Before we begin our celebration, I want to talk to you for about half an hour—and I apologize for this, because I’m for the elimination of sermons on Sunday mornings. But I need to explain, both for you and for the radio audience, what we’re going to do. It has been announced as an Aquarian Age religious service. I did not invent that title. It has nothing (so far as I know) to do with the Aquarian Age, if such a thing exists. And I don’t like the word “service.” It’s got all sorts of associations of sanctimoniousness. So I would rather call it a contemplative ritual, period.

Our purpose in doing this is to offer a suggestion to the churches—to the Christian, Jewish and Islamic churches in particular—because for a long, long time, the kind of religious celebration which they have conducted has been impossibly loquacious and didactic. Almost all our religious observances are nothing but talk. They tell God what to do (as if he didn’t know), and they tell the people what to do (as if they were able to do it, or even willing). And this throwing the book at people, and telling them the word, I think we’ve had enough of it. Because the history of religion is almost equivalent to the history of the failure of preaching, since preaching is a kind of moral violence which excites people’s sense of guilt—and there is no more uncreative sense than that. You cannot love and feel guilty at the same time any more than you can be afraid and angry at the same time.

What seems to me to be lacking in our Western religious observances is some sort of social ritual, or liturgy, which gives an opportunity for spiritual experience—that is to say: for a transformation of the individual consciousness so that, in one way or another, the individual is able to realize his oneness with the eternal energy behind this universe, which some people call God and others prefer not to name or to conceive. The Western religions have, from an official standpoint, been somewhat suspicious and leery of mystical experience. Because in the founder of Christianity, a mystical experience led to the claim that he was God incarnate, which was (to the Jews) a stumbling block and (to the Greeks) foolishness. Because if you believe that God is a monarch, a beneficent tyrant in charge of the universe, anyone else claiming to be God is obviously committing an act of subversion and would be suspected of introducing democracy into the kingdom of heaven, which is supposed to be a monarchy and not a republic. And I do not understand how we can be citizens of the United States, believing that a republic is the best form of government, but go on insisting that the universe is a monarchy.

I feel, rather, that Jesus was a person who had this colossal mystical experience that we call cosmic consciousness: the experience that your real self is not that little superficial idea or image of yourself, which we call “I,” but the total energy of the world flowing through you and expressing itself in you, and that’s the real you. And it was on that basis that he could say, “I and the Father are one.” What the Christians did was to stop the gospel cold by saying, “All right, Jesus was God, but nobody else.” And so for lack of the spiritual experience of Jesus, nobody has been able to live the religion of Jesus, they have lived instead the religion about Jesus—which is a very different thing, because he’s been put up on a pedestal and worshiped at a distance, and his example and life rendered ineffective. Because you can’t make the tail wag the dog, or the cart pull the horse. You cannot expect love in action unless there is what the Christians call grace underlying it. And grace, so far as anybody knows, is a purely theoretical thing which you believe you’ve received, but there has never been any indication of it—to speak of, except in exceptional individual lives that occur rather occasionally.

So what I’m proposing instead of the ordinary kind of religious service is, as I said, a contemplative ritual. And the idea is not to have everybody shaken up and whooping around like Indians on the warpath, but to bring about a state of profound peace. So therefore I should say something in a preliminary way about meditation—or contemplation, as I prefer to call it.

Usually, when Western people hear that an Oriental practices meditation, he asks, “What do you meditate on?” And that question puzzles a Buddhist or a Hindu, because you don’t meditate on anything any more than you breathe on anything. You breathe, and in the same way you meditate. The verb is, in a way, intransitive. Meditation is the act of allowing one’s thoughts to cease. As Patanjali puts it in the beginning of the Yoga Sutra—yoga meaning the art of meditation; more strictly speaking, yoga means “union.” The union of the individual and the universe. He says, after saying, “Now, yoga is explained,” he says, “yogas citta vritti nirodha,” which means: yoga is stopping the agitation of thinking. Thinking is talking to yourself, or figuring to yourself. That’s the way I use the word. Now, if I talk all the time, I don’t hear what anyone else has to say. Consequently, if I talk to myself all the time, I don’t have anything to think about except thoughts. There is no interval between thoughts during which I can come into touch with reality; that is to say the world which thoughts represent, as words represent events, or as money represents wealth. And so if I’m never silent in my head, I’m living in a world of total abstraction, divorced from reality altogether.

You may ask: “What is reality?” And people have various theories about what it is. But you must remember that they’re all theories. Those who believe that reality is material are projecting upon the real world a philosophical theory about it, and those who say that it is mental or spiritual are doing likewise. Reality itself is neither mental nor spiritual, nor any concept that we can have of it, reality is simply: [Strikes singing bowl]—or anything else non-verbal, and words are reality and so far as they are noises. But even that is saying too much.

Now, therefore, to meditate you might think that we attempt to suppress thought. We do not do that. Because you cannot meditate—let me put that in a more emphatic way: you cannot meditate. You, your ego image, can only chatter. Because when it stops, it isn’t there. When you are not thinking, you have no ego, because your ego is a concept: the thinker behind the thoughts, the feeler behind the feelings. And the thinker behind the thoughts is only a thought, an idea of some reference point to which all our experiences happen. And that, of course, cuts us off from what we experience. It makes a great gap or gulf between the knower and the known. And that creates the spirit of alienation to the world from which we suffer. Conflict, hate, domineering spirit arise from that basic division.

So when you come to an end of thought, and you don’t know how to meditate, you don’t know what to do with your mind, nobody can tell you, then thinking comes to an end naturally and you just watch. You don’t ask who watches, because that merely arises from the fact that, in grammar, every verb has to have a subject by rule. That is not a rule of nature, it is a rule of grammar. In nature there can be watching without a separate watcher, just as there can be flashing without something called lightning that does it. The lightning is, of course, the flashing.

So when you realize that you’ve come to your wit’s end, you can begin meditation—or meditation happens. And that is happening, is the watching, simply of what is; of all the information to you conveyed by your exterior and interior senses, and of the thoughts that keep chattering on about it all. You don’t try to stop those thoughts, you just let them run as if they were birds twittering outside. And they will eventually get tired of themselves and stop. But don’t worry about whether they do or don’t. Just simply watch whatever it is that you are feeling, thinking, experiencing, and that’s it, watch it. And don’t go out of your way to put any names on it. That’s really what meditation is.

And, you see, you’re not expecting any result. You are in meditation in an eternal present. You’re not doing it to improve yourself—you’ve found you can’t do that. Your ego can’t possibly improve you, because it’s what’s in need of improvement. Your ego can’t let go of itself, because it is a complex called clinging to oneself. That’s what it is by definition. So it’s just something that evaporates when it is understood that it is unable to achieve a transformation of consciousness, mystical experience, the vivid sense of union of individual and cosmos.

So, one of the easiest ways to enter into the state of meditation is, therefore, listening to what is; using the sense of sound. Sound is, curiously enough, a sense that bores us less easily than sight. And when you listen to sound, you listen to it—just the random sounds, you know, that are going on in the room, in the street—as if you were listening to music: without trying to identify its source, name it, or put any label on it at all. Just enjoy whatever sound may be going on, whether it’s in this hall, or whether it’s in the area where you’re listening to the radio. That’s what we shall do at the proper part of the ritual. Just listen.

Now, we can go on from that listening to making sound ourselves and also listening to it. And instead of making sound, we learn the knack of letting it happen through us. Once the great choir master in England, Sir Walford Davies, was rehearsing a choir in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury (who was then William Temple, a great theologian). And this was a raw choir that didn’t really know much about singing. And he gave them a hymn to sing that they knew very well. And to impress the Archbishop, they sung it with gusto, and it sounded forced and terrible. Then he had with him a professional choir, and he asked them to sing a little-known hymn, and sing it several times until everybody got the hang of the tune. “Now,” he said, “I want you to sing this tune, but there’s one very important thing, and that is that you don’t try to sing it. You mustn’t try. You must think of the melody and let it sing itself.” And they sang it very well. And he turned to the Archbishop and said, “Your grace, that’s good theology, isn’t it?” And it obviously was, because William Temple told me the story.

So then, we get to what is in India called the use of mantra. And that is the chant—words, sounds, chanted—not for their meaning, but for their sound. And thus everything that will occur in the following celebration will not be in the English language. It is not intended to be understood in a discursive and intellectual sense. You are asked only to dig the sound. And I use the word “dig” advisedly, because it means something a little more than appreciate. It means “enter into,” “penetrate,” “get right to the bottom of.” Because when you are listening to sound, and when you are letting sound hum through you, this is one of the most obvious manifestations of the energy of the universe. Śabda, as it’s called in Sanskrit, is Brahman, commonly said. Sound is Brahman. Sound is God. That’s the real meaning of “In the beginning was the word.” It doesn’t mean in the beginning was the chatter, in the beginning was the commandment, the orders. It means the vibration, the word, in that sense.

So we concentrate, therefore, purely on the sound, and you will find that, although we have a chorus that has been made familiar with these mantras, some of them are so simple that you will all be able to join in with them. And please do so quite freely. It’s a pity, you see, that the Roman Catholic Church (which used to have a mantric service, the mass) is dropping it and putting the mass into the vernacular—and not very good vernacular at that, so far as the English translation is concerned—so that it’s become terribly intellectual. And often there’s somebody standing by the altar at a microphone to explain what’s going on. And therefore as Clare Boothe Luce put it the other day, it is no longer possible to practice contemplative prayer at mass because you’re being hammered at with information, with exhortation, with edification all the time.

And the Catholic Church should realize that, in giving up Latin, it has lost its magic. Religion is not supposed to be understood. Religion is that which is past understanding. Understanding may lead up to it, as a pedagogue, but to express religion intellectually is using the intellect for something it can’t do. It is comparable to taking up the automatic telephone and dialing W-H-A-T-I-S-G-O-D and expecting to get information as an answer. Although the telephone is very useful otherwise, you cannot find out the mystery of the universe through talk, only through awareness. And for that reason we offer this as an example, and it’s offered in this way.

It is a ritual, and it has a certain order to it, but it’s very easy to get together. It doesn’t require an enormous amount of dramatic rehearsal. And it’s something that any group can do anywhere on a do-it-yourself basis anytime. And I suggest that churches get rid of their pews, where everybody is herded in like cattle to look at the backs of each other’s necks, and that they spread their floor with rugs and cushions, and that they have something in which people can approach an ineffable—that means beyond words—spiritual experience, and not be told and forced into a particular pattern of thinking, of mentation.

So, you see, for that reason I have only given the slightest suggestion of how one uses these mantra, or the silence, for meditation. You all have your own way of doing things like that. Do it your own way. All this is a vehicle, a support, for contemplation.

So now there will be an intermission, in which I suggest you simply sit quietly and get settled, and then we will proceed to the contemplative ritual.

[Chanting]

Namo tassa bhagavato arahato sammāsaṃbuddhassa. Buddham saranam gacchami. Dhanham saranam gacchami. Sangham saranam gacchami. Panatipata veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami. Adinnadana veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami. Kamesumicchacara veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami. Musavada veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami. Suramerayamajjapamadaṭṭhana veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami. Namo tassa bhagavato arahato sammāsaṃbuddhassa. Om ahavairo kanatagata om. Om mani bhava tathagata om. Om maradhna sambhava tathagata om. Om namo gashidhi gathagata om. Om makshovia tathagata om.

Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.

[???]

Listen and let the sound play with your ears. Don’t give it a name. Just listen. Close your eyes and go entirely into a world of sound. If I should say anything to you during this silence, just listen to the sound of my voice and don’t worry about the meaning of the words. Your brain will take care of that by itself.

[Meditation]

The air which is playing with your ears is also playing with your lungs. If you let your lungs breathe as they wish to without helping them, watch what they do. When they feel like breathing out, let it go out, but don’t assist. When it feels like coming in, let it come in, but don’t pull. Are you breathing or is it breathing you?

Where did the sounds come from—judging with your ears only? They seem to come out of silence, out of nothing. What’s the nothing? Can you feel it, sense it—without words, without ideas? If you keep your tongue relaxed, you won’t talk to yourself so much.

Remember, there is no special state you are supposed to be in. Simply let yourself be aware of whatever state you are in. Don’t name it. Just feel. Now only is important.

When there is no thinking, where is yesterday? Where is tomorrow? Where is self? Where is other?

Now, would you gently allow a sound to arise in your imagination, in the ear of the mind, a sound that is pleasing to you and which you would feel natural humming. Just your own sound. And, letting your breath sort of fall out easily and naturally, hum the sound out loud. Let it get loud, and louder.

[Humming]