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Rather worn out in an age where it becomes more and more obvious that our world is a floating world. It's a world floating in space where all positions are relative and any point may be regarded as the center, a world which doesn't float on anything, and therefore the religious attitude appropriate to our time is not one of clinging to rocks, but of learning to swim.
And you know that if you get in the water and you have nothing to hold on to and you try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown. But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float. And this is exactly the situation of faith. Welcome to the Alan Watts podcast, Being in the Way. I'm your host, Mark Watts.
and you've been listening to a portion of Relevance of Eastern Philosophy. And today we're going to dive into this talk, and we're going to do something a little bit different, which is that we're going to hear some of the question and answer period that followed this talk. This is from the vault, the Alan Watts Archives, and it's a bit of history that has never been aired before. As a matter of fact, I don't think anybody has ever heard this unless they were there at the original session.
It's a delightful piece because you get my father interacting with the audience and telling some great stories and just generally bringing out a different dimension of his relationship with the audience. So this is going to become a regular feature here on this podcast and also on play.alanwatts.org, which will be dedicated to airing remastered series and also to new materials out of the vault. Well, not new.
They're all at least 50 years old, but new to your ears in that many, many of these have never been aired before, like the one today, and others haven't been heard in 30 or 40 years. This podcast is co-produced with the Ram Dass Be Here Now Network, and our music is provided by Moment Records and is Zakir Hussain from the Rhythm Experience album.
So here's Alan Watts in Relevance of Eastern Philosophy. And after the talk, I'll give you that address for the Play Channel again. And enjoy today's program. See, our image of the world is that the world is a construct. And it's very natural for a child to say to its mother, how was I made?
As if, you know, you were somehow put together. But that goes back to the imagery of Genesis, where God creates Adam and makes a clay figurine. And then he breathes the breath of life into the nostrils of this figurine, and it comes to life. So there is the fundamental supposition which even underlies the development of Western science. That everything has been made and then someone knows how it was made. And you can find out.
Because behind the universe, there is an architect. This could be called the ceramic model of the universe. Because there's a basic feeling that there are two things in existence. One is stuff, material, and the other is form. Now, material like clay by itself is stupid. It has no life in it, has no intelligence.
And therefore for matter to assume orderly forms, it requires that an external intelligence be introduced to shape it. And therefore with that deeply embedded in our common sense, it's very difficult for people to realize. that this image is not necessarily for description of the world at all. Indeed, the whole idea of stuff is completely absent from modern physics, which studies the physical universe purely in terms of pattern and structure.
But the Hindu model of the world, and I'm speaking of Hindu mythology, the popular imagery, I'm talking about the popular imagery on both sides. I'm not at the moment getting into theological technicalities. The Hindu model of the universe is a drama. The world is not made, it is acted. And so behind every face, human, animal, plant, mineral, There is the face or non-face of the central self, the Atman, which is Brahman, the final reality, which is not defined because...
Obviously, that which is the center cannot be made an object of knowledge any more than you bite your own teeth or lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. It's what there is. It's the basis. And you are it, which is... a colloquial translation of the Sanskrit adage, Tatvam Asi, that art thou. The idea being, you see, that the nature of reality is a game of hide and seek.
Because that's really the only game there is. Now you see it, now you don't. All nature is vibrating. It's a wave-like motion of crest and trough, pulse and interval, pulse and interval. Only we don't always notice that because our senses respond slowly, say, to light. And light appears to be a continuous energy without interval. So the idea goes like this, that for endless cycles of time, the supreme reality, the self, plays hide-and-seek with itself.
That for a period of a kalpa, which is 4,320,000 years, the self is awake to itself and knows that it's it. But for another kalpa, It gets lost. It says to itself, man, get lost. And pretends that it is a vast multiplicity. That's exactly what you would do. if you had the privilege of dreaming any dream you wanted when you went to bed at night. This would enable you, of course, in one night to dream 75 years of clock time.
And what you would do, first of all, you would have marvelous adventures. You would have every conceivable delight and satisfy every wish. And then as time went on, that would get a little boring and you would get more daring. You would have adventures. You would rescue princesses from dragons. And then you would get even more daring, and you would dream that you weren't dreaming. And then you'd get into really serious messes, because wouldn't it be a surprise when you woke up?
And eventually, you would be dreaming that you were sitting here in this auditorium listening to me. You would eventually get around to that for your sins. So... Well, maybe that's what's happening anyhow, you see. And in Sanskrit, this dream is called Maya. But it's a word that means more than dream or illusion. It means creative power, magic, skill, art, and measurement. Laying down the foundations is making a Maya.
So, then, the world is a big act. It's play, not in the sense of something trivial, but in the sense of a stage play. Hamlet is a play. You play the organ in church. That's not trivial. And so the actor of this play, being the best of all possible actors, takes himself in totally. Almost. Because everybody knows in the back of their mind that there's something funny about being a self. So you see, when you go to the theater,
You know, of course, that the proscenium arch tells you that what's going on behind this arch is not for real. But somehow the actor almost persuades you that it is real. He wants to get you sitting on the edge of your chair. He wants you laughing, crying. He wants you in a state of anxiety so that he almost persuades you. But you see, if the actor is as good as the supreme self, the audience is taken in.
Thoroughly. And they believe the play is real. What skill? How marvelous. But you see, in all acting, there is behind the stage a green room. Out on the stage, the Lord does not come on as the Lord. He comes on as you and I, heroes and villains. But off scene, he assumes his... true nature and doffs his mask, which in Latin is his persona. In classical drama, the persona was the megaphone mouth mask worn for the open air theater.
And by a curious degradation of words, the word person has come to mean the real individual. And when Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote how to be a real person, The real title of his book should have been How to Be a Genuine Fake. Well, now this image, this model of the universe, Is it disturbing to Christians? What is particularly disturbing is the element in it of what's a very special theological cuss word called pantheism. The feeling that if
every part is being played by the Supreme Lord, then all the real distinctions between good and evil are obliterated. Now that is the biggest nonsense ever uttered. Distinctions between good and evil do not have to be eternal distinctions to be real distinctions. It is really to say that a distinction which is not eternal is not real is a highly unchristian thing to say and certainly a very un-Jewish thing. Because...
one of the fundamental principles of the Hebrew attitude is that all finite things that have been created by God are good. And therefore, a thing that doesn't have to be infinite to be good. All finite things come to an end. Furthermore, to invoke the authority of heaven in matters of moral regulation. is like putting two million current through your electric shaver. It ended in the final asininity.
of the notion that if you went against the will of God, since evil is eternal, you would fry in hell forever and ever and ever. And as the Chinese say, do not swat a fly on a friend's head with a hatchet. Like all kinds of judicial torture and harsh justice, such ideas bring law into disrespect and such a fierce God and such an unbending attitude.
resulted in the fact of people disbelieving in God altogether, and shall we say, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. So this is among many reasons why people are saying God is dead. It's very inconvenient to have the kind of God who is this authoritarian boss of the world, prying down over your shoulder all the time, knowing your inmost thoughts and judging you. It's a very uncomfortable feeling and everybody's happy to be rid of it.
it has never significantly improved anybody's behavior. In the so-called ages of faith, people were just as immoral, if not more so, than they are today. Because, you see, all this fixed notion of God... is idolatry. If thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image of anything that is in the heaven above, etc., The most dangerous and pernicious images are not those made of wood or stone. Nobody takes those seriously. They are the images made of imagination and conception and thought.
And that is why in the fundamental approach to the Godhead, both the Christian, I mean, both the Hindu and the Buddhist, and for that matter, the Taoist, take what is called the negative approach. which used to be known long ago in the Middle Ages as apophatic theology. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, to proceed to the knowledge of God, it is necessary to go by the way of remotion.
of saying what God is not, since God by his immensity exceeds every conception to which our intellect can attain. So then, when... of the Godhead, the Hindu says, all that can truly be said is neti, neti, not this, not this. And when the Buddhist uses such a term for the final reality as shunyata, which means voidness or emptiness.
Then, textbook after textbook on comparative religion that I've read by various theologians say, this is terrible negativism. This is nihilism. But he doesn't realize that it's nothing of the kind. If, for example, you have a window on which there's a fine painting of the sun, your act of faith in the real sun will be to scrape that off.
so that you can let the real sunlight in. And so in the same way, pictures of God on the window of the mind need scraping off, because otherwise they become idolatrous, they become substitutes for the reality. Now I'm hoping that this sort of understanding will issue from God is dead theology. I'm not quite sure whether it's going to. Because as a matter of fact...
There are precedents within the Christian tradition for an intelligent God is dead theology, for what I would call atheism in the name of God, or agnosticism in the name of God. The word agnostic has a curious history. It's based on the Greek word agnosia, which we used to translate into English as unknowing. And there's a very interesting mystical treatise of the 14th century called The Cloud of Unknowing.
showing how the highest form of prayer, contemplative prayer, was that in which all concept of God had been left behind. Where, in other words, one completely let go of clinging to God. And this was the supreme act of faith. So that you don't any longer need an image. because this gets in the way of the reality. But the moment you insist on an image, then you have the church as a huge imperialistic vested interest organization.
After all, if the church is the body of Christ, isn't it through the breaking of the body of Christ that life is given to the world? But the church doesn't want to be broken up by Jove now. It goes around canvassing for new members. See, the difference between a physician and a clergyman is this. The physician wants to get rid of his patients and he gives them medicine and he hopes they won't get hooked on the medicine. Whereas the clergyman is usually forced.
to make his patients become addicts so that they'll pay their dues. The doctor has faith in turnover. He knows that there will always be sick people, and the clergy also need faith in turnover. Get rid of your congregations. Say, now, you've heard all I've got to tell you. Go away. If you want to get together for making celestial whoopee, which is worship, all right. But don't, I used to, when I was...
a chaplain in the university, I used to tell the students that if they came to church out of a sense of duty, they weren't wanted. They would be skeletons at the feast. It would be much better if they went swimming or stayed in bed. Because we were going to celebrate the Holy Communion, and I meant celebrate. But somehow or other, you see, we take religion in a kind of dead earnest.
I remember when I was a boy at school how wicked it was to laugh in church. We don't realize, as G.K. Chesterton said, that the angels fly because they take themselves lightly. And as Dante said in the Paradiso, when he heard the song of the angels, it sounded like the laughter of the universe. What are those angels doing? They're saying, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, which doesn't really mean anything.
It's sublime nonsense. And so in the same way, there are Buddhist texts and Hindu texts, which are the chants of the Buddhas or the divine beings, which don't mean anything at all. never did mean anything. They are just glorious laling, glossolalia. So the point that I wish to make most strongly. is that behind a vital religious life for the West, there has to be faith. which is not expressed in things to which you cling, in ideas, opinions, to which you cling in a kind of desperation.
Faith is the act of letting go, and that must begin with letting go of God, let God go. But you see... This is not atheism in the ordinary sense. Atheism in the ordinary sense is fervently hoping that there isn't a God. But I'm afraid, you see, that this movement is going to issue in what someone described as Christian secularism. The assumption that there is nothing at all to life except a pilgrimage between the maternity ward and the crematorium.
And that it is within that span that Christian concern must be exercised. Because that's all there is. Well... It is true, that's pretty much common sense these days. I very much doubt whether most religious people believe in their religion. Not really. It's become unplausible. You know, even Jehovah's Witnesses are pretty polite when they come round to the door. If they really believed what they were talking about, they'd be screaming in the streets.
If some Catholics believe what they're talking about, they would be making an awful fuss. They would be having the most horrendous television programs that would make Batman look like nothing. They would have... Full-page ads in the papers about the terrible things that would happen if you didn't. And more so if you did. And they would be very serious about it. But nobody is. Because 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. Haeckel's gyration or fortuitous congress of atoms is of the same vintage as Freud's.
libido, the blind surge of lust at the basis of human psychology. You see what was going on? This was, man was indulging in a put down attitude. to the world. And saying enough of wishful thinking. Belief in God and someone up there who cares is for little old ladies and weak spirits. We are tough these days. We face facts. And therefore, by making the universe seem as banal as it could possibly be, one advertised one's own hardheadedness. This was a kind of role-playing.
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. God, 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. It's a very odd situation.
And the more I look at things, I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird. 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, existence is nothing at all. I mean, it's just basic and 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 journals is now as satisfactorily dull as any other kind of... purely technical inquiry. No good philosopher lies awake nights worrying about the destiny of man and the nature of God and all that sort of thing, because...
A philosopher today is a practical fellow who comes to the university with a briefcase at nine and leaves at five. He does philosophy during the day, which is discussing whether certain sentences have meaning, and if so, what. And then he would, as William Earle said in a very funny essay, he would come to work in a white coat if he thought he could get away with it.
The problem is he's lost his sense of wonder. Wonder is like, in modern philosophy, something you mustn't have. It's like enthusiasm in 18th century England. It's a very bad form. But you see... I don't know what question to ask when I wonder about the universe. It isn't a question that I'm wondering about, it's a feeling that I have. Imagine if you had an interview with God.
Everybody was going to have an interview with God and you were allowed to ask one question. What would you ask? And don't rush into it. You will soon find that you have no idea what to ask. Because I cannot formulate the question that is my wonder. The moment my mouth opens to utter it, I suddenly find I'm talking nonsense. But that should not prevent wonder from being the foundation of philosophy.
Well, as Aristotle said, wonder is the beginning of philosophy. Because it strikes you that existence is very, very strange. And then 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 then furthermore, when you realize that in a world where there are no eyes, the sun would not be light.
And that in a world where there were no soft skins, rocks would not be hard. Nor in a world where there were no muscles, would they be heavy. Existence is relationship, and you are smack in the middle of it. So, there is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude in the sense of awe, astonishment at existence.
And that is also a basis of respect for existence. We don't have very much of it in this culture, even though we call it materialistic. A materialist is a person who loves material. And I suppose in the Christian tradition and in the Jewish, one would say that the Lord God is the greatest materialist. Because, you know, as William Temple once said, God is interested in many other things than religion.
Were God only interested in religion, the world would consist of nothing but church buildings and Bibles and clergymen. And that would be pretty boring. So... In the culture that we call materialistic today, we are, of course, bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gas as quickly as possible. This is not a materialistic culture.
because it has no respect for material. And respect is in turn based on wonder, on feeling the marvel of just an ordinary pebble in your fingers. So I'm afraid, you see, for the God is dead theology, that it will sort of drift off into 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. And 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 on the divine authority. The code is the revealed will of God for man which you are commanded to obey. and the cult is the divinely revealed form of worship which you must practice. Commandment, because God is boss, he's ruler, king of kings and lord of lords.
But the disciplines, 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. They do indeed have precepts, 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 sauce. A little man inside your head, located between the ears and behind the eyes, who is the source of conscious attention and voluntary behavior. Most people, you know, don't think, don't really...
think that they are anything but that and that 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, conception or parturition, nobody could ever decide.
And 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? 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 it into words. In the same way, the Hindu god knows how he creates this 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 recovers 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? And 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, Shiva, I know what you're doing. And you say, 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 nastinesses are transparent to this 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 desire 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 throw 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 going to pay better to be unselfish than to be selfish. Well, Luther saw that. Augustine saw that. But there it is.
Because what he's done, you see, he's beginning to make you 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 thought, like inches are units of measurement. There are no things in physical nature. How many things is a thing? It's any number you want. Because a thing is a think, a unit of thought. It's 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 careful 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 mauve 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 Dr. 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. What is altered is not the way your senses perceive. 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 behavior of a living organism... I cannot possibly describe that behavior without simultaneously describing the behavior of the environment. So that I discover that I don't describe organisms in environments, I describe...
a unified field of behavior 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 are 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 Advaita, 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 the sort of doctrine that everybody is really the Godhead destroys the possibility of real love between individuals, because you have to be definitely other than I if I'm 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, then 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, the Lord, do all these things. And haven't you heard the story about the Yetzirah?
that according to Jewish theology, the Lord God implanted in Adam at the beginning of time a thing called the Yetzirah. It means the wayward 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 and said, you've been eating of that tree, I told you not to eat. And he passed the buck to Eve and said, this woman that thou gavest me, she tempted me and I did eat. And he looked at Eve, now what about it? He said, well, it was the serpent. He looked at the serpent. The 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 a faithful 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. Well, I think that people are more impressed today by the sheer physical demonstration of it.
inevitability of these facts, which must make us therefore respect the social and physical environment, because it's you. In this understanding, God is transcendent in the sense of transcending all things. That is to say, God is not a thing and transcends every possible conception. The difficulty with the ordinary transcendent God is that he's made another thing, only the top thing. And when we relate to God as to another person, well, he's just another person, the top person.
Big boss. But true transcendence means that God is not a thing or an event. Because in this way of understanding, there are no things. Things are abstractions. And the same way with events. Because the ideas of things and events are a calculus. with which to describe the flow of life, just as we use point instance to measure curves, even though the curve is continuous.
See, life is a sort of Rorschach plot. All natural forms are wiggly. And that's very inconvenient because wiggly things are slippery. And if you want things to be definite, it's like... Somebody in the far-off times looked at mountains through a fishing net. And because the holes of the net were evenly spaced, he could measure the mountain. And there's a recent Russian poem which has a beautiful image in it.
of the world as a ball in a net bag. And those are the lines of latitude and longitude. Well, is it your idea that in order to take seriously that God is... Transcendent, that means, are beyond all our conception. You're not suggesting that we do away with imagery, but that we just look at them in a relative sense. Isn't that right? What you do is this.
When you have reached the point of being able to do away with imagery, you can go back to imagery. And then when we do that, I prefer the most frankly anthropomorphic imagery. because there there's less and less danger of its being taken literally. But when we go to the transcendent aspect, I don't want to mix the idea of transcendence with the idea of royalty.
Because then you get a transcendence which is unrelated to you. God ceases to be the ground of your being, but comes the ceiling of your aspirations. Well, it depends fundamentally what you mean by how you use these words. You can use the word unreality in a pejorative sense. But you can also use it in a good sense. When a play is put on, or when a marvelous stage magician appears, we are delighted that he produces an illusion.
And we think it's magnificent and say, hooray, good illusion. So in the same way, the more optimistic aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism look upon the world illusion as magnificent. And although it's unreal. In the sense that it's not eternal. And it isn't the ground. It isn't the final reality of being. So far as they're concerned, the only reality is God. Or the Godhead. And that's what there is. But the miraculous quality of this reality is that it can appear to be everything else besides. Yes.
In other words, unreality has what you might call relative or derived reality. But what they mean by unreality is that it is not, it is something that comes and goes. I mean, if we're going to talk to each other, we have to agree upon some game rules. And somebody tries out a rule and see if that will work. And somebody else says, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's keep it that way.
that societies and communities eventually build up their game rules. And we have no trouble in getting people to obey the rules of grammar because we don't make such a fuss about them. You must realize that there are many possibilities of ground rules and variations. And I don't think there's any kind of basic one except this, that we feel it to be a good idea.
to have relations. After all, a human being is necessarily social. You don't exist without at least two others, father and mother. And we don't... We exist as society. And in this respect, the fundamental premise that I think you might be able to derive is that since the community of man... and living beings is a community. That we need ground rules that implement this and express it. Although they may be very varied. Because you see...
The biological community is a mutual eating society. Well, I mean, we've decided that it's a good idea that the show go on. And so this have some connection with the metaphysical. fact that the lord is putting on the show and uh so uh but you see uh In this room, there's a perfectly clear distinction between up and down, but this is not abolished by the fact that this room is also in interstellar space where there is no such distinction.
And so, in the same way, the rules of ethics depend on their ground just in the same way as everything you see depends on having eyes, or everything you hear on the radio depends on there being a diaphragm in the speaker. Even though anything can come over this diaphragm, the diaphragm has no influence on the message. So you can play all sorts of games, but you've got the general ground of ethics, which is the idea, let the show go on.
But then it's complicated by the fact of a mutual eating society and the guilt that we feel because we live by destroying other creatures. Now, you see, that is a real... troublesome problem, which some philosophy has responded with ahinsa, harmlessness, with avoiding animal food and all that sort of thing. But my solution of it is quite different. I feel that if you've killed a fish and it's going to give its life for you...
the fish should at least have the privilege of enjoying itself in your form, into which it has become transmuted. And therefore, it is a proper respect to cook it as well as possible. Love it into a state of superb edibility. And then it's your duty to the fish to enjoy it, you see. And this is the meaning of this is my body which is given to you. If you look at it that way.
This is my blood which is shed for you. You see the crushed wheat and the crushed grapes. The life is sacrificial. And he says, this is the blood. shed for the remission of sins, so don't feel guilty about it. So the problem is, you see, in the subordinate conflicts... which are essential to the continuation of the system as a whole, to make them contained conflicts. In other words, instead of eating so much whale that we obliterate the race of whales.
We have to farm whales and take care of them. We have to replenish the soil. This is the terrifying thing. I mean, for example, let's take chickens. The stores are being flooded with non-chickens and pseudo-eggs. Because these chickens are raised in cell blocks, fed on chemicals, on the superstition that anything fed to a chicken will turn into a chicken. And they taste just like that. They've never scratched around in the sun or anything. And that's not proper love of one's food.
Even if you're going to kill it, you say, I love you so much I could eat you. There's a great Buddhist image called Indra's net. And it likens the universe to a net of jewels. Imagine a spider's web in the morning dew. And every dew drop, it contains the reflections of all the others. Now, every dewdrop stands for what is called in Japanese a ji, which means a thing event. And so they say of this ji ji muge, between thing event and thing event, there is no block, blockage.
So this is called the doctrine of the mutual penetration or interpenetration of all things. So this is an organic image because it is a system of order which doesn't have a boss keeping it in order. You see, you couldn't see something in the same way in the construction of the human body. There are two arguments about the body. One is that one is fundamentally and basically a stomach. In fact, you're a tube.
And the object of this tube is to put things in at one end and let them out at the other. This maintains the tube, but also wears it out. So the tubes have ways of producing other tubes to go on doing the same thing. Therefore, in the course of time, they evolve ganglia at one end with sensitive instruments and eyes and ears, the better to find things to put in at one end and let out at the other. And in this case, the brain is simply an outpost of the stomach.
But then there's the other and equally forceful argument, that the brain took longer to evolve and therefore came later because it's a more subtle and sophisticated thing. But the stomach is simply the servant of the brain. It's a gadget that exists to provide... energy and fuel for the mental organism. Of course, this is part of the ancient argument that has always gone on in Western philosophy between the people who represent the school of prickles.
and the people who represent the school of goo. Prickles people would be nominalists. Goo would be realists. Prickles would be classicists. Goo would be romanticists. Prickles would like to believe that the ultimate constituents of matter are particles. Goo people would prefer waves. Prickles go in for logical positivism and statistical psychology and rigorous research. And goo people prefer mysticism and poetry and music. And in theology, prickles people, come on. Same.
The definite and clear teaching of the church is, it is a requisite that we have a firm biblical foundation for ethical monotheism. You can hear the prickles. I call it intellectual porcupinism. But the prickles say of the goo people, they're disgusting. They are vague and wishy-washy and have unclear thinking. And the goo people say of the prickles people, they're all made of bones. They just rattle. They have no flesh on it.
They know the words, but they don't know the music. Now the truth of the matter is, you see, as between prickles and goo, that you wouldn't be able to know you were prickly unless you could have goo to compare yourself with. Whereas the gooey people wouldn't know about goo unless they could compare themselves with the prickly people. And so I discover more and more in the pursuit of philosophy that I don't know what I think unless somebody disagrees with me. Therefore, I become dependent upon...
my opposite. And this again is the theory of groups. The saved group needs the damned group. And so both life is, of course, gooey prickles and prickly goo. It all depends on how you look at it. Insofar as there is a motivation for ethics, you have a complex, you have a hierarchy of motivations. You have the basic thing that the show should go on.
Then, though, there's a lot of gamesmanship has to be played beyond that. Who's going to, who are you going to eat? You see, well, you make the rule not to eat your own species. You eat some other kind of species. And then there are all sorts of one-upmanship things that can't very well be avoided. I'm more tolerant than you. Do you know that game? I'm more ready to admit my anxiety than you are.
Hinduism is not really a missionary religion at all. Hinduism regards all religions as manifestations of the way to the one. I increasingly avoid religious arguments because... I see that everybody has their own way of doing it. It's like a garden where there are all sorts of different species which are mutually interdependent.
I do a bit object to the people who are on a missionary basis and say our religion is the best religion and you all ought to believe it. I think the mission should be abandoned, frankly. No, you must understand that within a unity there are distinctions because you cannot realize unity without distinctions or vice versa. That's right. That's the point. Life is a harmony of opposing tensions, as in the lyre and the bow, to quote Heraclitus.
Yes. The G.G. Mudikai doctrine is the peak doctrine of all Mahayana philosophy. It is given conceptual form, yes, but when you work on this... You work on it in a non-conceptual way. You see, if you approach Mahayana study from the intellectual viewpoint, you eventually find yourself in a bull session in which the presiding guru will demolish every idea that you have. and show that it's untenable. And then you'll say, well, what would you suggest? And he doesn't say anything.
And then, you see, you are about... These people can get very passionate under these circumstances, and they get very unhappy. But the teacher seems to be all right. So what happens is that there's an inward transformation takes place. The intellectual process becomes a psychological process in which you suddenly let go of everything. And you see the point. Only...
The point wasn't words, just as the point of when you eat, you don't eat the menu. A lot of philosophy is trying to translate the dinner into the menu all the time. You see, what happened was... Yes, what happened was this, that when Ludwig Wittgenstein finished the Tractatus and published it about 1922... The last words in it were, of that which one cannot speak, one should remain silent. And this was an epochal moment in Western philosophy, where all philosophy departments...
should have immediately gone into meditation. But since the academic world doesn't know that whether a philosopher is really working if he doesn't say anything. You think he's goofing off, you see. And therefore, everybody has to go on talking and publishing and thinking up new problems instead of going into supreme contemplation, which was the proper end of philosophy. They missed the boat. Even Wittgenstein felt he had to go back and write all those notebooks and get everything confused again.
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The channel is a place where you'll hear new and remastered talks monthly, as well as some of these selections from the archive. It's also a place where you can support the organization and everything that we do to bring this material to you. Thank you for joining us. I'm Mark Watts, and this has been Alan Watts in the Being in the Way podcast.
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