Quotes from Alan Watts on the Bible
"On the contrary," I replied, "a truly loving God would not stultify our minds. He would encourage us to think for ourselves." I tried, then, to show him that his belief in the divine authority of the Bible rested on nothing more than his own personal opinion, to which, of course, he was entitled. This is basic. The authority of the Bible, the church, the state, or of any spiritual or political leader, is derived from the individual followers and believers, since it is the believers’ judgment that such leaders and institutions speak with a greater wisdom than there own. This is, obviously, a paradox, for only the wise can recognize wisdom. Thus, Catholics criticize Protestants for following their own opinions in understanding the Bible, as distinct from the interpretations of the Church, which originally issued and authorized the Bible. But Catholics seldom realize that the authority of the Church rests, likewise, on the opinion of its individual members that the Papacy and the councils of the Church are authoritative. The same is true of the state, for, as a French statesman said, people get the government they deserve.
"The more deceptive idols are not images of wood and stone but are constructed of words and ideas and mental images of God."
Now, the King James Bible did not, as one might gather from listening to fundamentalists, descend with an Angel from heaven A.D. 1611, when it was first published. It was an elegant, but often inaccurate, translation of Hebrew and Greek documents composed between 900 B.C. and A.D. 120. There is no manuscript of the Old Testament, that is, of the Hebrew Scriptures, written in Hebrew, earlier than the Ninth Century B.C. But we know that these documents were first put together and recognized as the Holy Scriptures by a convention of rabbis held at Jamnia (Yavne) in Palestine shortly before A.D. 100. On their say-so. Likewise, the composition of the Christian Bible, which documents to include and which to drop, was decided by a council of the Catholic Church held in Carthage in the latter part of the Fourth Century. Several books that had formerly been read in the churches, such as the Shepherd of Hermas and the marvelous Gospel of Saint Thomas , were then excluded. The point is that the books translated in the King James Bible were declared canonical and divinely inspired by the authority (A) of the Synod of Jamnia and (B) of the Catholic Church, meeting in Carthage more than 300 years after the time of Jesus. It is thus that fundamentalist Protestants get the authority of their Bible from Jews who had rejected Jesus and from Catholics whom they abominate as the Scarlet Woman mentioned in Revelation.
There were numerous other writings circulating among Christians, including the Epistles of Saint Paul and Saint John, the Apocalypse (Revelation) and such documents (later excluded) as the Acts of John , the Didache , the Apostolic Constitutions and the various Epistles of Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp.
The Bible is a dangerous book, though by no means an evil one. It depends, largely, on how you read it with what prejudices and with what intellectual background. Regarded as sacred and authoritative, such a complex collection of histories, legends, allegories and images becomes a monstrous Rorschach blot in which you can picture almost anything you want to discover just as one can see cities and mountains in the clouds or faces in the fire.
Fundamentalists "prove" the truth of the Bible by trying to show how the words of the prophets have foretold events that have come to pass in relatively recent times. But any statistician knows that you can find correlations, if you want to, between almost any two sets of patterns or rhythms between the occurrence of sunspots and fluctuations of the stock market, between the lines and bumps on your hand and the course of your life or between the architecture of the Great Pyramid and the history of Europe. This is because of eidetic vision, or the brain’s ability to project visions and forms of its own into any material whatsoever. But scholars of ancient history find the remarks of the prophets entirely relevant to events of their own time, in the ancient Near East. The Biblical prophets were not so much predictors as social commentators.
In other words, the Gospel, or "good news" that Jesus was trying to convey, despite the limitations of his tradition, was that we are all sons of God. When he uses the terms I am (as in "Before Abraham was, I am") or Me (as in "No one comes to the Father but by Me"), he is intending to use them in the same way as Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita :
He who sees Me everywhere and sees all in Me; I am not lost to him, nor is he lost to Me. The yogi who, established in oneness, worships Me abiding in all beings, lives in Me, whatever be his outward life.
And by this "Me" Krishna means the atman that is at once the basic self in us and in the universe. To know this is to enjoy eternal life, to discover that the fundamental "I am" feeling, which you confuse with your superficial ego, is the ultimate reality forever and ever, amen.
In this essential respect, the, the Gospel has been obscured and muffled almost from the beginnings. For Jesus was presumably trying to say that our consciousness is the divine spirit, "the light which enlightens every one who comes into the world," and which George Fox, founder of the Quakers, called the Inward Light. But the Church, still bound to the image of God as the King of kings, couldn’t accept this Gospel. It adopted a religion about Jesus instead of the religion of Jesus. It kicked him upstairs and put him in the privileged and unique position of being the Boss’s son, so that, having this unique advantage, his life and example became useless to everyone else. The individual Christian must not know that his own "I am" is the one that existed before Abraham. In this way, the Church institutionalized and made a virtue of feeling chronic guilt for not being as good as Jesus. It only widened the alienation, the colossal difference, that monotheism put between man and God
When I try to explain this to Jesus freaks and other Bible bangers, they invariably reveal theological ignorance by saying, "But doesn’t the Bible say that Jesus was the only -begotten son of God?" It doesn’t. Not, at least, according to Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Anglican interpretations. The phrase "only-begotten son refers not to Jesus the man but to the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, who is said to have become incarnate in the man Jesus. Nowhere does the Bible, or even the creeds of the Church, say that Jesus was the only incarnation of God the Son in all time and space. Furthermore, it is not generally known that God the Son is symbolized as both male and female, as Logos-Sophia, the Design and the Wisdom of God, based on the passage in Proverbs 7:9, where the Wisdom of God speaks as a woman.
"But then," they go on to argue, "doesn’t the Bible say that there is no other name under heaven whereby men may be saved except the name of Jesus? But what is the name of Jesus? J-E-S-U-S? Iesous? Aissa? Jehoshua? Or however else it may be pronounced? It is said that every prayer said in name of Jesus will be granted, and obviously this doesn’t mean that "Jesus" is a signature on a blank check. It means that prayers will be granted when made in the spirit of Jesus, and that spirit is, again, the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal God the Son, who could just as well have been incarnate in Krishna, Buddha, Lao-tzu or Ramana Maharshi as in Jesus of Nazareth.
It should be understood that the expression "son of" means "of the nature of," as when we call someone a son of a bitch and as when the Bible uses such phrases as "sons of Belial" (an alien god), or an Arab cusses someone out as e-ben-i-el-homa "son of donkey!" or simply "stupid". Used in this way,"son of" has nothing to do with maleness or being younger than. Likewise, the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, the Logos-Sopia, refers to the basic pattern or design of the Universe, ever emerging from the inconceivable mystery or the Father as the galaxies shine out of space. This is how the great philosophers of the Church have thought about the imagery of the Bible and as it appears to a modern student of the history and psychology of world religions. Call it intellectual snobbery if you will, but although the books of the Bible might have been "plain words for plain people" in the days of Isaiah and Jesus, an uneducated and uninformed person who reads them today, and takes them as the literal Word of God, will become a blind and confused bigot.
Let us look at this against the background of the fact that all monotheistic religions have been militant. Wherever God has been idolized as the King or Boss-Principle of the world, believers are agog to impose both their religion and their political rulership upon others. Fanatical believers in the Bible, the Koran and the Torah have fought one another for centuries without realizing that they belong to the same pestiferous club, that they have more in common than they have against one another and that there is simply no way of deciding which of their "unique" revelations of God’s will is the true one. A committed believer in the Koran trots out the same arguments for his point of view as a Southern Baptist devotee of the Bible, and neither can listen to reason, because their whole sense of personal security and integrity depends absolutely upon pretending to follow an external authority. The very existence of this authority, as well as the sense of identity of its follower and true believer, requires an excluded class of infidels, heathens and sinners people whom you can punish and bully so as to know that you are strong and alive. No argument, no reasoning, no contrary evidence can possibly reach the true believer, who, if he is somewhat sophisticated, justifies and even glorifies his invincible stupidity as a "leap of faith" or "sacrifice of the intellect."
Oddly enough, there are unbelievers who envy them, who wish that they could have the serenity and peace of mind that come from "knowing" beyond doubt that you have the true Word of God and are in the right. But this overlooks the fact that those who supposedly have this peace within themselves are outwardly obstreperous and violent, standing in dire need of converts and followers to convince themselves of their continuing validity just as much as they need outsiders to punish.
Even though it is impossible to persuade or argue with them in a reasonable way, it is just possible that they can be wooed and enchanted by a more attractive style of religion, which will show them that their unbending "faith" in their Bibles is simply an inverse expression of doubt and terror a frantic whistling in the dark.
There have been other images of God than the Father-Monarch: the Cosmic Mother; the inmost Self (disguised as all living beings), as in Hinduism; the indefinable Tao, the flowing energy of the universe, as among the Chinese; or no image at all, as with the Buddhists, who are not strictly atheists but who feel that the ultimate reality cannot be pictured in any way and, what is more, that not picturing it is a positive way of feeling it directly, beyond symbols and images. I have called this "atheism in the name of God" a paradoxical and catchy phrase pointing out something missed by learned Protestant theologians who have been talking about "death of God" theology and "religionless Christianity," and asking what of the Gospel of Christ can be saved if life is nothing more than a trip from the maternity ward to the crematorium. It is weird how such sophisticated Biblical scholars must go on clinging to Jesus even when rejecting the basic principle of his teaching the experience that he was God in the flesh, an experience he unknowingly shared with all the great mystics of the world.
It is becoming again as a child and laying oneself open to reality as it is actually and directly felt, experiencing it without trying to categorize, identify or name it.
SO GOOD
There is simply universe, an always present happening in which there is no perceptible difference between self and other, or, as in breathing, between what you do and what happens to you. Without losing command of civilized behavior, you have temporarily "regressed" to what Freud called the oceanic feeling of the baby the feeling that we all lost in learning to make distinctions, but that we should have retained as their necessary background, just as there must be empty white paper under this print if you are to read it.
When you listen to the world in this way, you have begun to practice what Hindus and Buddhists call meditation a re-entry to the real world, as distinct from the abstract world of words and ideas. If you find that you can't stop naming the various sounds and thinking in words, just listen to yourself doing that as another form of noise, a meaningless murmur like the sound of traffic. I won't argue for this experiment. Just try it and see what happens, because this is the basic act of faith of being unreservedly open and vulnerable to what is true and real.
Two eminent historians of science, Joseph Needham and Lynn White, have pointed out the surprising fact that in both Europe and Asia, science arises from mysticism, because both the mystic and the scientist are types of people who want to know directly, for themselves, rather than be told what to believe.
THIS IS WHY SERMONS ARE SO BORING TO ME
And in this sense they follow the advice of Jesus to become again "as little children," to look at the world with open, clear, and unprejudiced eyes, as if they had never seen it before. It is in this spirit that an astronomer must look at the sky and a yogi must attend to the immediately present moment, as when he concentrates on a prolonged sound.
Years and years of book study may simply fossilize you into fixed habits of thought so that any perceptive person will know in advance how you will react to any situation or idea. Imagining yourself reliable, you become merely predictable and, alas, boring. Most sermons are tedious. One knows in advance what the preacher is going to say, however dressed up on a fancy language. Going strictly by the book, he will have no original ideas or experiences, for which reason both he and his followers become rigid and easily shocked personalities who cannot swing, wiggle, lilt or dance.
Thus, we reach the seeming paradox that you cannot at once idolize the Bible and embody the spirit of Jesus. He twitted the Pharisees as today he would twit the fundamentalists: "You search the Scriptures daily, for in them you think you have life." The religion of Jesus was to trust life, both as he felt it in himself and as he saw it around him. Most of us would feel that this was a ridiculous gamble to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness but, come to think of it, is there any real alternative?
Watts had an enormous impact on popular culture and the generally educated reader of the period stretching from the late-1930s to the mid-1970s. His books, particularly Behold the Spirit (1947), The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), The Way of Zen (1957), Nature, Man and Woman (1958), Beyond Theology (1964), and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966),
"The more deceptive idols are not images of wood and stone but are constructed of words and ideas and mental images of God."
Now, the King James Bible did not, as one might gather from listening to fundamentalists, descend with an Angel from heaven A.D. 1611, when it was first published. It was an elegant, but often inaccurate, translation of Hebrew and Greek documents composed between 900 B.C. and A.D. 120. There is no manuscript of the Old Testament, that is, of the Hebrew Scriptures, written in Hebrew, earlier than the Ninth Century B.C. But we know that these documents were first put together and recognized as the Holy Scriptures by a convention of rabbis held at Jamnia (Yavne) in Palestine shortly before A.D. 100. On their say-so. Likewise, the composition of the Christian Bible, which documents to include and which to drop, was decided by a council of the Catholic Church held in Carthage in the latter part of the Fourth Century. Several books that had formerly been read in the churches, such as the Shepherd of Hermas and the marvelous Gospel of Saint Thomas , were then excluded. The point is that the books translated in the King James Bible were declared canonical and divinely inspired by the authority (A) of the Synod of Jamnia and (B) of the Catholic Church, meeting in Carthage more than 300 years after the time of Jesus. It is thus that fundamentalist Protestants get the authority of their Bible from Jews who had rejected Jesus and from Catholics whom they abominate as the Scarlet Woman mentioned in Revelation.
There were numerous other writings circulating among Christians, including the Epistles of Saint Paul and Saint John, the Apocalypse (Revelation) and such documents (later excluded) as the Acts of John , the Didache , the Apostolic Constitutions and the various Epistles of Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp.
The Bible is a dangerous book, though by no means an evil one. It depends, largely, on how you read it with what prejudices and with what intellectual background. Regarded as sacred and authoritative, such a complex collection of histories, legends, allegories and images becomes a monstrous Rorschach blot in which you can picture almost anything you want to discover just as one can see cities and mountains in the clouds or faces in the fire.
Fundamentalists "prove" the truth of the Bible by trying to show how the words of the prophets have foretold events that have come to pass in relatively recent times. But any statistician knows that you can find correlations, if you want to, between almost any two sets of patterns or rhythms between the occurrence of sunspots and fluctuations of the stock market, between the lines and bumps on your hand and the course of your life or between the architecture of the Great Pyramid and the history of Europe. This is because of eidetic vision, or the brain’s ability to project visions and forms of its own into any material whatsoever. But scholars of ancient history find the remarks of the prophets entirely relevant to events of their own time, in the ancient Near East. The Biblical prophets were not so much predictors as social commentators.
In other words, the Gospel, or "good news" that Jesus was trying to convey, despite the limitations of his tradition, was that we are all sons of God. When he uses the terms I am (as in "Before Abraham was, I am") or Me (as in "No one comes to the Father but by Me"), he is intending to use them in the same way as Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita :
He who sees Me everywhere and sees all in Me; I am not lost to him, nor is he lost to Me. The yogi who, established in oneness, worships Me abiding in all beings, lives in Me, whatever be his outward life.
And by this "Me" Krishna means the atman that is at once the basic self in us and in the universe. To know this is to enjoy eternal life, to discover that the fundamental "I am" feeling, which you confuse with your superficial ego, is the ultimate reality forever and ever, amen.
In this essential respect, the, the Gospel has been obscured and muffled almost from the beginnings. For Jesus was presumably trying to say that our consciousness is the divine spirit, "the light which enlightens every one who comes into the world," and which George Fox, founder of the Quakers, called the Inward Light. But the Church, still bound to the image of God as the King of kings, couldn’t accept this Gospel. It adopted a religion about Jesus instead of the religion of Jesus. It kicked him upstairs and put him in the privileged and unique position of being the Boss’s son, so that, having this unique advantage, his life and example became useless to everyone else. The individual Christian must not know that his own "I am" is the one that existed before Abraham. In this way, the Church institutionalized and made a virtue of feeling chronic guilt for not being as good as Jesus. It only widened the alienation, the colossal difference, that monotheism put between man and God
When I try to explain this to Jesus freaks and other Bible bangers, they invariably reveal theological ignorance by saying, "But doesn’t the Bible say that Jesus was the only -begotten son of God?" It doesn’t. Not, at least, according to Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Anglican interpretations. The phrase "only-begotten son refers not to Jesus the man but to the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, who is said to have become incarnate in the man Jesus. Nowhere does the Bible, or even the creeds of the Church, say that Jesus was the only incarnation of God the Son in all time and space. Furthermore, it is not generally known that God the Son is symbolized as both male and female, as Logos-Sophia, the Design and the Wisdom of God, based on the passage in Proverbs 7:9, where the Wisdom of God speaks as a woman.
"But then," they go on to argue, "doesn’t the Bible say that there is no other name under heaven whereby men may be saved except the name of Jesus? But what is the name of Jesus? J-E-S-U-S? Iesous? Aissa? Jehoshua? Or however else it may be pronounced? It is said that every prayer said in name of Jesus will be granted, and obviously this doesn’t mean that "Jesus" is a signature on a blank check. It means that prayers will be granted when made in the spirit of Jesus, and that spirit is, again, the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal God the Son, who could just as well have been incarnate in Krishna, Buddha, Lao-tzu or Ramana Maharshi as in Jesus of Nazareth.
It should be understood that the expression "son of" means "of the nature of," as when we call someone a son of a bitch and as when the Bible uses such phrases as "sons of Belial" (an alien god), or an Arab cusses someone out as e-ben-i-el-homa "son of donkey!" or simply "stupid". Used in this way,"son of" has nothing to do with maleness or being younger than. Likewise, the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, the Logos-Sopia, refers to the basic pattern or design of the Universe, ever emerging from the inconceivable mystery or the Father as the galaxies shine out of space. This is how the great philosophers of the Church have thought about the imagery of the Bible and as it appears to a modern student of the history and psychology of world religions. Call it intellectual snobbery if you will, but although the books of the Bible might have been "plain words for plain people" in the days of Isaiah and Jesus, an uneducated and uninformed person who reads them today, and takes them as the literal Word of God, will become a blind and confused bigot.
Let us look at this against the background of the fact that all monotheistic religions have been militant. Wherever God has been idolized as the King or Boss-Principle of the world, believers are agog to impose both their religion and their political rulership upon others. Fanatical believers in the Bible, the Koran and the Torah have fought one another for centuries without realizing that they belong to the same pestiferous club, that they have more in common than they have against one another and that there is simply no way of deciding which of their "unique" revelations of God’s will is the true one. A committed believer in the Koran trots out the same arguments for his point of view as a Southern Baptist devotee of the Bible, and neither can listen to reason, because their whole sense of personal security and integrity depends absolutely upon pretending to follow an external authority. The very existence of this authority, as well as the sense of identity of its follower and true believer, requires an excluded class of infidels, heathens and sinners people whom you can punish and bully so as to know that you are strong and alive. No argument, no reasoning, no contrary evidence can possibly reach the true believer, who, if he is somewhat sophisticated, justifies and even glorifies his invincible stupidity as a "leap of faith" or "sacrifice of the intellect."
Oddly enough, there are unbelievers who envy them, who wish that they could have the serenity and peace of mind that come from "knowing" beyond doubt that you have the true Word of God and are in the right. But this overlooks the fact that those who supposedly have this peace within themselves are outwardly obstreperous and violent, standing in dire need of converts and followers to convince themselves of their continuing validity just as much as they need outsiders to punish.
Even though it is impossible to persuade or argue with them in a reasonable way, it is just possible that they can be wooed and enchanted by a more attractive style of religion, which will show them that their unbending "faith" in their Bibles is simply an inverse expression of doubt and terror a frantic whistling in the dark.
There have been other images of God than the Father-Monarch: the Cosmic Mother; the inmost Self (disguised as all living beings), as in Hinduism; the indefinable Tao, the flowing energy of the universe, as among the Chinese; or no image at all, as with the Buddhists, who are not strictly atheists but who feel that the ultimate reality cannot be pictured in any way and, what is more, that not picturing it is a positive way of feeling it directly, beyond symbols and images. I have called this "atheism in the name of God" a paradoxical and catchy phrase pointing out something missed by learned Protestant theologians who have been talking about "death of God" theology and "religionless Christianity," and asking what of the Gospel of Christ can be saved if life is nothing more than a trip from the maternity ward to the crematorium. It is weird how such sophisticated Biblical scholars must go on clinging to Jesus even when rejecting the basic principle of his teaching the experience that he was God in the flesh, an experience he unknowingly shared with all the great mystics of the world.
It is becoming again as a child and laying oneself open to reality as it is actually and directly felt, experiencing it without trying to categorize, identify or name it.
SO GOOD
There is simply universe, an always present happening in which there is no perceptible difference between self and other, or, as in breathing, between what you do and what happens to you. Without losing command of civilized behavior, you have temporarily "regressed" to what Freud called the oceanic feeling of the baby the feeling that we all lost in learning to make distinctions, but that we should have retained as their necessary background, just as there must be empty white paper under this print if you are to read it.
When you listen to the world in this way, you have begun to practice what Hindus and Buddhists call meditation a re-entry to the real world, as distinct from the abstract world of words and ideas. If you find that you can't stop naming the various sounds and thinking in words, just listen to yourself doing that as another form of noise, a meaningless murmur like the sound of traffic. I won't argue for this experiment. Just try it and see what happens, because this is the basic act of faith of being unreservedly open and vulnerable to what is true and real.
Two eminent historians of science, Joseph Needham and Lynn White, have pointed out the surprising fact that in both Europe and Asia, science arises from mysticism, because both the mystic and the scientist are types of people who want to know directly, for themselves, rather than be told what to believe.
THIS IS WHY SERMONS ARE SO BORING TO ME
And in this sense they follow the advice of Jesus to become again "as little children," to look at the world with open, clear, and unprejudiced eyes, as if they had never seen it before. It is in this spirit that an astronomer must look at the sky and a yogi must attend to the immediately present moment, as when he concentrates on a prolonged sound.
Years and years of book study may simply fossilize you into fixed habits of thought so that any perceptive person will know in advance how you will react to any situation or idea. Imagining yourself reliable, you become merely predictable and, alas, boring. Most sermons are tedious. One knows in advance what the preacher is going to say, however dressed up on a fancy language. Going strictly by the book, he will have no original ideas or experiences, for which reason both he and his followers become rigid and easily shocked personalities who cannot swing, wiggle, lilt or dance.
Thus, we reach the seeming paradox that you cannot at once idolize the Bible and embody the spirit of Jesus. He twitted the Pharisees as today he would twit the fundamentalists: "You search the Scriptures daily, for in them you think you have life." The religion of Jesus was to trust life, both as he felt it in himself and as he saw it around him. Most of us would feel that this was a ridiculous gamble to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness but, come to think of it, is there any real alternative?
Watts had an enormous impact on popular culture and the generally educated reader of the period stretching from the late-1930s to the mid-1970s. His books, particularly Behold the Spirit (1947), The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), The Way of Zen (1957), Nature, Man and Woman (1958), Beyond Theology (1964), and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966),
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