Wake UP !!!! Allan Watts

That the point that I wish to make most strongly is that behind a vital religious life for the West there has to be a 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 19th 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, it’s Heinkels gyrations, or fortuitous congress of atoms, is at 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. Darn it, what a put down 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, a very odd situation, and the more I look at things, I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird. I know that, see, a philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted. And sensible people see existence as nothing at all, I mean, it’s just basically ‘just 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. Therefore, philosophy has become the discussion of trivia. And philosophical journal is now a satisfactorily dull as any other kind of, um, purely technical inquiry. No good philosopher lies awake nights worrying about the destiny of man, and the nature of God, and the all that sort of thing, because philosophy 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, um, hе would is William Earl said in a very funny essay, he would come to work in a white coat, if he thought he could get away with it.

Problem is he’s lost his sense of wonder. Wonder is is like a, in in modern philosophy, something you mustn’t have. It’s like enthusiasm in 18th century England. It is very bad for him. 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’re 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 mutter it, I suddenly find out 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 the philosophy. Because it strikes you that the existence is very, very strange. And then more so, when this, so-called, insignificant little creature has inside his skull a neurological contraption that is able to center itself in the midst of these incredible, expansive galaxies and start measuring the whole thing! That is quite extraordinary. And, 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 material…ist, 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 clergymen, and be pretty boring. So, in the culture that we call materialistic today, we are, of course, bent on the total destruction of the 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. So, I’m afraid, you see, for the ‘God Is Dead’ theology. That it will sort of drift of into a secular do-goodery, in the name of Jesus. And this is, I think, where we can be strongly revivified and stimulated by the introduction into our spiritual life of certain things that are oriental. Now, you see, it must be understood that the crux of the Hindu and Buddhist disciplines is an experience, not a theory. Not a belief. If we say that a religion is a combination of creed, code and cult, in other words, this is true of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Аnd if they are religions, Buddhism is not. Because the creed is a revelation, a revealed symbolism of what the universe is about and you are commanded to believe in it, under divine authority. The code is the revealed will of God for man, which you were commanded tо obey, and the cult is the divinely revealed form of worship, that you must practice. Commandment, ’cause God is boss; is ruler; king of kings, and lord of lords. But the discipline, say, of yoga in Hinduism, or of the various forms of buddhist meditation, do not require you to believe anything. And they have no commandments in them. Тhey do, indeed, have presets, but they are, really, vows which you undertake on your own responsibility, not in obedience to anybody. They are experimental techniques for changing consciousness and the thing they are mainly concerned with is helping human beings to get rid of the hallucination that each one of us is a skin encapsulated ego. You know, a little source, a little man inside your head, located between the ears and behind the eyes, who is the source of conscious attention and voluntary behaviour. Most people you know don’t think, they don’t really think that they are anything but that, and the body is a thing you have. ‘Mommy, who would I have been if my father had been someone else? See, the parents give you the body and you pop the soul into it at some period at conception, or partition, nobody could ever decide. Now, this attitude stays with us, that we are something in a body, that we have a body, and we are not it. So, we experience the beating of the heart as something that happens to me, whereas talking, or walking is something that I do. Don’t you beat your heart? The language won’t allow you to think that. It’s not customary to say so. How do you think? How do you manage to be conscious? You don’t know. How do you open and close your hand? Do you know? If you’re a physiologist, you may be able to say, but that doesn’t help you to open and close your hand any better than I do. See, I know how to do it, but I can’t put into words. In the same way, the Hindu god knows how he creates his whole universe, because he does it, but he wouldn’t explain it, that would be stupid. You might, as well, try to drink the Pacific ocean with a fork. So, when a Hindu gets enlightened and he recoveres from the hallucination of being a skin encapsulated ego, and finds out that central to his own self is the eternal self of the universe, and you go up to him and say: ‘Well, how do you do all this?’, he says: ‘Well, just like you open and close your hand.’ And because we’re all it.

Whenever a questioner used to come to Sri Ramana, the great Hindu sage who died a few years ago, they said to him: ‘Master, was I living before, in a previous incarnation, and if so, who was I?’, he would say: ‘Who is asking the question? Who are you?’ And a spiritual teacher in both Hinduism and Buddhism is a kind of… well, what he does to awaken you, to get you over the hallucination of being the skin encapsulated ego, he bugs you, in a certain way.  He has a funny look in his eye, as if to say, ‘Come off it, Seaver, I know what you’re doing.’ And he says: ‘ What, me?!’ He looks at you in a funny way, and, finally, you get a feeling that he sees all the way through you. And, therefore, that all your selfish and evil thoughts, and nastiness is a transparent to his gaze. And then you have to try and alter them. He suggests, you see, that you practice the control of the mind. That you become desireless. You give up selfish desires, so as to cease to be a skin encapsulated self. And then you may have some success in quieting your mind and in concentrating. But then after that he’ll trow a curve at you, which is: ‘But aren’t you still desiring not to desire? Why are you trying to be unselfish?’ Well, the answer is: ‘I want to be on the side of the big battalions! I think it’s gonna pay better to be unselfish than to be selfish.’ Well, Luther saw that, Augustin saw that, but, there it is. Because, what he’s done, you see, he’s beginning to see the unreality, the hallucinatory quality of a separate self. This has merely conventional reality, in the same sense as lines of latitude and longitude, the measurements of the clock. That’s why one of the meanings of Maya, illusion, is measurement. Things, for example, are measurements. They are units of though, like inches are units of measurement. There are no things in physical nature. How many things is a thing? And, I mean, it’s any number you want. Because a thing is a think, a unit of thought. As much of reality as you can catch hold of in one idea. So, when this realization of the hallucination of the separate self comes about, it comes about through discovering that your alleged, separate self can’t do anything. It can’t improve itself, either by doing something about it, or by doing nothing about it. Both ways are based on illusion. You see, this is what you have to do to get people out of hallucinations. You make them act consistently on the suppositions of the hallucination. People who believe that the Earth is flat cannot possibly be talked into seeing that it’s round. Because they KNOW it’s flat. Because, ‘Can’t you see?!’ So, what you do is this. You say: ‘Let’s go and look over the edge. Wouldn’t that be fun?’ But, you see, to be sure that we do get to the edge, we must be very carefull not to walk in circles. So, you perform a discipline. You go steadily and rigorously westwards, along latitude 40, or something, and then, when you get back to the place where you started, he is convinced that the world is, at least, cylindrical. By experiment. By reductio ad absurdum of his premises. And so, in the same way, the guru, whether Hindu or Buddhist, performs a reductio ad absurdum on the premise of the skin encapsulated ego. Well, what happens then? You might imagine, from garbled accounts of Eastern mysticism, that one thereupon disappears forever into an infinite sea of faintly move jello, and become so lost to the world, and entranced, That you forget your name, address, telephone number and function in life. And nothing of the kind happens! The state of mystical illumination, although it may in its sudden onset be accompanied by a sensation of tremendous luminescence and transparency, as you get used to it, it’s just like everyday life. Here are the things that you formerly thought were separate individuals, and here is you, who you formerly thought was merely confronting these other people. When the great doctor D. T. Suzuki was asked: ‘What is it like to be enlightened?’, he said: ‘It’s just like ordinary, everyday experience, except, about two inches off the ground.’ Because, what is altered is not the way your senses percieve. What is altered is what you think about it. Your definitions of what you see. Your evaluation of it. So, when you don’t cling to it, when you have no longer a hostile attitude to the world, because you know the world is you. It is. I mean, let’s take it from the point of view of biology. If I describe the behaviour of a living organism, I cannot possibly describe that behaviour without simultaneously describing the behaviour of the environment. So that I discover that I don’t describe organisms in environments. I describe a unified field of behaviour called an organism-environment. It’s an awkward word, but there it is. The environment doesn’t push the organism around; the organism doesn’t push the environment around. They are two aspects, or poles, of the same process. And so, you have to understand that this attitude towards nature, seeing the fundamental unity of the self, which manifests it all, is not an attitude as missionaries are apt to suppose, which denies the value of differentiation. You must understand the principle of what is called ‘identical differences’. Take a coin. The head side is a different side from the tail side, and yet, the two are inseparable. Take the operation of buying and selling. Selling is a different operation from buying, but you can’t buy unless somebody sells at the same time, and vice versa. This is what is meant by the underlying unity of opposites, what is called in Hinduism ‘advitor’, or non-duality. Or when the Chinese use the word ‘Tao’ to designate the way of operation of the positive and negative principles, the Yang and the Yin. It is not a unity that annihilates differences, but a unity which is manifested by the very differentiations that we perceive. Just as…, it’s all polar, it’s like the two poles of a magnet. Different, but yet one magnet. So, when we say ‘oriental monism’, is a point of view towards life which merges everything into a kind of sickening goo. This is terribly unfair. It just isn’t so. If you argue that this sort of doctrine, that everybody is really the Godhead, destroys the possibility of real love between individuals, because you have to be definitively other than I if I am to love you. Otherwise it’s all self-love. Well, that argument collapses in view of the doctrine of the Trinity. If the three persons are one God, than they can’t love each other, by the same argument. Hinduism simply uses the idea, which is in the Christian Trinity, only it makes it a multi trinity, instead of a three one. That’s all.

Of course, the thorn in the flesh is always in approaching a doctrine which seems to be monistic, or pantheistic: what about evil?  Are we to make the ground of being responsible for evil. And we don’t want to do that, because we want to keep God’s skirts clean. In spite of the fact that our own Hebrew Bible says: ‘I am the lord, there is none else. I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil. I alone do all this things.’ And haven’t you heard the story about the ‘yetzer hara’, that according to Jewish theology, the lord god implanted in Adam, at the beginning of time, a thing called the ‘yetzer hara’. It means ‘the way with spirit’. I call it ‘the element of irreducible rascality’. And it’s very necessary to have this in order to be human. You see, how it was done was this prohibition not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. That was the one sure way of getting it eaten. But, of course, when the lord god accused Adam, he said: ‘You’ve been eating of that tree I’d told you not to eat.’ And he passed the back to Eve and said: ‘This woman that thou gavet me, she tempted me and I did eat.’ He looked at Eve: ‘Now, what about it?’ She said: ‘Well, it was the serpent.’ He looked at the serpent. Serpent didn’t say anything. Because he knew too much, and he wasn’t going to give away the show.

Who is it that sits at the left hand of God? We know who sits at the right hand. It’s hushed up, because that’s the side where the district attorney sits. And in the Book of Job, of course, you know, Satan is the district attorney at the court of Heaven. He’s the prosecutor. He’s the fateful servant of the court. Because, you see, the whole problem is.., it would be very bad indeed if God were the author of evil and we were his victims. That is, to say, if we keep the model of the king of the universe, and the creatures are all subjects of the king, then, a God who is responsible for evil is being very unkind to other people. But, in this theory, God is not another person. There are no victims of God, he’s never anything but his own victim. You are responsible. And if you want to stay in the state of illusion – stay in it. But you can always wake up.