacred and the profane, between things that pull you closer to truth and things that pull you away, tantra dissolves that boundary.

Emotion is not an obstacle to awakening, it is the raw material of awakening. Sensation is a doorway. Suffering is something to include, metabolize, and transfigure.

In this view, the energy of anger is not fundamentally different from the energy of devotion. Nothing needs to be rejected, nothing needs to be transcended out of, everything belongs.

And here, too, many people find deep relaxation in this realization.

What matters?

This is the distinction I keep circling: in Watts’ view, we relax because nothing matters. The cosmic game is playful, purposeless, and free. There is no test to pass, no judge keeping score. You can relax because the pressure was never real.

In the tantric view, we relax because everything matters. Every moment is already luminous with significance. You can relax because there is nothing to fix, not because experience is meaningless but because it is already sacred as-is.

One says “stop taking everything so seriously.” The other says, “take it all seriously out of worship.”

And somehow both lead to the same relaxation.

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The paradox

I don’t fully know how to hold both of these as true simultaneously. They feel like they should contradict each other. If nothing matters, how can everything be sacred?

And if everything is sacred, how can the whole thing be a joke?

But I keep coming back to the possibility that maybe they are not contradicting at all.

Maybe they are two lenses on the same truth, and what looks like contradiction is just the limits of language trying to examine something that doesn’t really fit into words.

Here’s my best attempt at synthesis, for now:

The joke is that there was never a problem. And the punchline is that what was here all along, the raw, unfiltered, unimproved this, was divine sacredness the whole time.

The cosmic joke isn’t that life is meaningless. It’s that we invented a problem: our own insufficiency, our need to earn our own existence. And in so doing, we became blind to the staggering holiness of what was already in and around us.

The joke and the sacred are not opposites. The joke is that it was sacred all along and somehow we didn’t notice.

I suppose the point is not to resolve these ideas into the One True Idea but rather to notice the moments when we catch the joke and the moments when everything goes sacred.. And to wonder whether those are actually the same moment.

I suspect they are.

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