Behind the father image, behind the mother image, behind the image of light inaccessible,
 and behind the image of profound and abysmal darkness, beyond all conception whatsoever,
 there's something else which we can't conceive at all.
 Welcome to The Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts.
 As one of the century's most eloquent philosophers, Alan Watts introduced a generation in the West
 to the fascinating ideas of the Far East, the wisdoms of the Orient.
 In the 1960s and early 70s, he lectured throughout the English-speaking world and was recorded
 in a variety of settings, from seminars aboard his ferry boat, the Vallejo, in Sausalito,
 California, to keynote addresses at major universities.
 It is sometimes said that Alan Watts begins where Joseph Campbell left off.
 The author of books on Christian theology, psychology, ecology, and Eastern religion,
 including his classic The Way of Zen, Watts' scholarship is deep and timeless.
 However, it is also his wit and playful approach to life that endears him to us today.
 In this high-energy public lecture, Alan Watts explores the deepest metaphysics underlying
 our images of God.
 He contrasts feminine and masculine images of God and suggests that when we form images
 of God, those images are exhibitions of a lack of faith.
 Founded at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco in 1971, this program is called
 Images of God.
 Here's Alan Watts.
 Now, I'm sure that most of you know the old story about the astronaut who went far out
 into space and was asked on his return whether he had been to heaven and seen God.
 And he said yes.
 And so they said to him, "Well, what about God?"
 And he said, "She is black."
 And although this is a very well-known and well-worn story, it is very profound.
 Because I tell you, I knew a monk who started out in life as pretty much of an agnostic
 or an atheist, and then he began to read Henri Bergson, the French philosopher who proclaimed
 the vital force, the élan vital, and so on.
 And the more he read into this kind of philosophy, the more he saw that these people were really
 talking about God.
 And I've read a great deal of theological reasoning about the existence of God, and
 they all start out on this line.
 If you are intelligent and reasonable, you cannot be the product of a mechanical and
 meaningless universe.
 Figs do not grow on thistles.
 Grapes do not grow on thorns.
 And therefore, you, as an expression of the universe, as an aperture through which the
 universe is observing itself, cannot be a mere fluke.
 Because if this world peoples as a tree brings forth fruit, then the universe itself, the
 energy which underlies it, what it's all about, the ground of being, as Paul Tillich called
 it, must be intelligent.
 Now when you come to that conclusion, you must be very careful, because you may make
 an unwarranted jump.
 Namely, the jump to the conclusion that that intelligence, that marvelous designing power
 which produces all this, is the biblical God.
 Be careful.
 Because that God, contrary to his own commands, is fashioned in the graven image of a paternal,
 authoritarian, beneficent tyrant of the ancient Near East.
 And it's very easy to fall into that trap, because it's all prepared, institutionalized
 in the Roman Catholic Church, in the synagogue, in the Protestant churches, all there ready
 for you to accept.
 And by the pressure of social consensus and so on and so on, it is very natural to assume
 that when somebody uses the word God, it is that father figure which is intended.
 Because even Jesus used the analogy, the father, for his experience of God.
 He had to.
 There was no other one available to him in his culture.
 But nowadays, we are in rebellion against the image of the authoritarian father.
 Especially this should happen in the United States, where it happens that we are a republic
 and not a monarchy.
 And if you as a loyal citizen of this country think that a republic is the best form of
 government, you can hardly believe that the universe is a monarchy.
 But to reject the paternalistic image of God as an idol is not necessarily to be an atheist.
 Although I have advocated something called atheism in the name of God.
 That is to say, an experience, a contact, a relationship with God, that is to say with
 the ground of your being, that does not have to be embodied or expressed in any specific
 image.
 Now, theologians on the whole don't like that idea.
 Because I find in my discourse with them that they want to be a little bit hard-nosed about
 the nature of God.
 They want to say that God has indeed a very specific nature.
 Political monotheism means that the governing power of this universe has some extremely
 definite opinions and rules to which our minds and acts must be conformed.
 And if you don't watch out, you'll go against the fundamental grain of the universe and
 be punished.
 In some way, old-fashionedly you will burn in the fires of hell forever.
 More modern-fashionedly, you will fail to be an authentic person.
 That's another way of talking about it.
 But there is this feeling, you see, that there is authority behind the world, and it's not
 you.
 It's something else.
 Like we say, that's something else that's far out.
 And therefore, this Jewish, Christian, and indeed Muslim approach makes a lot of people
 feel rather estranged from the root and ground of being.
 There are a lot of people who never grow up and are always in awe of an image of grandfather.
 Now I'm a grandfather.
 I have five grandchildren, and so I'm no longer in awe of grandfathers.
 I know I'm just as stupid as my own grandfathers were, and therefore I'm not about to bow down
 to an image of God with a long white beard.
 Now naturally, of course, we intelligent people don't believe in that kind of a God, not really.
 I mean, we think that God is spirit, that God is very undefinable and infinite and all
 that kind of thing.
 But nevertheless, the images of God have a far more powerful effect upon our emotions
 than our ideas.
 And when people read the Bible and sing hymns, "Ancient of days, who sitthest, throne in
 glory, immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes,"
 they still got that fellow up there with a beard on.
 It's way in the back of the emotions.
 And so we should think, first of all, in contrary imagery, and the contrary imagery is, she's
 black.
 Imagine instead of God the father, God the mother.
 And imagine that this is not a luminous being blazing with light, but an unfathomable darkness,
 such as is portrayed in Hindu mythology by Kali, K-A-L-I, the great mother, who is represented
 in the most terrible imagery.
 Kali has a tongue hanging out long, drooling with blood.
 She has fanged teeth.
 She has a scimitar in one hand and a severed head in the other.
 And she is trampling on the body of her husband, who is Shiva.
 Shiva represents also, furthermore, the destructive aspect of the deity, wherein all things are
 dissolved so that they be reborn again.
 And here is this blood-sucking, terrible mother as the image of the supreme reality behind
 this universe.
 Imagine it's the representative of the octopus, the spider, the awful-awfuls, the creepy-crawlies
 at the end of the line, which we are all terrified of.
 Now that's a very important image, because let us suppose, just for the sake of argument,
 that all of you sitting here right now are feeling fairly all right.
 I mean, you're not in hospital.
 You don't have the screaming me-mes.
 You have a sense you probably had dinner and are feeling pretty good.
 But you know that you feel that you're fairly good, because in the background of your minds,
 very far off in the background of your minds, you've got the sensation of something absolutely
 ghastly that simply mustn't happen.
 And so, against that, which is not happening, and which doesn't necessarily have to happen,
 but by comparison with that, you feel pretty all right.
 And that absolutely ghastly thing that mustn't happen at all is Kali.
 And therefore, at once, we begin to wonder whether the presence of this Kali is not in
 a way very beneficent.
 I mean, how would you know that things were good unless there was something that wasn't
 good at all?
 Now this is-- I'm not putting this forward as a final position.
 I'm only putting it forward as a variation, as a way of beginning to look at a problem
 and getting our minds out of their normal ruts.
 She's black.
 Well, she, first of all, feminine, represents what is called philosophically the negative
 principle.
 Now, of course, people who are women in our culture today and believe in women's lib don't
 like to be associated with the negative, because the negative has acquired very bad connotations.
 We say accentuate the positive.
 Well, that's a purely male chauvinistic attitude.
 How would you know that you were outstanding unless, by contrast, there was something instanding?
 You cannot appreciate the convex without the concave.
 You cannot appreciate the firm without the yielding.
 And therefore, the so-called negativity of the feminine principle is obviously life-giving
 and very important.
 But we live in a culture which doesn't notice it.
 You see a painting, a drawing of a bird, and you don't notice the white paper underneath
 it.
 You see a printed book, and you think that what is important is the printing.
 And the page doesn't matter.
 And yet, if you reconsider the whole thing, how could there be visible printing without
 the page underlying it?
 What is called substance, that which stands underneath, sub, underneath, stands, stands.
 To be substantial is to be underlying, to be the support, to be the foundation of the
 world.
 And of course, this is the great function of the feminine, to be the substance.
 And therefore, the feminine is represented by space, which is, of course, black at night.
 But were it not for black and empty space, there would be no possibility whatsoever of
 seeing the stars.
 Stars shine out of space.
 And astronomers, very high-powered astronomers, are beginning to realize that stars are a function
 of space.
 Now that's difficult for our common sense, because we think that space is simply inert
 nothingness.
 But we don't realize that space is completely basic to everything.
 It's like your consciousness.
 Nobody can imagine what consciousness is.
 It's the most elusive whatever it is that there is at all, because it's the background
 of everything else that we know.
 Therefore, we don't really pay much attention to it.
 We pay attention to the things within the field of consciousness, to the outlines, to
 the objects, to the so-called things that are in the field of vision, the sounds that
 are in the field of hearing, and so forth.
 But whatever it is that embraces all that, we don't pay much attention to it.
 We can't even think about it.
 It's like trying to look at your head.
 You know, you try to look at your head, and what do you find?
 You don't even find a black blob in the middle of things.
 You just don't find anything.
 And yet that is that out of which you see, just as space is that out of which the stars
 shine.
 So there's something very queer about all this.
 That which you can't put your finger on, that which always escapes you, that which
 is completely elusive, the blank, seems to be absolutely necessary for there to be anything
 whatsoever.
 Let's take this further.
 Kali also is the principle of death, because she carries a scimitar in one hand and a severed
 head in the other.
 Death.
 This is tremendously important to think about.
 We put it off.
 Death is swept under the carpet in our culture.
 In the hospital, they try to keep you alive as long as possible in utter desperation.
 They won't tell you that you're going to die.
 When their relatives have to be informed that it's a hopeless case, they say, don't tell
 this to the patient.
 And all the relatives come around with hollow grins and say, well, you'll be all right in
 about a month, and then we'll go and have a holiday somewhere and sit by the sea and
 listen to the birds and whatnot.
 And the dying person knows that this is mockery.
 Well, of course, we've made death howl with all kinds of ghouls.
 We've invented dreadful afterlives.
 I mean, the Christian version of heaven is as abominable as the Christian version of
 hell.
 I mean, nobody wants to be in church forever.
 Children are absolutely horrified when they hear these hymns which say, prostrate before
 thy throne to lie and gaze and gaze on thee.
 They can't imagine what this imagery means.
 I mean, in a very subtle theological way, I could wangle that statement around to make
 it extremely profound.
 I mean, to be prostrate at once and to gaze on the other hand, see, is a coincidentia
 oppositorum, a coincidence of opposites, which is very deep.
 But to a child, it is a crick in the neck.
 And that's the sort of imagery we're brought up with.
 So the idea of what might happen after death, well, you're going to be faced with your judge,
 the one who knows all about you.
 This is Big Papa, who knows you were a naughty boy and a very naughty girl, especially girl,
 from the beginning of things.
 He's going to look right through to the core of your inauthentic existence.
 And what kind of heebie-jeebies may come up.
 Or you may believe in reincarnation, and you think that your next life will be the rewards
 and the punishments for what you've done in this life.
 And you know you've got a way with murder in this life.
 And the most awful things are going to happen next time around.
 So you look upon death as a catastrophe.
 Then there are other people who say, well, when you're dead, you're dead.
 Just nothing going to happen at all.
 So what you got to worry about?
 Well, we don't quite like that idea.
 Because it spooks us.
 You know, what's it be like to die?
 To go to sleep and never, never, never wake up?
 Well, a lot of things it's not going to be like.
 It's not going to be like being buried alive.
 It's not going to be like being in the darkness forever.
 I tell you what, it's going to be like as if you never had existed at all.
 Not only you, but everything else as well.
 That just there was never anything and there's no one to regret it.
 And there's no problem.
 Well think about that for a while.
 It's kind of a weird feeling you get when you really think about that.
 You really imagine it.
 Just a stop altogether.
 And you can't even call it stop.
 Because you can't have stop without start.
 And there wasn't any start.
 There's just no thing.
 Well then when you come to think of it, that's the way it was before you were born.
 I mean, if you go back in memory as far as you can go, you get to the same place as you
 go forward in your anticipation of the future as to what it's going to be like to be dead.
 Then you get these funny ideas that this blankness is the necessary counterpart of what we call
 being.
 Now we all think we're alive, don't we?
 I mean, we're really here?
 That there is something called existence?
 You know, the existentialists, the sign, throne-less, ah!
 You know?
 Here we are!
 But how could you be experiencing that as a reality?
 Unless you had once been dead.
 How what gives us any ghost of a notion that we are here?
 Except by contrast with the fact that we once weren't.
 And later on, won't we?
 But this thing is a cycle.
 Like positive and negative poles in electricity.
 So this then is the value of the symbolism of "she is black."
 She, the womb principle, the receptive, the instanding, the void, and the dark.
 And so that is to come into the presence of the God who has no image.
 Behind the father image, behind the mother image.
 Behind the image of light inaccessible.
 And behind the image of profound and abysmal darkness.
 There's something else which we can't conceive at all.
 Dionysus the Areopagite called it the luminous darkness.
 Nagarjuna called it shunyata, the void.
 Shankara called it Brahman.
 That which can only, of which nothing at all can be said.
 Neti neti.
 Beyond all conception whatsoever.
 And you see, that is not atheism in the formal sense of the word.
 This is a profoundly religious attitude.
 Because what it corresponds to practically is an attitude to life of total trust.
 Of letting go.
 When we form images of God, they are all really exhibitions of our lack of faith.
 Something to hold on to, something to grasp.
 How firm a foundation, what lies underneath us, the rock of ages, or whatever, ein feste
 Burg.
 But when we don't grasp, we have the attitude of faith.
 If you let go of all the idols, you will of course discover that what this unknown is,
 which is the foundation of the universe, is precisely you.
 It's not the you you think you are.
 No, it's not your opinion of yourself.
 It's not your idea or image of yourself.
 It's not the chronic sense of muscular strain, which we usually call I.
 You can't grasp it.
 Of course not.
 Why would you need to?
 Supposing you could, what would you do with it?
 And who would do what with it?
 You can never get at it.
 So there's that profound central mystery.
 And the attitude of faith is to stop chasing it.
 Stop grabbing it.
 Because if that happens, the most amazing things follow.
 But all these ideas of the spiritual, the godly, as this attitude of must, and we have
 been laid down the laws which we are bound to follow, all this jazz, is not the only
 way of being religious and of relating to the ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves
 and the world.
 You've been listening to The Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts.
 For a cassette copy of this program, call 1-800-969-2887, which is 1-800-WO-WATTS.
 Or send $10 with your name and address to the Electronic University, PO Box 2309, San
 Anselmo, California, 94979.
 When you write, please include the name of your local station.
 Ask for tape number two, "Images of God."
 You'll also receive the program "Mythologies of Nature," which is included on the tape.
 If you have any comments about the program or would like further information about the
 spoken works of Alan Watts, please write us at the same address, the Electronic University,
 PO Box 2309, San Anselmo, California, 94979.
 The Love of Wisdom with Alan Watts is produced by the Electronic University.
 My theme music is by Acoustic Alchemy.
 I'm Neil Harvey.
 Thank you for listening.
 (upbeat music)


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