So the best kind of view we can envisage is one in which we get rid of the idea of a future as an area of experience that solves problems that it doesn't. Western man has been obsessed with history in a way that is quite unlike any other culture and has seen the course of human events as a series of progressive steps towards a goal in the beyond. And you will see that this is absolutely basic to the theology of the Jewish and Christian religions as we now know them, although it wasn't necessarily always so. They are absolutely wedded to the idea that the significance of human life is historical. That is to say that the present has in itself no justification. It's only justified what we do now in terms of the way in which it leads in some kind of progressive pattern towards tomorrow.

[01:09]

And therefore there is that, to use Tennyson's phrase, the one far-off divine event to which all creation moves. And we may never enjoy that. Maybe our children will. Maybe our children's children. Although actually the result of this is going in exactly the opposite direction to that of its intention. Living in a historical society, the one far-off divine event to which all creation moves is so far as anybody can see it. The explosion of a cobalt bomb which will get rid of all life on the planet. That's history for you. And therefore the urgent task of today is to stop history. And to do this by creating a diversion. A diversion from history. Now I've explained this in past seminars, but because some of you are here for the first time today, I'm just going to go over this briefly. Let's suppose that we get the sort of situation where you've got a gambling casino.

[02:10]

And there's been a very dangerous game with high stakes going on for most of the night. The stakes have been getting higher and higher, and there's a huge assemblage of people gathered round this table where the contestants are betting not only thousands and billions and billions of dollars, but they've finally brought out their nuclear weapons and have said, I dare you to blow the scene up first. Wowee, what a gamble. Here, you know, it's like in a powder magazine, you're sitting with a box of matches and say, if you don't agree with me, I'll drop the match and blow us both up. So that's the kind of game that's been going on. And it's on a collision course and no one can stop it. Because the mental set of the contestants is such that they can't give up. Unfortunately, both of them believe in the life hereafter. In some funny way.

[03:13]

You know, perhaps the Russians don't believe in the life hereafter. But the Western Christians tend to believe in it. So once, many years ago, when Professor Urey of the University of Chicago gave a talk to the assembled Episcopal clergy of the Diocese of Chicago and raised all sorts of horrors about atomic bombs, an old man got up who was the bishop, the suffragan bishop of Chicago, Bishop Randall, and said, after the clergy had expressed great concern, I don't know what all you people are so disturbed about, because all this man has told us is that we're going to die. And we knew that already. And as Christians, we're not afraid of death. So the clergy got up and said, hey, all right, it's all right for you, Bishop Randall, you're an old man. And you don't have the problems of us young people with children and families and all that kind of thing.

[04:16]

But you see what a dangerous man, a man who believes in the life hereafter, can be. Because he can say, better be dead than red. Because he believes in a future beyond the grave in which accounts will be settled and the reds will be proved wrong. Now, I'm trying to indicate what I stand for myself as a sort of half-baked representative of the traditions of the Orient is not a future life beyond the grave in the ordinary sense of the word, but a realization of the fact that our true life is timeless. That we don't have a future in the sense that we will not carry over into future manifestations of our existence our personal memories.

[05:23]

But there will be future manifestations of our existence, only we won't know it. We will experience it again and again just as we do now, without remembering any past. Because if we did carry over into the future an indefinite memory, conscious memory of our past, we would be bored. We would say this is the same old thing over and over again and we've had enough of it. But nature, just as we have in our biology, our physiology, an elimination system besides an eating system, so in our psychology we have a forgetting system as well as a memory. And it's equally important. If you cannot erase, if you cannot wipe the slate clean, that's the whole, that's the real meaning of the Christian idea of forgiveness, of the Jewish idea of the year of jubilee. Forget it.

[06:26]

And then we can begin life anew. And see the familiar world with the eyes of children who find it all absolutely astonishing. As we get older we say, oh well. We've seen the sunrise many times. And therefore we need to forget. And that's the mystery of death. And therefore a style of life which sets the future always as the thing to be worked for, it seems to me to be biologically, physiologically, psychologically unsound. Because it's always preparation and lacks the verve as well as the nerve to live now. So then, this is one of the reasons today why the most extraordinary changes are going on in people's thinking.

[07:35]

See basically, people really do know what's good for them. They have an obscure, unconscious sense. D'Atoxio once said, a democracy is always right but for the wrong reasons. And this is why our laws in the British and American tradition are really so sane. In so far as they say, well ultimately the people must decide what they want. Nobody knows, no individual knows what is good for the people. The people themselves know. They don't know why but they know in an obscure way. And therefore you will find at a moment when human survival is in jeopardy, that there begins to be, from as it were the grass roots of society, a rumbling revolution that something's got to be different. And what has got to be different is of course that our consciousness has to be changed.

[08:39]

That western civilization and to some extent oriental civilization has gone on these many centuries with an experience of what it is to be alive, what it is to be human, what it is to be a person, that is a hallucination. Namely, that you are an independent center of consciousness and volition inside a capsule of skin, looking out upon, as we say confronting, a world that is not you, that is alien. And that in so far as that world is not a human world, and most of it isn't, it is stupid, mechanical, blind. And therefore there's the sense of intense hostility towards the external world and the idea, so much promoted by the Jewish and the Christian traditions, that the valuable thing about being human is that you are a person.

[09:47]

Now we'll go into that word person but the idea is that the supremely valuable thing about human life is that you are an individual ego and that by the force of your psychological effort and your independent will you are going to control and transform the world. And therefore any point of view which puts down in any way the individual ego and its power to exercise mind over matter is repugnant to our cultural tradition. This is very strong in the United States. I've often said scratch an American and find a Christian scientist. Someone who believes that you should not be in any way obligated to, dependent upon the physical aids of life. If you're in pain, if you had a headache, well you shouldn't take aspirin.

[10:55]

You should use your willpower or your faith or your something, you know, and overcome it that way. And these people are always blind to the fact that they do have to eat every day. There are all sorts of fantasies, half-baked oriental notions too, about people who don't need to eat, who are surviving on one banana and a glass of water per day, that sort of thing. And that strikes the imagination of our culture as what would be the ideal. That's why we cook so badly. We don't eat with gusto like the French. We eat apologetically like the British. So, this extraordinary fascination with the good of human life as being summed up in the ego and its energy and its independence

[11:59]

is an idea that had something to be said for it. But you can always have too much of a good thing. Now I must repeat, something that is always necessary to understand anything I'm saying is that I exaggerate. Instead of being moderate and taking due consideration for all possible points of view, whereby we come to a measured, mature, and balanced view of things, if you do that as a philosopher, nobody will listen to you. So what you do is you make an exaggeration in a certain direction to balance and compensate an exaggeration that's gone in the other direction. So, with our culture, the exaggeration has gone in the direction of the value, sacredness of the ego. So I'm pitching a cause in the other direction and saying the ego is a hallucination.

[13:01]

And that's what's the trouble with us, is that we believe in this, and that therefore we, in the possession of our enormous technology, are fighting the external world and destroying it. Look around. In every direction, this lovely Marin County is being destroyed by smog, automobiles, tract dwellings, water pollution, air pollution, disregard of the forests. You could go a little further up north and take a plane ride to Seattle and see what's been happening. It's just terrible. So, we then find ourselves in this situation, that we have inherited religions which emphasize salvation in the future. Beyond death, maybe. Or the Jewish people don't so much emphasize the idea of immortality.

[14:08]

Jewish people think of the messianic hope that the day of the Lord is coming, someday, when there will be a general knocking of heads together and the wisdom of Moses and Solomon will be vindicated. But it's all set to the future. And therefore, in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions, mystical religion is suspect. There are not many Jewish mystics. Yes, the Hasidim are a special sect. But among Christians, you will not find the mystical very much favored. There are great Christian mystics. But the Catholic Church always says of mystical experience that it is an extraordinary grace and they mean by using the word extraordinary,

[15:10]

extra-ordinary. That is to say, it is something of a peculiarity, like a miracle felt safe to certain individuals, outside ordinary Christianity. Ordinary Christianity, way back in the 4th century, definitely rejected Gnosticism in favor of faith. Knowledge was rejected. One should not have knowledge of divine things. One should believe. Because wherever anybody claimed to knowledge, they were in danger of the sin of spiritual pride. But you can equally be proud. My faith is stronger than your faith. It makes no difference. So, the emphasis in the whole of the Christian tradition,

[16:17]

in religion, has been knowledge of God in terms of belief. Belief in a revelation. Belief in a dogma. And so Christianity has not only not encouraged, but actually suppressed any religious manifestation which emphasized the primacy of experience, of knowing the divine, as distinct from believing in the divine. Oriental religion, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, is concerned not with belief at all. Not with dogma, because it would say immediately, how can you express divine things in words? All words are invalid when it comes to the ultimate reality. But it would say, on the other hand, though words may be invalid, there is the possibility of experiencing it. And so the right experience, rather than the right belief,

[17:20]

is the concern of Oriental religion. So the goal of the Buddhist, and of the Hindu, is not salvation, it is liberation. Liberation in terms of an experience, which is called bodhi, or awakening, samadhi, or unitive consciousness, moksha, liberation, nirvana, letting go, that's what it really means, breathing out. Letting go of your grasp on the breath, on life. Now, therefore, the religions, so-called religions of the Orient, have therefore become of extraordinary fascination to Western people since the 19th century. Publishers are selling, literally, millions of books throughout the Western world on yoga, Vedanta, Zen,

[18:21]

Taoism, especially to young people. People under 25, if they have any pretensions to education at all, have read this, know about it. Interesting. Because, as I said, they have what Carl Rogers calls positive growth potential. That is to say, knowing fundamentally when to get in out of the rain. And that what is needed for Western culture, for technological culture, whether Western or Eastern, is a new kind of human being. Not, though, not as a moral necessity. You know, when we talk about a new man in a Christian or in a Jewish context, it's always in terms of a preaching that you should reform, you should take yourself in hand,

[19:26]

you should talk seriously to yourself and be converted. This doesn't work anymore. It never did really work. Because a person who is converted to an unselfish style of life by preaching is always a hypocrite. Because he's not really been changed. He's trying to change. He knows he ought to change. He feels guilty because of the style of life which he has lived in the past. And out of the energy of that sense of guilt, tries to reform. But because he still experiences himself fundamentally as a separate ego, or his new style of life, his attempted love of other people, his morality, is a fake. And that's why it is so true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That is why do-gooders create so much trouble. That is why eventually the do-gooder resorts to violence.

[20:29]

And employs the police to do for you what is good for you. Will shoot you for your own best interests. That's where it ends up. So therefore, Western religion as we have known it, in the standard brands of the Jewish and the Christian religions, is falling apart. It is becoming of no interest. It's becoming a joke. And it's happening faster and faster and faster. Despite the strong stands taken by the lunatic fringe of Protestantism, mostly in the southern and central United States. People like Jehovah's Witnesses and hard-shelled Baptists. That has all become incredible. In fact, ministers, rabbis, do not believe what they're saying.

[21:37]

And some of them are honest enough to come out and say so. In talking about the death of God. If for example, you really felt that, shall we say, a fundamentalist Protestantism is the truth. And the people who didn't believe in Jesus Christ were going to fry in hell forever. And you really, you really honestly believe that. You would be screaming in the streets. Because most of your friends, and not to mention your relations, would be destined for eternal hellfire. And you ought to be concerned about that. But they are not screaming in the streets. Yes, they issue polite warnings over a few radio stations. Tracts. But even Jehovah's Witnesses are reasonably well behaved when they knock at your door.

[22:41]

They don't believe it. But they think they ought to. They're trying to con themselves into believing what they think they're supposed to believe. But nobody does. Most of the clergy who've been through a sophisticated theological training. And I'm thinking particularly of Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, and all respectable religions. They don't believe what they're talking about. Their great problem is that they think that the lay people want them to hand out the old time religion. And will be offended and will leave church if they don't. Like that joke in the New Yorker the other day, where a couple of Episcopalian type clergy in the vestry

[23:42]

with a collection plate which has practically nothing in it. And they're shrugging their shoulders and say, well, well, back to the good old generalities. You see what's happening is this. I've been very intimately involved with the problems of Bishop Pike and his successor and the Episcopal clergy in this diocese. Because I know them all rather well. And they're having a terrible time. The reason is this. They're all very theologically sophisticated and extremely intelligent people. But they depend for their financial support on a very few wealthy individuals, most of whom are reactionaries. Therefore, because of their

[24:45]

liberal and far out policies, they're losing their financial support. You would think that they would, by being so far out, recruit an enormous new following of young people, forward-looking people and so on, but they don't. Because those people aren't interested in the church at all. And therefore they are completely falling between two stools. Now why, for heaven's sakes, aren't those people interested in the church at all? There's nothing that can be done about the church as far as I can see. Except let it evaporate. Because by a curious principle, which we don't really understand, symbols and myths have a vitality,

[25:48]

which is like biological things, they are born and they die. And the mythology of the Judeo-Christian tradition is dead. God is dead. In the sense of God conceived as the personal father of the universe, who cares about you and upon whom you can rely. There was an excellent article on this by Rabbi Rubinstein from Pittsburgh in Playboy, just recently. I think it was the June issue of Playboy. Because, he made the point, it was a surprising article because when I started I thought, oh my God, here's this dreary old stuff. There is no God and the Jews

[26:51]

are still his chosen people. The Christian version is there is no God and Jesus Christ is his only son. Well anyway, I thought this was what was going to come up, but it wasn't. He switched towards the end of the article and said, now the death of God means the revival of mysticism. Of the experience of the nothingness, which is the ground of the world. Or what Tillich called the ground of being. Now, of course, but his article wouldn't have carried weight with somebody who wasn't theologically sophisticated. They would have thought, he was saying, well we ought to believe in nothingness instead of God. Not understanding the special theological meaning of the word nothingness. No thingness. Not nothingness in the sense of just blah.

[27:51]

But the notion that the ground of the world, which is your center and your being, as well as that of everybody and everything else, is not a thing. In the same way that the diaphragm in the speaker is not a noise. It's very much there. But it's not any of the noises that it makes. In a way it's all the noises it makes. But yet somehow something else. And so naturally therefore we can have no concept, because all our concepts are concepts of things, concepts of events. We can have no concept of God. And what is the meaning of the death of God theology is that the conceptual God is dead. Nobody can anymore talk the human race into some sort of

[28:53]

concept of God. Because the development of Christianity of Judaism and so on through their theologies have come to the point where nobody is going to buy that anymore. Actually, of course, the concept of God in the Jewish and Christian traditions, as in the Islamic tradition, is based on the conception of kingship in the ancient Near East. Monotheism is political. It is the elevation to the universe of people like Hammurabi of the Cyrus's of Persia and of the Pharaohs of Egypt and of King David. And the title of God, King of Kings, there's a collect in the Episcopal prayer book

[29:56]

especially, say, in the Church of England where, of course, the politics is constitutional monarchy. The priest gets up and says O almighty and everlasting God, King of kings, Lord of lords, the only ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all dwellers upon earth, most graciously deign to behold our sovereign lady, Queen Elizabeth, and view her plenteously with heavenly gifts, health and wealth, long to live, etc. So what you see is a court official addressing the throne. So the title King of Kings was borrowed from the Persian Shah. Cyrus was called the Djan Khan, which means the King of Kings. And so those royal honours

[30:59]

which the Jews didn't believe should be given to Cyrus although they had a special liking for him because he liberated them from the Babylonians. So they just transferred the titles of Cyrus to God to Jehovah. So we've been hung up for centuries with this political theory of the government of the universe as a dictatorship. It may be a constitutional monarchy in so far as God suspends his omnipotence and allows you a certain degree of free will only you'd better behave in the right way. You must choose to love God, you see. Because if you don't there's going to be trouble but it's up to you, you know, you have a chance. It's really a very funny system. But as a result of that

[32:01]

the most curious things develop into let me just take a little sidetrack into legal theory in the United States of America. How can you as members of the United States where you believe and you do solemnly swear that you believe this to be the best form of government you know when I moved into this country I had to face the immigration officers and they sat on an important looking desk with stars and stripes behind them and they said what do you think of the form of government of the United States well I said I think it's a very good form of government okay, so but when you actually become a citizen that was a later process you renounce all other allegiances and you do solemnly swear cross your heart and hope to die that the American flag represents the ideal form of government and it's a republic how then can you believe that the universe is a monarchy you just can't do that

[33:04]

one nation under God is an absolute contradiction because then when you say it's under God it's not a republic anymore it's a monarchy so now what happens you are a young man and you are called to the colors to fight and you find it against your conscience to do so you don't believe in killing people what do you have to do well this has been modified recently but what you always had to do was to appeal over the head of the nation and the president to a superior authority called a supreme being they didn't actually say God because they wanted to allow that not only Christians but maybe some Mohammedans

[34:04]

and people like that also might do this and a few rationalists who believed in a supreme being like Wolfsbier but you had to in other words to accept the military view of the world that there's a chain of command going down from the highest boss and you say to the commander in chief of the United States who's president Johnson I have word from a higher authority than you personally conveyed to me that I am not to fight in this war or any war and they have to say it because of freedom of religion and it's all this complicated game okay you're accepted you don't have to fight because you've appealed to a higher court so therefore a Buddhist or a Taoist finds himself in a very funny position because he doesn't like this word supreme being because he doesn't view the universe as

[35:05]

a military operation with a commander in chief or a monarch at the top he looks at it as an organism in which all of us are as it were the arms of God like the legs on a centipede so there isn't a chain of command it doesn't work that way well the courts have recently more or less decided that the word supreme being can be taken extremely vaguely like the famous story in the House of Commons when they were debating in 1928 on the revision of the prayer book for the Church of England and somebody got up and said it seems ridiculous that this house which contains a number of atheists should be debating on the whether the Church of England should have a new prayer book or not and somebody got up and said oh I don't think there are really any atheists here we all believe in some sort of a something somewhere but there it is now

[36:19]

so the political theory of the universe as a monarchy as a patriarchy simply does not make sense to people anymore it's worn out the view of the cosmos delivered to us by modern astronomy and modern physics is so magnificent and so stones the mind that's the real meaning of to be astounded astounded everybody's got to get stoned that it just doesn't jive anymore we've seen it's like style in works of art you very well know when you listen to Shostakovich that it wasn't written by Bach and when you look at the universe as revealed to us through modern science

[37:22]

you know it wasn't written by Jehovah it's too big it's too amazing and some people just abandon everything and say well for heaven's sakes let's keep control of this thing let's not get stoned let's say it was just a mechanism see it's stupid it's just a thing going on like Newton's billiard games and that's simply self-defense against allowing your reason to be bowled over by amazement at the nature of the world of reality of yourself of your organism of your brain your nervous system everything in control around here oh yes we all understand what's going on it's just nerves just protoplasm

[38:23]

molecule stuff we understand it all this is a defense mechanism so that doesn't work that doesn't appeal to anyone today the monarchical theory of the world doesn't appeal to anyone today I mean it's fizzling there are still a few people who dig it but it's on it's way out so what's going to take it's place? we see this this fantastic growth of interest therefore in experiential as distinct from dogmatic religion now I may have a slightly prejudiced position in this because I've been involved for years and years in trying to explain oriental philosophy and religion to western people and therefore naturally

[39:26]

it would please me to think that all kinds of people were interested in this but what I have today is a very odd feeling that I'm slightly alarmed that what I said has been taken so literally by young people and suddenly they really say you meant that? yeah they're coming on and hey wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute don't take me too seriously but this is always the case when the older generation has taught the younger generation this that and the other and the younger generation says yeah the older generation says now wait a minute we're not quite such good authorities as you may have thought

[40:28]

because you see the amazing vitality with which a change comes to pass and you think well maybe it is immature and will overstep itself and is being a little bit unwise in this way and that way it was ever thus young people were always immoderate you know hooray otherwise they wouldn't be young so what I think the death of God movement in the existing churches is is something like this the individual clergy have at last got to be honest they can't go on

[41:33]

going through the motions and preaching a religion that they themselves don't believe in but they've got to make a jump it's not enough to say God is dead and therefore life is nothing more than a trip from the maternity ward to the crematorium and how in that interim shall we apply some semblance of Christian principles that's what many of them are trying to wrestle with what we call secularized Christianity or religionless Christianity to use the phrase of Bultmann, no Bonhoeffer Bultmann called it the demythologized Bible I have tried to have this out with some of the important figures in this movement and notably the Bishop of Woolwich and Hamilton and Althyser

[42:34]

and there is a chance Pike too it isn't that we're saying there is nothing at all that transcends what we call common or garden reality as a matter of fact what we call everyday reality is pretty much a myth psychiatrists believe in it and as a matter of fact have a sort of vested interest in maintaining that everyday life is dull that it's just a matter of like a hospital where you've got scrubbed white tiles and bottles that clank and so on and that's reality

[43:38]

hard floors, Monday morning rather depressing get on with your work that's supposed to be the real world face it well that's simply again that's a form of the same self-defense against the marvel of the real world as you know the theory it's nothing but molecules it's all nothing buttery the thing is we don't know what it is and we are scared stiff to admit we don't know that we are in the grip of a fantastic miracle and that the biggest miracle in the whole thing is what we call yourself that's the thing you should be scared to death of you because you needn't be because what can it do

[44:41]

it can frighten itself, it can run up behind itself and shriek boo and jump out of its skin and go through all sorts of things but fundamentally what else is there only it always has to look as if it wasn't there or that it was out of control or that otherwise there'd be no fun so what would be a very constructive thing to happen is if the death of God theology would ally itself with the ancient tradition of mystical theology which in both India and reasonably early Christianity would say every positive idea about God is wrong see in Greek you have two kinds

[45:45]

of theological language one kind is called cataphatic from kata femi, femi is to speak so kata the particle means to speak according to metaphor God may be spoken of according to he was like a father but he is not a father, God is not a cosmic male parent but we say God the father because there is a certain analogy between God's relationship to the world and a father's relationship to his children so to speak of God as power as justice, as kingship, as light as whatever was cataphatic language then they said there is apophatic language now apo is a particle meaning away from away from speaking so apophatic words are eternal which means non-temporal

[46:47]

infinite, unlimited formless, bodiless etc, etc, all those negative words are the apophatic language and so these people held that the apophatic language was the truer language of the two even St. Thomas Aquinas who nobody reads anymore said in order to speak of God it is necessary to proceed by the way of remotion because God by his immensity exceeds every concept which our mind can form and therefore we speak of God as limitless, eternal in much the same way that a sculptor reveals an image by knocking stone away he doesn't add anything, he just takes away and the image is revealed so in the same way these mystics of the very ancient Christianity particularly Dionysius the Areopagite who wrote two books

[47:48]

one called the Divine Names which was the cataphatic theology and the other called Mystical Theology which was the apophatic way was actually Shankara the great Advaita or non-dualist Vedanta interpreter actually Shankara and St. Thomas Aquinas are just about contemporaries and if they had ever been able to meet they would have understood each other perfectly they talked the same language, they reasoned in the same way but Shankara went a little further over the precipice in not feeling the necessity to cling to any fixed conception of the divine but you see the point is now is not simply that you are getting rid of an idea and doing without as if it were an impoverishment getting rid of the idea of God is an enrichment

[48:50]

because it opens you up to experience the reality instead of the idea I call it spiritual window cleaning, you take the image that you've painted of the sun off the glass and by getting rid of it the sunlight itself can come into the room so by the act of getting rid of all idols that is to say intellectual images of God that you cling to and think this makes me feel safe, this makes me able to go on living etc. there is nothing see? and when there is nothing to cling to no way of pinning it all down pinning the universe down, pinning you down that I say well I really know who I am now

[49:54]

that's safe isn't any such way so that's why for example a person who is neurotic who is going through a psychotic crisis is actually in a very positive state if the doctors would only get around to seeing it that way because they are people who have the jitters because they don't know who they are anything might happen how do I know I'm going to be able in the next 5 minutes to continue the mastery of the English language it's just that I've been doing it all these years and I suppose it goes on but I could very well talk myself into a great worry that I might not be able to do it then how would I earn a living but you see you never do know you're not really in control because you don't even know how you make a decision how does your brain enable you to make an act of will you don't know

[50:55]

so the psychotic is a person on the edge suddenly realized how scary it all is so what the guru does for a psychotic is say instead of you've got to be put away you're dangerous, you're awful he says come on now, come on, make it, make it, make it you're just getting warm let go, stop being frightened of insanity, of chaos, plunge into it that's the only way you'll recover that's the act of faith The zip code is 94965

[52:02]

Thank you

[52:04]

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