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And it is well known to the great mystical tradition of the world—all over the world—that the, sort of, supreme vision can only come when you have got rid of every idea of God whatsoever. It would be like (as I’ve often used this image) cleaning a window on which somebody has painted blue sky. Well, to see the sky, you’ve got to scrape off the paint. |
Well, you say, “My goodness, you shouldn’t take that nice blue painting off. It’s very good. It was done by a great artist. |
See how pretty the clouds are. You mustn’t do that, because we won’t have that blue sky anymore.” See? So in that spirit the great mystics have always ceased to cling to God. |
That is because the only god you can cling to is the idea of God. In order to discover God, you have entirely to stop clinging. You see, why does one cling to God? |
For safety, of course. You want to save something. You want to save yourself. |
I don’t care what you mean by “saved”—whether it just means feel happy, or feel that life is meaningful, or, you know, there’s somebody up there who cares. So one clings. And if you don’t cling to God, you cling to something else: the state, money, sex, yourself, power. |
These are all false gods. But there has to come a state when clinging stops. And only then does the state of faith begin. |
People who believe in God don’t have any faith, because they want something to hold onto. So real faith is when you do not hold on to anything anymore. In the Christian tradition this is called the “Cloud of Unknowing.” There is a book of that title written by a fourteenth century British monk, anonymous. |
And he got it from Dionysius the Areopagite, who assumed the name of St Paul’s Athenian convert. He was a Syrian monk living in the sixth century. Both Meister Eckhart, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Scotus Eriugena, and many other great medieval theologians studied Dionysius the Areopagite. |
He wrote a book called the Theologia Mystica in which he explains that, in order to come to a full union with God, you must give up every conception of God whatsoever. And he enumerates: don’t think that God is oneness, or threeness, or unity, or spirit, or any kind of anything that the human mind can conceive. He is beyond all that. |
This is called apophatic theology. This is a Greek term contrasted with “cataphatic.” When you speak cataphatically, you say what God is like. So this man, Dionysius, wrote two books. |
One was called The Divine Names, and that was cataphatic theology. And the other was called “the mystical theology,” which is apophatic. Cataphatic: what God is like according to analogy. |
He is like a father. We do not say God is a cosmic male parent. But God is in some respects like a father, like spirit. |
Like we say nowadays: like, man, it’s like it’s raining. You know? There’s a certain relativity to that statement. |
So this is the the cataphatic language. The apophatic says what God is not. And all those theologians in the following of Dionysius said the highest way of talking about God is in negative terms. |
Just as (to use Dionysius’s own image) when a sculptor makes a figure, he does it entirely by removing stone; taking something away. So, in the same way, St. Thomas Aquinas said, “Because God, by his infinity, exceeds every idea to which the human mind can reach, the best way to speak of him is by remotion.” That is to say: by removing from our view of God every inadequate concept. This is what the Hindus call neti neti, saying of the Brahman, of the supreme reality: “It is not this, it is not this.” But this intellectual operation of destroying concepts must go hand in hand with a, shall we call it, psychological operation which is ceasing to cling to any image whatsoever, or simply ceasing to cling. |
Now, why? Well, because there’s no need to. There’s no need to cling. |
Because when you were born you were kicked off a precipice. And it was a big explosion, and a lot of other things are falling down with you, including some pretty large lumps of rock. One of them’s called the Earth. |
And it won’t help you to cling to the rocks when you’re falling off the precipice. It may give you an illusion of safety. But everything is falling. |
It’s falling apart. That’s what the ancients said: “All is transient.” Panta rhei: “all flows,” in the words of Heraclitus. And you can cling to anything. |
It’s like grabbing a smoke with a nonexistent hand. That’s all that clinging will ever achieve. All it does is make people anxious. |
So when you come to the realization that you cannot cling of anything, that there is nothing to cling to, there transpires an inner change of consciousness which we can call either faith or letting go. And then suddenly the thing hits you. In Sanskrit they put it this way: tat tvam asi. |
It means literally “that art thou,” or as we would say: “you’re it.” And if you are God, then you can’t have an idea of God any more than you can chew your own teeth. You don’t need one. The sun doesn’t need to shine on itself. |
Knives don’t need to cut themselves. Your eyes don’t need to look at themselves. What color is your head to your eyes? |
It isn’t black, is it? Can’t see anything. Matter of fact, the way it feels inside your head is what you call what it looks like outside. |
All these things you see outside are states of the nervous system in the brain. That’s how it feels, that’s how it looks inside the head. Only, you said, “Well, I thought that was what was outside.” True. |
Same way when the Zen master suddenly discovered that carrying the pail with water is it was a miracle. He discovered that. He realized there isn’t anything except God. |
And boy, if you really know that, you see, you don’t need to have a religion. But you can have one, because it’s a free world. I mean, if you want to try and express this in some way. |
And all religion is pure gravy after that. See? Any outward manifestation of religion. |
You know, it’s like a man with lots of money making some more. Only, it’s quite unnecessary. But so, according to the very best theologians, it was never necessary for God to create the world. |
Didn’t add anything to him. He didn’t have to do it. He was under no compulsion. |
So he did it out of what Dionysius the Areopagite calls [???]. Or we would anglicize it hyper-[??? ], “super fullness.” In other words: for kicks. |
I mean, you know, we don’t like using that language, but it’s completely contemporary and exactly right. That’s what the Bible says, only it puts it in a more sedate way. It says, “His Majesty did it for his pleasure.” Well, that’s the way you talk about somebody who’s the king. |
As Queen Victoria said, you know: “We are not amused!” And it says in the Book of the Proverbs that where the divine wisdom speaks—and speaks, you see, as an attribute of God standing aside from God; sort of primitive polytheism—and wisdom says that, “In the beginning of the world, her delight was to play before the divine presence, and especially to play with the sons of men.” The word, in Hebrew, is “play,” but in the King James translation it is “rejoice,” because that is a more sedate word than “play.” You may rejoice in church but not play. You may not have fun in church, but you may rejoice. See the difference? |
So then, the point of the matter is, then: there was no reason to make the world, and it was done for making celestial whoopee. That’s why the angels a laughing. They’re just splitting their sides. |
Only, when you hear it in church, everybody’s forgotten what Alleluia means. It’s lalling. Don’t you see? |
Alleluia! Hallelujah! It’s like blwee blweddle blwweee blwoo, you know? |
It’s just verbal. And it’s like birdsong. Birdsong isn’t about anything, it’s just for kicks. |
Why do you sing? Why do you like dancing? What’s music for? |
That’s what this Hallelujah is. So when nothing is being clung to, when one gets to that point, everything blows up. This is what’s meant by satori in Zen: “sudden awakening.” And you suddenly see: good heavens, what was I making all that fuss about? |
Because here we are. It’s what we’ve been looking for all the time. It’s right here! |
And that’s the thing. And you realize that you, basically, through and through, are all this. Only, you got into a kind of a funny illusion. |
I think we get into that illusion in rather a complicated way through our upbringing as children. Because many little children know from the beginning what it’s all about, only they haven’t got words to put it in. See, that’s the whole problem child psychology: what the child psychologist is ideally looking for is an articulate baby who can explain what it’s like to be a baby, you know? |
Never get there. By the time you teach—by teaching the child to speak, you mess it up. You give it this language, and you can think big thoughts like that with this funny limited language. |
Especially with the words they start children out with. And then, finally, when they’ve got the poor thing completely hypnotized, they tell it the most preposterous things. They tell it that it must be free. |
They say to you: “You, child, are an independent agent, and you’re responsible.” See? “Now, therefore, we command you to love us.” And, in other words, we require that you do something which will please us only if you do it voluntarily. Yeah! |
Do you want people who are mixed up? But I’m afraid, you see, that the new theology isn’t on to this. The new theology really is serious about there not being any God, and that the universe is therefore… pffft… a rather pitiful predicament in which we’re caught, has some compensations. |
But all this is a continuation of the 19th century philosophy, the fully automatic model, which is that it is an essentially stupid universe. It’s a mechanism. It is a gyration of blind energy in which human intelligence and values happens to be a fluke, and a rather uncomfortable one. |
Because nature doesn’t give a damn about us. And so we have to fight it. Now, all that is pure mythology, it is grossly unscientific. |
But most people believe. It’s common sense for today. But what an opportunity, though, there is in the new theology, and in this whole ferment going on, to get them to see this other point of view and realize that, when you get rid of God, all you are doing is: you’re destroying an idol. |
And all idols must be destroyed respectfully. Not like those wretched Puritans, who went around destroying all the saints figures and the stained glass in the medieval churches. That was disrespectful iconoclasm. |
Respectful iconoclasm would be, for example, every Easter Sunday the Bible should be ceremoniously burned. Because if Jesus is truly risen from the dead, you don’t need the Bible anymore. He’s around! |
Available. You don’t need the books. Burn it up ceremoniously with great respect! |
Because certainly, God doesn’t take himself seriously. If he did, I shudder to think what would happen. Now, you know, those people you’ve just been listening to, chanting the sutras on Kōya-san—which is the sort of ultimate center, retreat, inner sanctuary of Japanese practice of Vajrayāna Mahāyāna Buddhism—are a bunch of boys who are just like American college boys who play football, and they haven’t the faintest idea what they’re doing. |
Not today. They’re doing this because their fathers have sent them there—their fathers’ own temples—and they’ve got to carry on their fathers’ tradition. Because, after all, the family business has to go on. |
And they have no more idea what this is all about than the man in the moon. And you and I can sit here, and we could get swinging with this music, we could dance to it, and we could go very far out on it—which was what you were originally supposed to do—and for them it’s a chore. It’s a thing you have to get up for at five o’clock in the morning, and you have to memorize all this, and you have to get it exactly right, and do it. |
And they’ve completely forgotten what it was all about. But it was originally there. It’s a funny thing how this happens, you see. |
But do you see how I was explaining to you this morning how we have a rhythm between remembering and not remembering? You remember long enough to know that you’re there. Because if you don’t remember, nothing makes any impression upon you, therefore you are not there. |
But then, when memory gets too much and you’re too much there, then you have to realize that all memory is an illusion, that there is nothing except the present moment, and that there is no future as equally no past. And then you are liberated. But when you get liberated you have to come back in and play memory again. |
There’s a cleaning process—in other words, you wipe off the blackboard and then you start writing again. And then you wipe it off, and then you start writing again. And this is the process whereby life is kept going. |
So in the same way with these people. They have come to a point in the historical development of their way of life where they remember too much—it’s not new to them—and all this therefore becomes what we call going through the motions. And so this is the same paradox that I was talking about this morning: that the echo (which is memory) is simultaneously what tells you exist and what traps you. |
So, in the sense that it tells you you exist, it’s an advantage. To the extent that it traps you, it’s a debt. You’re in debt. |
You should be thankful. Somebody gave it to you. Ultimately, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the lord God did it all for you and you should be thankful, and say, “Anything bad that I did was for me. |
And dear God, anything good that I did was from you.” You see? What a marvelous mi-up that is. But all I’m saying is this: there is a point in all of this development where you have to say to people: please come off it. |
In other words, these boys here in Kōya-san, I was aching to know enough Japanese to say to them, “Do you realize what a great thing you have here? Couldn’t you possibly enjoy it for a few minutes? And let’s get together and all join hands around here and go through this again, these sutras, and really make it!” So I’m talking, you see, about the same process of what has been called flip-floppability, whereby we switch from one attitude to another, one situation to another. |
And this pulse-switch situation is the very nature of existence. That’s why your heart does that. That’s why all sounds, all light, everything is going blwwp, blwwp, blwwp, blwwp, blwwp, blwwp, see? |
And so, because of that blwwp, you know you’re here. Well, now, I’ve been trying to show how this game has its own inner meaning. So finally, we’ve got to come around to one form of Mahayana that I haven’t really discussed at all to complete the whole scene, which is what is called the School of the Pure Land. |
And this is the most popular form of Mahayana Buddhism in the Far East. In China, in Japan, everywhere, the multitudes go for this kind. And it’s all under the presiding image of those Dhyani Buddhas called Amitābha, whose name means “boundless light,” and who is a sort of subdivision or aspect of Mahāvairocana, who is the great sun Buddha, and is therefore probably derived historically from Ahura Mazdā from Persia, the great sun god of the Mazdeans and the Pasis. |
But although that may have been what set it all off, it has been greatly transformed by being canalized through Buddhism. Now, you have all seen photographs of the Buddha at Kamakura, the Daibutsu, that enormous bronze figure that sits in a beautiful park with pine trees, the temple having long been demolished by a tidal wave—for which thanks be to God, because if it hadn’t been for the tidal wave, nobody would ever have really seen this figure. But there is at Kamakura this huge bronze figure. |
It’s about 42 feet high. And here this creature sits, surrounded by a great business: thousands of schoolchildren are all the time on tours streaming by, photographers, people selling this, that, and the other, souvenirs, exhibitions of dwarf trees, and everything. They’re all going on around. |
And here this thing sits and looks down forever, and nothing can hush it. I mean, let’s put it this way: it hushes everything. That, no matter how much turmoil of children and et cetera is going on in this park, this huge face presides over everything. |
And you cannot ignore it. It subdues you into peace—without doing it in an authoritative way. It doesn’t say to you, “Shut up,” it just is so peaceful that you cannot help catching the infection of peace that comes from this figure. |
And this is the figure of Amida, Amitābha. Not the historical Shakyamuni, Guatama Buddha, living in India, but one of the Dhyani Buddhas who is not manifested in the world. Now, the religion connected with this figure is called Pure Land, Jōdo Shinshū (in Japanese): “the true sect of the Pure Land.” It comes—again, the origins are always in India. |
But the Japanese—under the genius of Hōnen and Shinran, who were medieval Buddhist saints—developed their own special variety of it. And this is a very strange religion, because it takes its basis as follows: We are living now in the most decadent period of history. That’s what they say. |
And this comes back from the Hindu idea that this is the Kali Yuga: this is the end of time where everything is completely fouled up. And this started in about 3000 BC. February 23rd, 3023 BC, the Kali Yuga began. |
And it’s got to last yet for 5,000 years, and then everything will fall apart; the universe will disappear out of sheer failure. So that, now, nobody can be virtuous. Because everybody who tries to be virtuous in this epoch of the world is merely showing off. |
It’s not really pure, it’s just pretending you’re virtuous, and it’s a big act. In other words: so, you give money to charity not because you really love the people you’re giving money to, but because you are under a sense of guilt and you feel you ought to. And therefore, because of that inescapable bad motivation, nobody can possibly liberate themselves from the chains of karma. |
The more you try to get out of your karma—that is to say: your conditioning, your bondage to your past—the more you simply get yourself involved in it. And therefore, all human beings living in the end time of the Kali Yuga—or what the Japanese call mappō—are just hopeless; hopelessly selfish. So in this predicament you cannot rely on jiriki (that means your own power) to get out, to get liberated, from Self. |
You have to rely on tariki, which is the power of something else altogether than you; something quite different. So in the Jōdo Shinshū sect, the tariki (the other power) is represented in the form of Amitābha (or the Japanese say Amida), this great beneficent Buddha figure who everybody loves. And he’s so strangely different from any kind of authoritarian God figure that we have in the West. |
Amida doesn’t bombinate. He sits there serenely, quiet. He doesn’t preach. |
And all you have to do is to say his name in the formula Namu Amida Butsu, which means: namu, “name;” Amida Butsu, “of Amida Buddha.” Namu Amida Butsu. And all you have to do is to say that formula, and after death you will be reborn in a special paradise called Sukhavati—which is Jōdo, the Pure Land—where becoming enlightened is a cinch. It has none of the difficulties surrounding it that we have in our ordinary life today. |
Everybody born in the Pure Land is born in the inside of a lotus. There’s a huge lotus pond in front of where Amida sits with all his attendants. And the lotus has come up and they go pop, you know, as the bud breaks. |
And every time it goes pop, like this, there’s a new little being in there who is somebody who has said that formula, Namu Amida Butsu. And those are human beings who are now sitting on lotuses is like Buddhas. And you should see— you go to Kōya-san, and they have a great painting now in their museum of what it’s like to arrive there. |
They have a huge panorama of Amitābha and all his attendants, and especially the apsarās, and she looks at you with lovely longing eyes. And so this is welcome to Amida’s paradise, where you will all sit on lotuses and be Buddhas without any difficulty. But the point is: all you have to do to get there is to say Namu Amida Butsu. |
You don’t even have to believe that it works. Now, that is the religion of most Japanese Buddhists, believe it or not. In other words, if you, of course, if you really get this and feel that that’s really going to happen to you, you’ll be grateful and you’ll try to help other people, and be a bodhisattva, and so on, and, you know, you’ll be generally helpful around the scene. |
But the whole idea is that you cannot do it by your own effort. And the moment you think you can do it by your own effort, you’re a phony. You have instead to go completely with the other: to disown your own power and capability of being virtuous, unselfish, et cetera. |
So then, this kind of religion develops a peculiar kind of saint, and they call these people myōkōnin. Myō means “wonderful,” kō means “fine,” nin means “man” or “person”—there can be a woman myōkōnin; it is not sexually restricted to men. So a myōkōnin is a very special kind of character. |
There are stories told about myōkōnin. There is one, for example: a traveling man who comes to a temple during the course of the night, and walks in, and he takes the sacred cushions on which the priests sit and arranges them right in front of the altar, and goes to sleep. In the morning the priest comes in and says, “What’s going on here?” And the myōkōnin looks at him and says, “Oh, you must be a stranger. |
You don’t belong to the family.” Another time, he had a great ability for calligraphy, for doing beautiful writing. And people were always trying to get his calligraphy from him, and he was cagey about it. It wasn’t so easy to get it. |
So one day, a very, very great man invited him for dinner and, again, left him alone in a reception room where there was stretched out on the floor some absolutely gorgeous paper, with ink and brushes just waiting there. And he got so fascinated that he just couldn’t resist. You know? |
Like a child. He simply couldn’t resist doing his calligraphy on that piece of paper. And suddenly, as he realized he had done it, that he had spoiled this gorgeous paper—you know, which was incredibly expensive—the host walked in. |
And he apologized and he said, “Really, I don’t know what to do. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t resist the temptation to make some things on this beautiful paper.” And the host said, “Oh, please don’t worry about that!” Because he had now possessed himself of a priceless object of art. |
This man’s work, today, sells for thousands and thousands of dollars. So this is the spirit I’m trying—I’m telling these anecdotes to try and illustrate the spirit of what’s called a myōkōnin: somebody in the swing of realizing that the very great thing in life is not your own doing; that it comes from the side of things—the flip, in other words, of experience—that you call “other.” There are some people who believe it comes from the split in experience you call “yourself.” That’s the jiriki people. The tariki people believe it comes from the other. |
But now, what happens is this: when you penetrate deeply into the doctrines of the Pure Land school, the simple people believe that there really is Amitābha Buddha, sitting on his golden lotus surrounded by all those apsarās. Exactly (from Japan) 108,000 miles to the west there is a paradise where all those people sit, and where you will be reborn when you die. And the simple priests of the sect in the country villages today still insist that that’s what you should believe. |
But the sophisticated priests don’t believe that at all. They know that Amitābha is in you—only, it is that side of you which you don’t define as “you.” When you say, “I have a body” instead of saying “I am a body,” that’s because you feel that your body happens to you, that it’s something you got mixed up with, that was given to you by your parents. You don’t say, “I beat my heart on purpose,” you feel that your heart is something that happens to you. |
So all that side of things that you experience as a passive recipient of it is tariki. But in all this, who are you? Who is the recipient of these gifts? |
Don’t you see that “self” and “other” go together? That you don’t need to cling to yourself, because you have everything you called other—and that’s you, too. But you only realize this if you explore it, if you go to an extreme. |
So you can go to the extreme by pursuing the idea of total courage: of letting go of everything, of being a true Zen monk and abandoning all your property, and living in a barn and sitting in the middle of the night in the cold, and eating rice and pickles and so on, and you can explore liberation that way. That’s going to an extreme. But eventually you will come around to the same point as the person who goes to the other extreme, which is: no effort whatsoever. |
It comes of itself. Only, he gets in a kind of bind, too. Because when am I making no effort? |
Even if I say Namu Armida Butsu, I’m doing something about it. Now, I’ve got to stop saying this Namu Armida Butsu. You know, saying Namu Armida Butsu is so easy, but it’s still a little bit work. |
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