Alan Watts - Nature of God

now I'm sure that most of you know the old story about the astronaut who went far out into space and was asked on his return whether he had been to heaven and seen God and he said yes and so they said to him well what about God and he said she is black and although this is a very well-known and well-worn story it is very profound because I tell you I knew a monk who started out in life as pretty much of an agnostic or an atheist and then he began to read only birdsong the French philosopher who proclaimed the vital force the a long Vittal and so on and the more he read into this kind of philosophy the more he saw that these people were really talking about God and I've read a great deal of theological reasoning about the existence of God and they all start out on this line if you are intelligent and reasonable you cannot be the product of a mechanical and meaningless universe figs do not grow on thistles grapes do not grow on thorns and therefore you as an expression of the universe as an aperture through which the universe is observing itself cannot be a mere fluke because if this world peoples as a tree brings forth fruit then the universe itself the energy which underlies it what it's all about the ground of being as Paul Tillich called it must be intelligent now when you come to that conclusion you must be very careful because you may make an unwarranted jump namely the jump to the conclusion that that intelligence that marvelous designing power which produces all this is the biblical God be careful because that God contrary to his own commands is fashioned in the graven image of a paternal authoritarian beneficent tyrant of the ancient Near East and it's very easy to fall into that trap because it's all prepared institutionalized in the Roman Catholic Church in the synagogue in the Protestant churches all they're ready for you to accept and by the pressure of social consensus and so on and so on it is very natural to assume that when somebody uses the word God it is that father figure which is intended because even Jesus used the analogy the father for his experience of God he had to there was no other one available to him in his culture but nowadays we are in rebellion against the image of the authoritarian father especially this should happen in the United States where it happens that we are a republic and not a monarchy and if you as a loyal citizen of this country think that a republic is the best form of government you can hardly believe that the universe is a monarchy but to reject the paternalistic image of God as an idol is not necessarily to be an atheist although I have advocated something called atheism in the name of God that is to say an experience a contract a relationship with God that is to say with the ground of your being that does not have to be embodied or expressed in any specific image now theologians on the whole don't like that idea because I find in my discourse with them that they want to be a little bit hard nosed about the nature of God they want to say that God has indeed a very specific nature ethical monotheism means that the governing power of this universe has some extremely definite opinions and rules to which our minds and acts must be conformed and if you don't watch out you'll go against the fundamental grain of the universe and be punished in some way old fashioned Li will burn in the fires of hell forever more modern fashioned Li you will fail to be an authentic person it's another way of talking about it but there is this feeling you see that there is Authority behind the world and it's not you it's something else like we say that's something else that's fara and therefore this jewish-christian and indeed Muslim approach makes a lot of people feel rather strange estranged from the root and ground of being there are a lot of people who never grow up and are always in awe of an image of grandfather now I'm a grandfather I have five grandchildren and so I'm no longer in awe of grandfathers I know I'm just as stupid as my own grandfather's were and therefore I'm not about to bow down to an image of God with a long white beard now naturally of course we intelligent people don't believe in that kind of a God not really I mean we think that God is spirit that God is so very undefinable and infinite and all that kind of thing but nevertheless the images of God are far more have a far more powerful effect upon our emotions than our ideas and when people read the Bible and sing hymns Ancient of Days who sittest throned in glory immortal invisible God only wise in light and accessible hid from our eyes they still got that fellow up there with a beard on its way in the back of the emotions and so we should think first of all in contrary imagery and the contrary imagery is she's black imagine instead of God the Father God the mother and imagine that this is not a luminous being blazing with light but an in fathomable darkness such as is portrayed in Hindu mythology by Kali ka Li a great mother who is represented in the most terrible imagery Kali has a tongue hanging out long drooling with blood she has fan teeth she has a scimitar in one hand and a severed head in the other and she is trampling on the body of her husband who is Shiva Shiva represents also furthermore the destructive aspect of the deity wherein all things are dissolved so that they be reborn again and here is this blood sucking terrible mother as the image of the supreme reality behind this universe imagine it's the representative of the octopus the spider the awful office the creepy crawlies at the end of the line which we're all terrified of now that's a very important image because let us suppose just for the sake of argument that all of you sitting here right now are feeling Oh fairly alright I mean you're not in hospital you're not you don't have the Screaming Mimi's you have a sense you probably had dinner and a feeling pretty good but you know that you feel that you are fairly good because in the background of your mind's very far off in the background of your minds you've got the sensation of something absolutely ghastly that simply mustn't happen and so against that which is not happening which doesn't necessarily after her but by comparison with that you feel pretty alright and that absolutely ghastly thing that mustn't happen at all is colleague and therefore at once we begin to wonder whether the presence of this collie is not in a way very beneficent I mean how how would you know the things were good unless there was something that wasn't good at all now this is I'm not putting this forward as a final position I'm only putting it forward as the variation as a way of beginning to look at a problem and getting our minds out of their normal ruts she's black well she first of all feminine represents what is called philosophically the negative principle now of course people who are women in our culture today and believe in women's lib don't like to be associated with the negative because the negative is acquired very bad connotations we say accentuate the positive that's a purely male chauvinistic attitude how would you know that you were outstanding unless by contrast there was something in standing you cannot appreciate the convex without the concave you cannot appreciate the firm without the yielding and therefore the so-called negativity of the feminine principle is obviously life-giving and very important but we live in a culture which doesn't notice it you see a painting the drawing of a bird and you don't notice the white paper underneath it you see a printed book and you think that what is important as the printing and the page doesn't matter and yet if you reconsider the whole thing how could there be visible printing without the page underlying it what is called substance that which stands underneath sub underneath stands stands to be substantial is to be underlying to be the support to be the foundation of the world and of course this is the great function of the feminine to be the substance and therefore the feminine is represented by space which is of course black at night but where it not for black and empty space there would be no possibility whatsoever of seeing the stars stars shine out of space and astronomers a very high-powered astronomers are beginning to realize that stars are a function of space now that's difficult for our common sense because we think that space is simply inner nothingness then we don't realize that space is completely basic to everything it's like your consciousness nobody can imagine what consciousness is it's the most elusive whatever it is that there is at all because it's the background of everything else that we know therefore we don't really pay much attention to it we pay attention to the things within the field of consciousness to the outlines to the object that the so called things that are in the field of vision the sounds that are in the field of hearing and so forth but what it is that ever it is that embraces all that we don't pay much attention to it we can't even think about it it's like trying to look at your head you know you try to look at your head and what do you find you don't even find the black blob in the middle of things you just don't find anything and yet that is that out of which you see just as space is that out of which the stars shine so with something very clear about all this that that which you can't put your finger on that which always escapes you that which is completely elusive the blank seems to be absolutely necessary for there to be anything whatsoever now let's take this further karley also is the principle of death because she carries a scimitar in one hand and a severed head in the other death this is tremendously important to think about we put it off death is swept under the carpet in our culture in the hospital they try to keep you alive as long as possible in utter desperation they won't tell you that you're going to die they when their relatives have to be informed that it's a hopeless case they say don't tell this to the patient and all the relatives come around with hollow grins and say well you'll be alright in about a month and then we'll go but have a holiday somewhere and sit by the sea and listen to the birds what not and the dying person knows that this is mockery well of course we've made death howl with all kinds of ghouls we've invented dreadful after lives I mean the Christian version of heaven is as abominable as the Christian version of hell I mean nobody wants to be in church forever children are absolutely horrified when they hear these hymns which say prostrate before thy throne to lie and gaze and gaze on thee they can't imagine what this imagery means I mean in a very subtle theological way I could wangle that statement around make it extremely profound I mean to be prostrate at once and to gaze on the other hand see is it coincident here opposite Oram a coincidence of opposites which is very very deep but to a child it is a crick in the neck and that that's the sort of imagery we're brought up with so the idea of what might happen after death well you're going to be faced with your judge the one who knows all about you this is big Papa who knows you were a naughty boy and a very naughty girl especially go from the beginning of things he's going to look right through to the core of your inauthentic existence and what kind of heebie-jeebies may come up or you maybe believe in reincarnation and you think that your next life will be the rewards and the punishments for what you've done in this life and you know you got away with murder in this life none of us awful things are going to happen next time around do you look upon death as a catastrophe then there are other people who say well when you're dead you're dead just your nothing gonna happen at all so what you ought to worry about well we don't quite like that idea because it exposes you know what's it be like to die to go to sleep and never never never wake up well a lot of things it's not going to be like it's not going to be like being buried alive it's not going to be like being in the darkness forever I tell you what it's going to be like as if you never had existed at all not only you but everything else as well the just there was never anything and there's no one to regret it and there's no problem well I'll think about that for a while it's kind of a weird feeling you get when you really think about that you really imagine it just to stop altogether and it says you can't even call it stop because you can't have stopped without start and there wasn't any star there's just nothing well then when you come to think that's the way it was before you were born if you go back in memory as far as you can go you get to the same place as you go forward in your anticipation of the futures to what it's going to be like to be dead integrins is your funny ideas that this blankness is the necessary counterpart of what we call being now we all think we're alive don't we I mean we're really here that there is something called existence no the existentialist uh sighing thoroughness you know yeah but how could you bringing that as a reality unless you had once been dead how what gives us any ghost of a notion that we are here except by contrast with the fact that we once weren't and later on won't we but this thing is a cycle like positive and negative poles in electricity so this then is the value of the symbolism of she is black she the wound principle the receptive the in standing the void and the dark and so that is to come into the presence of the God who has no image behind the father image behind the mother image behind the image of light inaccessible and behind the image of profound and abysmal darkness there's something else which we can't conceive at all Dionysius the Areopagite called it the luminous darkness nagarjuna called it sunita the void Shankara called it Brahman that which can only of which nothing at all can be said neti neti beyond all conception whatsoever and you see that is not atheism in the formal sense of the word this is a profoundly religious attitude because what it corresponds to practically is an attitude to life of total trust of letting go when we form images of God there are all really exhibitions of our lack of faith something to hold onto something to grasp how firm a foundation what lies underneath us the Rock of Ages or whatever I infest the blue but when we don't grasp we have the attitude of faith if you let go of all the idols you will of course discover that what this unknown is which is the foundation of the universe is precisely you it's not the you you think you are now it's not your opinion in yourself it's not your idea or image of yourself it's not the chronic sense of muscular strain which we usually call I you can't grasp it of course not why would you need to suppose you could what would you do with it and who would do what with it you could never get at it so there is that profound central mystery and the attitude of faith is to stop chasing it stop grabbing it because if that happens the most amazing things follow but all these ideas of the spiritual the godly as this attitude of an must and we have been laid down the laws which we are bound to follow all this chairs is not the only way of being religious and are relating to the ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves in the world you

Channel: Ambient Life

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Keywords: Ambient Wisdom, Alan Watts, Philosophy, Nature of God, Nature of Death, Nature of God and Death, God, Death, Wisdom, Existentialism, Images of God, Ambient Music, Ambient Life

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Length: 25min 46sec (1546 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 05 2015