What do you do? You put your mind into two watertight compartments, one of which you're
 abreast of science and the modern world and all that kind of thing, and the other compartment
 which simply has nothing to do with that, is a completely cut-off thing called religion,
 where you believe in absolutely ludicrous propositions. A lot of people do that. But
 a lot of people want a religion which is difficult to believe in, because that's a kind of a
 test of faith, whether you can swallow it. It's like the story about Abraham being told
 to sacrifice his son Isaac, and he was about to do it, because you do what you're told.
 It's a test of faith. People like the security of a definite religion. I mean, you've got
 to believe in, and this is the truth. I was once having an argument with a Jehovah's Witness,
 and he said, "Don't you think that if there were really a loving God who was concerned
 about the human race, that he would provide us with an infallible textbook that would
 tell us how to live?" I said, "He would do nothing of the kind. It would completely destroy
 the human mind." You know, you'd never have to think if that was the case. So, while there
 is that, here is then this possibility. Is it to be no God? Is life just this trip from
 the maternity ward to the crematorium? And that the issue of religion is to improve that
 trip. That is to say, through social concern, through getting rid of poverty and war and
 exploitation and disease. Is that the whole business of religion, or is there something
 else? Those who take this view, which we will call the secularist position in theology,
 are of course strongly influenced by contemporary philosophy, especially in that form which
 is called scientific empiricism, or logical positivism, which maintains that the idea
 of God is not a fallacy, but is a meaningless idea. That, in other words, the proposition
 that there exists God, and that God is the origin and creator and governor of everything
 that is happening, they maintain that those sentences are utterly devoid of meaning. As
 much so as if I were to say everything is up. Because they will say no logical proposition
 can be made about all processes whatsoever, because all propositions are labels on boxes.
 And you can't have the box containing all boxes, because this box would have no outside,
 and therefore it wouldn't be a box. So all propositions, all words, must refer to classes
 of some kind, and you can't have the class of all classes. And also, they would say,
 the notion that there is a God is meaningless because it doesn't help you to make any prediction.
 Or they can ask it in this way. What evidence, supposing somebody could bring it forward,
 would completely satisfy you as disproving the existence of God? And no believer in God
 can think of any evidence that would conclusively prove that there wasn't a God. Just like psychoanalysts
 are completely incapable of thinking of any evidence which would disprove the existence
 of the Oedipus complex. So they, on logical grounds, take this position. And so, since
 many theologians are in fact influenced by modern philosophy, take these arguments seriously,
 they would like to secularize the whole conception of religion, or to put it in Bonhoeffer's
 words, "have Christianity without religion." Well now, when you might say, "There is nothing
 to life except the trip between the maternity ward and the crematorium, that's what there
 is." I've heard something like that before. When asked, "What is the Buddha?" A Chinese
 master replied, "It's windy again this morning." Another Buddhist master, on his deathbed,
 wrote the poem, "From the bathtub to the bathtub I have uttered stuff and nonsense." The bathtub
 in which the baby is washed at birth, and the bathtub in which the corpse is washed
 before burial. All the time between, he said, I was going yakety-yak. Now what about those
 poems? Do they mean what they say? Well, not quite. There's something different here.
 Because, they are based on a life devoted to the discipline of a very particular kind
 of meditation, culminating in a completely shattering experience, which is very difficult
 to talk about. But generally speaking, it is the encounter with eternity, with the eternal.
 Not necessarily in the sense of that which goes on and on and on through time, but the
 eternal is the timeless, that which transcends time, is beyond measurement in terms of hours
 and days. And when a person who is in that state of consciousness, or has been through
 it, looks at the ordinary everyday world, it's true he sees the ordinary everyday world
 as we see it, but with a very, very extraordinary difference. And if we would have to put that
 difference into some sort of Western, Christian-influenced language, he would perhaps say, don't you realize
 that sitting around here in this room, with our ordinary everyday faces and clothes and
 personalities, we are sitting smack in the middle of the beatific vision, and that this
 sitting here in this room is infinity and eternity precisely. It is it. And this is
 the beatific vision. This is God. And it feels that way too. It really does. Or something
 like it. But in this kind of religion, they still have temples, they have Buddhas, and
 they chant sutras and offer incense and ring gongs and all that kind of thing. But they
 are always saying that the highest religion, to get really to get there, you have to kill
 the Buddha. Supposing a clergyman got up one day in the pulpit, and said, every time you
 say Jesus Christ, you have to wash your mouth out. Or if you meet God the Father, kill him.
 If you meet God the Son, kill him. If you meet God the Holy Spirit, kill him. If you
 meet the Pope, kill him. If you meet St. Augustine, kill him. If you meet your father and mother,
 kill them. Kill them all right away. All right, what I've been saying is simply translating
 into Christian terms a Buddhist teacher talking about the year 800 A.D. That's what he said.
 Only he put the Buddhist names in where I put the Christian ones in. But I don't think
 this is what is happening in the movement of the new theology. I think that what's happening
 there is that they are just getting rid of God. This is not this other thing I'm talking
 about, which could be called the religion of no religion. You see, if you could take
 this right into Christianity, because to the extent that every Christian is a Jew, you
 see, we use the Jewish scriptures as the Old Testament. So every Christian is a Jew. You
 who are supposed to believe in the Tenth Amendments, and one of them says, "Thou shalt not make
 to thyself any graven image of anything that is in the heavens above or the earth beneath
 or the waters that are under the earth. Thou shalt not bow to them nor worship them." And
 that is what this thing I've been talking about is. It is a destruction of idols. Because
 the most dangerous graven images are not those which are made of wood and stone. They are
 those which are made of ideas. And it is well known to the great mystical tradition of the
 world, all over the world, that the sort of supreme vision can only come when you have
 got rid of every idea of God whatsoever. It would be like, as I've often used this image,
 cleaning a window on which somebody has painted blue sky. Well, to see the sky, you've got
 to scrape off the paint. Well, you say, "My goodness, you shouldn't take that nice blue
 painting off. It's very good. It was done by a great artist. See how pretty the clouds
 are. You mustn't do that because we won't have any of that blue sky anymore." See? So
 in that spirit, the great mystics have always ceased to cling to God. That is because the
 only God you can cling to is the idea of God. In order to discover God, you have entirely
 to stop clinging. You see, why does one cling to God? For safety, of course. You want to
 save something. You want to save yourself. I don't care what you mean by saved. Whether
 it just means feel happy, or feel that life is meaningful, or, you know, there's somebody
 up there who cares. So one clings. And if you don't cling to God, you cling to something
 else. The state, money, sex, yourself, power. These are all false gods. But there has to
 come a state when clinging stops. And only then does the state of faith begin. People
 who believe in God don't have any faith, because they want something to hold on to. So real
 faith is when you do not hold on to anything anymore. In the Christian tradition, this
 is called the cloud of unknown. There is a book of that kind, written by a fourteenth-century
 British monk, Anonymous. And he got it from Dionysus the Areopagite, who assumed the name
 of St. Paul's Athenian convert. He was a Syrian monk, living in the sixth century. Both Meister
 Eckhart, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Scotus Origina, and many other great medieval theologians
 studied Dionysus the Areopagite. He wrote a book called The Theology of Mystica, in
 which he explains that in order to come to full union with God, you must give up every
 conception of God whatsoever. And he enumerates them. Don't think that God is oneness, or
 unity, or spirit, or any kind of anything that the human mind can conceive. He is beyond
 all that. This is called apophatic theology. This is a Greek term contrasted with cataphatic.
 When you speak cataphatically, you say what God is like. So this man, Dionysius, wrote
 two books. One was called The Divine Names, and that was cataphatic theology. The other
 was called The Mystical Theology, which is apophatic. Cataphatic, what God is like according
 to analogy. He is like a father. We do not say God is a cosmic male parent. But God is,
 in some respects, like a father, like spirit. Like we say nowadays, like man, it's like
 it's raining. There's a certain relativity to that statement. So this is the cataphatic
 language. The apophatic says what God is not. And all those theologians in the following
 of Dionysius said the highest way of talking about God is in negative terms. Just as, to
 use Dionysius' own image, when a sculptor makes a figure, he does it entirely by removing
 stone, taking something away. So in the same way, St. Thomas Aquinas said, because God,
 by his infinity, exceeds every idea to which the human mind can reach, the best way to
 speak of him is by remotion. That is to say, by removing from our view of God every inadequate
 concept. This is what the Hindus call neti, neti, saying of the Brahman of the supreme
 reality, it is not this, it is not this. But this intellectual operation of destroying
 concepts must go hand in hand with a, shall we call it, psychological operation, which
 is ceasing to cling to any image whatsoever. Or simply ceasing to cling. Now why? Well
 because there's no need to. There's no need to cling. Because when you were born, you
 were kicked off a precipice. And it was a big explosion, and a lot of other things are
 falling down with you, including some pretty large lumps of rock. One of them is called
 the earth. And it won't help you to cling to the rocks when you're falling off the precipice.
 May give you an illusion of safety. But everything is falling. It's falling apart. That's what
 the ancients said, when all is transient. Pantare, all flows, in the words of Heraclitus.
 And you can't cling to anything. It's like grabbing at smoke with a non-existent hand.
 That's all that clinging will ever achieve. All it does is make people anxious. So when
 you come to the realization that you cannot cling to anything, that there is nothing to
 cling to, there transpires an inner change of consciousness, which we can call either
 faith or letting go. And then suddenly the thing hits you. In Sanskrit, they put it this
 way, tat vamasi, means literally, that art thou, or as we would say, you're it. And if
 you are God, then you can't have an idea of God any more than you can chew your own teeth.
 You don't need one. The sun doesn't need to shine on itself. Knives don't need to cut
 themselves. Your eyes don't need to look at themselves. What color is your head to your
 eyes? It isn't black, is it? You can't see anything. Matter of fact, the way it feels
 inside your head is what you call what it looks like outside. All these things you see
 outside are states of the nervous system in the brain. That's how it feels, that's how
 it looks inside the head. And you said, "Well, I thought that was what was outside." True.
 Same way, when the Zen master suddenly discovered that carrying the pail with water in it was
 a miracle, he discovered that. He realized there isn't anything except God. And boy,
 you don't, if you really know that, you see, you don't need to have a religion. But you
 can have one, because it's a free world. I mean, if you want to try and express this
 in some way, and all religion is pure gravy after that, see? Any outward manifestation
 of religion, you know, it's like a man with lots of money making some more. Only it's
 quite unnecessary. But so, according to the very best theologians, it was never necessary
 for God to create the world. It didn't add anything to him. He didn't have to do it.
 He was under no compulsion. So he did it out of what Dionysus the Areopagite calls "epa
 pleres," or we would just anglicize it, "hyper pleres," super fullness. In other words, for
 kicks. I mean, you know, we don't like using that language, but it's completely contemporary
 and exactly right. That's what the Bible says. Only it puts it in a more sedate way. It says,
 His Majesty did it for his pleasure. That's the way you talk about somebody who is the
 king. His Queen Victoria said, you know, "We are not amused." And it says in the book of
 the Proverbs that where the divine wisdom speaks, and speaks, you see, as an attribute
 of God standing aside from God. Sort of primitive polytheism. And wisdom says that in the beginning
 of the world, her delight was to play before the divine presence. And especially to play
 with the sons of men. The word in Hebrew is "play." But in the King James translation,
 it is "rejoice," because that is a more sedate word than "play." You may rejoice in church,
 but not play. You may not have fun in church, but you may rejoice. See the difference? So
 then, the point of the matter is then there was no reason to make the world, and it was
 done for making celestial whoopee. That's why the angels are laughing. They're just
 splitting their sides. Only when you hear it in church, everybody's forgotten what "Hallelujah"
 is. It's allowing. Don't you see? Hallelujah. It's like, you know, it's just verbal. And
 it's like birdsong. Birdsong isn't about anything. It's just for kicks. Why do you sing? Why
 do you like dancing? What's music for? That's what this "Hallelujah" is. So when nothing
 is being clung to, when one gets to that point, everything blows up. This is what's meant
 by "satori" in Zen, sudden awakening. And you suddenly say, "Good heavens! What was
 I making all that fuss about?" Because here we are. It's what we've been looking for all
 the time. And so it's right here. And that's the thing. And you realize that you, you basically,
 through and through, are all this. Only you got into a kind of a funny illusion. I think
 that we get into that illusion in rather a complicated way through our upbringing as
 children. Because many little children know from the beginning what it's all about. Only
 they haven't got words to put it in. That's the whole problem with child psychology. What
 child psychologists is ideally looking for is an articulate baby. I can explain what
 it's like to be a baby. You never get there. By the time you teach, by teaching the child
 to speak, you mess it up. You give it this language and you can't think big thoughts
 like that with this funny limited language. Especially with the words they start children
 out with. And then finally, when they've got the poor thing completely hypnotized, they
 tell it the most preposterous things. They tell it that it must be free. They say to
 you, you child are an independent agent and you're responsible, see? Now therefore, we
 command you to love us. And you, in other words, we require that you do something which
 will please us only if you do it voluntarily. Do you wonder people are mixed up? So, but
 I'm afraid, you see, that the new theology isn't on to this. The new theology really
 is serious about there not being any God, and that the universe is therefore a rather
 pitiful predicament in which we're caught, has some compensations. But what all this
 is a continuation of the 19th century philosophy, the fully automatic model, which is that this
 is an essentially stupid universe. It's a mechanism. It is a gyration of blind energy
 in which human intelligence and values happens to be a fluke, and a rather uncomfortable
 one, because nature doesn't give a damn about us. And so we have to fight it. And now all
 that is pure mythology. It is grossly unscientific. And, but most people believe it. It's common
 sense for today. But what an opportunity, though, there is in the new theology, and
 in this whole ferment going on, to get them to see this other point of view, and realize
 that when you get rid of God, you are, all you are doing is you're destroying an idol.
 And all idols must be destroyed respectfully. Not like those wretched Puritans who went
 around destroying all the saints' figures and the stained glass in the medieval churches.
 That was disrespectful iconoclasm. Respectful iconoclasm would be, for example, every Easter
 Sunday the Bible should be ceremoniously burned. Because if Jesus is truly risen from the dead,
 you don't need the Bible anymore. He's around. Available. You don't need the books. You burn
 it up, ceremoniously, with great respect. Because certainly God doesn't take himself
 seriously. If he did, I shudder to think what would happen.


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