The point that I wish to make most strongly is that behind a vital religious life for
 the West, there has to be faith which is not expressed in things to which you cling, in
 ideas, opinions, to which you cling in a kind of desperation. Faith is the act of letting
 go and that must begin with letting go of God, let God go. But you see, this is not
 atheism in the ordinary sense. Atheism in the ordinary sense is fervently hoping that
 there isn't a God. It has become extremely plausible that this trip between the maternity
 ward and the crematorium is what there is to life. And we still have going into our
 common sense the nineteenth-century myth which succeeded the ceramic myth in Western history.
 I call it the myth of the fully automatic model of the universe, namely, that it's
 stupid, it's blind force, Hegel's gyration or fortuitous congress of atoms is of the
 same vintage as Freud's libido, the blind surge of lust at the basis of human psychology.
 But when you consider this attitude, you know, what is the poetic counterpart of it? Man
 is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about an insignificant
 star on the outer edges of one of the smaller galaxies. God, what a put-down that was.
 But on the other hand, if you think about that for a few minutes, I am absolutely amazed
 to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation.
 And the more I look at things, I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite
 weird. I know that... See, a philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at
 things that sensible people take for granted. And sensible people, existence is nothing
 at all, I mean, it's just basic, just go on and do something. See, this is the current
 movement in philosophy. Logical analysis says you mustn't think about existence, it's a
 meaningless concept. Therefore, philosophy has become the discussion of trivia. And philosophical
 journals is now as satisfactorily dull as any other kind of purely technical inquiry.
 No good philosopher lies awake nights worrying about the destiny of man and the nature of
 God and all that sort of thing, because a philosopher today is a practical fellow who
 comes to the university with a briefcase at nine and leaves at five. He does philosophy
 during the day, which is discussing whether certain sentences have meaning, and if so,
 what? And then he would, as William Earle said in a very funny essay, he would come
 to work in a white coat if he thought he could get away with it. The problem is, he's lost
 his sense of wonder. Wonder is like, in modern philosophy, something you mustn't have, it's
 like enthusiasm in 18th century England. It's a very bad form. But you see, I don't know
 what question to ask when I wonder about the universe. It isn't a question that I'm wondering
 about, it's a feeling that I have. Imagine, if you had an interview with God, everybody
 was going to have an interview with God, and you were allowed to ask one question, what
 would you ask? And don't rush into it, you will soon find that you have no idea what
 to ask. Because I cannot formulate the question that is my wonder. The moment my mouth opens
 to utter it, I suddenly find I'm talking nonsense. But that should not prevent wonder from being
 the foundation of philosophy. Of, well, as Aristotle said, wonder is the beginning of
 philosophy. Because it strikes you that existence is very, very strange. And then more so, when
 this so-called insignificant little creature has inside his skull a neurological contraption
 that is able to centre itself in the midst of these incredible expanse of galaxies and
 start measuring the whole thing. That is quite extraordinary. And then furthermore, when
 you realise that in a world where there are no eyes, the sun would not be light, and that
 in a world where there were no soft skins, rocks would not be hard, nor in a world where
 there were no muscles, would they be heavy. Existence is relationship, and you are smack
 in the middle of it. So, there is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude in
 the sense of awe, astonishment, at existence. And that is also a basis of respect for existence.
 We don't have very much of it in this culture, even though we call it materialistic. A materialist
 is a person who loves material. And I suppose in the Christian tradition, and in the Jewish,
 one would say that the Lord God is the greatest materialist. Because, you know, as William
 Temple once said, God is interested in many other things than religion. Were God only
 interested in religion, the world would consist of nothing but church buildings and Bibles
 and clergymen. That would be pretty boring. So, in the culture that we call materialistic
 today, we are of course bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion
 into junk and poisonous gas as quickly as possible. This is not a materialistic culture,
 because it has no respect for material. And respect is in turn based on wonder, on feeling
 the marvel of just an ordinary pebble in your fingers.
 So I'm afraid, you see, for the God is dead theology, that it will sort of drift off into
 secular do-goodery in the name of Jesus. And this is, I think, where we can be strongly
 revivified and stimulated by the introduction into our spiritual life of certain things
 that are Oriental. Now you see, it must be understood that the crux of the Hindu and
 Buddhist disciplines is an experience, not a theory, not a belief. If we say that a religion
 is a combination of creed, code, and cult—in other words, this is true of Judaism, Islam,
 and Christianity, and if they are religions, Buddhism is not—because the creed is the
 revelation, a revealed symbolism of what the universe is about, and you are commanded to
 believe in it on the divine authority. The code is the revealed will of God for man,
 which you are commanded to obey, and the cult is the divinely revealed form of worship which
 you must practice. Commandment, because God is boss, he's ruler, king of kings and lord
 of lords. But the disciplines, say, of yoga in Hinduism, or of the various forms of Buddhist
 meditation, do not require you to believe anything. And they have no commandments in
 them. They do indeed have precepts, but they are really vows which you undertake on your
 own responsibility, not in obedience to anybody. They are experimental techniques for changing
 consciousness. And the thing they are mainly concerned with is helping human beings to
 get rid of the hallucination that each one of us is a skin-encapsulated ego. You know,
 a little source, a little man inside your head, located between the ears and behind
 the eyes, who is the source of conscious attention and voluntary behavior. Most people, you know,
 don't think, don't really think that they are anything but that, and the body is a thing
 you have. "Mummy, who would I have been if my father had been someone else?" See, the
 parents give you the body and you pop the soul into it at some period, conception or
 parturition, nobody could ever decide. And this attitude stays with us, that we are something
 in a body, that we have a body, and we are not it. So we experience the beating of the
 heart as something that happens to me, whereas talking or walking is something that I do.
 Don't you beat your heart? Language won't allow you to think that, it's not customary
 to say so. How do you think? How do you manage to be conscious? You don't know. How do you
 open and close your hand? Do you know? If you're a physiologist, you may be able to
 say, but that doesn't help you to open and close your hand any better than I do. See,
 I know how to do it, but I can't put it into words. In the same way, the Hindu god knows
 how he creates this whole universe, because he does it. But he wouldn't explain it, that
 would be stupid. He might as well try to drink the Pacific Ocean with a fork. So when a Hindu
 gets enlightened and he recovers from the hallucination of being a skin-encapsulated
 ego, and finds out that central to his own self is the eternal self of the universe,
 and you go up to him and say, "Well, how do you do all this?" He says, "Well, just like
 you open and close your hand." And because we're all it. Whenever a questioner used to
 come to Sri Ramana, the great Hindu sage who died a few years ago, they said to him, "Master,
 was I living before in a previous incarnation? And if so, who was I?" And he would say, "Who
 is asking the question? Who are you?" And a spiritual teacher in both Hinduism and Buddhism
 is a kind of... Well, what he does to awaken you, to get you over the hallucination of
 being the skin-encapsulated ego, he bugs you in a certain way. He has a funny look in his
 eye, as if to say, "Come off it, Shiva, I know what you're doing." And you say, "What,
 me?" And he looks at you in a funny way. And finally, you get a feeling that he sees all
 the way through you, and therefore that all your selfish and evil thoughts and nastinesses
 are transparent to this gaze. And then you have to try and alter them. He suggests, you
 see, that you practice the control of the mind, that you become desireless. You give
 up selfish desire, so as to cease to be a skin-encapsulated self. And then you may have
 some success in quieting your mind and in concentrating, but then after that he throws
 a curve at you, which is, "But aren't you still desiring not to desire? Why are you
 trying to be unselfish?" Well, the answer is, "I want to be on the side of the big
 battalions. I think it's going to pay better to be unselfish than to be selfish." Well,
 Luther saw that. Augustine saw that. But there it is. Because what he's done, you see, he's
 beginning to make you see the unreality, the hallucinatory quality of a separate self.
 This has merely conventional reality, in the same sense as lines of latitude and longitude,
 the measurements of the clock. That's why one of the meanings of maya, illusion, is
 measurement. Things, for example, are measurements. They are units of thought, like inches are
 units of measurement. There are no things in physical nature. How many things is a thing?
 It's any number you want. Because a thing is a think, a unit of thought. There's much
 of reality as you can catch hold of in one idea.
 So when this realization of the hallucination of the separate self comes about, it comes
 about through discovering that your alleged separate self can't do anything. It can't
 improve itself, either by doing something about it or by doing nothing about it. Both
 ways are based on illusion. You see, this is what you have to do to get people out of
 hallucinations. You make them act consistently on the suppositions of the hallucination.
 People who believe that the earth is flat cannot possibly be talked into seeing that
 it's round, because they know it's flat, because can't you see? So what you do is
 this, you say, "Let's go and look over the edge, wouldn't that be fun?" But you
 see, to be sure that we do get to the edge, we must be very careful not to walk in circles.
 So you perform a discipline. You go steadily and rigorously westwards, along latitude 40
 or something, and then when you get back to the place where you started, he is convinced
 that the world is at least cylindrical. By experiment. By reductio ad absurdum of his
 premises. And so in the same way, the guru, whether Hindu or Buddhist, performs a reductio
 ad absurdum on the premise of the skin-encapsulated ego.
 Well what happens then? You might imagine from garbled accounts of Eastern mysticism
 that one thereupon disappears forever into an infinite sea of faintly-mauved jello, and
 becomes so lost to the world and entranced that you forget your name, address, telephone
 number and function in life. And nothing of the kind happens. The state of mystical illumination,
 although it may in its sudden onset be accompanied by a sensation of tremendous luminescence
 and transparency, as you get used to it, it's just like everyday life. Here are the things
 that you formerly thought were separate individuals, and here is you, who you formerly thought
 was merely confronting these other people. When the great Dr. D.T. Suzuki was asked,
 what is it like to be enlightened, he said it's just like ordinary everyday experience,
 except about two inches off the ground. Because what is altered is not the way your senses
 perceive. What is altered is what you think about it. Your definitions of what you see.
 Your evaluation of it. So when you don't cling to it, when you have no longer a hostile
 attitude to the world because you know the world is you, it is. I mean, let's take it
 from the point of view of biology. If I describe the behavior of a living organism, I cannot
 possibly describe that behavior without simultaneously describing the behavior of the environment.
 So that I discover that I don't describe organisms in environments, I describe a unified
 field of behavior called an organism environment. It's an awkward word, but there it is. The
 environment doesn't push the organism around. The organism doesn't push the environment
 around. They are two aspects or poles of the same process.
 And so you have to understand that this attitude towards nature, seeing the fundamental unity
 of the self which manifests it all, is not an attitude as a missionary is apt to suppose
 which denies the value of differentiation. You must understand the principle of what
 are called identical differences. Take a coin. The head side is a different side from the
 tail side, and yet the two are inseparable. Take the operation of buying and selling.
 Selling is a different operation from buying, but you can't buy unless somebody sells at
 the same time and vice versa. This is what is meant by the underlying unity of opposites,
 what is called in Hinduism Advaita, or non-duality, or when the Chinese use the word Tao to designate
 the way of operation of the positive and negative principles, the yang and the yin. It is not
 a unity that annihilates differences, but a unity which is manifested by the very differentiations
 that we perceive. Just as it's all polar, it's like the two poles of a magnet, different
 but yet one magnet.
 So when we say Oriental monism is a point of view towards life which merges everything
 into a kind of sickening goo, this is terribly unfair. It just isn't so. If you argue that
 the sort of doctrine that everybody is really the Godhead destroys the possibility of real
 love between individuals, because you have to be definitely other than I if I'm to love
 you, otherwise it's all self-love. Well, that argument collapses in view of the doctrine
 of the Trinity. If the three Persons are one God, then they can't love each other by the
 same argument. Hinduism simply uses the idea which is in the Christian Trinity, only it
 makes it a multi-Trinity instead of a three-one. That's all.
 Of course, the thorn in the flesh is always, in approaching a doctrine which seems to be
 monistic or pantheistic, what about evil? Are we to make the ground of being responsible
 for evil? And we don't want to do that because we want to keep God's skirts clean, in spite
 of the fact that our own Hebrew Bible says, "I am the Lord, there is none else. I form
 the light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil. I the Lord do all these things."
 And haven't you heard the story about the Yetzir Ha'ra, that according to Jewish theology,
 the Lord God implanted in Adam, at the beginning of time, a thing called the Yetzir Ha'ra.
 It means the wayward spirit. I call it the element of irreducible rascality. And it's
 very necessary to have this in order to be human. You see, how it was done was this prohibition
 not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. That was the one sure way of getting it eaten.
 But of course, when the Lord God accused Adam and said, "You've been eating of that tree,
 I told you not to eat," and he passed the buck to Eve and said, "This woman that thou
 gavest me, she tempted me and I did eat." And he looked at Eve, "Now what about it?"
 She said, "Well, it was the serpent." And he looked at the serpent. The serpent didn't
 say anything, because he knew too much and he wasn't going to give away the show.
 Who is it that sits at the left hand of God? We know who sits at the right hand. It's hushed
 up. Because that's the side where the district attorney sits. And in the book of Job, of
 course, you know Satan is the district attorney at the court of heaven. He's the prosecutor.
 He's a faithful servant of the court. Because, you see, the whole problem is, it would be
 very bad indeed if God were the author of evil and we were his victims. That is to say,
 if we keep the model of the king of the universe, and the creatures are all subjects of the
 king, then a God who is responsible for evil is being very unkind to other people. But
 in this theory, God is not another person. There are no victims of God. He's never anything
 but his own victim. You are responsible. And if you want to stay in the state of illusion,
 stay in it. But you can always wake up.
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