And the birds are outside the window.
 Just in time for Alan Watts here on WFMU.
 East Orange, WXHD, Mount Hope.
 Tonight, death.
 And taking this until 7 o'clock with Joe Frank.
 Alan Watts info, you can write to us here at WFMU PO Box 2011,
 Jersey City, New Jersey, 07303.
 AlanWatts.com, that's A-L-A-N-W-T-T-S.com for more information on the late Mr. Watts.
 And check out WFMU.org for our weekly schedule.
 Right now though, Alan Watts, death.
 People have a tremendous investment in survival, in continuity, in going on and on through
 time.
 The opposite has been true with at least three major religions of Asia, the Hindu, the Buddhist
 and the Jain.
 Where they seem to be against continuity.
 And design their disciplines to give deliverance from constant rebirth into the world of birth
 and death.
 And we normally interpret that point of view as being a pessimistic attitude against life.
 And sometimes it is indeed in a way against life.
 One discovers in India, in modern times at any rate, a puritanical attitude of asceticism,
 avoidance of pleasure, of sex and all that, in order to become spiritual.
 But I think to a large extent the attitudes of modern Indians who are ascetical in this
 way are very largely influenced by British education.
 A very strange thing happened in India in the early 19th century.
 There was a certain Lord Macaulay who wrote poetry that all Englishmen learn in school
 called "The Lays of Ancient Rome."
 And he was a great classicist.
 He was someone like Mortimer Adler, who believed that all wisdom was contained in the great
 books of the West.
 And he attempted to eradicate Hindu culture completely and replace it with British culture.
 And he was pretty successful in many ways because a great Hindu statesman I used to
 know told me that he had not discovered Hindu culture until he was 45 years old.
 He was brought up like an Englishman on Xenophon, Plato, Sophocles, Livy, Ovid and Julius Caesar,
 Shakespeare etc. etc. all down the line.
 And it was so funny because he was much older than I, but we all knew the same Latin jokes.
 And he looked like an elephant.
 At great big ears, he was a wonderful fellow.
 So India was Britishized to an extraordinary degree and acquired certain Victorian attitudes,
 which still exist among many of the Swamis who come to this country.
 They are squeamish.
 But the real meaning of this so-called escape from the round of birth and death is not actually
 an attitude against life.
 Indeed to the contrary.
 It's an attitude of the fundamental and true acceptance of life.
 Now it seems gloomy and wretched to point out that we're all going to die.
 But I want you to notice that the theme of the transience, the impermanence of all forms,
 is a theme to which poets constantly resort.
 One of the most popular poems in the world is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
 And the whole theme of it is transience.
 The earthly hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes or it prospers.
 And an arm like snow upon the desert's dusty face, lighting a little hour or two, is gone.
 Or the great passage in Shakespeare in The Tempest, "Our revels now are ended.
 And these, our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air,
 into thin, thin air.
 And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
 the solemn temples, the great globe itself, I, all which it inherits, shall dissolve.
 And like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.
 We are stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
 Well, said that well, it isn't so bad.
 So, but we resist this.
 Unamuno said, the Spanish philosopher, "The human beings are the only creatures who hoard
 their dead."
 Why do we do this?
 There's an Undertaker's advert that was around some years ago, which shows a middle-aged
 but handsome lady looking out of the window on a rainy day.
 And it says, "What a comfort to know that, you know, your husband, who's died of ulcers
 or something, is not corrupting.
 Because he's been put in a concrete vault, in a bronze casket, and skillfully embalmed,
 and there he will be forever and ever, safe from the bugs."
 This is terrible.
 Because I have a theory that dead people should be used as fertilizer.
 That enormous fields should be prepared, and they'd be put about three feet underground,
 until they rot completely, and then a certain period has to wait for maturing, and then
 we plant all those fields, and we return to the earth that which we took from it.
 That would be really civilized.
 But instead, we try to make a block on the end.
 You see, biology is a mutual eating society.
 Everything eats everything.
 And human beings are trying to opt out.
 We refuse to be eaten.
 Of course, we've conquered the tigers and the various predatory animals that might eat
 us, except the little ones.
 The little bacteria, they feast on us.
 And we say, "No!
 We are the end!"
 Man is the head of nature, and man must not be eaten.
 But in so doing, we do not realize how we deprive ourselves.
 Because we are trying to put a stop to the chain of life.
 So then, we would say, however, that the Hindus and Buddhists are really trying to put a stop
 to the chain of life.
 Because they want to opt out altogether.
 But this is a misinterpretation of the profoundest reaches of their discipline.
 What the Hindus and Buddhists are seeking deliverance from is not life, but time.
 And time is, as I have tried to show you, an artificial concept.
 This gadget that I wear on my wrist represents each minute by a hairline.
 And this hairline is made to be as thin as possible, as is compatible with visibility.
 Because--and therefore it gives us the notion--that this moment is nowhere.
 And therefore we get the feeling from the watch that time flies, and we become anxious.
 So short, and so the exclamation of Faust at the end of Goethe's drama, saying to the
 moment, "Oh, still delay thou art so fair!"
 The horror of the approaching end.
 So on in Mahler's version of the same drama, where he sold his soul to the devil, and it's
 approaching midnight.
 "Ah, Faustus," he says to himself, "thou hast but one brief hour to live."
 And then the horrors.
 And he quotes the Latin verse, "O lente, lente, curite noctis equi," "O slowly, slowly run,
 ye horses of the night."
 Back up.
 The person facing death.
 As you get older, as you face death, you notice that time is going faster and faster and faster.
 When you're a child, time drags, and you just can't wait for it to get ahead so that you
 can be an adult.
 Because to be a child is to be in a sort of--to have no civil liberties.
 You can't wait to grow up.
 Then when you get to be fifty, sixty, and so on, it's going faster.
 You just can't keep track of it.
 But it's an illusion.
 There is no time.
 And so this is what the Hindu-Buddhist wisdom is really saying, is that it is not for the
 abolition of real life, but of abstract life.
 Of the conceptualized idea of the universe which bugs us all.
 That it's a terrible thing, that forms all come to an end, that they're transient.
 And therefore to protect us from this reality, we construct abstract worlds in which our
 form goes on forever.
 But the abstract worlds that we construct are all terrible.
 Like I was showing you, the Christian idea of heaven was a complete bore.
 And the Buddhists and the Hindus know all about various heavens, they have at least
 seven of them.
 But they regard them as illusions.
 And they regard the very gods and angels as still in the state of illusion.
 Whereas a Buddha, or in the Hindu terminology, a Jivanmukta, someone who's liberated, is
 in a certain way higher than the gods, because delivered from the illusion of the cycle of
 time.
 So notice therefore, that almost all religious beliefs are in fact fantasies to overcome
 mortality, the slipping away of life, the dissolving of ourselves.
 And therefore they exhibit, fundamentally, anxiety.
 Belief is anxiety.
 The Anglo-Saxon word underlying belief is "lief," which means to wish.
 So we say wishful thinking underlies the various beliefs of all what I would call dogmatic
 religions.
 Because if you go into it, the reason for belief in God, as a compassionate Father,
 the reason for belief in immortality, the reason for belief in the notion that goodness
 will triumph and it'll all come out all right in the end, all that is what the Buddhists
 call "trishna," or clinging.
 It isn't really an attitude of faith at all.
 It's an attitude of frantic clinging on to what you think you are.
 And therefore you might say that the highest religion is the religion of non-religion.
 We could call it atheism in the name of God.
 It so happens that this is within the Orthodox Christian tradition.
 Very few people know about it.
 But there was a fellow who lived in the fifth or sixth centuries who wrote under the name
 of Dionysius the Arabagite.
 And he was translated into Latin by John Scotus Origina, who was a scholar at the court of
 Charlemagne.
 He was deeply studied by St. Thomas Aquinas.
 In fact, if the writings of the Arabagite had been lost, they could probably be reconstructed
 from St. Thomas's quotations.
 But he wrote a book called Theologia Mystica, which is a very strange book.
 It's about what he calls "negative theology."
 There are two kinds of theology.
 One is called "catephatic," and the other is called "apophatic."
 The "phatic" part comes from the Greek word "pheme," which is to say, "cata" means "according
 to," "apo" means "away from."
 So when you talk about God apophatically, you're talking about God in terms of things
 which God might be said to resemble.
 You're using a parabolic, analogic, metaphorical language.
 God the Father, therefore, does not say that God is literally a cosmic male parent, but
 is in certain respects like a father.
 But cataphatic, apophatic language, tells you what God is not, and so you get such words
 as "infinite," "eternal," and so on, "illimitable," "bodiless," and all these are negative words.
 And so Dionysius explains that the highest knowledge of God must be by the way of negation,
 and he likens it to a sculptor making an image.
 But he makes the image by taking stone away.
 And so in the same way, one comes to the knowledge of God by going beyond all ideas of God and
 getting rid of them.
 This is the same exactly as the doctrine of the Upanishads, where the principle is of
 Brahman, we must say, neti neti, not this idea, not that idea.
 All ideas, all fixations, and even religious methods must be surpassed, because all our
 intellectual concepts of the divine, all our methods to get the divine, are in the last
 resort only ways of avoiding it.
 Let go.
 There is a Tibetan Tanka painting I have at home of a monstrous being called Yamantaka.
 Yamantaka has eleven heads, eighteen arms and eighteen feet, and an aureole of fire,
 and in the various hands of the various arms there are bells and daggers and clubs and
 thunderbolts and all kinds of objects which this being manipulates.
 And the being is always shown tilted at an angle and dancing like fury upon the bodies
 of the gods.
 All the gods, including Buddha, are being trampled underfoot by Yamantaka.
 Well, I think this is a very strange thing, and naturally the Christian missionaries who
 went over there said, "Well, these people are obviously devil worshippers, because Yamantaka's
 main face is the head of a bloodthirsty bull with fangs, although when you see all the
 other heads, right at the top is the head of the Bodhisattva of supreme compassion,
 Chenrezig in Tibetan, or you know as Kanon in Japanese, Avalokiteshvara, the watchful
 lord, who's an androgyne and always comes on in a majorly female appearance.
 So likewise, one of the great Chinese Zen masters, Linji, or Rinzai as they say in Japanese,
 had a passage in his discourses where he says, "Oh you followers of the Way, if you meet
 Buddha, kill the Buddha.
 If you meet the patriarch, kill the patriarch.
 If you meet father or mother, kill them.
 Kill everything you meet.
 Stand above it, pass on and be free."
 Now this sounds terrible.
 It's as if a minister were to get up in church and say, "Every time you say Jesus, wash your
 mouth up."
 And until they do that, Christianity will remain pretty dead.
 It's interesting that the Buddha had a disciple by the name of Ananda, who loved the master
 very much, and was sort of his very close personal friend.
 And he was the last of all Buddha's disciples to attain enlightenment.
 He was too attached to Buddha.
 So that, in a way, being religious gets in the way of religion.
 Now does that mean on the other hand, see, here's a puzzle about Krishnamurti, who explains
 this very carefully.
 But his earnest disciples, which he doesn't admit that he has, can't read anything except
 mystery stories.
 He says he never reads a religious book.
 He never reads the Bhagavad Gita or the Lankavatara Sutra or the Tao Te Ching or the Bible.
 A friend of mine was sitting next to him on a plane and was fascinated as to what he was
 reading and he was reading a mystery story.
 Fine, there's nothing against that, but if you can only read mystery stories.
 And if you can't join in any religious observance, you are in some way curiously limited, because
 you have made a religion of the religion of no religion.
 Ha!
 What a trap that is!
 So those Puritans who broke down the idols of the Church and burned, like the Caliph
 who burned up the library of Alexandria because he said either it is the Koran or it is not
 in the Koran and the Koran is the only thing we need, so if these books are not the Koran,
 burn them.
 In the same way with Bible bangers.
 So they have this iconoclastic attitude against all the wonderful, colorful, exuberant activities
 and arts that have flown from the great religions.
 I think that's silly.
 To me it's a hang-up to be against religion, because to be against it is still not to have
 transcended it.
 So however, if we are going to have an attitude which accepts religion but transcends it,
 Bernard Berenson, you know, made the interesting remark that he regarded himself as a graduate
 of the Roman Catholic Church in just the same sense as he was a graduate of Harvard University.
 He was very grateful to the Catholic Church, but he didn't swallow it anymore.
 He wasn't a member of it any longer.
 And I take the same attitude to the Anglican Church, and for that matter to Buddhism.
 So one gets therefore to the point where beliefs are seen to be obstacles.
 Belief in survival, belief in God, heaven, hell, all those ideas are dropped, because
 you see that really they're your own projections.
 As also is the belief in the mechanical universe, belief in atheism.
 These are equally projections.
 Some people find the idea that the universe is merely mechanical extremely comforting,
 because thank God there is no God watching us, judging us.
 Ah, that's a relief.
 Just tick-tock stuff.
 You see, every way, every form of belief is really an attempt to cling on.
 And it is precisely that which destroys life.
 It is time which destroys life.
 Now we have to understand that carefully.
 There is a difference between time and rhythm.
 The clock goes tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick,
 so that the human mind can't stand it.
 And so we project upon the clock.
 Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, and if you listen to a clock with a loud tick,
 you find yourself eventually making it play tunes.
 We'll be right back in just a moment with part two of tonight's Alan Watts lecture,
 "Death," here on WFMU, taking us up until 7 o'clock in Joe Frank at that time.
 This is WFMU Freeform Listener Sponsored Radio, 91.1 FM, 90.1 FM, and on the internet at WFMU.org.
 [ Music ]
 [ Music ]
 [Demonstration]
 Why? because we are getting nearer to the biological rhythm.
 Biological rhythm is real rhythm.
 Your heart goes [beatboxes] Everything in biology is that [beatboxes]
 See?
 [laughter]
 That's rhythm, it isn't time.
 It's something quite different.
 Time shortens the moment to the hairline of the abstract second.
 See?
 Time kills rhythm and life.
 Because of the abstract notion of the hairline as the now.
 Now, if we are to measure now, must be made to seem as short as possible.
 And so time altogether ignores the fact that now is eternal.
 Eternal now means beyond time.
 It doesn't mean everlasting.
 That's the nature of hell, is everlastingness.
 But the nature of true heaven is eternity which it is beyond time
 and therefore beyond transcending the round of samsara of birth and death.
 [claps]
 Now, dear people, I really, um, would love it
 if I could in some way convey to you
 the experience of eternity.
 [silence]
 I mean, here we are in this room.
 And at any rate, now, we don't have anywhere special to go.
 I mean, you're a little bit trapped here as a captive audience
 because you paid to get in and, uh, you may as well make the best of it.
 But we are not, at this moment, we are not really going anywhere. See?
 Actually, this assemblage sitting around here
 is the eternal gathering.
 And as I look at you, I see an array of gods and goddesses.
 Beautiful. Wow.
 Touched by sunlight,
 we're here.
 This is it.
 Is that possible to accept?
 That, uh,
 to understand this actual situation that we're in
 is the,
 the point
 of all great spiritual quests.
 It's not going to be tomorrow.
 It's not going to be when you've had time to do something, you know,
 and progress towards it in practice.
 You have to get it now. Now or never.
 The Easter anthem, incidentally.
 One of the old archaic ones goes,
 "This is the day which the Lord hath made.
 Let us rejoice and be glad in it."
 See?
 This is the day. Eighty days, it's called in Latin.
 This is the day.
 The Zen Buddhist saying, "Every day is a fine day."
 Ha ha.
 If we realize this, you see,
 we don't give a shit anymore about immortality.
 It simply ceases to matter.
 Because in the full experience of the eternal now, we watched,
 under your very eyes,
 or rather, to be more exact, under your very ears,
 you heard the future vanish.
 And you heard no past.
 If you come to your senses,
 there is only the eternal now.
 So,
 so what?
 Ha ha ha.
 You can get rid of an awful lot of encumbering baggage.
 Because, you see, when you have really accepted this,
 and it's easy to do by accepting mortality.
 I mean, you're sure we're all going to die.
 Sure we're all falling apart.
 But once that has become obvious,
 you find mysteriously that you have an immense access of new energy.
 Because we are constantly wasting energy.
 I mean, really wearing ourselves out, trying to hold ourselves together.
 And to be sure that we are secure and that everything is going to be alright, and isn't.
 And we get more and more worried, and so on and so on.
 Whereas if we just left that alone, we'd have all that energy available for other things.
 And we would blossom.
 Like great saints and spiritual people who have abandoned the world.
 They don't mean what most people mean by the world.
 They mean they've abandoned the ordinary conception of the world.
 And they float around.
 In Japanese one calls such people "unsui", which means cloud and water.
 In other words, they drift like clouds and flow like water.
 Be unsui.
 Why not?
 What have you got to lose?
 Only a concept of who you are.
 That's all.
 That's all.
 [Music]
 And that concludes tonight's Alan Watts lecture, "Death" here on WFMU.
 You?
 Thanks for watching!


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