Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
There’s nothing to hold on to, you see? The moment you really stop holding on to anything, because you see there is nothing to hold on to, what happens? You become the ball.
Have a ball! It has nowhere to bounce, you see? You become the ball.
There’s nothing to hold on to. But you can only see that when you’re not holding on to anything anymore and you’ve given up. Resignation, or whatever it is.
In other words, that urgency to succeed, to be something, to get there, to make it, to be right—when you see you can’t and you give up, you get reborn. Because that’s the death. The real meaning of going to heaven after death has nothing to do with literal death, it has to do with this death.
Now the other side of the picture: what about the notion that you’re It? Tat tvam asi. Not only that it isn’t serious, but that fundamentally, right at the root of things, you are the ultimate reality?
Not you, as I repeat, as this apparently separate ego that is a kind of phantom (like the equator; the social institution), but the you which, as I say, grows the hair and blues or browns the eyes, and so on. Now, the difficulty that this presents to our common sense—and it does present a difficulty to our common sense—is that we’ve all been brought up to feel alienated from the world in the sense that it is something we came into, and it is something that we confront. A meeting.
We face it. So we face facts, we face reality, we encounter. Martin Buber’s emphasis on dialogue, on I–thou.
The confrontation, you see? This is a silly notion. At least, it’s silly if it doesn’t have something undergirding it.
You can’t have a dialogue between two people who don’t speak the same language. In other words, you can’t have a relationship without an underlying unity. You can’t have a battle, even, between the tiger and the shark, because they have no common ground.
And Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle. So underlying all conflict in nature is common ground, unity. Because even when we say that two things are the poles apart, that’s a way of saying they’re connected.
Because the whole Earth joins the two poles. The whole magnet joins the north and the south poles. So just as we have been taught to ignore the background behind the figure, the space behind the solid, so also we’ve been taught to ignore the joining link between the two poles.
I once said that the way most of us think—somebody asks for a banana, he ought to be satisfied with just the two ends of the banana. See? When you— [tape cut] —so there’s no point going to New York.
But just if there’s a distance between them, if there’s some difficulty in getting from one place to the other, so that not everybody in New York can go to San Francisco, not everybody in San Francisco can go to New York, then they’re different places and it’s worth going there. So, also: for the two ends of the banana to have any significance, you’ve got to have the banana of which the two ends are ends. So, in the same way, each individual isn’t something that comes into the world from nowhere and confronts it—or from somewhere else altogether—and the universe is not a kind of heap of flotsam and jetsam that happened to collect in space like a bunch of old rubber tires and broken logs in some little nook on the San Francisco Bay.
Of course, there was the bay underneath the whole thing, you see, actually? So, in the same way, to think—you see, the Christians and the Jews, to some extent, have got over this idea that we are created out of nothing. Now, of course, there’s an esoteric sense to that.
In a way, a māyā, an illusion, is a creation out of nothing. Suddenly, the magician makes a phantasm appear in the empty room. In a way, that’s a creation out of nothing, see?
He does it, say, by hypnosis; magic. But this idea of being created out of nothing has certain psychological and moral overtones, or undertones, in which you are supposed to be nothing down to the marrow and core of your existence. See, what that means is, psychologically, that there’s someone wagging his finger at you and saying, “Never forget that you are really a jerk,” you see?
That you’re a little worm. You don’t deserve anything. You exist entirely by the grace and pleasure of another.
And the sooner you grovel suitably to acknowledge this, the better. Because the consequences of saying this and the meaning of saying this is: what’s going to be done about it? So there’s the choice, you see, in your thinking, in your myth-making, in your imagination: do you want to settle for a completely schizoid universe in which there is a gulf between the Lord and the illusion, the Brahma and the māyā, so total that forever and ever the one is not the other?
Or would you rather have a unified, integrated universe in which the māyā is something that the Lord is doing; it’s his act, his play? Or Its act, if you don’t like the masculine personal pronoun. Her act; the great mother.
And it seems to me that these two views are sort of like this, you see: you can diagram them. You see, one person is looking at the universe this way. Here’s the domain of existence; being.
And everything comes into it thus; from nowhere, see? That’s one way of looking at things. How this ever got together, you can’t even think.
You have to turn your mind inside out and get this kind of collected flotsam and jetsam idea. The other diagram is this. Here, again, is the domain of being, but it’s like a star.
It radiates. The whole of it radiates each individual point of focus, you see? Now, there you’ve got an integrated situation.
And that’s what things look like. Stars look like that, crystals look like that, octopuses look like that, spiders look like that, human beings stick out like that. It all works that way.
Because underneath the differences—there are the differences, all the way around—is the unity. If you don’t know unity, you don’t know you’re different. They go together.
Theology has not, as a matter of fact, had a very distinguished record in promoting the study of other than the Christian religion. And this is rather puzzling. Most study of comparative religions that goes on in theological schools has historically been missionary-oriented: to find out the weird ideas of the prospects so as to be able to undermine them.
Because, you see, if you know in the first place that you have the true religion, there really is no point in studying any other one, and you can very quickly find reasons for showing them to be inferior because that was a foregone conclusion. They had to be. And therefore, all arguments about the respective merits of various religions—especially where Christianity is involved, and often where Judaism is involved, and sometimes Islam, too; all of which are essentially imperialistic religions—in all such discussions the judge and the advocate are usually the same person.
Because if, for example, you get into discussions as to whether Buddha was a more profound and spiritual character than Jesus Christ, you arrive at your decision on the basis of a scale of values which is, of course, Christian. And in this sense the judge and the advocate of the same. And I really do marvel at this Christian imperialism, because it prevails even among theological liberals.
And it reaches its final absurdity in religion-less Christianity—the doctrine that there is no God and Jesus Christ is his only son. Because, you see, there’s some anxiety here that, even though we don’t believe in God anymore, somehow we’ve still got to be Christians, and obviously because we have a very curious organization which must be understood. The inner meaning of the church as it works in fact.
A society of the saved, you see, necessarily requires outside it a society of the not saved. Because if there is not that contrast, you don’t know that you belong to the in-group. And in this way all social groups with claims to some kind of special status must necessarily create aliens and foreigners.
And Saint Thomas Aquinas let the cat out of the bag one day when he said that the saints in heaven would occasionally peer over the battlements into Hell and praise God for the just punishment visited upon the evildoers. Now, as you know, I’m not being very fair and very kind to modern theology. But there is this strange persistence of insisting that our group is the best group.
And I feel that there is in this something peculiarly irreligious, and furthermore it exhibits a very strange lack of faith. Because I believe that there is a strong distinction between faith on the one hand, and belief on the other. That belief is, as a matter of fact, quite contrary to faith.
Because belief is really wishing. It’s from the Anglo-Saxon root leaf, “to wish,” and belief stated, say, in the Creed is a fervent hope that the universe will turn out to be thus and so. And in this sense, therefore, belief precludes the possibility of faith because faith is openness to truth to reality whatever it may turn out to be.
“I want to know the truth”—that is the attitude of faith. And therefore, to use ideas about the universe and about God as something to hang onto, in the spirit of “Rock of ages cleft for me”—you know, hymnal imagery is full of rocks and mighty fortresses are God. And there’s something very rigid about a rock.
And we are finding our rock getting rather worn out in an age where it becomes more and more obvious that our world is a floating world. It’s a world floating in space where all positions are relative, and any point may be regarded as the center. A world which doesn’t float on anything, and therefore the religious attitude appropriate to our time is not one of clinging to rocks but of learning to swim.
And you know that if you get in the water and you have nothing to hold on to and you try to behave as you would on dry land you will drown. But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float. And this is exactly the situation of faith.
This is surely all implied in the New Testament. When, for example, Jesus began to foretell his own death his disciples were very disturbed because it is written in our law that the Messiah does not die, and he replied, “Unless a grain of corn fall into the ground and die, it remains isolated and brings forth no fruit.” Or rather, “If it die, it brings forth much fruit.” And on another occasion he said to the disciples, “It is expedient for you that I go away, but if I go not away from the Paraclete”—the Holy Spirit—“cannot come to you.” But we have reversed all this. Jesus—to me it was one of those rare and remarkable individuals who had a particular kind of spiritual experience which in terms of Hebrew theology he found most difficult to express without blasphemy.
“I and the Father are one.” In other words, I am God. And that is something, of course, if you are a Hindu—that is a rather natural statement to make. You see, in our culture (which has Hebrew theology in its background) anyone who says “I am God” is either blasphemous or insane.
Because our image of God—and the image, don’t forget, has far more emotional power than any amount of theology and abstraction—it is our father which really influences us as a conception of God, not necessarily being Tillich’s decontaminated name for God: the Ground of Being, or Professor Northrop’s undifferentiated aesthetic continuum. These aren’t very moving, even though subtle theologians prefer this kind of thing and will tell us that when we call God the Father, we don’t have to believe, literally, that there is a cosmic male parent, and still less that he has a white beard and sits on a golden throne above the stars. No serious theologian ever believed in such a God.
But nevertheless the imagery affects us, because the image of the monotheistic God of the West is political. The title King of Kings and Lord of Lords is the title of the emperors of ancient Persia. The image of God is based on the Pharaohs, the great rulers of the Chaldeans, and the kings of Persia.
And so this is the political governor and Lord of the universe who keeps order and who rules it from, metaphorically speaking, above. So anyone who would say “I am God” is therefore implying that he’s in charge of everything, that he knows all about it, and therefore everybody else ought to bow down and worship him. But in India if you say, “I am God,” they say, “Congratulations, at last you found out!” Because the image is quite different.
See, our image of the world is that the world is a construct. And it’s very natural for a child to say to its mother, “How was I made?” as if, you know, you were somehow put together. But that goes back to the imagery of Genesis, where God creates Adam and makes a clay figurine.
And then he breathes the breath of life into the nostrils of this figurine and it comes to life. So there is the fundamental supposition which even underlies the development of Western science that everything has been made and then someone knows how it was made. And you can find out.
Because behind the universe there is an architect. This could be called the ceramic model of the universe. Because there’s a basic feeling that there are two things in existence one is stuff—material—and the other is form.
Now, material like clay by itself is stupid. It has no life in it, has no intelligence. And therefore, for matter to assume orderly forms, it requires that an external intelligence be introduced to shape it.
And therefore, with that deeply embedded in our common sense, it’s very difficult for people to realize that this image is not necessarily for description of the world at all. Indeed, the whole idea of “stuff” is completely absent from modern physics, which studies the physical universe purely in terms of pattern and structure. But the Hindu model of the world—and I’m speaking of Hindu mythology, the popular imagery.
I’m talking about the popular imagery on both sides. I’m not at the moment getting into theological technicalities. The Hindu model of the universe is a drama: the world is not made, it is acted.
And so behind every face—human, animal, plant, mineral—there is the face on face of the central self, the Ātman, which is Brahman, the final reality which is not defined because, obviously, that which is the center cannot be made an object of knowledge anymore than you bite your own teeth or lift itself up by own bootstraps. It’s what there is. It’s the basis.
And you are it—which is a colloquial translation of the Sanskrit adage tát tvam ási; “that art thou.” The idea being, you see, that the nature of reality is a game of hide-and-seek. Because that’s really the only game there is: now you see it, now you don’t. All nature is vibrating.
It’s a wavelike motion of crest and trough, pulse and interval, pulse and interval. Only, we don’t always notice that because our senses respond slowly—say, to light. And light appears to be a continuous energy without interval.
So there’s the idea that goes like this: that for endless cycles of time this supreme reality, the Self, plays hide-and-seek with itself. That, for a period of a kalpa (which is four 4,320,000 years) the Self is awake to itself and knows that it’s It. But for another kalpa it gets lost.
It says to itself, “Man, get lost!” and pretends that it is a vast multiplicity. That’s exactly what you would do if you had the privilege of dreaming any dream you wanted when you went to bed at night. This would enable you, of course, in one night, to dream 75 years of clock time.
And what you would do, first of all: you would have marvelous adventures. You would have every conceivable delight and satisfy every wish. And then, as time went on, that would get a little boring and you would get more daring.
You would have adventures: you would rescue princesses from dragons. And then you would get even more daring, and you would dream that you weren’t dreaming. And then you’d get into really serious messes—because wouldn’t it be a surprise when you woke up!
And eventually you would be dreaming that you were sitting here in this auditorium listening to me. You would eventually get around to that, for your sins. Well, maybe that’s what’s happening anyhow, you see?
And in Sanskrit this dream is called māyā, but it’s a word that means more than “dream” or “illusion,” it means “creative power,” “magic,” “skill,” “art,” and “measurement.” Laying down the foundations is making a māyā. So then, the world is a big act. It’s play—not in the sense of something trivial, but in the sense of a stage play.
Hamlet is a play. You play the organ in church. That’s not trivial.
And so the actor of this play (being the best of all possible actors) takes himself in totally—almost. Because everybody knows in the back of their mind that there’s something funny about being a self. So, you see, when you go to the theater you know, of course, that the proscenium arch tells you that what’s going on behind this arch is not for real.
But somehow the actor almost persuades you that it is real. He wants to get you sitting on the edge of your chair. He wants you laughing, crying, he wants you in a state of anxiety so that he almost persuades you.
But, you see, if the actor is as good as the supreme Self, the audience is taken in thoroughly and they believe the play is real. What skill! How marvelous!
But, you see, in all acting there is, behind the stage, a green room. Out on the stage the Lord does not come on as the Lord, he comes on as you and I; heroes and villains. But off-scene, he assumes his true nature and doffs his mask, which in Latin is his persona.
In classical drama the persona was the megaphone mouth mask worn for the open air theater. And by a curious degradation of words the word “person” has come to mean the real individual. And when Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote How to Be a Real Person, the real title of his book should have been How to Be a Genuine Fake.
Well, now, this image, this model of the universe, is disturbing to Christians. What is particularly disturbing is the element in it of what’s a very special theological cussword called pantheism: the feeling that, if every part is being played by the supreme Lord, then all the real distinctions between good and evil are obliterated. Now, that is the biggest nonsense ever uttered.
Distinctions between good and evil do not have to be eternal distinctions to be real distinctions. It is really: to say that a distinction which is not eternal is not real is a highly un-Christian thing to say, and certainly a very u- Jewish thing. Because one of the fundamental principles of the Hebrew attitude is that all finite things that have been created by God are good.
And therefore, a thing doesn’t have to be infinite to be good. All finite things come to an end. Furthermore, to invoke the authority of heaven in matters of moral regulation is like putting a two million [Volt] current through your electric shaver.
It ended in the final asininity of the notion that if you went against the will of God, since evil is eternal, you would fry in hell forever and ever and ever. And as the Chinese say: “Do not swat a fly on a friend’s head with a hatchet.” Like all kinds of judicial torture and harsh justice, such ideas bring law into disrespect. And such a fierce God and such an unbending attitude resulted in the fact of people disbelieving in God altogether and, shall we say, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
So this is among many reasons why people are saying God is dead. It’s very inconvenient to have the kind of God who is this authoritarian boss of the world, prying down over your shoulder all the time, knowing your inmost thoughts, and judging you. It’s a very uncomfortable feeling and everybody’s happy to be rid of it.
It has never significantly improved anybody’s behavior. In the so-called ages of faith people were just as immoral, if not more so, than they are today. Because, you see, all this fixed notion of God is idolatry.
If thou shalt not make to thy self any graven image of anything that is in the heaven above, et cetera, the most dangerous and pernicious images are not those made of wood or stone—nobody takes those seriously—they’re the images made of the imagination and conception and thought. And that is why, in the fundamental approach to the Godhead, both the Hindu and the Buddhist (and, for that matter, the Taoist) take what is called the negative approach, which used to be known long ago in the Middle Ages as Apophatic theology. As Saint Thomas Aquinas said, “To proceed to the knowledge of God it is necessary to go by the way of remotion,” of saying what God is not—since God, by his immensity, exceeds every conception to which our intellect can attain.
So then, of the Godhead the Hindu says: all that can truly be said is neti neti, “not this, not this.” And when the Buddhist uses such a term for the final reality as śūnyatā, which means “voidness” or “emptiness,” then textbook after textbook on comparative religion that I read by various theologians say this is terrible negativism. This is nihilism. But he doesn’t realize that it’s nothing of the kind.
If, for example, you have a window on which there’s a fine painting of the sun, your act of faith in the real sun will be to scrape that off so that you can let the real sunlight in. And so, in the same way, pictures of God on the window of the mind need scraping off, because otherwise they become idolatrous. They become substitutes for the reality.
Now, I’m hoping that this sort of understanding will issue from God-is-dead theology. I’m not quite sure whether it’s going to. Because, as a matter of fact, there are precedents within the Christian tradition for an intelligent God-is-dead theology, for what I would call atheism in the name of God or agnosticism in the name of God.
The word “agnostic” has a curious history. It’s based on the Greek word agnosia (ἀγνωσία), which we used to translate into English as “unknowing.” And there’s a very interesting mystical treatise of the fourteenth century called the Cloud of Unknowing, showing how the highest form of prayer, contemplative prayer, was that in which all concept of God had been left behind. Where, in other words, one completely let go of clinging to God.
And this was the supreme act of faith. So that you don’t any longer need an image, because this gets in the way of the reality. But the moment you insist on an image, then you have the church as a huge imperialistic vested interest organization.
After all, if the church is the body of Christ, isn’t it through the breaking of the body of Christ that life is given to the world? But the church doesn’t want to be broken up. By Jove, no!
It goes around canvassing for new members. See, the difference between a physician and a clergyman is this: the physician wants to get rid of his patients, and he gives them medicine and he hopes they won’t get hooked on the medicine. Whereas the clergyman is usually forced to make his patients become addicts so that they’ll pay their dues.
The doctor has faith in turnover. He knows that there’ll always be sick people. And the clergy also need faith in turnover.
Get rid of your congregations! Say, “Now you’ve heard all I’ve got to tell you. Go away!” If you want to get together for making celestial whoopee (which is worship), alright.
But when I was a chaplain in the university, I used to tell the students that if they came to church out of a sense of duty, they weren’t wanted. They would be skeletons at the feast. It would be much better if they went swimming or stayed in bed.
Because we were going to celebrate the Holy Communion—and I meant: celebrate. But somehow or other, you see, we take religion in a kind of dead earnest. I remember when I was a boy at school how wicked it was to laugh in church.
We don’t realize, as G. K. Chesterton said, that the angels fly because they take themselves lightly. And as Dante said in the Paradiso, when he heard the song of the angels: it sounded like the laughter of the universe. What are those angels doing?
They’re saying Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, which doesn’t really mean anything. It’s sublime nonsense. And so, in the same way, there are Buddhist texts and Hindu texts which are the chants of the Buddhas or the divine beings which don’t mean anything at all, and never did mean anything.
They are just glorious lolling; glossolalia. So the point that I wish to make most strongly is that, behind a vital religious life for the West, there has to be faith which is not expressed in things to which you cling—in ideas, opinions, to which you cling in a kind of desperation. Faith is the act of letting go, and that must begin with letting go of God.
Let God go. But, you see, this is not atheism in the ordinary sense. Atheism in the ordinary sense is fervently hoping that there isn’t a God.
It has become extremely plausible that this trip between the maternity ward and the crematorium is what there is to life. And we still have going into our common sense the nineteenth century myth which succeeded the ceramic myth in Western history—I call it the myth of the fully automatic model of the universe—namely: that it’s stupid, it’s blind force. Haeckel’s gyration—fortuitous congress of atoms—is of the same vintage as Freud’s libido, the blind surge of lust at the basis of human psychology.
But when you consider this attitude, you know, what is the poetic counterpart of it? Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock-ball that revolves about an insignificant star on the outer edges of one of the smaller galaxies. Gosh, what a putdown that was.
But on the other hand, if you think about that for a few minutes, I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock-ball rotating around a spherical fire. It’s a very odd situation! And the more I look at things, I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird!
See, a philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted. And sensible people say, “Existence is nothing at all! I mean, it’s just basic.
Go on and do something.” See, this is the current movement in philosophy. Logical analysis says you mustn’t think about existence. It’s a meaningless concept.
And therefore philosophy has become the discussion of trivia, and philosophical journals are now as satisfactorily dull as any other kind of purely technical inquiry. No good philosopher lies awake nights worrying about the destiny of man and the nature of God and all that sort of thing because a philosopher, today, is a practical fellow who comes to the university with a briefcase at nine and leaves at five. He does philosophy during the day, which is discussing whether certain sentences have meaning, and if so, what.
And then he would, as William Earle said in a very funny essay, he would come to work in a white coat if he thought he could get away with it. The problem is he’s lost his sense of wonder. Wonder is, like, in modern philosophy, something you mustn’t have.
It’s like enthusiasm in eighteenth century England. It’s very bad form. But, you see, I don’t know what question to ask when I wonder about the universe.
It isn’t a question that I’m wondering about. It’s a feeling that I have. Imagine if you had an interview with God—everybody was going to have an interview with God, and you were allowed to ask one question, what would you ask.
And don’t don’t rush into it. You will soon find that you have no idea what to ask. Because I cannot formulate the question that is my wonder.
The moment my mouth opens to utter it, I suddenly find I’m talking nonsense. But that should not prevent wonder from being the foundation of philosophy. Well, as Aristotle said: wonder is the beginning of philosophy.
Because it strikes you that existence is very, very strange. And then, moreso, when this so-called insignificant little creature has inside his skull a neurological contraption that is able to center itself in the midst of this incredible expanse of galaxies and start measuring the whole thing. That is quite extraordinary!
And then, furthermore, when you realize that in a world where there are no eyes, the sun would not be light, and that in a world where there were no soft skins, rocks would not be hard, nor in a world where there were no muscles would they be heavy. Existence is relationship, and you are smack in the middle of it. So there is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude in the sense of awe, astonishment at existence.
And that is also a basis of respect for existence. We don’t have very much of it in this culture, even though we call it materialistic. A materialist is a person who loves material.
And I suppose in the Christian tradition, and in the Jewish, one would say that the lord God is the greatest materialist. Because, you know, as William Temple once said, “God is interested in many other things than religion.” Were God only interested in religion the world would consist of nothing but church buildings and Bibles and clergyman. And that would be pretty boring.
So in the culture that we call materialistic today we are, of course, bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gas as quickly as possible. This is not a materialistic culture because it has no respect for material. And respect is, in turn, based on Wonder, on feeling the marvel of just an ordinary pebble in your fingers.