In a moment, you'll be hearing another talk from the future religion series that Alan Watts is discussing these weeks. First, we want to remind you that if you want the Alan Watts Spoken Word Catalog, you can get it by writing to MEA Box 303, Sausalito, CA 94965. We'll be repeating the address at the end of today's broadcast. Now here is Lecture 2 from the seminar, Future of Religion, by Alan Watts. Well now, the next question that arises in discussing the future of religion is whether Judaism and Christianity can in some way be saved. This is a question with many aspects to it. It isn't only a question of the reinterpretation of doctrines, the what Pope John called agionamento,

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the updating of Christianity. It's a question of the institution. What are we going to do with the church buildings? What are we going to do with the organization? What about all these people employed as ministers? What function have they, could they have in the future development of religion if we agree to the idea that their gospel is no longer good news, but just a bore? Is there any way in which this whole thing can be salvaged? I've had myself different changing views about this. First of all I would say that the function of a priest is to destroy the church.

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Because the church, if we can, I can restate this you see, in the classical terms of Christian theology. The church is the body of Christ. What does that mean? Well if you go back to classical Christian theology, here's your idea. What is Christ? Christ is the incarnation of God the Son, the second person of the Trinity. The second person of the Trinity, well we have to go back and explain the Trinity. You have to have a Trinity conception of God if you think in a language based on sentences where there are subjects, verbs and predicates. Because the basic structure of the sentence is I love you.

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So I is one aspect of it. You is the contrary aspect of it, and love is the joining aspect. So if God is love, then I is the Father, you is God the Son, and love is God the Holy Spirit. All the reasoning about the Trinity, why there was a doctrine of the Trinity goes back to that. And you see that all the thoughts that were moving in the minds of those early theologians, they didn't understand this themselves, they didn't realize that they were hooked on a three part sentence and therefore had to think that way. But that's why it emerged. And so if you're a wise theologian, you don't knock down the doctrine of the Trinity. You merely realize the obvious reasons why it arose. Because if God was only one, God could not be love unless the object of God's love were

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his creations. But if his creations were the object of his love, then he could not be love without his creations. Therefore God was not a self-supporting system. Therefore they had to find out reasons for God being love in his own right. That meant the Trinity. And that led to endless complications, which I will sidestep at the moment and go on with the main theme, that Jesus of Nazareth was supposed to be the second person of the Trinity, God as the object of his own love and of his own knowledge, embracing and becoming finite. The finite state, the human state, with the suffering, with the difficulties, with the

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limitations that all that involved. And this is called in Greek theology kenosis, kenosis, K-E-N-O-S-I-S, it means self-abandonment or self-emptying. Now by virtue of that, the whole physical universe is believed to be altered. In so far as the creator became the creature, through the body, the physical body of Christ, all physical bodies whatsoever are touched. So that St. Paul uses the resurrection of Christ and he calls it the first fruits of those who slept. Christ rises from the dead, overcomes death by accepting death, and by this means then

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all the physical universe is in process of being changed into the body of Christ, that is to say the union of creator and creature. And so the church doesn't mean buildings, it doesn't mean clergymen. The church, the ecclesia, meaning the assembly of those called together, the original idea of it is that this is the leaven, like you put yeast into bread and the leaven leavens the whole lump, using Jesus' own illustration. The church is the leaven, the organization, or let's better say the organism, through which the entire universe is in process of becoming converted into the divine. You call this apotheosis, meaning the divinization of something.

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And so when the original meaning behind the Christian mysteries is that when a person is baptized, he is joined to this leavening process, which is ultimately going to extend not simply to people, but to weeds and grubs and birds and stones, that ultimately through the leavening influence of the church, the whole physical universe will be converted into Christ, where the word Christ means not only the historical character, Jesus of Nazareth, who is regarded as the beginning of the process, but where Christ means the created world and the divine world in perfect harmony and union.

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So here, you see, is a fundamental notion of Christianity, that the world is in process of becoming the body of Christ. So, then the question, you see, that I posed at the beginning, is that the priest of the church, of the institutional church, will in fact further this process of becoming the body of Christ by destroying the institutional church. Why? Because the institutional church has become a purely political power. What do you do? Let's take this problem in a very practical way, where I speak from long experience. I have a friend, a good friend, who is the rector, vicar or whatever, of the Episcopal

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Church here in Sausalito. And he's a wise man. But what are his problems? He has an expensive plant that he has to maintain. Not only a church building, but a parish hall, very modern. And he has to be sure that there are enough people in the community who annually pledge so much money to maintain this operation. And therefore he's interested in upholding the building. And yet he knows, in his own heart, that that's not the way things should work. So then, I've often wanted to preach a sermon at the laying of the foundation stone of a church, where the stone is ceremoniously laid. And I will take as my text from the Gospel of St. Matthew, if a man's son ask him bread,

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will he give him a stone? The answer is yes. You will find again and again, that if you want to raise money for a project, you can far more easily raise money for the erection of a building, than you can for the support of living people, in their work as scholars or priests or physicians or psychiatrists or whatever it may be that they do. You can't get money for people, you can get money for buildings. And so, the priest then has to say, we must destroy the church. Burn the buildings down, deny all the doctrines, because the whole symbolism is, that it was by the breaking of the body of Christ, that the salvation of the world was delivered.

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When Jesus predicted his own death to his disciples, they were scandalized. And they said, but it is written in the tradition that the Messiah is not subject to death. This is in the Gospel of St. John. And Jesus replied, if a grain of corn does not fall into the ground and die, it remains lifeless and isolated, but if it dies it brings forth much fruit. So therefore, it is only through letting go of the process of clinging to life, which is all our fixation on immortality, on preserving the valuable things, etc., this huge anxiety that we hold on. So he was saying, let it go. So then, when the priest celebrates mass, what happens?

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To understand this, we have to go back to the very meaning of the mass. In the civilization of the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean world, the staple food was bread from wheat, and the staple drink was wine. You didn't, if you were in your right mind, drink water, because it was polluted. And therefore, an alcoholic content in the water was a safeguard against infection. So they had a way of making wine, not quite like our wine today, it was a very thick mixture. It was like concentrated port, and they served at table what is called a krater, from which we get our word crater, which was a shallow bowl-like cup. And they poured wine into this, and they mixed it with water.

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And this was the staple drink, as today children in Greece, in France, always drink wine. They don't consider it alcoholic luxury, they consider it food. So then, in this state of civilization, bread and wine were the staple food and drink. Now, bread is made from crushed wheat, and wine is made from crushed grapes. So there's an idea of sacrifice, that the life of the wheat and the life of the grapes is sacrifice that we may live. And therefore, Jesus identified himself with this sacrifice, with the universal process of biology, whereby all biological beings live in a mutual eating society, and we are only sustained by feeding on other forms of life. But he switched it, instead of saying, this is a situation in which we are predators,

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and we clobber these other forms of life, and alas, you know, he put himself in the position of everything clobbered, and said, I am all those creatures that you destroy and eat, therefore, taking the bread, this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And then taking the cup, this is my blood of the New Testament. That is to say, the New Testament means relationship, really, diatheke in Greek. The new dialogue, the new interchange between man and reality, and the New Testament is

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that it's not that you clobber the world, and feel terribly guilty because you've eaten fish and cows and wheat, but that I, God, give myself to you through the wheat, through the grapes, through the cows. So the blood is shed for you for the remission of sins. In other words, please, take this offering and don't feel guilty about it anymore. Because the I, in the form of the victims, give myself to you voluntarily. So then, the idea of the Mass, of Holy Communion, or whatever you want to call it, is the breaking of the bread and the crushing of the grapes. That through the sacrificial act, the destroying act, life is given. Therefore, when a priest repeats the sacrifice, and at the altar he takes the bread in the

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form of the host, and breaks it, and pours out the blood, pours out the wine, all that becomes merely ridiculous symbolism, if he is not also ready to break up the church. That means to knock down the idols, first of all, that is to say the dogmas upon which people rely and lean, suddenly discover the death of God, you see. Then, suddenly discover the historical Jesus is something you can't put your finger on. Maybe the resurrection didn't happen, you know, there's nothing to cling to. No miracles possible, perhaps. Break it up. And above all, break up the organization, which is a political institution, with enormous

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property holdings, generally exploiting the public. Then on those conditions, if the clergy, if the ministry, were so to break up the church, the church would come to life, it would become a significant institution again, which it now is not. So, the next thing is this, there's another aspect to the breaking up of the church. I spent some time this morning on going through the political analogy of the kingdom of God. God as the big boss whom everyone must obey. Now, there are two themes in Christianity, one of which is political and the other of

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which is organic. The political image is the kingdom of God, the organic image is the body of Christ, or the symbolism of the vine. I am the vine and you are the branches. Indeed, one of the most extraordinary books in the Bible, that love poem, called the Song of Songs, has a theme of a love relationship between the creator and the creature, in which all the imagery is vegetative, as distinct from urbane. So, a transformation of the church from the political urbane institution to the vegetative organic institution, where the image of the government, or the, no, not the government, let me say the order of the world, changes from that of the polis, the city, the kingdom, to that of the vine and the body, the organism.

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This is the inner meaning of the incarnation, of the union of God and man. While God and man are not truly united, then order must be imposed from above. When God and man are truly united, in the spirit of the prophet Jeremiah, who said, no more shall everyone teach his brother a thing, no God, but they shall all know me, for I will write my law in their hearts. And the law written in the heart, you see, is entirely different from the law imposed from above. The law written in the heart means what comes naturally. Now, Jesus was a very clever guru, and in order to get people to have the law come naturally, he parodied the law imposed.

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And he did this in the Gospel of St. Matthew, which is never read correctly. You know how it begins with the Beatitudes. And when he says, blessed are the pure in heart, in makairos in Greek means happy, not blessed in the sort of punctuous sense which that word has in English. It means happy, makairos. Are the pure. It doesn't mean the people who don't tell dirty jokes. Pure means clear, transparent, hip, aware, unhung up, see. Now, he then does a very strange thing. He says, I have not come to destroy the law and the prophets.

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Not to destroy, but to fulfill. For I tell you that not one ornamental serif or punctuation mark shall be taken away from the law until the end of the world. Therefore you've got to obey all those forms. The scribes and the Pharisees pride themselves because they obey the law very thoroughly. But you must be more righteous than they are, unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will not be able to enter into the kingdom of heaven. So to underline this and exemplify it, you have heard it said of old time, there are a series now of crimes. One is to be angry with your brother. Another crime is to call him something that would correspond to our way of saying to a

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person, you bastard. Another way would correspond to our way of saying to someone, you're a fool. Now obviously to be very angry is the major crime. So what he does is he reverses the order of courts. We might say we have a magistrate's court, or let's say we have the Marin County courts in San Rafael. We have the state of California superior courts in San Francisco, and we have the federal courts leading up to the Supreme Court. Now what he does is the funny thing. He switches the order. For the major crime, which is being really angry, he assigns you to the lowest court. For the minor crime, which is calling someone a fool, he assigns you to the major court, which is hellfire, guerner. And then if you keep reading on in the gospel, you know everybody reads in the King James

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Bible, whoever says thou fool shall be in danger of hellfire. And because instead of using quotation marks, it uses a capital letter for the beginning of what would ordinarily be in quotes, people think that saying thou fool means calling God a fool. It doesn't mean that at all. It means, if you read it in Greek, moire, in the evocative, means fool, saying to some, your brother, fool, you shall be in danger of hellfire. But later on in the same gospel, he addresses the whole crowd and uses the same expression in the plural, moroi, you fools and blind, following blind guides. You see, he doesn't even obey his own precept, so his precept must be taken ironically. He's a humorist here, he's saying, you Pharisees, you think you're so great because you obey

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the law. Now look, I'm going to give you a law, and you obey that. In other words, it's the technique of reductio ad absurdum, because what does he do next? He says, you've heard it said of old time, that you shall not commit adultery, haha, but I tell you that anybody who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery in his heart, and so all these pious fakes think, oh, we shouldn't have lustful thoughts about women, that's awful. Who doesn't have lustful thoughts about women? You don't always have to act them out. So then he goes on with this joke, therefore, if your eye offends you, you know, you looked at that girl and the kind of thing, pluck it out, ah, it's better for you that you enter

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into the kingdom of heaven with one eye, rather than have to go into hell with two eyes. You know, really, these ministers, these theologians have absolutely no humor at all, for the whole thing is a joke. So likewise, your adversary meets you and wants to take away your coat, well, give him your cloak also, you know, you're going to be, haha. So he says, you know, God is absolute perfection, makes his sun to shine on the evil, on the good, and sends his rain on the just and on the unjust. You do the same thing, well, nobody can. Can you love your enemies? Can you take no thought for the moral? Can you be as carefree as the birds and the bees?

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Can you really, sincerely love God and your neighbor with all your heart, with all your soul and all your mind? Who can? See, here's the thing he's doing. He challenges, he throws this whole thing at you as a koan, pretending it's a commandment. And everybody in Christianity has tried, sincerely, to obey these things, except that every minister gives up on the take no thought for the moral bit and says it's not practical. Why, so the meaning of it is, you shall love God, you shall love your neighbor, and no faking please. That is a fake commandment. It's a test, it's a reductio ad absurdum of the whole idea of law, of enforced goodness,

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because one must obey out of the fear of divine power. Because if you obey out of the fear of divine power, your actions are not significantly moral. Your actions are significantly moral only if they are done out of love, and love would not be motivated by fear. How are we to love? You can't love, possibly, not possibly, while you still think you're an ego, while you still think you're separate from other people and the rest of the world, you can't love at all. How then are you overcome being an ego? Why? Obviously, you can only overcome it. If you, in some experimental way, find out that the ego is a delusion. So therefore, Jesus proposes, as a way of finding out that your ego is an illusion,

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that you live up to these ideals. Now I can go on further, I don't know if anybody reads the Bible anymore, whether this means anything to you, but St. Paul, in the epistle to the Romans, has an argument which is very clever. He says that God did not give Moses the law with the expectation that it would be obeyed. Indeed, he says, I learned sin through the law. I had not known covetousness except the law had said thou shalt not covet. Then he poses this funny problem, shall we then sin that grace may abound? He says, oh no, heaven forbid, Mithiganito, but he says, now look, the reason why God

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gave the law was to convict us of sin. It was not in the expectation that the law would be obeyed, but only to show us how far short we fell of the divine life. So exactly the same reasoning must therefore apply to the precepts of Jesus. Not given in the expectation that they would be obeyed, but in the expectation that through trying to obey them, we would discover that we were in a mess of some kind. That we couldn't obey them. Well, why not? Why can't you do it? Why can't you love, really, genuinely, completely? The answer is you're hung up on the idea that you are a separate ego, cut off, alone.

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You really believe you're that. So let's test this ego out. By trying to get it to do this, and trying to get it to do that, all those things it's supposed to be capable of doing, you discover that you're not capable of doing them. And the reason you're not capable of doing them is that you as a separate individual don't exist. You're a hallucination in that sense. And that's what has to be discovered. And you can't find that out by just telling people with itself. They won't believe it. You can only dissolve an illusion by getting people to act on it, as if it were true, and act on it consistently, persistently, and thoroughly. When it all falls apart, it doesn't work. So, in this way, Jesus is using a guru technique, where like a Zen master gives a koan.

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What is the sound of one hand? Who are you, authentically and genuinely, before your father and mother conceived you? Show me. In other words, act perfectly sincerely, without any social conditioning, what your parents told you you were, etc., etc., etc. Nobody can do it. Why can't they do it? Because there's no authentic, separate you. And when you find that out, naturally, you know that what you really are is your one with the universe. Like Jesus would say, I am the father of one. Before Abraham was, I am. I am the way, the truth, and the life. That's what you really are. Only then, the whole Christian church managed to circumvent this and shut it up.

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It was too true to be good. And they said, oh yeah, only Jesus was the way, the truth, and the life. Not you, baby, not you, not you. But in a way, that's put such a burden on Western man, and it's taken just under two thousand years to see through it, and the change is coming, see? Everybody's beginning to realize what the whole trick was about. Jesus, you see, was an individual who got enlightened. Only, he was in the context of the Hebrew world, and he had the puzzle of how to express his state of consciousness in terms of his own time.

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He couldn't very well come out and say directly, I've just discovered that I'm the Lord God. But not in a context of Jewish theology, because of the political imagery. If he said in the context of Jewish theology, I am the Lord God, that would have been like saying you all should bow down and worship me. When some people, including many of his disciples, caught on that he was indeed the Lord God, that was their response, you see? They bowed down and worshipped him. When he tried to turn them off that, saying why do you call me good, there is none good but God, and why he insistently prevented them from the political involvement which was that if he was truly the Son of God, which means simply Son of means of the nature of,

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why didn't he lead the revolution against the Roman Empire? And he threw all that aside as a temptation, in exactly the same way as the Buddha threw aside all magical powers, and said don't, that's a sidetrack, that doesn't lead to understanding. When the Buddha was walking along a stream one day, there was a yogi who suddenly started walking across the water, because of his miraculous powers. And the Buddha said to him, hey, hey, hey, come back, there's a ford just fifty yards up the river. So in the same way, Jesus would not give signs of divine dominance to those who asked for them, but the church, in later times you see, has put him on a pedestal, so that the whole

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doctrine is rendered ineffective, just like that. And has tried and tried and tried and tried to insist that these commandments, you must love God, you must take no thought for the morrow. Is tried equivocally at that to say these are commandments, and you ought to feel terribly guilty because you don't love God with all your heart. You do take thought for the morrow. You don't really trust in God. And for two thousand years it's taken to realize that maybe Jesus had a sense of humor. It was ironical. Was trying to get his students, disciples, to realize they were just as much incarnations

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of God as he was. Because he said, when the Jews took up stones to stone him, this again in the Gospel of John. And he said, many good works I have shown you, for what do you stone me? And they said, we don't stone you for a good work, but for blasphemy. Because you being a man, make yourself God. And he replied, is it not written in your law, quote, I have said you are gods. And he's quoting the 83rd psalm, where it says, you are gods and the children of the most high, but you shall die like men. So he said, if I say, I am a son of God, which means, son of in Hebrew or in Arabic, it means

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of the nature of. When you say, we say, you're a son of a bitch, it means you're bitchy. So when they say, Eben Ekelb, which means son of a dog, Eben El Homar, son of a donkey, or son of Belial, they mean of the nature of. So son of God, means like son of a bitch, only the opposite way, you're divine. It had nothing to do with paternity, it's simply an expression. So when he said, if I say, I am a son of God, and in the King James translation, it's all loused up by going, I am the son of God, which is not in the original Greek. He says, simply, I am a son of God, so are you. Only you can't realize this, that you're a son of God, while you're still hooked up on the idea of legal righteousness, that you can, by the effort of your own separate conscious

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will, do the divine acts. You have to let go of yourself. You have to abandon that situation before you can be enthused, transformed, and inflamed with the divine spirit. So what he does throughout that whole sermon on the mount then, is to make a caricature of legal righteousness. One of the funniest ways in which he did this was in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican. This is most ingenious. He tells a story, you see, of the Pharisee goes into the temple, goes straight up to the front seat, stands up before the altar, and says, oh God, I am not as other men are. I have paid my tithes regularly, I have fulfilled this obligation, I have fulfilled that obligation,

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and I'm feeling very good about it. You know, just like the senior warden of the vestry in the Episcopal Church, or a knight of Columbus. Then he says this publican, who's a disreputable character, creeps into the back of the synagogue, beats himself on the breast, and says, God be merciful to me, sinner. I tell you that that man went down to his house justified, rather than the Pharisee. Now what happened? Everybody tries to imitate the publican. Now the Pharisees creep into the back of the church, beat themselves on the breast, and say, God be merciful to me, a sinner, because they think that's the way to do it. Now you see, telling that story has an effect. It has taken away the possibility of being the genuine publican, as distinct from the

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phony Pharisee, because now the moment you're trying to be genuine, you're being phony. And I don't know, I've never seen anybody except, I think, Grodek, who's writing on this, showed me the idea, who saw through what a subtle teacher Jesus was. But you have to read between the lines. You have to get the humor of it. You have to get all the plays that are going on in this. Because he's fully aware of the effect that his stories have on his audience. Well they didn't know what to do with him. They just had to get rid of him. This is KSAN in San Francisco.

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