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.
 Recorded at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco in 1971, his 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.
 Ethical 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.
 Or 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 sittest, throne in glory,
 immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes," they've
 still got that fellow up there with that 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.
 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 sittest, throne in glory,
 immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes," they've
 still got that fellow up there with that 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 fang 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-me's, 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."
 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.