Alan Watts The Mystery Teachings of Jesus Christ (Remastered)

between Western psychology psychiatry and psychotherapy and the so-called religions of Asia there is common ground because both are interested in changing states of human consciousness whereas institutional Western religion Christianity Judaism and even Islam are relatively less interested in this matter Western religions are more concerned with behavior doctrine and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and of the world but this matter concerns psychiatry in psychology very much only those states of consciousness which are not normal are usually treated in Western psychology as being in some way sick there are of course exceptions to this and they have increasingly been exceptions in the work of young and to some extent even of graddic of prince hong of more modern people rogers and ronald lang changing consciousness is often looked upon as a form of therapy but in general different states of consciousness from the normal are regarded as a form of sickness and therefore official and institutional psychiatry constitutes itself the guardian of sanity and of socially approved experience of reality and very often it seems to me that reality appears rather much the way the world is seen on a bleak Monday morning in this official doctrine I might even say Dogma of what reality is because after all we know that our science such as it is of psychology is founded in the scientific naturalism of the 19th century and the metaphysical and mythological assumptions of that science still underlie a great deal of psychological thinking in behaviorism eminently but also to a large extent in official psychoanalysis indeed one might say that psychoanalysis is based on Newtonian mechanics and in fact could be called psycho hydraulics not that that analogy is altogether inappropriate because there are certainly respects in which our psychic life flows and exhibits the dynamics of water but of course we want to know what kind of water and for the scientific naturalism of the 19th century the basic energies of nature were considered to be very much inferior to human consciousness in quality ends tackle the biologist at that time would think of the energy of the universe as blind energy and correspondingly it seems to me that Freud thought of the libido as essentially blind unconscious energy embodying only a kind of formless unstructured and insatiable lust this is a generalization some modification in that thinking is of as possible but the tendency is to regard all that which lies below the surface of human consciousness as being less evolved because you must remember that this was also the time of Darwin's theories of evolution of seeing the human mind as a fortuitous development from much more primitive forms of life coming forth by purely mechanical processes by natural selection and by the survival of the fittest and therefore man was in general seen as a fluke of nature an embodiment of Reason emotion and values for which the more basic processes of nature had no sympathy and about which they did not care if therefore the human race is to flourish we must take charge of evolution f-two spontaneous process that means must be directed by human ingenuity despite the fact that although our brains are capable of dealing with a colossal number of variables at once our conscious attention is not most people cannot consider more than three variables at the same time without using a pencil and this shows that in many ways the scanning process of man's conscious attention is very inadequate for dealing with the infinitely many variables the mounted dimensional processes of the natural universe however a serious attempt has been made and scientific naturalism issued in a fantastic fight with nature in this whole notion of the conquest and subordination of nature which has as a matter of fact very ancient non scientific and Biblical origins with the idea of man as the head and chief and ruler of nature in the image of God and the time has now domed upon us all when our attempts to beat nature into submission are having alarming results because we see that it's very dangerous to mess around with processes that we don't understand that have enormous numbers of variables and we begin to wonder whether we hadn't better let well enough alone at the same time although I said that Western psychology had more in common or more common interest with oriental religion than it does with Western religion there is a sense in which psychiatry and psychotherapy are becoming the religion of the West psychoanalysis has much in common with the forms and procedures of institutional religion there is for example apostolic succession the passing down of mana of qualified power to practice therapy from the Father founder Sigmund Freud through his immediate apostles to an enormous company of Archbishop's and bishops among whom there are of course as there were with Christianity Horatio acts such as young and broad egg and rank and Reich and the heresy arcs are duly excommunicated and anathematized there are rituals as there are also rituals with religion there is the sacrament of the couch there is the spiritual discipline of free association there is the mystic knowledge of the interpretation of dreams and our there are also the two great symbolic fetishes the long one and the round one now it's extraordinarily easy to make fun of all this and we must not forget that we owe a tremendous debt to Freud if for nothing else than pointing out that much of ourselves of which we are aware in terms of the conscious ego is not really ourselves it is something superficial however we find its nature it is superficial and the realities of human life are not under the gaze of it's scanning process at least not in the ordinary way and that was a tremendous revelation there's no question about that but one sees troublesome signs when the doctrines and processes of Psychiatry psychoanalysis and so forth become officialized and I think Thomas SAS in his books the myth of mental illness and the manufacture of madness is pointing out something extremely important to us which is that in effect the psychological official of today is the priest and that he is beginning to exercise the same sort of controls over human life as we're exercised by the church in the Middle Ages so that a professor of psychiatry at Columbia or Harvard or Yale Medical School's passed today the same sort of intellectual respectability and authority as the professor of theology at the University of Toledo or Padua would have had in the year 1400 now you must realize that the theologians of those days not simply believed in their cosmology in the theology they almost knew it was true in the same way that our scientists know certain things to be true despite the fact that they changed their opinions very often while they hold them they have in effect the force of dogma has witnessed the anathematizing of Velikovsky org is uncomfortable ideas and therefore there are heresies existing today which are persecuted in the same way as heresies were persecuted by the Holy Inquisition and they are persecuted out of kindness in exactly the same way that the Holy Inquisition persecuted heresy out of kindness and deep concern for human beings that is unimaginable to us but it was so for after all if you seriously believe that someone who did not hold the Catholic faith and who voluntarily rejected it would be tortured physically and spiritually for ever and ever and ever in hell you would resort to almost any means to preserve a fellow human being from such a fate chillie if the complaint or disease of heresy from which he suffered was infectious you would first of all reason with him and if he was not responsive to reason he would resort to abuse and to forceful argument and if he was not responsive to that she would give him shock treatment and bang him about his that didn't work the thumbscrew in the rack and the Iron Maiden and if that didn't work as a last desperate resort you would burn him at the stake in the pious hope that in the midst of those searing fires he would think better and make the last act of perfect contrition and so be rescued from everlasting damnation and you did all this when the spirit of this is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you in the spirit of the surgeon who is very very sorry indeed that he has to make you undergo this extremely painful operation but it is in your best interest and there really is at least a 50/50 chance that you may survive and so therefore in perfectly scientific medical spirit people may be very arbitrarily and without due process deprived of their civil rights incarcerated in prisons that are in many cases much worse than prisons for criminals and generally left to rot be neglected and ignored and when bumptious given shock treatment or put in solitary confinement for what because they have unorthodox and heretical states of consciousness a lot of these people are not dangerous until provoked into being dangerous by being ignored by being treated as machines and in generally defined as non-human and if you are defined as non-human there's precious little you can do about it because everything you say that sounds human will be taken as a kind of utterance of a mechanical man as imitating humaneness out of lunatic cunning you will be suspicious everything you say will be listened to in a different way and with different ears and you will have one hell of a time talking yourself out of it because there are really are no rules as to what one must do when incarcerated for having unorthodox consciousness there is no clear road to repentance and this is found likewise in jails where people are incarcerated on one to ten year sentences as in places like Vacaville California where when I visited such prisons young men have come to me in perfect desperation saying I don't know what happened to me because I want to live like a decent citizen I know I've done things that are wrong but I simply don't know what what is expected of me here if I try to do what's expected they say I'm compliant and that seems to be some sort of a sickness Thomas fast drew attention to this when he quoted a discussion of the types of schoolchildren who may very well need therapy there were overachieving children they were underachieving children there were children who exhibited erratic patterns there were children who were sort of the dahle mediocre in fact every sort of child can be given a diagnostic name for his behavior which sounds sick as young once suggested life itself is a disease with a very poor prognosis he's linked us on for years and invariably ends with death and I submit that in our present knowledge of the human mind such power in the hands of psychiatrists is amazingly dangerous for I would suggest that today we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300 and that while there are indeed individuals who are certainly able to perform psychotherapy it is the sheerest arrogance for anybody to say that he is officially qualified to do so we do not know how it is done just as we do not know really how musical artistic and literary genius is done you cannot really teach it you can put the tools for doing these things into people's hands and you can show them how to use the tools but whether they will use those tools with genius is quite unpredictable and this is above all true of the art of psychotherapy we don't know how it's done we've got some vague ideas there are probably are some people who by reason of their mental derangement are probably not qualified to perform it because they are maybe out just to make other people into messes but to say that there are certain standards and certain examinations that can be passed and certificates that could be issued which do indeed qualify people for this work is I think pernicious nonsense and is used of course out of economic self-interest when those who consider themselves official therapists run into competition the same was done by religion I was talking imagine it to a Buddhist priest in Thailand some years ago I was looking at some books in a bookshop in the precincts of the Buddhist temple and I was wandering over and I noticed a book on a certain form of Buddhist meditation and I murmured he satipatthana which is the name of a certain kind of Buddhist meditation and our voice suddenly said to me you practice satipatthana I looked up and there was the skinny Buddhist monk in a yellow robe with rather red eyes looking at me I said not exactly satipatthana I used a different method it's called Zen oh sorry ma Tama not sin I said oh well it's something like it isn't it no well it's rather like yoga I said isn't it not yoga no slightly put on a different Oni right way well look I said to him I have a lot of Roman Catholic friends who tell me that their way is the only right way Who am I to believe you know I said you know you're like someone who's got a a ferry boat for crossing the river I used the Buddhist simile and another fellow down the stream has opened up ferry business and you go to the government and say he is not authorized to operate a ferry boat because he's competition to you let all operate ferry boats who will and if you haven't got the sentence to get off to stay off one that sinks it's your fault and after all I could say to him do you believe that everything that happens to you is your own karma so why worry but now it's so interesting that since official psychiatry and I underline that word official because I hope those of you in this audience who are therapists will regard yourselves as an official is that we'll give you an out well nevertheless official psychiatry has curious things in common with Western religion as well as with Eastern with Eastern I said only insofar as it has an interest in states of consciousness and inclines to regard other states of consciousness than the ordinary as sick but it has one very important feature in common with Western religion and that we have to go a little bit into Western religious history and ask ourselves what in western religion and especially in Christianity and this goes also for Judaism Islam what is the great heresy curiously enough the great heresy was first in the West committed by no less a person than Jesus Christ who believed himself to be God this of course will be unquestionably true if you think that the gospel of st. John has historical value it's a little Vega in the synoptic Gospels but if you read the gospel of San John there is absolutely no doubt about it for he said I and the father are one he who has seen me has seen the father before Abraham was I am I am the way the truth and the life I am the resurrection and the life he said all that according to this gospel and that is something that in the Western world you are not supposed to say especially you are not supposed to believe it and naturally it was very difficult for Jesus because he was saying all this in the context of the Hebrew culture and he tried to find language in the Hebrew Scriptures with which to express his state of consciousness because he had an unusual state of consciousness as I read it he had cosmic consciousness otherwise known as mystical experience otherwise known as moksha Nirvana Bodhi satori-sama Alfama or what you will and that happens to people it has happened as far back as we know it happens all over the world and in all cultures we don't know very much about it we don't really know ways in which to make it happen because it seems to be of the nature of it that it is a spontaneous surprise but it unquestionably happens and most people keep their mouths shut about it when it does I had a friend who in the middle of having a stroke had this illumination and he said to me I fear to speak to my friends at this but it was the most beautiful experience I shall never be afraid of death in fact I recommend everyone to have a stroke this was my friend Shawn father lately deceased Greek Beta Tau Jesus certainly had this transformation of consciousness and he was crucified for it why because he had committed an act of insubordination and treason again the cosmic government because if you believe that God is a monarch an absolute omniscient and omnipotent authority shall we say a sort of cosmic ego then to claim to be that is to introduce democracy into the Kingdom of Heaven to use up divine authority and to speak in its name without proper authorization and they asked Jesus by what authority - you speak of heaven or of men and he was tricky about answering that one he said by what authority did John the Baptist speak when they were nervous about answering that one he could have asked by what authority did Isaiah speak etcetera on Moses but Moses became official Authority and if you could wangle it that what you said was simply an extension of what Moses said because rabbi so-and-so said it who got it from rabbi so and so who got it from rabbi so and so who got it from rabbi so and so who got it from Moses then it's okay notice this that to be an authority today in the academic world depends on documentation it's not enough to say for I say unto you you must put in your footnotes and the more the footnotes the more the authority obviously so our dissertations tend to be books about books about books about books and our libraries multiplied by mitosis so when somebody speaks as an authority that means speaks has the author that's all it means it's a statement for which you of which you are the author and therefore for which you assume responsibility that is to speak with authority and to be original is likewise not to be freaky but to speak from the origin that is what Christians mean when they say to speak in the spirit to have your mouth possessed by the Holy Spirit as they believe the mouth of Jesus was possessed by the Holy Spirit so the gospel of Jesus which of course was hushed up from its inception was that wake up everybody and find out who you are asking that again in the Gospel of John they pointing to his disciples may be one even as you father and I are one and when he was accused of blasphemy the Jews took up stones to stone him you know and he said many good works have I shown you from the Father and from which of these do you stone me and they said for a good work we don't stone you but for blasphemy because you being a man make yourself God now listen to the reply he said is it not written in your law I have said Ye are gods and if that is what the scripture says it can't be denied so why do you tell me I blaspheme because I say I am a son of God no answer because I said I am a son of God he doesn't say that in your King James translation it says I am the son of God and you'll see the V italicized then you will think that that is for emphasis if you don't realize that passages in italics in the King James Bible are to Appalachians by the translators in Greek leaving out the definite article is equivalent of having the indefinite article we asked to see you is a son of God not oh yes to feel so son of in Hebrew and in Arabic means of the nature of when we call someone a son-of-a-bitch we mean busy and so if you call someone the son of god you mean divine of the nature of God as the Nicene Creed subsequently defined it he is of one substance with the father but what happened was that this being blasphemy for the Jews it became blasphemy that for the Christians for anyone else than Jesus to say they said ok baby it was so with you but there it stops no more of this business and as a result of that Jesus was made irrelevant by pedestal ization by being kicked upstairs in spite of the fact that he said greater works than these that I do shall you do oh no upstairs with you baby because we just can't have that sort of thing going on in a monarchical universe we're not gonna have democracy in the kingdom of heaven so this is why the gospel is impossible because we are supposed to follow the example of Christ where he says for example be not anxious for the morrow do not worry about what you shall eat what you will drink and what you shall wear God will take care of you doesn't he take care of the birds don't the flowers grow and they are wonderful they're crazy they're great what are you worrying about I've never heard a sermon preached on that never because it's totally subversive the economy would crash so they say oh yes that's all very well but he was the boss's son see he had that colossal advantage take up your cross and follow him hey but wait a minute I don't know I'm going to be resurrected three days later I can't do all those miracles he had an unfair advantage so how could you ask us to follow the example of Christ but supposing he didn't have an unfair advantage supposing that what was true about Jesus as a son of God is true of us only only a few of us know it and we are pretty careful to be quiet about it lest the same thing happened to us has happened to Jesus and indeed it often does and you know you get these people from Arkansas or Texas or anywhere in the Bible Belt who never heard of the Upanishads and they have this Cosmic Consciousness experience and they realize that that's what happened to Jesus they say I'm Jesus come back well everybody says to them you aren't Jesus is pretty obvious you're not Jesus you're just charged you just Joe Doakes well they say he says that's what they said about Jesus he has a perfect argument except they say you're not much of a Jesus they say all right if you're Jesus command that these stones me be made bread and he says a wicked and deceitful generation seeketh for a sign and there shall no sign be given now well why talk about this and is it interesting is it important for the human being to realize that in some sense of the word whatever it means he is God or one with God as is plainly taught by the Hindus hinted at by the Buddhists only they don't like to put it out as a concept in case people will use the concept as an idol to hang on to they want you to find out for yourself and not believe in it and certainly the Daoists understand it the Sufis understand it a lot of people understand it but so what well the importance of it is this that to know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe you feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it you feel in other words that the whole energy which expresses itself in the galaxies is intimate it is not something to which you are a stranger but it is that with which you whatever that is are intimately bound out that in your seeing your hearing you're talking you're thinking you're moving you express that which it is which moves the Sun and other stars and if you don't know that if you don't feel that well naturally you feel alien you feel a stranger in the world and if you feel a stranger you feel hostile and therefore you start to bulldoze things about to beat it up and to try and make the world submit to your will and you become a real troublemaker so I feel also one reason why you become hostile is that feeling that you were just brought into this place that your father and mother went up to some monkey business that they probably shouldn't have done or it was bad rubber goods and as a result of this here you are you didn't ask to be here well you always feel you can turn around and blame them you can blame somebody you can blame the government you can blame the rascals you can play to blame the cheaters always supposing you yourself under a school which is a long odds you always can blame someone and say I didn't ask for it take it away and yet and yet and yet very few people are all too ready to take it away Tommy who said that the only serious philosophical problem is whether or not to commit suicide and if you don't if you don't say take it away are you going to do you've really got to assume responsibility for it we've got to say yes to what happens it's my karma and that doesn't mean merely those are there are many in misinterpretations of the doctrine of karma it's usually and popularly understood is that what happens to you either fortunate or unfortunate is the result of good or bad deeds in a previous life well that's popular superstition the real meaning of karma the word in Sanskrit means simply do and if I say of an event it is your karma it is saying it is your doing so the exposition a book which would expand karma would be not so much a whodunit as a you'd on it but that seems fantastic now therefore what I propose we do is that we instead of just ideologized we have a clinical experience you know in a psychiatric school in medical school it's very usual for a doctor to bring a patient out in front of the students and talk with the patient as a kind of demonstration he says I want you to recognize the difference between a psychopath and a manic-depressive or a schizophrenic or something they don't know what all these things mean and especially the schizophrenia and so he he has a dialogue with the patient right there so let us suppose that I'm the patient and you are the students and the doctors and I suffer from what you would call the delusion that I'm God and therefore you might want to do something about me or with me or humor me or ask me questions and so I'm perfectly willing to submit to your examination and your treatment and invite you to help yourselves now will you marry me No [Laughter] yes sleep Enya is like politics one sleeps on the right side and then when you're tired of that you sleep on the left when you're tired of that you sleep on your back and when you tired of that you sleep on your stomach and it is thus that the world goes wrong now you don't become god yes no remember three persons but one God could I tell you a little bit about Satan yes although the matter is a little esoteric not I told you all about it in the book of Job where you will see that in the court of heaven Satan is the district attorney he is not as Christians imagine the enemy of heaven and the enemy of mankind he's merely the person who sees the bad side of things and carries out the dirty work and therefore he saw job and wondered whether job really was as great a guy as he seemed to be and suggested that God should appoint a committee of Investigation to find out and the committee did its work very thoroughly but the case went against Satan because it was proved in the end the job was an honorable man now you notice that although we pay the salary of the district attorney whenever there's a great criminal case before the public eye people begin to take the side of the underdog and the prosecutor always has less public sympathy than the defense except in political trials on the right hand of God and you know the defense is always on the right-hand of the charge in court is our only mediator and advocate which was the phrase referring to Jesus Christ our Lord so there is the defense and there is the prosecution and it is the function of Satan to be the prosecutor there is a good deal more to it than that because before all this started as in a stage play there was an arrangement in the greenroom before coming on stage in which certain things were understood but that are only to be revealed when the curtain goes down at the end of the play yes but he doesn't know it why do you hide it's for the same reason you're hiding yes who else on man has free will to the extent that he knows who he is not otherwise where I got it from yes to the extent that she knows who she is yes that is correct I know more God than any of you well that because saying quite a bit yes what is not God there is nothing that is not God it's like waking up from a dream after a while ones experience begins to have what I would call I haven't we been here before feeling going round and round and round and then you begin wondering where am I going and to answer that question you have to can't find out what you want and so I went into that very thoroughly what do I want to happen and of course as soon as you ask yourself that you begin to fantasize and our amazing technology is that course an expression of human desire desire for power for what we want to achieve so I simply set myself to thinking through how far we could go and so I soon found myself at a great push-button place where I had a fantastic mechanism with buttons available for every conceivable thing I could wish so I spent quite a bit of time playing with those and science fiction wasn't it you know you go going like that and here is Cleopatra and so on you know and then press this button a symphonic music in 4-channel sound 16-channel stock anything you know the all possible pleasures are available and when you know you're like everybody's dream of the sultan and the palace you suddenly notice there's a button labeled surprise you push that and here we are yes boredom is have caused the problem boredom is the other side of creativity and the energy of creation has as its that is the yang the inside of that energy is called boredom everything of course is fundamentally Yang and Yin if you understand that you really don't need to understand anything else as God what responsibility do I feel to ameliorate evil in the world I begin with the point that I am responsible for the way the world is if I couldn't feel that I'd have to blame somebody else I'm not willing to do that because I know that under various changing circumstances it might be appropriate for me to be as big a rascal as Rascals of bean now as to improving the world the world is always improving it may look to some people slow but it's improving even when it is declining because the world works sinden undulatory process like a wave it goes up and it goes down it goes up and it goes down and it couldn't go up all the time because if it did we wouldn't know that that was up so it goes down some of the time so that we can know when it goes up because if we didn't know when it went up it would like it would be like being in a space where everything was light there'd be nothing to write home about there will be no black marks on the space and so it would be like a piece of perfectly empty paper similarly it would be in a completely black space also be a kind of unconsciousness with nothing to write home about does there be nothing nothing would make any difference so therefore if you're going to have black you won't know that it's black unless you have some white and if you're going to have white you won't know that it's white unless you have some black director that's not a teaching it's a co on a co on a Cohen in the Japanese word for a spiritual problem used in Zen Buddhism such as what is the sound of one hand and these problems are given to those who ask questions concerning their spiritual development and sometimes s and Paul pointed out commandments are given not in the expectation that they will be obeyed but in the expectation that they will reveal something to those who hear them that was some Paul's comment on the whole Mosaic law yes the hereafter is of course now because if you will examine it closely there is no when else than now and if you want to make hell of it you can make hell of it if you want to make heaven of it you can make heaven of it target repository it's all here always was always will be what is dead there is an undulation in consciousness how would you know you were alive unless you'd once been dead yes God why was funny necessary for him have material possessions necessary for you it wasn't unnecessary for him to have material possessions they said of Sir John the Baptist that he was in aesthetic but of Jesus this man consorts with gluttonous and wine-bibber sand comes eating and drinking and when the lady mary borden precious ointment on his feet and anointed him they said the same thing that the members of the vestry say to the minister today why this great expense couldn't it all have been sold for much money and given to the poor it is a problem sure but you see in many ways when you get down to these very deep ethical problems well there sure is no easy decision one way or the other you must look in the path the problem from the point of view of an artist which way of doing this is in some sense greater it may be better to go off with a bang than with a whimper there are rituals as there are also rituals with religion there is the sacrament of the couch there is the spiritual discipline of free association there is the mystic knowledge of the interpretation of dreams and are there are also the two great symbolic fetishes the long one and the round one now it's extraordinarily easy to make fun of all this and we must not forget that we owe a tremendous debt to Freud if for nothing else than pointing out that that much of ourselves of which we are aware in terms of the conscious ego is not really ourselves it is something superficial however we find its nature it is superficial and the realities of human life are not under the gaze of its scanning process at least not in the ordinary way and that was a tremendous revelation there's no question about that but one sees troublesome signs when the doctrines and processes of psychiatry psychoanalysis and so forth become officialized and I think Thomas SAS in his books the myth of mental illness and the manufacture of madness is pointing out something extremely important to us which is that in effect the psychological official of today is the priest and that he is beginning to exercise the same sort of controls over human life as we're exercised by the church in the Middle Ages so that a professor of psychiatry at Columbia or Harvard or Yale Medical School's passed today the same sort of intellectual respectability and authority as the professor of theology at the University of Toledo or Padua would have had in the year 1400 now you must realize that the theologians of those days not simply believed in their cosmology and the theology they almost knew it was true in the same way that our scientists know certain things to be true despite the fact that they changed their opinions very often while they hold them they have in effect the force of dogma has witnessed the anathematizing a very cough ski or his uncomfortable ideas and therefore there are heresies existing today which are persecuted in the same way as heresies were persecuted by the Holy Inquisition and they are persecuted out of kindness in exactly the same way that the Holy Inquisition persecuted heresy out of kindness and deep concern for human beings that is unimaginable to us but it was so for after all if you seriously believe that someone who did not hold the Catholic faith and who voluntarily rejected it would be tortured physically and spiritually for ever and ever and ever in hell you would resort to almost any means to preserve a fellow human being from such a fate especially if the complaint or disease of heresy from which he suffered was infectious you would first of all reason with him and if he was not responsive to reason he would resort to abuse and to forceful argument and if he was not responsive to that she would give him sharp treatment and bang him about if that didn't work the thumbscrew in the rack and the Iron Maiden and if that didn't work as a last desperate resort you would burn him at the stake in the pious hope that in the midst of those searing fires he would think better and make a last act of perfect contrition and so be rescued from everlasting damnation and you did all this when the spirit of this is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you in the spirit of the surgeon who is very very sorry indeed that he has to make you undergo this extremely painful operation but it is in your best interest and there really is at least a 50/50 chance which you may survive and so therefore in perfectly scientific medical spirit people may be very arbitrarily and without due process deprived of their civil rights incarcerated in prisons that are in many cases much worse than prisons for criminals and generally left to rot be neglected and ignored and when bumptious given shock treatment or put in solitary confinement for what because they have unorthodox and heretical states of consciousness a lot of these people are not dangerous until provoked into being dangerous by being ignored by being treated as machines and in generally defined as non-human and if you are defined as non-human as British little you can do about it because everything you say that sounds human we'll be taken as a kind of utterance of a mechanical man as imitating humanists out of lunatic cunning you will be suspicious everything you say will be listened to in a different way and with different ears and you will have one hell of a time talking yourself out of it because there really are no rules as to what one must do when incarcerated for having unorthodox consciousness there is no clear road to repentance and this is found likewise in jails where people are incarcerated on one to ten year sentences as in places like Vacaville California where when I visited such prisons young men have come to be in perfect desperation saying I don't know what happened to me because I want to live like a decent citizen I know I've done things that are wrong but I simply don't know what what is expected of me here if I try to do what's expected they say I'm compliant and that seems to be some sort of a sickness Thomas fast drew attention to this when he quoted a discussion of the types of school children who may very well need therapy there were overachieving children they were underachieving children there were children who exhibited erratic patterns there were children who were sort of the dahle mediocre in fact every sort of child can be given a diagnostic name for his behavior which sounds sick as young once suggested life itself is the disease with a very poor prognosis he's linked us on for years and invariably ends with death and I submit that in our present knowledge of the human mind such power in the hands of psychiatrists is amazingly dangerous for I would suggest that today we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300 and that while there are indeed individuals who are certainly able to perform psychotherapy it is the surest arrogance for anybody to say that he is officially qualified to do so we do not know how it is done just as we do not know really how musical artistic and literary genius is done you cannot really teach it you can put the tools for doing these things into people's hands and you can show them how to use the tools but whether they will use those tools with genius is quite unpredictable and this is above all true of the art of psychotherapy we don't know how it's done we've got some vague ideas there probably are some people who by reason of their mental derangement are probably not qualified to perform it because they are maybe out just to make other people into messes not to say that there are certain standards and certain examinations that can be passed and certificates that could be issued which do indeed qualify people for this work is I think pernicious nonsense and is used of course out of economic self-interest when those who consider themselves official therapists run into competition the same was done by religion I was talking imagine it to a Buddhist priest in Thailand some years ago I was looking at some books a bookshop in the precincts of the Buddhist temple and I was wandering over and I noticed a book on a certain form of Buddhist meditation and I murmured he satipatthana which is the name of a certain kind of Buddhist meditation and our voice suddenly said to me you practice satipatthana I looked up and there was the skinny Buddhist monk in a yellow robe with rather red eyes looking at me I said not exactly satipatthana I used a different method it's called Zen oh sorry Madonna not Zen I said oh well it's something like it isn't it no well it's rather like yoga I said isn't it not yoga no slightly put on a different Oni right way well look I said to him I have a lot of Roman Catholic friends who tell me that their way is the only right way Who am I to believe you know I said you know you're like someone who's got a a ferry boat for crossing the river I used the Buddhist simile and another fellow down the stream was opened up ferry business and you go to the government and say he is not authorized to operate a ferryboat because he's competition to you let all operate ferry boats who will and if you haven't got the sentence to get off to stay off one that sinks it's your call and after all I could say to him you believe that everything that happens to you is your own karma so why worry but now it's so interesting that since official psychiatry and I underline that word official because I hope those of you in this audience who are therapists will regard yourselves as an official Lisa I will give you an out but nevertheless official psychiatry has curious things in common with Western religion as well as with Eastern evil East and I said only insofar as it has an interest in states of consciousness and inclines regarde other states of consciousness than the ordinary has sick but it has one very important feature in common with Western religion and that we have to go a little bit into Western religious history and ask ourselves what in Western religion and especially in Christianity and this goes also for Judaism Islam what is the great heresy curiously enough the great heresy was first in the West committed by no less a person than Jesus Christ who believed himself to be God this of course will be unquestionably true if you think that the Gospel of st. John has historical value it's a little Vega in the synoptic Gospels but if you read the Gospel of cynjohn there is absolutely no doubt about it for he said I and the father are one he who has seen me has seen the father before Abraham was I am I am the way the truth and the life I am the resurrection and the life he said all that according to this gospel and that is something that in the Western world you are not supposed to say especially you are not supposed to believe it and naturally it was very difficult for Jesus because he was saying all this in the context of the Hebrew culture and he tried to find language in the Hebrew Scriptures with which to express his state of consciousness because he had an unusual state of consciousness as I read it he had cosmic consciousness otherwise known as mystical experience otherwise known as moksha Nirvana Bodhi satori-sama alfama or what you will and that happens to people it has happened as far back as we know it happens all over the world and in all cultures we don't know very much about it we don't really know ways in which to make it happen because it seems to be of the nature of it that it is a spontaneous surprise but it unquestionably happens and most people keep their mouths shut about it when it does I had a friend who in the middle of having a stroke had this illumination and he said to me I fear to speak to my friends at this but it was the most beautiful experience I shall never be afraid of death in fact I recommend everyone to have a stroke [Music] this was my friend Sean father lately deceased Greek painter but Jesus certainly had this transformation of consciousness and he was crucified for it why because he had committed an act of insubordination and treason against the cosmic government because if you believe that God is a monarch an absolute omniscient and omnipotent authority shall we say a sort of cosmic ego then to claim to be that is to introduce democracy into the Kingdom of Heaven to use up divine authority and to speak in its name without proper authorization and they asked Jesus by what authority do you speak of heaven or of men and he was tricky about answering that one he said by what authority did John the Baptist speak and they were nervous about answering that one he could have asked by what authority did Isaiah etcetera on Moses but Moses became official Authority and if you could wangle it that what you said was simply an extension of what Moses said because rabid stars and if you don't know that if you don't feel that well naturally you feel alien you feel a stranger in the world and if you feel a stranger you feel hostile and therefore you start to bulldoze things about to beat it up and to try and make the world submit to your will and you become a real troublemaker so I feel also one reason why you become hostile is that feeling that you were just brought into this place that your father and mother went up to some monkey business that they probably shouldn't have done or it was bad rubber goods and as a result of this here you are you didn't ask to be here well you always feel you can turn around and blame them you can blame somebody you can blame the government you can blame the rascals you can play that blame the cheaters always supposing you yourself under a school which is a long odds you always could blame someone and say I didn't ask for it take it away and yet and yet and yet very few people are all too ready to take it away Tom you said that the only serious philosophical problem is whether or not to commit suicide and if you don't if you don't say take it away are you gonna do you've really got to assume responsibility for it we've got to say yes to what happens it's my karma and that doesn't mean merely those are there are many in misinterpretations of the doctrine of karma it's usually in popularly understood that what happens to you either fortunate or unfortunate is the result of good or bad deeds in a previous life well that's popular superstition the real meaning of karma the word in Sanskrit means simply do and if I say of an event it is your karma it is saying it is your doing so the exposition book which would expand karma would be not so much a whodunit as a you died but that seems fantastic now therefore what I propose we do is that we instead of just ideologized we have a clinical experience you know in a psychiatric school in medical school it's very usual for a doctor to bring a patient out in front of the students and talk with the patient as a kind of demonstration he says I want you to recognize the difference between a psychopath and a manic-depressive or a schizophrenic or something they don't know what all these things mean and especially the schizophrenia and so he he has a dialogue with the patient right there so let us suppose that I'm the patient and you are the students and the doctors and I suffer from what you would call the delusion that I'm God and therefore you might want to do something about me or with me or humor me or ask me questions and so I'm vertically willing to submit your examination and your treatment and invite you to help yourselves now will you marry me No [Laughter] yes sleeping is like politics one sleeps on the right side and then when you're tired of that you sleep on the left when you're tired of that you sleep on your back and when you tired of that you sleep on your stomach and it is thus that the world goes wrong now you don't become God no remember three persons but one God could I tell you a little bit about Satan yes although the matter is a little esoteric not I told you all about it in the book of Job where you will see that in the court of heaven Satan is the district attorney he is not as Christians imagine the enemy of heaven and the enemy of mankind he's merely the person who sees the bad side of things and carries out the dirty work and therefore he saw job and wondered whether job really was as great a guy as he seemed to be and suggested that God should appoint a committee of Investigation to find out and the committee did its work very thoroughly but the case went against Satan because it was proved in the end the job was an honorable man now you notice that although we pay the salary of the district attorney whenever there's a great criminal case before the public eye people begin to take the side of the underdog and the prosecutor always has less public sympathy than the defense except in political trials on the right hand of God and you know the defense is always on the right hand of the judge in court is our only mediator and advocate which was the phrase referring to Jesus Christ our God so there is the defense and there is the prosecution and it is the function of Satan to be the prosecutor there is a good deal more to it than that because before all this started lies in a stage play there was an arrangement in the green room before coming on stage in which certain things were understood but that are only to be revealed when the curtain goes down at the end of the play yes but he doesn't know it why do you hide is for the same reason you're hiding yes who else on man has free will to the extent that he knows who he is not otherwise where I got it from yes to the extent that she knows who she is yes [Music] that is correct I know more God than any of you well that because saying quite a bit yes what is not God there is nothing that is not God it's like waking up from a dream after a while one's experience begins to have what I would call I haven't we been here before or feeling going round and round and round and then you begin wondering where am i between Western psychology psychiatry and psychotherapy and the so-called religions of Asia there is common ground because both are interested in changing states of human consciousness whereas institutional Western religion Christianity Judaism and even Islam are relatively less interested in this matter Western religions are more concerned with behavior doctrine and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and of the world but this matter concerns psychiatry in psychology very much only those states of consciousness which are not normal are usually treated in Western psychology as being in some way sick there are of course exceptions to this and they have increasingly been exceptions in the work of young and to some extent even a product of prince hong of more modern people rogers and ronald lang changing consciousness is often looked upon as a form of therapy but in general different states of consciousness from the normal are regarded as a form of sickness and therefore official and institutional psychiatry constitutes itself the guardian of sanity and of socially approved experience of reality and very often it seems to me that reality appears rather much the way the world is seen on a bleak Monday morning in this official doctrine I might even say dogma of what reality is because after all we know that our science such as it is of psychology is founded in the scientific naturalism of the 19th century and the metaphysical and mythological assumptions of that science still underlie a great deal of psychological thinking in behaviorism eminently but also to a large extent in official psychoanalysis indeed one might say that psychoanalysis is based on Newtonian mechanics and in fact could be called psycho hydraulics not that that analogy is altogether inappropriate because there are certainly respects in which our psychic life flows and exhibits the dynamics of water but of course we want to know what kind of water and for the scientific naturalism of the 19th century the basic energies of nature were considered to be very much inferior to human consciousness in quality ernst haeckel the biologist at that time would think of the energy of the universe as blind energy and correspondingly it seems to me that Freud thought of the libido as essentially blind unconscious energy embodying only a kind of formless unstructured and insatiable lust this is a generalization some modification in that thinking is of course possible but the tendency is to regard all that which lies below the surface of human consciousness as being less evolved because you must remember that this was also the time of Darwin's theories of evolution of seeing the human mind as a fortuitous development from much more primitive forms of life coming forth by purely mechanical processes by natural selection and by the survival of the fittest and therefore man was in general seen as a fluke of nature an embodiment of Reason emotion and values for which the more basic processes of nature had no sympathy and about which they did not care if therefore the human race is to flourish we must take charge of evolution f2 spontaneous process that means must be directed by human ingenuity despite the fact that although our brains are capable of dealing with a colossal number of variables at once our conscious attention is not most people cannot consider more than three variables at the same time without using a pencil and this shows that in many ways the scanning process of man's conscious attention is very inadequate for dealing with the infinitely many variables the mounted dimensional processes of the natural universe however a serious attempt has been made and scientific naturalism issued in a fantastic fight with nature in this whole notion of the conquest and subordination of nature which has as a matter of fact very ancient non-scientific and biblical origins with the idea of man as the head and chief and ruler of nature in the image of God and the time has now domed upon us all when our attempts to beat nature into submission are having alarming results because we see that it's very dangerous to mess around with processes that we don't understand that have enormous numbers of variables and we begin to wonder whether we hadn't better let well enough alone at the same time although I said that Western psychology had more in common or more common interest with oriental religion than it does with Western religion there is a sense in which psychiatry and psychotherapy are becoming the religion of the West psychoanalysis has much in common with the forms and procedures of institutional religion there is for example apostolic succession the passing down of mana of qualified power to practice therapy from the Father founder Sigmund Freud through his immediate apostles to an enormous company of Archbishop's and bishops among whom there are of course as there were with Christianity heresy arcs such as urine and grout egg and rank and right and the heresy arcs are duly excommunicated and anathematized I saw and so said it who got it from rabbi so and so who got it from rabbi so and so who got it from rabbi so and so who got it from Moses then it's ok notice this that to be an authority today in the academic world depends on documentation it's not enough to say for I say unto you you must put in your footnotes and the more the footnotes the more the authority obviously so our dissertations tend to be books about books about books about books and our libraries multiply by mitosis so when somebody speaks as an authority that means speaks has the author and so it means it's a statement to which you of which you are the author and therefore for which you assume responsibility that is to speak with authority and to be original is likewise not to be freaky but to speak from the origin that is what Christians mean when they say to speak in the spirit to have your mouth possessed by the Holy Spirit as they believe the mouth of Jesus was possessed by the Holy Spirit so the gospel of Jesus which of course was hushed up from its inception was that wake up everybody and find out who you are asking that again in the Gospel of John they pointing to his disciples may be one even as you father and I are one and when he was accused of blasphemy the Jews took up stones to stone him you know and he said many good works have I shown you from the father and from which of these do you stone me and they said for a good work we don't stone you but for blasphemy because you being a man make yourself God now listen to the reply he said is it not written in your law I have said Ye are gods and if that is what the scripture says it can't be denied so why do you tell me I blaspheme because I say I am a son of God no answer because I said I am a son of God he doesn't say that in your King James translation it says I am the son of God and you will see the V italicized and you will think that that is for emphasis if you don't realize that passages in italics in the King James Bible are interpolations by the translators in greek leaving out the definite article is equivalent of having the indefinite article we asked to you is a son of God not oh yes to see you so son hog in Hebrew and in Arabic means of the nature art when we call someone a son-of-a-bitch we mean bitchy and so if you call someone a son of God you mean divine of the nature of God as the Nicene Creed subsequently defined it he is of one substance with the father but what happened was that this being blasphemy for the Jews it became blasphemy that for the Christians for anyone else than Jesus to say they said ok baby it was so with you but there it stops no more of this business and as a result of that Jesus was made irrelevant by pedestal ization by being kicked upstairs in spite of the fact that he said greater works than these that I do shall you do oh no upstairs with you baby because we just can't have that sort of thing going on in a monarch 'uncle universe we are not going to have democracy in the kingdom of heaven so this is why the gospel is impossible because we are supposed to follow the example of Christ where he says for example be not anxious for the morrow do not worry about what you shall eat what you should drink and what you shall wear can take care of you doesn't he take care of the birds don't the flowers grow and they are wonderful they're crazy they're great what are you worrying about I've never heard a sermon preached on that never because it's totally subversive the economy would crash so they say oh yes that's all very well but he was the boss's son see he had that colossal advantage take up your cross and follow him hey but wait a minute I don't know I'm going to be resurrected three days later I can't do all those miracles he had an unfair advantage so how could you ask us to follow the example of Christ but supposing he didn't have an unfair advantage supposing that what was true about Jesus as a son of God is true of us only only a few of us know it and we are pretty careful to be quiet about it lest the same thing happened to us has happened to Jesus and indeed it often does and you know you get these people from Arkansas or Texas or anywhere in the Bible Belt who never heard of the Upanishads and they have this Cosmic Consciousness experience and they realize that that's what happened to Jesus they say I'm Jesus come back well everybody says to them you want Jesus is pretty obvious you're not Jesus you're just charting you just Joe Dokes well they say he says that's what they said about Jesus he has a perfect argument except they say you're not much of a Jesus they say all right if you're Jesus command that these stones me be made bread and he says a wicked and deceitful generation seeketh for a sign and there shall no sign be given now well why talk about this and is it interesting is it important for the human being to realize that in some sense of the word whatever it means he is God or one with God as is plainly taught by the Hindus hinted at by the Buddhists only they don't like to put it out as a concept in case people will use the concept as an idol to hang on to they want you to find out for yourself and not believe in it and certainly the Daoists understand it the Sufis understand it a lot of people understand it but so what well the importance of it is this that to know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe you feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it you feel in other words that the whole energy which expresses itself in the galaxies is intimate it is not something to which you are a stranger but it is that with which you whatever that is are intimately bound out that in your seeing your hearing you're talking you're thinking you're moving you express that which it is which moves the Sun and other

Channel: Alan Watts Remastered

Views: 143,228

Rating: 4.7237902 out of 5

Keywords: Alan Watts, Jesus Christ, Mystery Teachings, Teachings, Jesus, Christ, life coaching, personal development, self help, middle path, middle way

Id: trz7fW_cD-I

Length: 95min 47sec (5747 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 27 2018