It's Time To Wake Up - Alan Watts on Religion

A lot of people don't know how we got the Bible at all. We Westerners got the Bible thanks to the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church and members of the Church wrote the books of the New Testament and they took over the books of the Old Testament which even by the time of Christ had not been finally decided upon by the Jews. The Jews did not close the canon of the Old Testament until the year 100 AD or thereabouts at the Synod of Jamnion. Then they finally decided which were the canonical books of the Hebrew Scriptures and embodied them in the Masoretic Text, the earliest copy of which dates from the 10th century, early in the 10th century AD. The books to be included in the New Testament were not finally decided upon until the year 382 AD again at the Synod of Rome under Pope Damasus. So it was the Church, the Catholic Church that promulgated the Bible and said we are giving you these Scriptures on our authority and by the authority of the informal tradition that has existed among us from the beginning inspired by the Holy Spirit. So you receive historically the Bible on the Church's say-so and the Catholic Church insists therefore that the Church collectively speaking under the presumed guidance of the Holy Spirit has the authority to interpret the Bible and you can take that or leave it. Because obviously the authority of the Bible is not first of all based on the Bible itself. I can write a Bible and state within that book that it is indeed the Word of God which I have received and you are at liberty to believe me or not. Hindus believe that the Vedas are divinely revealed and inspired with just as much fervor as any Christian or any Jew. Muslims believe that the Koran is divinely inspired and some Buddhists believe that their Sutras are also of divine or rather a Buddhic origin. The Japanese believe that the ancient texts of Shinto are likewise of divine origin and who is to be judged? If we are going to argue about this as to which version of the truth is the correct one, we will always end up in an argument in which the judge and the advocate are the same person. And you wouldn't want that if you were brought into a court of law, would you? Because if I say that, well, thinking it all over I find that Jesus Christ is the greatest being who ever came onto this earth, by what standards do I judge? Why obviously I judge by the sort of moral standards that have been given to me as somebody brought up in a Christian culture. There is nobody impartial who can decide between all the religions because more or less everybody has been in one way or another influenced by one of them. So if the church says the Bible is true, it finally comes down to you. Are you going to believe the church or aren't you? If nobody believes the church, it will be perfectly plain, won't it, that the church has no authority because the people is always the source of authority. That's why de Tocqueville said that a people gets what government it deserves. You may say, well, God himself is the authority. How are we to show that? That's your opinion. Well, you say, well, you wait and see. The day of judgment is coming and then you'll find out who's the authority. Yes, but at the moment there is no evidence for the day of judgment and it remains until there is evidence, simply your opinion that the day of judgment is coming and there is nothing else to go on except the opinion of other people who hold the same view and whose opinions you bought. So really, I won't deny anybody's right to hold these opinions. You may indeed believe that the Bible is literally true and that it was actually dictated by God to Moses and the prophets and the apostles. That may be your opinion and you are at liberty to hold it. I don't agree with you. I do believe, on the other hand, that there is a sense in which the Bible is divinely inspired. But I mean by inspiration something utterly different from dictation, receiving a dictated message from an omniscient authority. I think inspiration comes very seldom in words. In fact, almost all the words written down by automatic writing from a psychic input that I've ever read strike me as a bit thin. When a psychic begins to try and write of deep mysteries instead of telling you what your sickness is or who your grandmother was, he begins to get superficial. And psychically communicated philosophy is never as interesting as philosophy carefully thought out. But divine inspiration isn't that kind of communication. Divine inspiration is, for example, to feel for reasons that you can't really understand that you love people. Divine inspiration is a wisdom which is very difficult to put into words, like mystical experience. That's divine inspiration. And a person who writes out of that experience could be said to be divinely inspired. Or it might come through dreams, through archetypal messages from the collective unconscious through which the Holy Spirit could be said to work. But since inspiration always comes through a human vehicle, it is liable to be distorted. In other words, I'm talking to you through a sound system, and it's the only one now available. Now, if there's something wrong with this sound system, whatever truths I might utter to you will be distorted. My voice will be distorted. And you might mistake the meaning of what I said. Now so therefore, everybody who receives divine inspiration, and I'm using that in a very loose way, you can mean anything you like by divine, that's your option, but anybody who receives it will express it within the limits of what language he knows. And by language here, I don't only mean English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, or Sanskrit. I mean language in the sense of what sort of terms are available to you, what kind of religion were you brought up with. Now you see, if you were brought up in the Bible Belt, you came out of Arkansas somewhere, and that's all the religion you knew, and you had a mystical experience of the type where you suddenly discover that you are one with God, then you're liable to get up and say, I'm Jesus Christ, and lots of people do. Well, the culture that we live in just can't allow that. There was only one Jesus Christ, and sort of you don't look like you were Jesus Christ coming back again because it's said in the scriptures that when he comes back there'll be no doubt about it. He'll appear in the heavens with legions of angels, and you're not doing that, you're just old Joe Doakes that we knew years ago, and now you say you're Jesus Christ. Well he says that when Jesus Christ said he was God, nobody believed him, and you don't believe again. You know, you can't answer that argument. But you see, he says it that way because he is trying to express what happened to him in terms of a religious language which is circumscribed by the Holy Bible. He's never read the Upanishads, he's never read the Diamond Sutra, he's never read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the I Ching, or the Lao Tzu, and therefore there is no other way in which he can say this. But if he had read the Upanishads, he would have had no difficulty, and nor would the culture, the society in which he was talking, have any difficulty. Because it says in the Upanishads, we are all incarnations of God. Now my assumption, my opinion, is that Jesus of Nazareth was a human being, like Buddha, like Sri Ramakrishna, like Ramana Maharshi, etc., who early in life had a colossal experience of what we call Cosmic Consciousness. Now you don't have to be any particular kind of religion to get this experience. It can hit anyone, anytime. There are obviously a number of you in this building who've had it, in greater or lesser degree. But it's found all over the world, and when it hits you, you know it. Sometimes it comes after long practice of meditations and spiritual discipline. Sometimes it comes for no reason that anybody can determine. We say it's the grace of God. That there comes this overwhelming conviction that you have mistaken your identity. That what you thought, what I thought, was just old Alan Watts, who I know very well is just a big act and a show. But what I thought was in, you know, me, was only completely superficial. That I am an expression of an eternal something or other, X, a name that can't be named, as the name of God was taboo among the Hebrews. I am. And that I suddenly understand why, exactly why everything is the way it is. It's perfectly clear. Furthermore, I feel no longer any boundary between what I do and what happens to me. I feel that everything that's going on is my doing, just as my breathing is. Is your breathing voluntary or involuntary? Do you do it or does it happen to you? So you can feel it both ways. But you feel everything like breathing. And it isn't as if you have become a puppet. There is no longer any separate you. There is just this great happening going on. And if you have the name in your background, you will say, this happening is God. Or the will of God, or the doing of God. Or if you don't have that word in your background, you will say with a Chinese, it is the flowing of the Tao. Or if you're a Hindu, you will say it is the Maya of Brahman. The Maya means the magical power, the creative illusion, the play. So you can very well understand how people to whom this happens feel genuinely inspired. Because very often there goes along with it an extremely warm feeling. Because you see the divine in everybody else's eyes. When Kabir, a great Hindu-Muslim mystic, was a very old man, he used to look around at people and say, to whom shall I preach? Because he saw the beloved in all eyes. But there is everybody, in his own peculiar way, playing out an essential part in this colossal cosmic drama.