It's Time To Wake Up - Alan Watts on Religion

a lot of people don't know how we got the Bible at all we westerners got the Bible thanks to the Catholic Church the Catholic church and members of the church wrote the books of the New Testament and they took over the books of the Old Testament which even by the time of Christ had not been finally decided upon by the Jews the Jews did not close the Canon of the Old Testament until the year 100 A.D or thereabouts at the Synod of jamnia and then they finally decided which were the canonical books of the Hebrew scriptures and embodied them in the masoretic text the earliest copy of which dates from the 10th Century early in the 10th Century A.D the books to be included in the New Testament were not finally decided upon until the year 382 A.D again at the Synod of Rome under Pope damasus so it was the church the Catholic church that promulgated the Bible and said we are giving you these scriptures on our Authority and by the authority of the informal tradition that has existed Among Us from the beginning inspired by the Holy Spirit so you receive historically the Bible on the churches say so and the Catholic Church insists therefore that the church collectively speaking under the presumed guidance of the Holy Spirit has the authority to interpret the Bible and you can take that or leave it [Music] because obviously the authority of the Bible is not first of all based on the Bible itself I can write a Bible and state within that book that it is indeed the word of God which I have received and you're at liberty to believe me or not Hindus believe that The Vedas are divinely revealed and inspired with just as much fervor as any Christian or any Jew Muslims believe that the Quran is divinely inspired and some Buddhists believe that their sutras are also of divine or rather a buddhic origin the Japanese believe that the ancient texts of Shinto are likewise of divine origin and who is to be judged if we're going to argue about this as to which version of the truth is the correct one we will always end up in an argument in which the judge and The Advocate are the same person and you wouldn't want that if you were brought into a court of law would you because if I say that well thinking it all over I find that Jesus Christ is the greatest being who ever came onto this this Earth by what standards do I judge why obviously I judge by the sort of moral standards that have been given to me as somebody brought up in a Christian culture there is nobody impartial who can decide between all the religions because more or less everybody has been in one way or another influenced by one of them so if the church says the Bible is true it finally comes down to you are you going to believe the church or are you if nobody believes the church it will be perfectly plain won't it that the church has no Authority because the people is always the source of authority that's why detoxville said that the people gets what government it deserves you may say well God himself is the authority are we to show that that's your opinion but you say will you wait and see the day of judgment is coming and then you'll find out who's the authority yes but at the moment uh that there is no evidence for the day of judgment and it remains until there is evidence simply your opinion that the day of judgment is coming and there is nothing else to go on accept the opinion of other people who hold the same view and whose opinions you bought so really I won't deny anybody's right to hold these opinions you may indeed believe that the Bible is literally true and that it was actually dictated by God to Moses and the prophets and the apostles and that may be your opinion and you are at Liberty to hold it I don't agree with you I do believe on the other hand that there is a sense in which the Bible is divinely inspired but I mean by inspiration something utterly different from dictation receiving a dictated message from an omniscient Authority I think inspiration comes very seldom in words in fact almost all the words written down by automatic writing from the psychic input that I've ever read strike me as a bit thin when a psychic begins to try and write a deep Mysteries instead of telling you what your sickness is or who your grandmother was he begins to get superficial and psychically communicated philosophy is never as interesting as philosophy carefully thought out but divine inspiration isn't that kind of communication divine inspiration is for example to feel for reasons that you can't really understand that you love people divine inspiration is a wisdom which is very difficult to put into words like mystical experience that's divine inspiration and a person who writes out of that experience could be said to be divinely inspired or it might come through dreams through archetypal messages from the collective unconscious through which the Holy Spirit could be said to work but since inspiration always comes through a human vehicle it is liable to be distorted in other words I'm talking to you through a sound system and it's the only one now available now if there's something wrong with this sound system whatever truths I might utter to you will be distorted my voice will be distorted and you might mistake the meaning of what I said now so therefore everybody who receives divine inspiration and I'm using that in a very loose way you could mean anything you like by Divine that's your option but anybody who receives it will express it within the limits of what language he knows and by language here I don't only mean English Latin Greek Hebrew or Sanskrit I mean language in the sense of what sort of terms are available to you what kind of religion were you brought up with now you see if you were brought up in the Bible Belt you came out of Arkansas somewhere and that's all the religion you knew and you had a mystical experience of the type where you suddenly discover that you are one with God then you're liable to get up and say I'm Jesus Christ and lots of people do well the culture that we live in just can't allow that there were only one Jesus Christ and so if you don't look like you were Jesus Christ coming back again because it said in the scriptures that when he comes back there will be no doubt about it he'll appear in the heavens with Legions of angels and you're not doing that you're just old Joe jokes that we knew years ago and now you say you're Jesus Christ well he says that when Jesus Christ said he was God nobody believed him and you don't believe again you know you can't answer that argument but you see he says it that way because he is trying to express what happened to him in terms of a religious language which is circumscribed by the Holy Bible he's never read the upanishads he's never read the diamond Sutra he's never read the Tibetan Book of the Dead or the E Jing or the louder and therefore there is no other way in which he can say this but if he had read the upanishads he would have had no difficulty and nor would the culture the society in which he was talking have any difficulty because it says in the upanishads we are all incarnations of God now my assumption in my opinion is the Jesus of Nazareth [Music] was a human being like Buddha like SRI ramakrishna like Ramana maharshi Etc who early in life had a colossal experience of what we call Cosmic consciousness now you don't have to be any particular kind of religion to get this experience it can hit anyone anytime there are obviously a number of you in this building who've had it in greater or less a degree but it's found all over the world and when it hits you you know it sometimes it comes after long practice of meditations and spiritual discipline sometimes it comes for no reason that anybody can determine we say it's the grace of God that there comes this overwhelming conviction that you have mistaken your identity that what you thought what I thought was just old Alan Watts who I know very well is just a big act in a show but what I thought was in you know me was only completely superficial that I am an expression of an eternal something or other X a name that can't be named as the name of God was taboo among the Hebrews I am and that I suddenly understand why exactly why everything is the way it is it's perfectly clear furthermore I feel no longer any boundary between what I do and what happens to me I feel that everything that's going on is my doing just as my breathing is is your breathing voluntary or involuntary do you do it or does it happen to you so you can feel it both ways but you feel everything like breathing and it isn't as if you had become a puppet there is no longer any separate you there is just this great happening going on and if you have the name in your background you will say this happening is God or the will of God or the doing of God or if you don't have that word in your background you will say with the Chinese it is the flowing of the Dao or if you're a Hindu you will say it is the Maya of Brahman the Maya means the magical power the creative illusion the play so you can very well understand how people to whom this happens feel genuinely inspired because very often there goes along with it an extremely warm feeling because you see the Divine and everybody else's eyes when Kabir a great Hindu Muslim Mystic Was A Very Old Man he used to look around at people and say To Whom Shall I preach because he saw the Beloved in all eyes but there is everybody in his own peculiar way ing out an essential part in this colossal Cosmic drama

Channel: True Meaning

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Id: 4f5yF8GeCG4

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 23 2023