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So, therefore, the image of yourself that you have is simply a caricature, just when we make a caricature, say, of Adolf Hitler, and we pull down the hair and put a comb instead of a mustache, you know? We just associate Adolf Hitler’s image with the shock of hair and the toothbrush mustache. So in the same way, our image of ourselves is a caricature of ourselves because it does not include almost all the important things about ourselves.
It does not include all the goings-on inside the physical organism. Oh, we get belly rumbles, and occasionally we’re aware of that, occasionally we’re aware of our breathing, occasionally we’re aware if it hurts somewhere, but for the most part, we’re totally unconscious of everything going on inside us. We’re unconscious of our brains and how they work, we’re unconscious of our relationships to the external world, many of our relationships to other people are completely unconscious.
I mean, we depend, say, on telephone operators, electricians, supplying our electricity; on all kinds of services that we never even think about. We don’t think about air pressure, we don’t think about the chemical constitution of the air we breathe, we don’t think about cosmic rays, gamma rays, x-rays, the output of the sun. All these things are absolutely essential to our life, but they are not included in the ego image.
So the ego image is very incomplete. In fact, it’s an illusion. But we say, “Now, look: it can’t be that way because I feel I!” I mean, it’s not just an image of myself I have, I have a solid feeling behind the word ‘I,’ when I think “I” I feel there’s something there!
So I feel—don’t I—that behind this image, this symbol of myself, there is what we would call a concrete referent. There is a feeling, a solid sensation to which it refers. Now, what is that?
Interesting question. Because the first thing: if your brain is your ego, you have very little in the way of direct sensation of your brain. In fact, operations can be performed on the brain with only surface anesthesia, because there’s no feeling in the brain itself.
Try that one out for size. You don’t feel all these interior operations. They, therefore, cannot be the sensation of ego.
When your eyes are functioning well, you don’t see your eyes. If your eyes are imperfect you see spots in front of them, that means there’s some lesions in the retina or wherever it may be. And because your eyes aren’t working properly, you feel them.
So, in the same way, you don’t hear your ears. If you have singing in your ears it means there’s something wrong with your ears. So, therefore, if you do feel yourself, there must be something wrong with you!
And whenever you have the sensation of ‘I,’ [it] is like spots in front of the eyes; it means something’s wrong with your functioning. That’s why you feel you’re there, why you feel you as being different from—and somehow cut off from—all that you really are, which is everything you’re experiencing. The real you is the totality of everything you’re aware of, and a great deal more besides.
But what is this thing that we feel in ourselves when we say that is the concrete, material me! Well, I’ll tell you what it is. When you were a little child in school—you remember?—you were picking your nose and looking out of the window, flicking spitballs at something.
Suddenly, the teacher rapped the desk and said, “Pay attention!” Wowee! Now, how did you do that? Well, you stared at the teacher and you put a frown on your face because that’s how it looks like to pay attention.
And when the teacher sees all pupils in the class staring at her—or him—and frowning, then the teacher is consoled and feels that the class is paying attention. This class is doing nothing of the kind. The class is pretending to pay attention.
Alright, so you’re reading a book; there’s some difficult book you have to read because it’s required, and you’re bored to death with it, and you think, “Well, I really have got to concentrate on this book.” And so you sort of glare at it and you try to force your mind to follow its argument, and then you discover you’re not really reading the book—you’re thinking about how you ought to read it. What do you do if I say to you, “Now look: take a hard look at me. Would you please take a hard look at me?” See?
Take a real hard look. Now, what are you doing? What’s the difference between a hard look and a soft look?
Why, with your hard look you are straining muscles around your eyes, and you’re starting to stare. Now, if you stare at a distant image—like a clock far away from you—you make the image fuzzy. If you want to see the clock clearly you must close your eyes, imagine black for a while, and then lazily and easily open them and you’ll see the image.
The light will come to you. What do you do when I say, “Now, listen carefully! Listen very carefully to what I’m saying.” You find you’re beginning to strain yourself around your ears.
Golly, I remember—in school—I had a boy who couldn’t read sat next to me. And he wanted to convince the teacher that he really was trying to read, so he would say, “Rrrruuunn Sspooott, rrrrrrruunnn!” You know? And he was all his muscles.
Well, what have they got to do with reading? What does straining your muscles here to hear, straining your muscles here to see—what does that have got to do with seeing? Nothing.
Alright, supposing somebody says, “Okay, now: you’ve got to use your will. Got to exercise strong will.” That’s the ego, isn’t it? What do you do when you exercise your will?
Well, they say “Grit your teeth! Clench your fists!” See? So you grit your teeth, you clench your fists—or, if you want to stop wayward emotions, you go uptight.
You pull your stomach in, or hold your breath, or contract your rectal muscles. “Uuuungh,” like this. But all those activities have absolutely nothing to do with the efficient functioning of your nervous system.
Just as staring at images makes them fuzzy, listening hard—all this muscular tension around here—distracts you from what you’re actually hearing, gritting your teeth has nothing to do with courage. All this is a total distraction, and yet we do it all the time, and therefore we have a chronic sensation of muscular strain—the object of which is an attempt to make our nervous system (our brains, our sensitivity) function properly, and it doesn’t work! It’s like, you know, taking off in a jet plane.
You’ve gone zooming down the runway and you think this plane has gone too far down the runway, and it isn’t up in the air yet. So you start pulling at your seat belts to help the thing up. It doesn’t have any effect.
And so, in exactly the same way, all these muscular strains we do and have been taught to do all our lives long—so that we look as if we’re paying attention, we look as if we’re trying—all this is futile. But the chronic sensation of strain is the sensation to which we are referring as ‘I.’ So our ego is—what have you—an illusion married to a futility. It’s the image of ourselves—which is incorrect, false, and only a caricature—married to, combined with, a futile muscular effort to will, to be effective.
So then, what do we do about that? I mean, wouldn’t it be much better if we had a sensation of ourselves that was in accord with facts? And—as I tried to explain in the beginning—the facts, the reality, of our existence is that we are both the natural environment (which ultimately is the whole universe) and the organism playing together.
Why don’t we feel that way? Why, obviously because this other feeling gets in the way of it. This socially induced feeling—which comes about as a result of a kind of hypnotism exercised upon us throughout the whole educational process—has given us a hallucinatory feeling of who we are, and therefore we act like madmen.
We don’t respect our environment, we destroy it… but, you know, exploiting and destroying your environment, polluting the water and the air and everything is just like destroying your own body. The environment is your body. But we act in this crazy way because we’ve got a crazy conception of who we are.
We are raving mad! “Well,” you say to me then, “alright, how do I get rid of it?” My answer to that is: “That’s the wrong question.” How does what get rid of it? You can’t get rid of your hallucination of being an ego by an activity of the ego.
Sorry, but it can’t be done! You can’t lift yourself up by your own bootstraps, you can’t put out fire with fire, and if you try to get rid of your ego with your ego, you’ll just get into a vicious circle. You’ll be like somebody who worries because they worry, and then worries because they worry because they worry.
And you go round and round and get crazier than ever. The first thing to understand—when you say “What can I do about getting rid of this false ego?”—is: the first answer is “Nothing.” Because you’re asking the wrong question. You’re asking “How can I, thinking of myself as an ego, get rid of thinking of myself as an ego?” Well, obviously, you can’t!
“No,” you’ll say, “then it’s hopeless!” No, no, now wait a minute! Don’t go so fast! It isn’t hopeless.
You haven’t got the message, that’s all. If you find out that your ego-feeling, your will, and all that jazz, cannot get rid of that hallucination, you found out something very important. In finding out that you can’t do anything about it, what you have found out is that you don’t exist—that is to say, you as ego—you don’t exist, so obviously you can’t do anything about it.
So you find you can’t control—not really—your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, all the processes going on inside you and outside you that are happening; there’s nothing you can do about it. So then, what follows? Well, there’s only one thing that follows: you watch what’s going on.
You see, feel this whole thing happening, and then suddenly you find—to your amazement—that you can perfectly well get up, walk over to the table, pick up a glass of milk and drink it. There’s nothing standing in your way for doing that. You can still act, you can still move, you can still go on in a rational way, but you’ve suddenly discovered that you’re not what you thought you were.
You’re not this ego pushing and shoving things inside a bag of skin. You feel yourself, now, in a new way, as the whole world—which includes your body, everything that you experience—is going along. It’s intelligent.
Trust it. The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality. And the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it is with the world as they think about it, and talk about it, and describe it.
For on the one hand there is the real world, and on the other a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very, very useful symbols. All civilization depends on them.
But like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth, and our names about ourselves—our ideas of ourselves, our images of ourselves—with ourselves. Now, of course, reality—from a philosopher’s point of view—is a dangerous word. A philosopher will ask me: what do I mean by reality?
Am I talking about the physical world of nature, or am I talking about a spiritual world, or what? And to that, I have a very simple answer. When we talk about the material world, that is actually a philosophical concept.
So, in the same way, if I say that reality is spiritual, that’s also a philosophical concept. And reality itself is not a concept. Reality is [Alan strikes a standing bell], and we won’t give it a name.
Now, it’s amazing what doesn’t exist in the real world. For example, in the real world there aren’t any things, nor are there any events. That doesn’t mean to say that the real world is a perfectly featureless blank.
It means that it is a marvelous system of wiggles in which we describe things and events in the same way as we would project images on a Rorschach blot, or pick out particular groups of stars in the sky and call them constellations as if they were separate groups of stars. Well, they’re groups of stars in the mind’s eye, in our system of concepts. They are not—out there, as constellations—already grouped in the sky.
So, in the same way, the difference between myself and all the rest of the universe is nothing more than an idea. It is not a real difference. And meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.
That is to say, that we become interiorally silent and cease from the interminable chatter that goes on inside our skulls. Because you see, most of us think compulsively all the time, that is to say, we talk to ourselves. I remember, when I was a boy, we had a common saying: “Talking to yourself is the first sign of madness.” Now, obviously, if I talk all the time, I don’t hear what anyone else has to say.
And so, in exactly the same way, if I think all the time—that is to say if I talk to myself all the time—I don’t have anything to think about except thoughts. And therefore I’m living entirely in the world of symbols, and am never in relationship with reality. Alright, now that’s the first basic reason for meditation.
But there is another sense—and this is going to be a little bit more difficult to understand—why we could say that meditation doesn’t have a reason, or doesn’t have a purpose. And in this respect, it’s unlike almost all other things that we do—except perhaps making music and dancing, because when we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music—to get to the end of the piece—then, obviously, the fastest players would be the best.
And so, likewise, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor, as we would be if we were taking a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point. When we play music, the playing itself is the point.
And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. And therefore, if you meditate for an ulterior motive—that is to say, to improve your mind, to improve your character, to be more efficient in life—you’ve got your eye on the future and you are not meditating!
Because the future is a concept; it doesn’t exist. As the proverb says, “Tomorrow never comes.” There is no such thing as tomorrow; there never will be, because time is always now. And that’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking: we find there is only a present, only an eternal now.
So it’s funny then, isn’t it, that one meditates for no reason at all except—we could say—for the enjoyment of it. And here I would interpose the essential principle that meditation is supposed to be fun. It’s not something you do as a grim duty.
The trouble with religion as we know it is that it is so mixed up with grim duties. We do it because it’s good for you; it’s a kind of self-punishment. Well, meditation—when correctly done—has nothing to do with all that.
It’s a kind of digging the present, it’s a kind of grooving with the eternal now, and brings us into a state of peace where we can understand that the point of life—the place where it’s at—is simply here and now. Well now, in the art of meditation there are various props, supports. One thing that we’re going to use as a means of stilling chatter in the mind is pure sound, and for that reason it’s useful to have a gong.
This is a Japanese Buddhist gong made of bronze and shaped like a bowl. If you don’t have one of these you can get the rounded end of an oxygen tank—have a machinist saw it off roughly into the shape of a bowl, and use that. Or you can use your own voice; chanting.
Another prop in meditation is the use of incense, and that is because the sense of smell is our repressed sense, and because it’s our repressed sense it has a very powerful influence on us. And therefore, we associate certain smells with certain states of mind. And so the smell of incense is associated with peace and contemplation, and so it’s advantageous to burn incense in meditation.
The other prop is a string of beads, and these beads are used in meditation for an unconscious method of timing yourself. Instead of looking at a watch, you move a bead each time you breathe in and out, so that at a certain rate—you see, there are always 108 beads on a rosary, and when you get to slow breathing, halfway around the rosary is about 40 minutes. And that is the usual length of time for which one sits in meditation because otherwise, you get uncomfortable, and you get stiff legs and problems of that kind.
Now then, the other thing—first of all, what we have to go into—is: how does one sit in meditation? You can sit any way you want. You can sit in a chair, or you can sit like I’m sitting—which is the Japanese way of sitting—or you can sit in the lotus posture—which is more difficult, with the feet on the thighs, soles upwards; and the younger you start that in life, the easier you’ll find it to do—or you can just sit cross-legged on a raised cushion above the floor.
Now, the point of this is that if you keep your back erect—I don’t mean stiff like this, nor slumped like this, but just easily erect—you are centered and easily balanced, and you have a feeling of being thoroughly rooted to the ground. And that sort of physical stability is very important for the avoidance of distraction and generally feeling settled. Here and now; je suis j’ouest, as the French say.
I’m here and I’m gonna stay. Well now, the easiest way to get into the meditative state is to begin by listening. If you simply close your eyes and allow yourself to hear all the sounds that are going on around you.
Just listen to the general hum and buzz of the world as if you were listening to music. Don’t try to identify the sounds you are hearing, don’t put names on them, simply allow them to play with your eardrums and let them go. In other words, you could put it: let your ears hear whatever they want to hear.
Don’t judge the sounds. There are no, as it were, “proper” sounds or “improper” sounds, and it doesn’t matter if somebody coughs, or sneezes, or drops something; it’s all… just… sound. And if I am talking to you right now and you’re doing this, I want you to listen to the sound of my voice just as if it were noise.
Don’t try to make any sense out of what I’m saying because your brain will take care of that automatically. You don’t have to try to understand anything, just listen to the sound. As you pursue that experiment you will very naturally find that you can’t help naming sounds (identifying them), that you will go on thinking—that is to say, talking to yourself inside your head—automatically.
But it’s important that you don’t try to repress those thoughts by forcing them out of your mind because that will have precisely the same effect as if you were trying to smooth rough water with a flatiron. You’re just going to disturb it all the more. What you do is this: as you hear sounds coming up in your head—thoughts—you simply listen to them as part of the general noise going on, just as you would be listening to the sound of my voice, or just as you would be listening to cars going by or to birds chattering outside the window.
So look at your own thoughts as just noises, and soon you will find that the so-called “Outside World” and the so-called “Inside World” come together. They are a happening. Your thoughts are a happening just like the sounds going on outside, and everything is simply a happening and all you’re doing is watching it.
Now, in this process another thing that is happening that is very important is that you’re breathing. And as you start meditation, you allow your breath to run just as it wills. In other words, don’t do—at first—any breathing exercise, but just watch your breath breathing the way it wants to breathe.
And then notice a curious thing about this: you say, in the ordinary way, “I breathe” because you feel that breathing is something that you are doing voluntarily, just in the same way as you might be walking or talking. But you will also notice that, when you are not thinking about breathing, your breathing goes on just the same. So the curious thing about breath is that it can be looked at both as a voluntary and an involuntary action.
You can feel, on the one hand, “I am doing it,” and on the other hand, “It is happening to me.” And that is why breathing is a most important part of meditation: because it is going to show you—as you become aware of your breath—that the hard and fast division that we make between what we do on the one hand, and what happens to us on the other, is arbitrary. So that, as you watch your breathing, you will become aware that both the voluntary and the involuntary aspects of your experience are all one happening. Now, that may at first seem a little scary because you may think, “Well, am I just the puppet of a happening?
The mere passive witness of something that’s going on completely beyond my control?” Or, on the other hand, “Am I really doing everything that’s going along? Well… if I were, I should be God. And that would be very embarrassing because I would be in charge of everything.
That would be a terribly responsible position.” The truth of the matter—as you will see it—is that both things are true. You can see it that everything is happening to you, and on the other hand, you’re doing everything. For example, it’s your eyes that are turning the sun into light.
It’s the nerve ends in your skin that are turning electric vibrations in the air into heat and temperature. It’s your eardrums that are turning vibrations in the air into sound. And in that way you are creating the world.
But when we’re not talking about it, when we’re not philosophizing about it, then there is just this happening, this [Gong]… and we won’t give it a name. Now then, when you breathe for a while, just letting it happen and not forcing it in any way, you will discover a curious thing: that, without making any effort, you can breathe more and more deeply. In other words, supposing you simply are breathing out—and breathing out is important because it’s the breath of relaxation, as when we say, “Whew!” and heave a sigh of relief.
So when you are breathing out, you get the sensation that your breath is falling out. Dropping, dropping, dropping out, with the same sort of feeling you have as if you were settling down into an extremely comfortable bed. And you just get as heavy as possible and let yourself go, and you let your breath go out in just that way.
And when it’s thoroughly, comfortably out and it feels like coming back again, you don’t pull it back in, you let it fall back in. Letting your lungs expand, expand, expand, until they feel very comfortably full, and you wait a moment and let it stay there, and then once again you let it fall out. And so, in this way, you will discover that your breath gets quite naturally easier and easier, and slower and slower, and more and more powerful.
So that with these various aids—listening to sound, listening to your own interior feelings and thoughts, just as if they were something going on, not something you are doing, but just happenings; and watching your breath as a happening that is neither voluntary nor involuntary, you are simply aware of these basic sensations—then you will begin to be in the state of meditation. But don’t hurry anything. Don’t worry about the future.
Don’t worry about what progress you’re making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is. Don’t be terribly selective, particular; say, “I should think of this and not of that.” Just watch whatever is happening.
Now then: to make this somewhat easier to have the mind free from discursive, verbal thinking, sound—or chanted sound—is extremely useful. If you, for example, simply listen to the gong [Gong] and let that sound be the whole of your experience—it’s quite simple, it requires no effort. [Gong] And then along with that, especially if you don’t have a gong, we can use what are called in the Sanskrit language mantra.
Mantra are chanted sounds which are used not so much for their meaning as for the simple tone, and they go along with that easy kind of slow breath. One of the basic mantras is, of course, the sound Aum. That sound is used because, if you spell it out A-U-M, it runs from the back of your throat to your lips, and therefore it contains the whole range of the voice.
And for that reason, it represents the total energy of the universe. This word is called the praṇava (प्रणव), the name for the ultimate reality, for the which than which there is no whicher. And so, in this way, then, [Gong] if you chant it: “Ooooooouuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmm.” And it’s varied like this: [Gong] “Aaaaaauuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmm.” [Gong]“Hoouuummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.” And you can keep that up for quite a long time, and eventually you will find—as you go on chanting—that the words of the chant will simply have become pure sound.
And you won’t be thinking about it; you won’t have any images about the sound going on in your mind, you will simply become completely absorbed in sound, and therefore you will find yourself living in an eternal now in which there is no past, and there is no future, and there is no thing called ‘difference,’ between what you as knower and what you are as the known; between yourself and the world of nature outside you. It all becomes one doing, one happening. And you’ll be out of your mind!
But, you see, to go out of your mind—at least once a day—is tremendously important because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all the time, you are over-rational. In other words, you’re like a very rigid bridge which—because it has got no give, no craziness, in it—is going to be blown down in the first hurricane.
I’ve been talking about the perception of the world coming suddenly out of nothing. You’ll remember that—in a previous talk—I asked you to close your eyes and listen, and you would hear silence, and then sounds coming right out of that silence. And then I suggested that you use your eyes and see light, shape, form coming at you as a vibration that is preceding out of space.
And I pointed out that our logic resists that because we say you can’t get something out of nothing, and that we normally think of all the energetic manifestations of this universe as coming out of the past. We think the things that were there already are producing the things that are going on now. But I was trying to get you to look at it in the other way so that you would see the whole world starting now—instead of in the past—and the past as a kind of echo fading away into memory.
And I illustrated it as being like the wake of a ship that trails across the water and then fades out, but the wake is started by the ship in the present. And so, in the same way, I’m moving on to the uncommonsensical idea of the world as a production of energy that is beginning right now and is coming out of the nothing that we variously call space and silence. But then, naturally, this raises the question: “How on Earth could that happen?” And it has been, of course, the usual explanation that the world is being created by God.
In Christian and Catholic theology it is said that God creates the world out of nothing. And I want to emphasize the point in all fairness—to Catholic, and to Islamic, and to Jewish doctrine—that it doesn’t merely teach that God once upon a time started the world and set it going like you would wind up a machine and then leave it alone. All these three religions teach that God is always creating the world, out of nothing, now, and willing it by his divine energy into being at this moment.
But now the difficulty for us all, I think—especially for educated people in the modern world—is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible. That is to say, in church, or in synagogue, we seem to be addressing a royal personage. The layout of the church or of the synagogue looks like a royal court: there is some sort of throne, and we address prayers and requests to the being represented by the altar—or the throne, or the tabernacle—as if that being were a king and were causing this universe in his royal omnipotent and omniscient wisdom.
But then, when we take a look through our telescopes and microscopes, or even when we go out in the forest and look at nature, we have a problem. Because the idea of God that we get from the holy scriptures, the Bible, the Quran, doesn’t quite seem to fit the sort of world around us that we see in just the same way as you wouldn’t dream of ascribing a composition by Stravinski to Bach. The style of God venerated in church, mosque, and synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
And it’s so hard to conceive the author of the one as the author of the other. And, furthermore, it strikes most intelligent people that our traditional religious ideas of God are too primitive. It seems impossible to think that this universe could have been authored by the naïve idea of God as a sort of old gentleman who lives far above the stars in Heaven, seated on a golden throne, and adored by legions of angels.
That seems a concept almost unworthy of the sort of universe that modern science has revealed to us. In other words—I mean, here’s a picture of God. A friend of mine, Richard Borst, photographed this in a church just south of Oaxaca in Mexico, and it shows a very primitive, Indian, Catholic imagination of God the father wearing a triple crown—like the pope.
Only: he’s rather young, handsome; he’s not quite the old grey-bearded man—the ancient of days—but there is a serious idol, Christian idol, of God the father almighty. That has become implausible. But also, for many people, it has become implausible that the root of the universe—which the theologian Paul Tillich calls the Ground of Being—that the root of the universe can be, in some way, a person to whom we can relate in just the same way that we relate to other people; and furthermore, a person who cares about us.
In the words of Jesus: “Five sparrows are sold for a farthing, but yet not one of them falls to the ground without the Father knowing it. So realize that you are of more value than many sparrows.” In other words, God cares a great deal more about you. But it just baffles our imagination that there could be this sort of person who cares about each one of us, who is totally aware of every single thing that we are and that we do and, by virtue of being aware of us, creates us.
Of course, one thing that is difficult about the idea is that it’s embarrassing. We do not feel comfortable if we are watched all the time by an infinitely intelligent judge. You know how it is in school: when you’re a child and you’re working at some exercise, and the teacher walks behind your desk and looks [at] what you’re doing.
Now even if you like the teacher very much, you feel put off by being watched. And that makes you self-conscious and awkward. And so in the same way many people opt for atheism because they don’t want that uncomfortable feeling that they’re being watched all the time.
It’s awkward. And if I were God I wouldn’t do it; I wouldn’t want to embarrass my creatures in that way, and so I would leave them alone for a lot of the time. In fact, I’ve often thought about this whole thing.
The kind of God that people worship is, of course, an attempt to imagine an absolutely perfect human being. But it’s a very poor attempt. For example, Jesus taught that if somebody sins against you, you forgive him.
And his disciples asked, “Well, how many times do you forgive him?” And he said, “Ninety and nine times,” which is our way of saying umpteen times; always forgive somebody who sins against you. But notice that that is required of a saint. A saint is always forgiving, but it’s not required of God.
God will not forgive you unless you apologize, and you have to grovel on the ground if you’ve committed what the Catholic church calls a mortal sin. You’ve got to come to God in a state of great penitence, and if you don’t do that you are liable to be confined in the dungeons of the court of heaven—commonly known as hell—for always and always and always. I don’t think that’s a very nice kind of fellow—I mean, you wouldn’t invite that sort of god to dinner because he would embarrass everybody.
Everybody’d be sitting on the edge of their chair, you know, like this! And God would be looking at you in such a way that you felt you were being seen through and through, that all your awful past, all your falseness and lack of authenticity would be completely perceptible to him. And though he understood it, and though he forgave it, he would nevertheless make you feel absolutely terrible.
You just wouldn’t want that sort of company at dinner. You may think it’s frivolous of me to say this, but don’t forget that the pictorial image of God that people have in the backs of their minds—even if you’re a very sophisticated philosopher or theologian—that primitive pictorial image has a very strong influence on your feelings about religion, about the universe, and about yourself. So it’s just for that reason that the traditional idea of God has become implausible to many people, and that modern Protestant theologians (and even some Catholics) have been talking recently about the death of God, and about the possibility of whether we could have a religionless religion.
That is to say, a religion which does not involve belief in God. What, in other words, would become of the Gospel—the Gospel of Jesus Christ—if it were shown that Jesus’ own belief in God were unnecessary and invalid? What would remain of his teaching, of his ideas about caring for other human beings, about social responsibility, and so on and so forth, if the idea of God simply evaporated?
I think that’s a pretty wishy-washy kind of religion. I mean, if you’re going to say that this life is fundamentally nothing but a pilgrimage from the maternity ward to the crematorium—and that’s it, baby! You’ve had it!—I think that indicates a singular lack of imagination.