Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
He’s never read the Upanishads. He’s never read the Diamond Sutra. He’s never read the Tibetan Book of the Dead or the I Ching or Lao Tzu, and therefore there is no other way in which he can say this.
But if he had read the Upanishads he would have had no difficulty. And nor would the culture, the society, in which he was talking have any difficulty. Because it says in the Upanishads we are all incarnations of god.
Only, they do not mean by the word “god”—in fact, they don’t use that word, they use Brahman—they don’t mean the same thing that a Hebrew meant by “god.” Because the Brahman is not personal. Brahman is, we would say, suprapersonal. Not impersonal, because that is a negation.
But I would say suprapersonal. Brahman is not he or she. Has no sex.
Brahman is not the creator of the world—as something underneath and subject to Brahman—but the actor of the world, the player of all the parts. So that everyone is a mask (which is the meaning of the word “person”) in which the Brahman plays a role. And like an absorbed actor, the divine spirit gets so absorbed in playing the role as to become it, and to be bewitched.
And this is all part of the game: to believing I am that role. When you were babies you knew who you were. Psychoanalysts refer to that as the oceanic feeling—they do not really like it, but they admit that it exists—where the baby cannot distinguish between the world and the way it acts upon the world.
It’s all one process—which is, of course, the way things are. But we learned very quickly (because we are taught very quickly) what is “you” and what is “not you,” what is voluntary, what is involuntary. Because you can be punished for the voluntary but not for the involuntary.
And so we unlearn what we knew in the beginning. And in the course of life, if we’re fortunate, we discover again what we really are: that each one of us is what would be called in Arabic or Hebrew a son of god. And the word “son of” means “of the nature of,” as when you call someone a son of a bitch, or in Arabic you say abn alkalb which means “son of a dog;” aibn himar: “son of a donkey.” So a “son of Belial” means an evil person.
“Son of god” means a divine person: a human being who has realized union with God. Now, my assumption, my opinion, is that Jesus of Nazareth was a human being,—like Buddha, like Sri Ramakrishna, like Ramana Maharshi, et cetera—who early in life had colossal experience of what we call cosmic consciousness. Now, you do not have to be any particular kind of religion to get this experience.
It can hit anyone any time, like falling in love. There are obviously a number of you in this building who’ve had it in greater or lesser degree. But it’s found all over the world.
And when it hits you, you know it. Sometimes it comes after long practice of meditations and spiritual discipline, sometimes it comes for no reason that anybody can determine. We say it’s the grace of god: that there comes this overwhelming conviction that you have mistaken your identity.
That, what you thought (what I thought) was just old Alan Watts (who I know very well) is just a big act and the show. But what I thought was me was only completely superficial. That I am an expression of an eternal something-or-other, X—a name that can’t be named, as the name of God was taboo among the Hebrews.
I am. And that I suddenly understand exactly why everything is the way it is. It’s perfectly clear.
Furthermore, I feel no longer any boundary between what I do and what happens to me. I feel that everything that’s going on is my doing, just as my breathing is. Is your breathing voluntary or involuntary?
Do you do it or does it happen to you? See, you can feel it both ways. But you feel everything like breathing.
And it isn’t as if you had become a puppet. There is no longer any separate “you.” There is just this great happening going on. And if you have the name in your background you will say, “This happening is god,” or the will of god, or the doing of god.
Or, if you don’t have that word in your background, you will say with the Chinese, “It is the flowing of the Tao.” Or if you’re a Hindu, you will say, “It is the māyā of Brahman.” The māyā means the magical power, the creative illusion, the play. So you can very well understand how people to whom this happens feel genuinely inspired. Because very often there goes along with it an extremely warm feeling.
Because you see the divine in everybody else’s eyes. When Kabir, a great Hindu-Muslim mystic, was a very old man, he used to look around at people and say, “To whom shall I preach?” Because he saw the beloved in all eyes, and could see—sometimes I look into people’s eyes, and I can look right down and I can see that beloved in the depth of those pools. And yet the expression on the face is saying, “What, me?” It’s the funniest thing!
But there is everybody, in his own peculiar way, playing out an essential part in this colossal cosmic drama. And it’s so strange that one can even feel it in people you thoroughly dislike. So let’s suppose, then, that Jesus had such an experience.
And they’re of all ranges, as I’ve said. This could be a very, very strong one indeed. And from the sayings of Jesus, especially in the Gospel of Saint John, anybody who studied the psychology of religion can easily detect that that experience must have taken place, or something very like it.
But, you see, Jesus has a limitation that he doesn’t know of any religion other than those of the immediate Near East. He might know something about Egyptian religion, a little bit maybe about Greek religion, but mostly about Hebrew. There is no evidence whatsoever that he knew anything about India or China.
And people who think Jesus was god assume that he must have known, because he would have been omniscient. No! Saint Paul makes it perfectly clear in the Epistle to the Philippians that Jesus renounced his divine powers so as to be man.
“Let this mind be in you”—which was also in Christ Jesus—“who, being in the form of God, thought not equality with God a thing to be hung on to, but humbled himself and made himself of no reputation and was found in fashion as a man and became obedient to death.” Theologians call that kénōsis, which means “self-emptying.” So, obviously, an omnipotent and omniscient man would not really be a man. So even if you take the very orthodox Catholic doctrine of the nature of Christ—that he was both true god and true man—you must say that, for true god to be united with true man, true god has to make a voluntary renunciation (for the time being) of omniscience and omnipotence—and omnipresence, for that matter. Now, therefore, if Jesus were to come right out and say, “I am the son of god,” that’s like saying “I’m the boss’s son” or “I am the boss.” And everybody immediately says that is blasphemy.
That is subversion. That is trying to introduce democracy into the kingdom of heaven. That is—you are a usurper of the throne.
No man has seen god. Now Jesus, in his exoteric teaching as recorded in the synoptic gospels, was pretty cagey about this. He didn’t come right out there and say “I and the Father are one.” Instead, he identified himself with the messiah described in the second part of the prophet Isaiah: the suffering servant who was despised and rejected of men.
And this man is the non-political messiah, in other words. It was convenient to make that identification, even though it would get him into trouble. But to his elect disciples, as recorded in Saint John, he came right out and said, “Before Abraham was, I am.
I am the way, the truth, and the life. I am the resurrection and the life. I am the living bread that comes down from heaven.
I and the Father are one, and he who has seen me has seen the Father.” And there can be no mistaking that language. So the Jews found out, and they put him to death—or had him put to death—for blasphemy. This is no cause for any special antagonism to the Jews.
We would do exactly the same thing. It’s always done. It happened to one of the great Sufi mystics in Persia who had the same experience.
Now, what happened? The apostles didn’t quite get the point. They were awed by the miracles of Jesus.
They worshiped him as people do worship gurus—and you know to what lengths that can go if you’ve been around guruland. And so the Christians said, “Okay, okay! Jesus of Nazareth was the son of god.
But let it stop right there! Nobody else.” So what happened was that Jesus was pedestalized: he was put in a position that was safely upstairs, so that his troublesome experience of cosmic consciousness would not come and cause other people to be a nuisance. And those who have had this experience and expressed it during those times when the church had political power were almost invariably persecuted.
Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. John Scotus Eriugena was excommunicated. Meister Eckhart’s theses were condemned.
And so on and so on. A few mystics got away with it because they used cautious language. But you see what happens.
If you pedestalize Jesus, you strangle the Gospel at birth. And it has been the tradition in both the Catholic Church and in Protestantism to pass of what I will call an emasculated gospel. Gospel means “good news.” And I cannot for the life of me think what is the good news about the gospel as ordinarily handed down.
Because look here: here is the revelation of god in Christ, in Jesus, and we are supposed to follow his life and example without having the unique advantage of being the boss’s son. Now, the tradition—both Catholic and Protestant fundamentalist—represents Jesus to us as a freak: born of a virgin, knowing he is the son of god, having the power of miracles, knowing that basically it’s impossible to kill him (that he is going to rise again in the end), and we are asked to take up our cross and follow him when we don’t know that about ourselves at all. So what happens is this: we are delivered, therefore, a gospel which is in fact an impossible religion.
It’s impossible to follow the way of Christ. Many a Christian has admitted it. “I’m a miserable sinner.
I fall far short of the example of Christ.” But do you realize the more you say that, the better you are? Because what happened was that Christianity institutionalized guilt as a virtue. You see, you can never come up to it.
Never! And therefore you will always be aware of your shortcomings, and so the more shortcomings you feel, the more, in other words, you are aware of the vast abyss between Christ and yourself. You will have your opportunity to speak in the question period, madam.
So you go to confession. And if you’ve got a nice, dear, understanding confessor, he won’t get angry with you. He’ll say, “My child, you know you’ve sinned very grievously, but you must realize that the love of god and of our lord is infinite, and that naturally you are forgiven.
As a token of thanksgiving say three Hail Mary’s.” And, you know, you’ve committed a murder and robbed a bank and fornicated around and so on, and the priest is perfectly patient and quiet. Well, you feel awful! I have done that to the love of God.
I’ve wounded Jesus, grieved the Holy Spirit, and so on. But you know in the back of your mind you’re going to do it all over again. You won’t be able to help yourself.
You’ll try, but there’s always a greater and greater sense of guilt. Now, the lady objected that I was putting up a straw man and knocking it down. This is the Christianity of most people.
Now, there is also a much more subtle Christianity of the theologians, the mystics, and the philosophers, but it is not what gets preached from the pulpit, grant you. But the message of Billy Graham is approximately what I’ve given you, and of all what I would call fundamentalist forms of Catholicism and Protestantism. What would the real gospel be?
The real good news is not simply that Jesus of Nazareth was the son of god, but that he was a powerful son of god who came to open everybody’s eyes to the fact that you are, too. And this is perfectly plain if you’ll go to the tenth chapter of Saint John, verse thirty: there is the passage where Jesus says, “I and the Father are one.” There are some people who are not intimate disciples around, and they are horrified. And they immediately pick up stones to stone him.
He says, “Many good works I have shown you from the Father, and for which of these do you stone me?” And they said, “For a good work we stone you not, but for blasphemy. Because you, being a man, make yourself God.” And he replied, “Isn’t it written in your law, ‘I have said you are gods?’” He is quoting the eighty-second Psalm. “Is it not written in your law, ‘I have said you are gods’?
If God called them those to whom He gave His word, Gods”—and you can’t deny the scriptures—“how can you say I blaspheme because I said I am a son of God?” Well, there’s the whole thing in a nutshell. Because if you read the King James Bible that descended with the angel, you will see in italics in front of these words, “Son of God,” “the Son of God.” “Because I said I am the Son of God.” And most people think the italics are for emphasis. They’re not.
The italics indicate words interpolated by the translators. You will not find that in the Greek. In the Greek [it] says “a son of God.” So it seems to me here perfectly plain that Jesus has got it in the back of his mind and that this isn’t something peculiar to himself.
So when he says, “I am the way. No man comes to the Father but by me,” this “I am,” this “me,” is the divine in us, which in Hebrew would be called the ruach adonai. A great deal is made of this by the esoteric Jews, the Cabalists, and the Hasidim.
The ruach is the breath which God breathed into the nostrils of Adam. It is differin from the soul. The individual soul in Hebrew is called nép̄eš.
So we translate the ruach into the Greek penephma, and the nép̄eš in to psike, or psyche; the spirit. And you ask the theologians what’s the difference between the soul and the spirit, and he won’t be able to tell you. But it’s very clear in Saint Paul’s writings.
So the point is that the ruach is the divine in the creature by virtue of which we are “sons of” or “of the nature of” God. Manifestations of the divine. This discovery is the gospel.
That is the good news. But this has been perpetually repressed throughout the history of Western religion, because all Western religions have taken the form of celestial monarchies, and therefore have discouraged democracy in the kingdom of heaven. Until, as a consequence of the teaching of the German and Flemish mystics in the 15th century, there began to be such movements as the Anabaptists, the Brothers of the Free Spirit, and the Levellers and the Quakers.
A spiritual movement which came to this country and founded a republic and not a monarchy. And how could you say that a republic is the best form of government if you think that the universe is a monarchy? Obviously, if God is top on a monarchy, monarchy is the best form of government.
But, you see, ever so many citizens of this republic think they ought to believe that the universe is a monarchy, and therefore they’re always at odds with the republic. It is from principally white, racist Christians that we have the threat of fascism in this country. Because, you see, they have a religion which is militant, which is not the religion of Jesus (which was the realization of divine sonship), but the religion about Jesus which pedestalizes him, and which says that only this man, of all the sons of woman, was divine, and you had better recognize it.
And so it speaks of itself as the church militant: the onward Christian soldiers marching, as to war. Utterly exclusive, convinced (in advance of examining the doctrines of any other religion) that it is the top religion. And so it becomes a freak religion, just as it has made a freak of Jesus; an unnatural man.
It claims uniqueness, not realizing that what it does teach would be far more credible if it were truly Catholic—that is to say, restated again, the truths which have been known from time immemorial, which have appeared in all the great cultures of the world. But even very liberal Protestants still want to say, somehow (so as, I suppose, to keep the mission effort going or to pay off the mortgage): “Yes, these other religions are very good. God has no doubt revealed Himself through Buddha and Lao Tzu.
But….” Now, obviously, it is a matter of temperament. You can be loyal to Jesus just as you’re loyal to your own country. But you are not serving your country if you think that it’s necessarily the best of all possible countries.
That is doing a disservice to your country. It is refusing to be critical where criticism is proper. So of religion: every religion should be self-critical, otherwise it soon degenerates into a self-righteous hypocrisy.
If, then, we can see this; that Jesus speaks not from the situation of a historical deus ex machina—a kind of weird, extraordinary event—but he is a voice which joins with other voices that have said in every place and time: “Wake up, man! Wake up and realize who you are.” Now, I do not think, you see, until churches get with that, that they’re going to have very much relevance. You see, popular Protestantism and popular Catholicism will tell you nothing about mystical religion.
The message of the preacher, 52 Sundays a year, is: “Dear people, be good.” We’ve heard it ad nauseam! Or: “Believe in this.” He may occasionally give a sermon on what happens after death, or the nature of God. But basically the sermon is: be good.
But how? As Saint Paul said: “To will is present with me, but how to do that which is good, I find not. For the good that I would, I do not, and the evil that I would not, that I do.” How’re we going to be changed?
Obviously, there cannot be a vitality of religion without vital religious experience. And that’s something much more than emoting over singing Onward Christian Soldiers. But, you see, what happens in our ecclesiastical goings-on is that we run a talking shop.
We pray, we tell god what to do, or give him advice as if he didn’t know. We read the scriptures. And remember—talking of the Bible—Jesus said: “You search the scriptures daily, for in them you think you have life.” Saint Paul made some rather funny references about “the spirit which giveth life and the letter which kills.” I think the Bible ought to be ceremoniously and reverently burned every Easter.
We need it no more, because the spirit is with us. It’s a dangerous book. And to worship it is, of course, a far more dangerous idolatry than bowing down to images of wood and stone.
Because nobody in his senses can confuse a wooden image with god, but you can very easily confuse a set of ideas with god. Because concepts are more rarefied and abstract. So with this endless talking in church we can preach.
But, by and large, preaching does nothing but excite a sense of anxiety and guilt. And you can’t love out of that. No scolding, no rational demonstration of the right way to behave, is going to inspire people with love.
Something else must happen. “Well,” you say, “what are we going to do about it?” Do about it? You have no faith?
Be quiet. Even Quakers aren’t quiet. They sit in meeting and think—at least some of them do.
But supposing we are really quiet and we don’t think; be absolutely silent through and through. We say, “Well, you will just fall into a blank.” Oh? Ever tried?
I feel, then, you see, that it’s enormously important that churches stop being talking shops. They become centers of contemplation. What is contemplation?
Con templum: it’s what you do in the temple. You don’t come to the temple to chatter, but to be still and know that I am god. And this is why—if the Christian religion, if the gospel of Christ, is to mean anything at all instead of just being one of the forgotten religions, along with Osiris and Mithra—we must see Christ as the great mystic.
In the proper sense of the word mystic: not someone who has all sorts of magical powers and understands spirits and so on. A mystic, strictly speaking, is one who realizes union with god, by whatever name. This seems to me the crux and message of the gospel, summed up in the prayer of Jesus which Saint John records as he speaks over his disciples, praying that “they may be one, even as you, Father, and I are one.
That you may be all one.” All realize this divine sonship, or oneness, basic identity with the eternal energy of the universe, and the love that moves the sun and other stars. Now then, we have to get on to Buddhism. And in order to introduce Buddhism, it’s necessary to remember the whole background of the world view of India.
In other words, what we’re going to study, first of all, to understand Buddhism, is Indian cosmology, just as you would have to study the cosmology of the Ptolemaic view of the world in order to understand Dante, and in order to understand lots of things about medieval Christianity. So the cosmology of the Hindus, their view of the universe, has come right into Japanese life through Buddhism, but it antedates Buddhism. Buddhism simply adopted it as a matter of course, just as now, if you invented a new religion, you would probably adopt the cosmology of modern astronomy.
Well now, how does the Hindu see the world? You know, there are really three great views of the world that human beings have had. And they go: one is the Western view of the world which looks upon the world as a construct, an artifact, by analogy with ceramics and carpentry.
Then there is the Hindu view of the world which is dramatic; looks on it as a play. And then the Chinese view, which is organic and looks upon the world as an organism; a body. But the Hindu view sees it as a drama.
And it’s simply this: there is what there is and always was and always will be, which is called the Self. That, in Sanskrit, is Ātman. And the Ātman is also called Brahman.
Brahman—from the root bṛh: “to grow,” “to expand,” “to swell”—is actually related to our word “breath.” So Brahman, the Self, according to the Hindu view, plays hide and seek with itself for always and always and always. How far out, how lost can you get? So here, each one of us—according to the Hindu—idea is the godhead, on purpose getting lost for the fun of it.
And how terrible it can get at times! But won’t it be nice when you wake up? That’s sort of the basic idea.
And I found it’s an idea that any child can understand. It has great simplicity and great elegance. Now, in part of this cosmology we must understand another feature of this conception of the universe.
Not only—you remember, now, the kalpas (the periods of time), the yugas (the qualities of the time through which the universe goes). But there’s the final thing, which are called the six worlds, or the six paths of life. And this is very important for Buddhism—although it comes from Hinduism—is represented in what is called the bhāvacakra.
Bhāva means “becoming,” cakra means “wheel.” “The wheel of becoming,” “the wheel of birth and death.” And it has six divisions. It has the top people and the bottom people. The top people are called deva.
The bottom people are called naraka. Devas are angels, and they are the people who are the supreme spiritual successes. The naraka are tormented in purgatory, and they are the supreme spiritual failures.
They are the poles: the happiest people and the saddest people. Then, in between, there comes the world of the pretas, next to the naraka, next to the purgatory. The pretas are the frustrated spirits who have tiny mouths and enormous bellies.
Huge appetites, but very, very limited means of satisfying it. Then, next, they come between the narakas and the devas at the top. Next up from the pretas are the human beings, and they are supposed to hold a middle position in the six worlds.
Then you go up from the human beings to the devas, and then you start coming down again. The next world is called the asura. And those are the wrathful spirits; the personifications of storm and all the anger and violence of nature.
Next down is animals, coming between the asura and the purgatories again. Now, all these needn’t be taken literally. They are different modalities of the human mind.
We are in the naraka world when we are frustrated and in torment. When we are merely chronically frustrated, we’re in the preta world. When we are in the state of equanimity, even-mindedness, we’re in the human world.
When we are deliriously happy, we’re in the deva world. When we are furious, we are in the asura world. And when we are dumb we’re in the animal world.
So these are all modalities. And it would be said: now, this is terribly important to understand Buddhism. Because the better you get, the more you go up to the deva world.
The worse you get, the more you go down to the naraka world. But everything that goes up has to come down. So you can’t improve yourself indefinitely.
If you improve yourself beyond a certain limit, you simply start to get worse—like when you make a knife too sharp, it begins to wear away. So the Buddhahood—or liberation, enlightenment—is on no place on the wheel, unless it might be the center. By ascending, by becoming better, you tie yourself to the wheel by gold chains.
By retrogressing and becoming worse, you tie yourself to the wheel with iron chains. But the Buddha is one who gets rid of the chains altogether. And so this will explain why Buddhism (unlike Judaism and unlike Christianity) is not very, very frantically concerned with being good.
It is concerned with being wise. It is concerned with being compassionate—which is a little different from being good—with having tremendous sympathy and understanding and respect for all the ignorant people who don’t know that they’re It, but who are playing the very far out game of being you and I. And so this is why every Hindu greets his brother not by shaking hands, but by putting his hands together and bowing.
This is why the Japanese bow to each other, basically. This is why Buddhist rituals are full of the bowing gesture. Because you are honoring the Self playing the roles of all the people around you.
And all the more honor is due when the Self has forgotten what it’s doing, and is therefore in a very far out situation. Now, that is a basic Hindu view of the world. That’s the cosmology which goes along with Buddhism.
According to taste, temperament, tradition, popular belief, and so on, there is this additional idea that, when the the Lord, the Self, pretends that it’s each of us, it first of all pretends that it is something called the jīvātman. The Ātman, the Self, pretends to be an individual soul called a jīvātman. And the jīvātman reincarnates through a whole series of bodies, life after life after life, and according to what is called karma.
Karma—it literally means “doing.” The law of doing, whereby acts occur in a series. And they are linked with each other in an unbreakable chain. So everybody’s karma is the life course that he will work out through maybe innumerable lifetimes.
I’m not going into that, because a lot of Buddhists don’t believe that. You will find that the Zen people, for example, are quite divided on this. They will say: no, we don’t believe literally in reincarnation—that, after your funeral, you know, you will suddenly become somebody different living somewhere else.