This weekend is devoted to the future of religion, and I’ve introduced one kind of paradoxical gimmick into this series of seminars by saying that the best kind of future we can envisage is one in which we get rid of the idea of the future as an area of experience which solves problems. It doesn’t. Western man has been obsessed with history in a way that is quite unlike any other culture, and has seen the course of human events as a series of progressive steps towards a goal in the beyond. And you will see that this is absolutely basic to the theology of the Jewish and Christian religions as we now know them, although it wasn’t necessarily always so. But they are absolutely wedded to the idea that the significance of human life is historical significance—that is to say that the present has in itself no justification. It’s only justified what we do now in terms of the way in which it leads in some kind of progressive pattern towards tomorrow. And therefore there is that—to use Tennyson’s phrase—the one far-off divine event to which all creation moves. And we may never enjoy that. Maybe our children will. Maybe our children’s children.

Although actually, the result of this is going in exactly the opposite direction to that of its intention. Living in a historical society, the one far-off divine event to which all creation moves, is (so far as anybody can see it) the explosion of a cobalt bomb which will get rid of all life on the planet. That’s history for you. And therefore, the urgent task of today is to stop history, and to do this by creating a diversion—a diversion from history.

Now, I’ve explained this in past seminars, but because some of you are here for the first time today, I’m just going to go over this briefly. Let’s suppose we get the sort of situation where you’ve got a gambling casino, and there’s been a very dangerous game with high stakes going on for most of the night. And the stakes have been getting higher and higher, and there’s a huge assemblage of people gathered round this table where the contestants are betting not only thousands and millions and billions of dollars, but they’ve finally brought out their nuclear weapons and have said, “I dare you to blow the scene up first.” Wowee! What a gamble. You know, it’s like in a powder magazine: you’re sitting with a box of matches and say, “If you don’t agree with me, I’ll drop the match and blow us both up.” So that’s the kind of game that’s been going on. And it’s on a collision course and no one can stop it, because the mental set of the contestants is such that they can’t give up.

Unfortunately, both of them believe in the life hereafter in some funny way. Perhaps the Russians don’t believe in the life hereafter, but the Western Christians tend to believe in it. So once, many years ago, when Professor Yuri of the University of Chicago gave a talk to the assembled episcopal clergy of the diocese of Chicago and raised all sorts of horrors about atomic bombs, an old man got up—who was the Suffragan bishop of Chicago, Bishop Randall—and said after the clergy had expressed great concern, “I don’t know what all you people are so disturbed about, because all this man has told us is that we’re going to die. And we knew that already. And as Christians we’re not afraid of death.” So the clergy got up and said, “Hey, alright. It’s alright for you, Bishop Randall. You’re an old man, and you don’t have the problems of us young people with children and families and all that kind of thing.” But you see what a dangerous man a man who believes in the life hereafter can be. Because he can say, “Better be dead than red.” Because he believes in a future beyond the grave in which accounts will be settled, and the reds will be proved wrong.

Now, I’m trying to indicate what I stand for myself—as a sort of half-baked representative of the traditions of the Orient—is not a future life beyond the grave in the ordinary sense of the word, but a realization of the fact that our true life is timeless; that we don’t have a future in the sense that we will not carry over into future manifestations of our existence our personal memories, but there will be future manifestations of our existence. Only we won’t know it. We will experience it again and again, just as we do now, without remembering any past. Because if we did carry over into the future an indefinite memory, conscious memory, of our past, we would be bored. We would say this is the same old thing over and over again and we’ve had enough of it.

But nature—just as we have in our biology, our physiology, an elimination system besides an eating system, so in our psychology we have a forgetting system as well as a memory. And it’s equally important. If you cannot erase, if you cannot wipe the slate clean—that’s the real meaning of the Christian idea of forgiveness, of the Jewish idea of the year of Jubilee. Forget it! And then we can begin life anew, and see the familiar world with the eyes of children who find it all absolutely astonishing. As we get older we say, “Oh well… ho-hum…!” We’ve seen the sunrise many times, and therefore we need to forget. And that’s the mystery of death. And therefore, a style of life which sets the future always as the thing to be worked for, it seems to me to be biologically, physiologically, psychologically unsound. Because it’s always preparation and lacks the verve as well as the nerve to live now.

So then, this is one of the reasons today why the most extraordinary changes are going on in people’s thinking. See, basically, people really do know what’s good for them. They have an obscure unconscious sense. De Tocqueville once said, “A democracy is always right, but for the wrong reasons.” And this is why our laws in the British and American tradition are really so sane insofar as they say: well, ultimately the people must decide what they want. No individual knows what is good for the people. The people themselves know. They don’t know why, but they know in an obscure way.

And therefore you will find, at a moment when human survival is in jeopardy, that there begins to be from (as it were) the grassroots of society a rumbling revolution that something’s got to be different. And what has got to be different is, of course, that our consciousness has to be changed; that Western civilization—and to some extent Oriental civilization—has gone on these many centuries with an experience of what it is to be alive, what it is to be human, what it is to be a person, that is a hallucination. Namely: that you are an independent center of consciousness and volition inside a capsule of skin looking out upon (as we say: confronting) a world that is not you, that is alien, and insofar as that world is not a human world—and most of it isn’t—it is stupid, mechanical, blind. And therefore there’s this sense of intense hostility towards the external world. And the idea so much promoted by the Jewish and the Christian traditions is that the valuable thing about being human is that you are a person.

Now, we’ll go into that word, “person.” But the idea is that the supremely valuable thing about human life is that you are an individual ego, and that—by the force of your psychological effort and your independent will—you are going to control and transform the world. And therefore, any point of view which puts down in any way the individual ego and its power to exercise mind over matter is repugnant to our cultural tradition. This is very strong in the United States. I’ve often said, “Scratch an American and find a Christian Scientist”—someone who believes that you should not be in any way obligated to, dependent upon, the physical aids of life. If you’re in pain, if you had a headache—well, you shouldn’t take aspirin. You should use your willpower, or your faith, or your something, you know, and overcome it that way. And these people are always blind to the fact that they do have to eat every day. There are all sorts of fantasies. Half-baked oriental notions, too, about people who don’t need to eat, who are surviving on one banana and a glass of water per day. This sort of thing. And that strikes the imagination of our culture: what would be the ideal? That’s why we cook so badly. We don’t eat with gusto, like the French. We eat apologetically, like the British. So this extraordinary fascination with the good of human life as being summed up in the ego and its energy and its independence is an idea that had something to be said for it. But you can always have too much of a good thing.

Now, I must repeat something that is always necessary to understand anything I’m saying is that I exaggerate. I, instead of being moderate and taking due consideration for all possible points of view whereby we come to a measured, mature, and balanced view of things. If you do that as a philosopher, nobody will listen to you. So what you do is: you make an exaggeration in a certain direction to balance and compensate an exaggeration that’s gone in the other direction. So, with our culture, the exaggeration has gone in the direction of the value sacredness of the ego. So I’m pitching a cause in the other direction and saying the ego is a hallucination. And that’s what’s the trouble with us is that we believe in this, aAnd that therefore we, in the possession of our enormous technology, are fighting the external world and destroying it. Look around. In every direction this lovely Marin County is being destroyed by smog, automobiles, track dwellings, water pollution, air pollution, disregard of the forests. You could go a little further up north, take a plane ride to Seattle, and see what’s been happening. It’s just terrible.

So we then find ourselves in this situation that we have inherited religions which emphasize salvation in the future—beyond death, maybe. Or the Jewish people don’t so much emphasize the idea of immortality. Jewish people think of the messianic hope that the day of the Lord is coming someday, when there will be a general knocking of heads together, and the wisdom of Moses and Solomon will be vindicated. But it’s all set to the future. And therefore, in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions, mystical religion is suspect. There are not many Jewish mystics. Yes, the Hasidim are a special sect. But among Christians you will not find the mystical very much favored. There are great Christian mystics, but the Catholic Church always says of mystical experience that it is an extraordinary grace. And they mean, by using the word “extraordinary,” extra-ordinary. That is to say: it is something of a peculiarity, like a miracle, vouchsafed to certain individuals outside ordinary Christianity.

Ordinary Christianity, way back in the fourth century, definitely rejected Gnosticism in favor of faith. Knowledge was rejected: one should not have knowledge of divine things, one should believe. Because wherever anybody claimed to knowledge, they were in danger of the sin of spiritual pride. But you can equally be proud on: my faith is stronger in your faith. It makes no difference.

So the emphasis in the whole of the Christian tradition in religion has been knowledge of God in terms of belief—belief in a revelation, belief in a dogma. And so Christianity has not only not encouraged, but actually suppressed any religious manifestation which emphasized the primacy of experience, of knowing the divine as distinct from believing in the divine. Oriental religion—Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist—is concerned not with belief at all, not with dogma, because it would say immediately: how can you express divine things in words? All words are invalid when it comes to the ultimate reality. But it would say: on the other hand, the words may be invalid. There is the possibility of experiencing it. And so the right experience, rather than the right belief, is the concern of Oriental religion.

So the goal of the Buddhist and of the Hindu is not salvation. It is liberation. Liberation in terms of an experience which is called bodhi (or awakening), samādhi (or unitive consciousness), moksha (liberation), nirvana (letting go). That’s what it really means: breathing out, letting go of your grasp on the breath on life.

Now, therefore, the so-called religions of the Orient have therefore become an extraordinary fascination to Western people since the nineteenth century. Publishers are selling literally millions of books throughout the Western world on yoga, Vedanta, Zen, Taoism—especially to young people. People under 25, if they have any pretensions to education at all, have read this. I know about it. Interesting. Because, as I said, they have what Carl Rogers calls positive growth potential. That is to say: knowing fundamentally when to get in out of the rain. And that what is needed for Western culture, for technological culture—whether western or eastern—is a new kind of human being. Not, though, as a moral necessity.

You know, when we talk about a new man in a Christian or in a Jewish context, it’s always in terms of a preaching. That you should reform, you should take yourself in hand, you should talk seriously to yourself and be converted. This doesn’t work anymore. Never did really work. Because a person who is converted to an unselfish style of life by preaching is always a hypocrite—because he’s not really been changed. He’s trying to change. He knows he ought to change. He feels guilty because of the style of life which he has lived in the past, and out of the energy of that sense of guilt tries to reform. But because he still experiences himself fundamentally as a separate ego, all his new style of life is attempted love of other people. His morality is a fake. And that’s why it is so true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That is why do-gooders create so much trouble. That is why, eventually, the do-gooder resorts to violence, and employs the police to do for you what is good for you. He’ll shoot you for your own best interests. That’s where it ends up.

So therefore, Western religion as we have known it, in the standard brands of the Jewish and the Christian religions, is falling apart. It is becoming of no interest. It’s becoming a joke. And it’s happening faster and faster and faster, despite the strong stands taken by the lunatic fringe of Protestantism, mostly in the southern and central United States—people like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Hardshell Baptists: that has all become incredible. In fact, ministers, rabbis, do not believe what they’re saying. Some of them are honest enough to come out and say so, in talking about the death of God.

If, for example, you really felt that, shall we say, fundamentalist Protestantism is the truth, and that people who didn’t believe in Jesus Christ were going to fry in hell forever. You really, honestly believe that—you would be screaming in the streets, because most of your friends, and not to mention your relations, would be destined for eternal hellfire. And you ought to be concerned about that. But they are not screaming in the streets. Yes, they issue polite warnings over a few radio stations, tracts. But even Jehovah’s Witnesses are reasonably well behaved when they knock at your door. They don’t believe it. But they think they ought to. They’re trying to con themselves into believing what they think they’re supposed to believe. But nobody does.

Most of the clergy who’ve been through a sophisticated theological training—and I’m thinking particularly of Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, and all respectable religions—they don’t believe what they’re talking about. Their great problem is that they think that the laypeople want them to hand out the old-time religion, and will be offended and will leave church if they don’t. Like that joke in The New Yorker the other day, where a couple of Episcopalian type clergy in the vestry, with a collection plate which has practically nothing in it. And they’re shrugging their shoulders and say, “Well, well, back to the good old generalities.”

See, what’s happening is this. I’ve been very intimately involved with the problems of Bishop Pike, and his successor, and the Episcopal clergy in this diocese, because I know them all rather well. And they’re having a terrible time! The reason is this: they’re all very theologically sophisticated and extremely intelligent people, but they depend for their financial support on a very few wealthy individuals, most of whom are reactionaries. Therefore, because of their liberal and far-out policies, they’re losing their financial support. You would think that they would, by being so far out, recruit an enormous new following of young people, forward-looking people, and so on, but they don’t, because those people aren’t interested in the church at all. And therefore they are completely falling between two stools.

Now, why, for heaven’s sakes, aren’t those people interested in the church at all? There’s nothing that can be done about the church, as far as I can see—except let it evaporate. Because, by a curious principle which we don’t really understand, symbols and myths have a vitality which is like biological things. They are born and they die. And the mythology of the Judeo-Christian tradition is dead. God is dead—in the sense of God conceived as the personal father of the universe who cares about you, and upon whom you can rely.

There was an excellent article on this by Rabbi Rubenstein from Pittsburgh in Playboy just recently. I think it was the June issue of Playboy. Because he made the point—it was a surprising article, because when I started I thought: oh my God, here’s this dreary old stuff. There is no God and the Jews are still his chosen people. The Christian version is: there is no God and Jesus Christ is his only son. Well anyway, I thought this was what was going to come up. But it wasn’t. He switched towards the end of the article and said: now the death of God means the revival of mysticism, of the experience of the nothingness which is the ground of the world, or what Tillich called the ground of being.

Now, of course, his article wouldn’t have carried weight with somebody who wasn’t theologically sophisticated. They would have thought he was saying: well we ought to believe in nothingness instead of God—not understanding the special theological meaning of the word “nothingness”: no-thingness. Not nothingness in the sense of just blah, but the notion that the ground of the world—which is your center and your being, as well as that of everybody and everything else—is not a thing in the same way that the diaphragm in the speaker is not a noise. It’s very much there, but it’s not any of the noises that it makes. In a way, it’s all the noises it makes, but yet somehow something else.

And so naturally, therefore, we can have no concept, because all our concepts are concepts of things, concepts of events. We can have no concept of God. And the meaning of the death of God theology is that the conceptual God is dead. Nobody can anymore talk the human race into some sort of concept of God, because the development of Christianity, of Judaism, and so on, through their theologies, have come to the point where nobody’s going to buy that anymore.

Actually, of course, the concept of God in the Jewish and Christian traditions, as in the Islamic tradition, is based on the conception of kingship in the ancient Near East. Monotheism is political. It is the elevation to the universe of people like Hammurabi, of the Cyruses of Persia, and of the Pharaohs of Egypt, and of King David. And the title of God, King of Kings—there’s a collect in the Episcopal Prayer Book. It’s especially, say, in the Church of England, where of course the politics is a constitutional monarchy. The priest gets up and says, “Oh almighty and everlasting God, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the only ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all dwellers upon earth. Most graciously deign to behold our sovereign lady, Queen Elizabeth, and do her plenteously with heavenly gifts, health and wealth, long to live,” et cetera. And so, what you see is a court official addressing the throne.

So the title “King of Kings” was borrowed from the Persian Shah. Cyrus was called the Jahan Khan, which means “the King of Kings.” And so those royal honors which the Jews didn’t believe should be given to Cyrus—although they had a special liking for him, because he liberated them from the Babylonians—so they just transferred the titles of Cyrus to God; to Jehovah.

So we’ve been hung up for centuries with this political theory of the government of the universe as a dictatorship. It may be a constitutional monarchy insofar as God suspends his omnipotence and allows you a certain degree of free will. Only you’d better behave in the right way! You must choose to love God, you see? Because if you don’t, it’s going to be trouble. But it’s up to you, you know? You have a chance. It’s really a very funny system.

But, as a result of that, the most curious things develop into—let me just take a little sidetrack into legal theory in the United States of America. How can you, as members of the United States, where you believe and you do solemnly swear that you believe this to be the best form of government. You know, when I moved into this country I had to face the immigration officers, and they sat on an important-looking desk with the Stars and Stripes behind them, and they said, “What do you think of the form of government in the United States?” Well, I said, “I think it’s a very good form of government.” “Okay.” So, but when you actually become a citizen—that was the later process—you renounce all other allegiances, and you do solemnly swear across your heart and hope to die that the American flag represents the ideal form of government. And it’s a republic. How, then, can you believe that the universe is a monarchy? You just can’t do that. “One nation under God” is an absolute contradiction. Because then, when you say it’s under God, it’s not a republic anymore, it’s a monarchy.

So now, what happens? You are a young man and you are called to the colors to fight. And you find it against your conscience to do so. You don’t believe in killing people. What do you have to do? Well, this has been modified recently, but what you always had to do was to appeal over the head of the nation and the president to a superior authority called the supreme being. They didn’t actually say God, because they wanted to allow that not only Christians, but maybe some Mohammedans and people like that also might do this, and a few rationalists who believed in a supreme being like [???]. But you had, in other words, to accept the military view of the world: that there’s a chain of command going down from the highest boss. And you say to the commander in chief of the United States, who’s president Johnson: I have word from a higher authority than you personally conveyed to me that I am not to fight in this war or any war. And they have to say—because of freedom of religion, and it’s all this complicated game—okay, you’re excepted. You don’t have to fight, because you’ve appealed to a higher court.

So therefore, a Buddhist or a Taoist finds himself in a very funny position, because he doesn’t like this word “supreme being.” Because he doesn’t view the universe as a military operation with a commander in chief or a monarch at the top. He looks at it as an organism, in which all of us are, as it were, the arms of God like the legs on a centipede. So there’s not a chain of command, it doesn’t work that way.

Well, the courts have recently more or less decided that the word “supreme being” can be extremely vaguely. Like the famous story in the House of Commons, when they were debating in 1928 on the revision of the prayer book for the Church of England, and somebody got up and said, “It seems ridiculous that this house, which contains a number of atheists, should be debating on whether the Church of England should have a new prayer book or not.” And somebody got up and said, “Oh I don’t think there are really any atheists. We all believe in some sort of something somewhere.” But there it is.

Now—so the political theory of the universe as a monarchy, as a patriarchy, simply does not make sense to people anymore. It’s worn out. The view of the cosmos delivered to us by modern astronomy and modern physics is so magnificent and so stones the mind—that’s the real meaning of to be astounded: astoned. Everybody’s got to get stoned. But it just doesn’t jive anymore. We’ve seen—it’s like style in works of art. You very well know, when you listen to Shostakovich, that it wasn’t written by Bach. And when you look at the universe as revealed to us through modern science, you know it wasn’t written by Jehovah. It’s too big. It’s too amazing. And some people just abandon everything and say, “Well, for heaven’s sakes, let’s keep control of this thing. Let’s not get stoned. Let’s say it was just a mechanism.” See? It’s stupid. It’s just a thing going on, like Newton’s billiard games. And that’s simply self-defense against allowing your reason to be bowled over by amazement at the nature of the world, of reality, of yourself, of your organism, of your brain, your nervous system. Everything in control around here? Oh yes, we all understand what’s going on. It’s just nerves. Just protoplasm, molecules, stuff. We understand it all. This is a defense mechanism. So that doesn’t work. That doesn’t appeal to anyone today. The monarchical theory of the world doesn’t appeal to anyone today. I mean, it’s fizzling—there are still a few people who dig it, but it’s on its way out. So what’s going to take its place?

We see this fantastic growth of interest, therefore, in experiential (as distinct from dogmatic) religion. Now, I may have a slightly prejudiced position in this, because I’ve been involved for years and years in trying to explain Oriental philosophy and religion to Western people. And therefore, naturally, it would please me to think that all kinds of people were interested in this. But what I have today is a very odd feeling that I’m slightly alarmed that what I said has been taken so literally by young people. And suddenly they really say, you meant that? Yeah! You know? They’re coming on. And, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute! Don’t take me too seriously.

But this is always the case. When the older generation has taught the younger generation this, that, and the other, and the younger generation says, “Yeah,” the older generation says, “Now wait a minute. We’re not quite such good authorities as you may have thought.” Because you see the amazing vitality with which a change comes to pass. And you think: well, maybe it is immature, and will overstep itself, and is being a little bit unwise in this way and that way. It was ever thus. Young people were always immoderate. You know, hooray! Otherwise they wouldn’t be young.

So what I think the death of God movement in the existing churches is, is something like this. The individual clergy have at last got to be honest. They can’t go on going through the motions and preaching a religion that they themselves don’t believe in. But they’ve got to make a jump. It’s not enough to say God is dead, and therefore life is nothing more than a trip from the maternity ward to the crematorium. And how in that interim shall we apply some semblance of Christian principles? That’s what many of them are trying to wrestle with. What we call secularized Christianity—or religion-less Christianity, to use the phrase of Bultmann… no, Bonhoeffer. Bultmann calls it the de-mythologized Bible.

I have tried to have this out with some of the important figures in this movement, and notably the Bishop of Woolwich, and Hamilton, and Altizer. And there is a chance—Pike, too. It isn’t that we’re saying there is nothing at all that transcends what we call common or garden reality. As a matter of fact, what we call everyday reality is pretty much a myth. Psychiatrists believe in it and, in a matter of fact, have a sort of vested interest in maintaining that everyday life is dull, that it’s just a matter of like a hospital, where you’ve got scrubbed white tiles and bottles that clank and so on, and that’s reality. See? Hard floors. Monday morning, rather depressing: get on with your work. See? That’s supposed to be the real world. Face it!

Well, that’s simply, again, that’s a form of the same self-defense against the marvel of the real world as the theory it’s nothing but molecules. It’s all nothing-buttery. The thing is, we don’t know what it is, and we are scared stiff to admit that we don’t know—that we are in the grip of a fantastic miracle, and that the biggest miracle in the whole thing is what we call “yourself.” That’s the thing you should be scared to death of: you! Of course, you needn’t be. because what can it do? It can frighten itself. It can run up behind itself and shriek boo, and jump out of its skin and go through all sorts of things. But fundamentally, what else is there? Only, it always has to look as if it wasn’t there, or that it was out of control, otherwise it’d be no fun.

So what would be a very constructive thing to happen is if the death of God theology would ally itself with the ancient tradition of mystical theology, which in both India and reasonably early Christianity would say: every positive idea about God is wrong. See, in Greek you have two kinds of theological language. One kind is called cataphatic—from kata-phimi. Phimi is “to speak.” So kata, the particle, means “to speak according to metaphor.” God may be spoken of according to he was like a father. But he’s not a father. God is not a cosmic male parent. But we say God the father because there is a certain analogy between God’s relationship to the world and a father’s relationship to his children. So to speak of God as power, as justice, as kingship, as light, as whatever, was cataphatic language. Then they said there’s apophatic language. Now apoph is a particle meaning “away from.” Away from speaking. So apophatic words are eternal (which means non-temporal), infinite, unlimited, formless, bodyless, et cetera, et cetera. All those negative words are the apophatic language. And so these people held that the apophatic language was the truer language of the two. Even St. Thomas Aquinas, who nobody reads anymore, said: in order to speak of God, it is necessary to proceed by the way of remotion. Because God, by his immensity, exceeds every concept which our mind can form. And therefore we speak of God as limitless, eternal, in much the same way that a sculptor reveals an image by knocking stone away. He doesn’t add anything, he just takes away and the image is revealed.

So, in the same way, these mystics of the very ancient Christianity—particularly Dionysius the Areopagite, who wrote two books, one called The Divine Names, which was the cataphatic theology, and the other called Mystical Theology, which was the apophatic way—agree completely with the language of the Vedantists. You might think that Dionysius was actually Shankara, the great Advaita or non-dualist Vedanta interpreter. Actually, Shankara and St. Thomas Aquinas are just about contemporaries. And if they had ever been able to meet, they would have understood each other perfectly. They talked the same language, they reasoned in the same way. But Shankara went a little further over the precipice, in not feeling the necessity to cling to any fixed conception of the Divine.

But, you see, the point is not simply that you are getting rid of an idea and doing without, as if it were an impoverishment. Getting rid of the idea of God is an enrichment, because it opens you up to experience the reality instead of the idea. I call it spiritual window cleaning. You take the image that you’ve painted of the sun off the glass. And, by getting rid of it, the sunlight itself can come into the room. So by the act of getting rid of all idols—that is to say: intellectual images of God that you cling to and think, “This makes me feel safe, this makes me able to go on living,” et cetera—there is nothing, see? And when there is nothing to cling to, there is no way of pinning it all down, pinning the universe down, pinning you down, so that I say, “Well, I really know who I am now. That’s safe.” There isn’t any such way.

So that’s why, for example, a person who is neurotic, who is going through a psychotic crisis, is actually in a very positive state, if the doctors would only get around to seeing it that way. Because they are people who have the jitters, because they don’t know who they are. Anything might happen. How do I know I’m going to be able, in the next five minutes, to continue the mastery of the English language? You know? It’s just that I’ve been doing it all these years, and I suppose it goes on. But I could very well talk myself into a great worry that I might not be able to do it. Then how would I earn a living? But, you see, you never do know. You’re not really in control, because you don’t even know how you make a decision. How does your brain enable you to make an act of will? You don’t know.

So the psychotic is a person on the edge, suddenly realized how scary it all is. So what the guru does for a psychotic is say—instead of, “You’ve got to be put away because you’re dangerous, you’re awful”—he says, “Come on, now. Come on! Make it! Make it! Make it! You’re just getting warm.” Let go! Stop being frightened of insanity, chaos. Plunge into it. That’s the only way you’ll recover. That’s the act of faith.

Well now, the next question that arises in discussing the future of religion is whether Judaism and Christianity can in some way be saved. This is a question with many aspects to it. This is not only a question of the reinterpretation of doctrines, the (what Pope John called) Aggiornamento, the updating of Christianity. It’s a question of the institution. What are we going to do with the church buildings? What are we going to do with the organization? What about all these people employed as ministers? What function have they, could they have, in the future development of religion if we agree to the idea that their gospel is no longer good news, but just a bore? Is there any way in which this whole thing can be salvaged?

I’ve had myself different changing views about this. First of all, I would say that the function of a priest is to destroy the church. Because the church—I can restate this, you see, in the classical terms of Christian theology. The church is the body of Christ. What does that mean? Well, if you go back to classical Christian theology, here’s your idea. What is Christ? Christ is the incarnation of God, the Son, the second person of the Trinity. The second person of the Trinity—well, we have to go back and explain the Trinity. You have to have a Trinity conception of God if you think in a language based on sentences where there are subjects, verbs, and predicates. Because the basic structure of the sentence is “I love you.” So “I” is one aspect of it, “you” is the contrary aspect of it, and “love” is the joining aspect. So if God is love, then “I” is the Father, “you” is God the Son, and “love” is God the Holy Spirit. All the reasoning about the Trinity, why there was a doctrine of the Trinity, goes back to that. And you see that all the thoughts that were moving in the minds of those early theologians, they didn’t understand this themselves. They didn’t realize that they were hooked on a three-part sentence, and therefore had to think that way. But that’s why it emerged. And so if you’re a wise theologian, you don’t knock down the doctrine of the Trinity. You merely realize the obvious reasons why it arose. Because if God was only one, God could not be love unless the object of God’s love were his creations. But if his creations were the objects of his love, then he could not be love without his creations. Therefore, God was not a self-supporting system. Therefore, they had to find out reasons for God being love in his own right. That meant the Trinity.

And that’s led to endless complications—which I will sidestep at the moment and go on with the main theme, that Jesus of Nazareth was supposed to be the second person of the Trinity, God as the object of his own love and of his own knowledge, embracing and becoming finite. The finite state, the human state, with the suffering, with the difficulties, with the limitations that all that involved. And this is called in Greek theology, kénōsis. Kenosis means “self-abandonment” or “self-emptying.”

Now, by virtue of that, the whole physical universe is believed to be altered. Insofar as the Creator became the creature, through the physical body of Christ, all physical bodies whatsoever are touched. So that St. Paul uses the resurrection of Christ, and he calls it the first fruits of those who slept. Christ rises from the dead, overcomes death by accepting death. And by this means, then, all the physical universe is in process of being changed into the body of Christ—that is to say: the union of creator and creature.

And so the church doesn’t mean buildings, it doesn’t mean clergymen. The church, the ecclesia—meaning the assembly of those called together—the original idea of it, is that this is the leaven, like you put yeast into bread, and the leaven leavens the whole lump, using Jesus’ own illustration. The church is the leaven, the organization—or let’s better say the organism—through which the entire universe is in process of becoming converted into the divine. You call this apotheosis, meaning the divinization of something.

And so the original meaning behind the Christian mysteries is that, when a person is baptized, he is joined to this leavening process—which is ultimately going to extend not simply to people, but to weeds and grubs and birds and stones—that ultimately, through the leavening influence of the church, the whole physical universe will be converted into Christ. Where the word “Christ” means not only the historical character Jesus of Nazareth, who is regarded as the beginning of the process, but where Christ means the created world and the divine world in perfect harmony and union. So here, you see, is a fundamental notion of Christianity: that the world is in process of becoming the body of Christ.

So then the question, you see, that I posed at the beginning, is that the priest of the church, of the institutional church, will in fact further this process of becoming the body of Christ by destroying the institutional church. Why? Because the institutional church has become a purely political power. What do you do?

Let’s take this problem in a very practical way, where I speak from long experience. I have a good friend who is the rector, vicar, or whatever, of the Episcopal church here in Sausalito. And he’s a wise man. But what are his problems? He has an expensive plant that he has to maintain—not only a church building, but a parish hall; very modern. And he has to be sure that there are enough people in the community who annually pledge so much money to maintain this operation. And therefore he’s interested in upholding the building. And yet, he knows in his own heart that that’s not the way things should work.

So then, I’ve often wanted to preach a sermon at the laying of the foundation stone of a church. Well, the stone is ceremoniously laid, and I will take as my text from the Gospel of St. Matthew: “If a man’s son asks him bread, will he give him a stone? The answer is yes.” You will find again and again that if you want to raise money for a project, you can far more easily raise money for the erection of a building than you can for the support of living people in their work as scholars or priests or physicians or psychiatrists, or whatever it may be that they do. You can’t get money for people, you can get money for buildings.

And so the priest then has to say, “We must destroy the church. Burn the buildings down, deny all the doctrines!” Because the whole symbolism is that it was by the breaking of the body of Christ that the salvation of the world was delivered. When Jesus predicted his own death to his disciples, they were scandalized. They said, “But it is written in the tradition that the Messiah is not subject to death.” This is in the Gospel of St. John. And Jesus replied, “If a grain of corn does not fall into the ground and die, it remains lifeless and isolated. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.” So therefore, it is only through letting go of the process of clinging to life, which is all our fixation on immortality, on preserving the valuable things, et cetera—this huge anxiety that we hold on. So he was saying: let it go.

So then when the priest celebrates mass, what happens? To understand this, we have to go back to the very meaning of the mass. In the civilization of the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean world, the staple food was bread from wheat and the staple drink was wine. You didn’t (if you were in your right mind) drink water, because it was polluted. And therefore, an alcoholic content in the water was a safeguard against infection. So they had a way of making wine—not quite like our wine today. It was a very thick mixture. It was like concentrated port. And they served at table what is called a cratera, from which we get our word “crater,” which was a shallow, bowl-like cup. And they poured wine into this and they mixed it with water. And this was the staple drink—as today, children in Greece, in France always drink wine. They don’t consider it alcoholic luxury. They consider it food. So then in this state of civilization, bread and wine were the staple food and drink.

Now, bread is made from crushed wheat and wine is made from crushed grapes. So there’s an idea of sacrifice; that the life of the wheat and the life of the grapes is sacrificed that we may live. And therefore Jesus identified himself with this sacrifice: with the universal process of biology, whereby all biological beings live in a mutual eating society, and we are only sustained by feeding on other forms of life. But he switched it. Instead of saying this is a situation in which we are predators, and we clobber these other forms of life, and alas—you know?—he put himself in the position of everything clobbered and said, “I am all those creatures that you destroy and eat.” “Therefore,” taking the bread, “this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And then, taking the cup: “This is my blood of the New Testament.” That is to say, the New Testament means relationship, really. Diatheke in Greek. The new dialogue, the new interchange, between man and reality.

And the New Testament is that it’s not that you clobber the world, and feel terribly guilty because you’ve eaten fish and cows and wheat, but that I, God, give myself to you through the wheat, through the grapes, through the cows. So the blood is shed for you for the remission of sins. In other words: please take this offering and don’t feel guilty about it anymore. Because I, in the form of the victims, give myself to you voluntarily.

So then, the idea of the mass, of holy communion, or whatever you want to call it, is the breaking of the bread and the crushing of the grapes. That—through the sacrificial act, the destroying act—life is given. Therefore, when a priest repeats the sacrifice—and at the altar he takes the bread in the form of the host and breaks it, and pours out the blood, pours out the wine—all that becomes merely ridiculous symbolism if he is not also ready to break up the church. That means to knock down the idols, first of all—that is to say, the dogmas upon which people rely and lean. Suddenly discover the death of God, you see. Suddenly discover the historical Jesus is something you can’t put your finger on. Maybe the resurrection didn’t happen. You know, it was nothing to cling to. No miracles possible, perhaps. Break it up. And above all, break up the organization, which is a political institution with enormous property holdings, generally exploiting the public. Then, on those conditions—if the clergy, if the ministry were so to break up the church—the church would come to life. It would become a significant institution again, which it now is not.

So the next thing is this. There’s another aspect to the breaking up of the church. I spent some time this morning on going through the political analogy of the kingdom of God: God as the big boss whom everyone must obey. Now, there are two themes in Christianity, one of which is political, and the other of which is organic. The political image is the kingdom of God, the organic image is the body of Christ or the symbolism of the vine. “I am the vine and you are the branches.” Indeed, one of the most extraordinary books in the Bible, that love poem called the Song of Songs, has a theme of a love relationship between the creator and the creature in which all the imagery is vegetative as distinct from urbane.

So a transformation of the church from the political urbane institution to the vegetative organic institution, where the image of the government, or the—no, not the government, let me say the order of the world— changes from that of the polis (the city, the kingdom) to that of the vine and the body (the organism). This is the inner meaning of the incarnation of the union of God and man. While God and man are not truly united, then order must be imposed from above. When God and man are truly united in the spirit of the prophet Jeremiah, who said, “No more shall everyone teach his brethren,” saying: no God. “But they shall all know me, for I will write my law in their hearts.” And the law written in the heart, you see, is entirely different from the law imposed from above. The law written in the heart means what comes naturally.

Now, Jesus was a very clever guru. And in order to get people to have the law come naturally, he parodied the law imposed. And he did this in the Gospel of St. Matthew, which is never read correctly. You know how it begins with the Beatitudes. And when he says, “Blessed are the pure in heart”—Makarios in Greek means “happy,” not blessed in the sort of punctuous sense which that word has in English; it means “happy,” makarios—are the pure. It doesn’t mean the people who don’t tell dirty jokes. Pure means “clear,” “transparent,” “hip,” “aware,” “un-hung-up.” See?

Now, he then does a very strange thing. He says, “I have not come to destroy the law or the prophets. Not to destroy, but to fulfill. For I tell you that not one ornamental serif or punctuation mark shall be taken away from the law until the end of the world.” Therefore, you’ve got to obey all those forms. The scribes in the Pharisees pride themselves, because they obey the law very thoroughly. But you must be more righteous than they are. Unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will not be able to enter into the kingdom of heaven.

So to underline this and exemplify it—you have heard it said of old time—there are series now of crimes. One is to be angry with your brother. Another crime is to call him something that would correspond to our way of saying to a person, “You bastard!” Another way would correspond to our way of saying to someone, “You’re a fool!” Now, obviously, to be very angry is the major crime. So what he does is: he reverses the order of courts. We might say we have a magistrate’s court, or let’s say we have the Marin County courts in San Rafael, we have the state of California superior courts in San Francisco, and we have the federal courts leading up to the Supreme Court. See?

Now, what he does is the funny thing. He switches the order. For the major crime, which is being really angry, he assigns you to the lowest court. For the minor crime, which is calling someone a fool, he assigns you to the major court, which is hellfire. And then, if you keep reading on in the gospel—you know, everybody reads in the King James Bible, “Whoever says thou fool shall be in danger of hellfire.” And because instead of using quotation marks it uses a capital letter for the beginning of what would ordinary be in quotes, people think that saying “thou fool” means calling God a fool. It doesn’t mean that at all. If you read it in Greek, mōro, in the vocative, means “fool.” “Saying to your brother ‘fool,’ you shall be in danger of hellfire.” But later on, in the same gospel, he addresses the whole crowd and uses the same expression in the plural: mōros. “You fools!” And blind, following blind guides.

You see, he doesn’t even obey his own precept. So his precept must be taken ironically. He’s a humanist here. He’s saying, “You Pharisees, you think you’re so great because you obey the law. Now look, I’m going to give you a law, and you obey that.” In other words, it’s the technique of reductio ad absurdum. Because what does he do next? He says, “You’ve heard it said of old time that you shall not commit adultery. Ha-ha. But I tell you that anybody who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery in his heart.” And so all these pious fakes think, “Oh! We shouldn’t have lustful thoughts about women. That’s awful!” Who doesn’t have lustful thoughts about women? You don’t always have to act them out. So then he goes on with this joke. “Therefore, if your eye offends you”—you know, you looked at that girl and kind of thing—“pluck it out. Is it better for you that you enter into the kingdom of heaven with one eye rather than have to go into hell with two eyes.” You know, really, these ministers, these theologians have absolutely no humor at all! The whole thing is a joke. So likewise, your adversary meets you and wants to take away your coat—give him your cloak also. You’re going to be…!

So he says, you know, “God is absolute perfection, makes his Son to shine on the evil, on the good, and sends his reign on the just and on the unjust. You do the same thing.” Well, nobody can. Can you love your enemies? Can you take no thought for the morrow? Can you be as carefree as the birds and the bees? See, can you really sincerely love God and your neighbor with all your heart, with all your soul, and all your mind? Who can? See?

Here’s the thing he’s doing. He challenges. He throws this whole thing at you as a kōan, pretending it’s a commandment. And everybody in Christianity has tried sincerely to obey these things, except that every minister gives up on “that take no thought for morrow” bit and says it’s not practical. So the meaning of it is: you shall love God, you shall love your neighbor—and no faking, please! That is a fake commandment. It’s a test. It’s a reductio ad absurdum of the whole idea of law, of enforced goodness, because one must obey out of the fear of divine power.

Because if you obey out of the fear of divine power, your actions are not significantly moral. Your actions are significantly moral only if they are done out of love. And love would not be motivated by fear. How are we to love? You can’t love, possibly, not possibly, while you still think you’re an ego. While you still think you’re separate from other people in the rest of the world, you can’t love at all. How, then, are you overcome being an ego? Why, obviously, you can only overcome it if you, in some experimental way, find out that the ego is a delusion. So therefore, Jesus proposes—as a way of finding out that your ego is an illusion—that you live up to these ideals.

Now, I can go on further. I don’t know if anybody reads the Bible anymore; whether this means anything to you. But Saint Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans, has an argument which is very clever. He says that “God did not give Moses the law with the expectation that it would be obeyed.” Indeed, he says: “I learned sin through the law. I had not known covetousness, except the law had said, ‘Thou shalt not covet’.” Then he poses this funny problem: “Shall we then sin, that grace may abound?” He says, “Oh no, heaven forbid!” Mē genoito. But he says, “Now look, the reason why God gave the law was to convict us of sin. It was not in the expectation that the law would be obeyed, but only to show us how far short we fell of the divine life.” So exactly the same reasoning must therefore apply to the precepts of Jesus: not given in the expectation that they would be obeyed, but in the expectation that, through trying to obey them, we would discover that we were in a mess of some kind, that we couldn’t obey them.

Well, why not? Why can’t you do it? Why can’t you love—really, genuinely, completely? The answer is: you’re hung up on the idea that you are a separate ego: cut off, alone. You really believe you’re that. So let’s test this ego out by trying to get it to do this, and trying to get it to do that—all those things it’s supposed to be capable of doing. You discover that you’re not capable of doing them. And the reason you’re not capable of doing them is that you, as a separate individual, don’t exist. You’re a hallucination in that sense. And that’s what has to be discovered. And you can’t find that out by just telling people that it’s so; they won’t believe it. You can only dissolve an illusion by getting people to act on it as if it were true, and act on it consistently, persistently, and thoroughly. Then it all falls apart. It doesn’t work.

So, in this way, Jesus is using a guru technique where—like a Zen master gives a kōan: “What is the sound of one hand?” “Who are you, authentically and genuinely, before your father and mother conceived you? Show me.” In other words: act perfectly sincerely—without any social conditioning, what your parents told you you were, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Nobody can do it. Why can’t they do it? Because there’s no authentic, separate “you.” And when you find that out, naturally, you know that what you really are is: you’re one with the universe. Like Jesus would say, “I and the Father are one.” “Before Abraham was, I am.” “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” That’s what you really are.

Only then, the whole Christian church managed to circumvent this and shut it up. It was too true to be good. And they said, “Oh yeah, only Jesus was the way, the truth, and the life. Not you, baby. Not you. Not you.” But, in a way, that’s put such a burden on Western man. And it’s taken just under 2,000 years to see through it, and the change is coming. See? Everybody’s beginning to realize what the whole trick was about.

Jesus, you see, was an individual who got enlightened. Only, he was in the context of the Hebrew world, and he had the puzzle of how to express his state of consciousness in terms of his own time. He couldn’t very well come out and say directly, “I’ve just discovered that I’m the Lord God.” Not in a context of Jewish theology! Because of the political imagery. If he said in the context of Jewish theology, “I am the Lord God,” that would have been like saying, “You all should bow down and worship me.” When some people, including many of his disciples, caught on that he was indeed the Lord God, that was their response. You see? They bowed down and worshiped him. And he tried to turn them off that, saying, “Why do you call me good? There is none good but God.” And why he insistently prevented them from the political involvement, which was that, if he was truly the Son of God—which means simply, “Son of,” means “of the nature of”—why didn’t he lead the revolution against the Roman Empire? And he threw all that aside as a temptation in exactly the same way as the Buddha threw aside all magical powers and said, “Don’t. That’s a sidetrack. That doesn’t lead to understanding.”

When the Buddha was walking along a stream one day, there was a yogi who suddenly started walking across the water because of his miraculous powers. And the Buddha said to him, “Hey, hey, hey, come back! There’s a ford just fifty yards up the river.” So, in the same way, Jesus would not give signs of divine dominance to those who asked for them. But the church, in later times, you see, has put him on a pedestal so that the whole doctrine is rendered ineffective—krrk, just like that—and has tried and tried and tried and tried to insist that these commandments—you must love God, you must take no thought for the morrow—has tried equivocally at that to say these are commandments, and you ought to feel terribly guilty because you don’t love God with all your heart. You do take thought for the morrow. You don’t really trust in God.

And for 2,000 years it’s taken to realize that maybe Jesus had a sense of humor, was ironical, was trying to get his students, disciples, to realize they were just as much incarnations of God as he was. Because he said when the Jews took up stones to stone him—this again in the Gospel of St. John—and he said, “Many good works I have shown you. For what do you stone me?” And they said, “We don’t stone you for a good work, but for blasphemy. Because you, being a man, make yourself God.” And he replied, “Is it not written in your law: ‘I have said you are gods’?” And he’s quoting the 83^rd Psalm where it says, “You are gods, and the children of the most high, but you shall die like men.” So he said, “If I say I am a son of God”—which means, “a son of,” in Hebrew or in Arabic, it means “of the nature of.” When we say, “You’re a son of a bitch,” it means you’re bitchy. So when they say ebenekel, which means “son of a dog,” [???], “son of a donkey,” or son of Belial, they mean “of the nature of.” So “son of God” means like son of a bitch, only the opposite way: you’re divine. It has nothing to do with paternity. It’s simply an expression.

So when he said—if I say I am a son of God, and in the King James translation it’s all lost up by going, “I am the son of God,” which is not in the original Greek. He says simply, “I am a son of God, so are you.” Only, you can’t realize this, that you’re a son of God, while you’re still hooked up on the idea of legal righteousness: that you can, by the effort of your own separate conscious will, do the divine acts. You have to let go of yourself. You have to abandon that situation before you can be enthused, transformed, and inflamed with the divine spirit.

So what he does throughout that whole Sermon on the Mount is to make a caricature of legal righteousness. One of the funniest ways in which he did this was in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. This is most ingenious. He tells the story, you see, of the Pharisee. He goes into the temple, goes straight up to the front seat, stands up before the altar and says, “Oh God, I am not as other men are. I have paid my tithes regularly. I have fulfilled this obligation. I have fulfilled that obligation. And I’m feeling very good about it.” You know, just like the senior warden of the vestry in the Episcopal Church, or a knight of Columbus. Then he says this publican, who’s a disreputable character, creeps into the back of the synagogue, beats himself on the breast and says, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” “I tell you that that man went down to his house justified, rather than the Pharisee.” Now what happened? Everybody tries to imitate the publican. Now the pharisees creep into the back of the church, and beat themselves on the breast, and say, “God be merciful to me, a sinner,” because they think that’s the way to do it.

Now, you see, telling that story has an effect. It has taken away the possibility of being the genuine publican as distinct from the phony pharisee. Because now, the moment you’re trying to be genuine, you’re being phony. And I don’t know. I’ve never seen anybody—except, I think, Groddeck, whose writing on this showed me the idea—who saw through what a subtle teacher Jesus was. But you have to read between the lines. You have to get the humor of it. You have to get all the plays that are going on in this. Because he’s fully aware of the effect that his stories have on his audience. Well, they didn’t know what to do with it. They just had to get rid of it.

First of all, the problem of the death of God theology, and secondly the problem of whether the Jewish and Christian traditions can be in some way revived. Today I’m going to talk about the future of religion—in the first session from a social point of view, and in this afternoon’s session from an individual point of view. And what we are going to look at is a rather strange idea which Frederic Spiegelberg, who has taught the history of religions at Stanford for many years, calls the religion of no religion. A curious thing that has many aspects to it. He wrote a very interesting book about it years ago, which has unfortunately sort of disappeared from the market.

I met Spiegelberg in 1936 originally, as a refugee from Hitler in England. And he had just come out with the idea of the religion of no religion, and it immediately struck a responsive chord in me because I was involved with a study of Zen, which in a way is the religion of no religion. In Zen, for example, a famous story tells of one of the monks who was pestering his teachers to how he was making progress in his study of Zen. And the teacher said, “You’re all right, but you have a trivial fault.” “And what is that?” He said, “You have too much Zen.” Well, the student said, “Don’t you take it for granted that a person who is studying Zen would be interested in it, thinking about it, talking about it?” And the teacher said, “No, it turns one’s stomach.” So another monk who was standing by said, “Well, why is this?” He said, “When it’s like an ordinary everyday conversation, it’s much better.”

And so it has been a principle of Zen throughout its whole history that, if somebody asks you a religious question, you give a secular answer. “What is the ultimate meaning of Buddhism?” There’s enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool. Or if somebody says, “Why do you have a fan?” The answer is—see, that’s a secular question—so the answer is: this fan will ascend to the fifteenth heaven and hit the nose of the presiding deity. The answer is sacred.

There is a Latin saying from the poet Lucretius: tantum religio potuit suadere malorum—“too much religion is apt to encourage evil.” And so, somehow, always, I’m suspicious of religious people. When somebody comes on with a great spiel about idealism and what you ought to do and this and that, I know he’s a rascal. But when I meet somebody who from the very beginning of our association admits that he’s a rascal, I feel safer. And that’s the reason why, when men are friendly with each other—I don’t know about women, because that’s their private world and I’m not privy to it—but men who are fond of each other call each other bastards and all sorts of uncomplementary names. “Hey, you old son of a bitch, how are you doing?” See? That means that we recognize that we have in common something which in Hebrew theology is called the yetzer hara. This word in Hebrew means the “wayward spirit,” and according to Hebrew theology, when God created Adam in the beginning of time, he put in his heart the yetzer hara. And that was, in other words, a predisposition to be ornery, to be difficult, to be non-cooperative, to go off on his own in some way.

Christians don’t admit this. They have no doctrine of the yetzer hara, which is why Hebrews have more humor in religion than Christians do. There are some exceptions to this. For example, G. K. Chesterton, a great Catholic, had wonderful humor. And some Catholics have this. But, by and large, the Christian religion is serious. But the Hebrew religion has always a slight twinkle to it. If you see a play like The Fiddler on the Roof, the Hebrew can talk to God on a kind of a man-to-man basis. But the Christian is always cowering, fundamentally. Too big a load of guilt because of not admitting, not realizing, that it was God himself who was responsible for the waywardness of human nature; for the yetzer hara.

I call the yetzer hara in English translation the element of irreducible rascality that is in us all. And Jung spoke of this a great deal when he addressed himself to the problem of the assimilation of the evil in us. Once upon a time, Jung met a man in whom he could find no human failing whatsoever. And this man seriously disturbed him. He said, “I have at last met a genuine saint.” And he was so worried that he thought that he should take his own life in order, and reform himself. He said, “A few days later, I met the man’s wife. And never again have I been subject to this temptation.” Not because his wife was the sort of person who said, “Well, you should try and live with my husband.” That wasn’t the idea at all. It was that his wife contained the saint’s shadow side. He drove her to desperation, because she had to reflect all the repressed things in her husband. So Jung saw through it, and never again was tempted to be a saint.

I have a most amusing friend who lives with me here on this boat, the artist Jean Varda. And he is always in danger of being beguiled by saints. Someone comes around who he is sure is a completely saintly person, and then suddenly there’s a frightful disillusionment. It always turns out that it wasn’t that way at all.

So one has to be very suspicious of all pretensions to goodness and to sanctity, because they do not recognize the yetzer hara, or the element of irreducible rascality that is in us all. And this, then, is why preaching, a preached religion, is a failure. The whole lesson of history is that preaching doesn’t work; that preaching is really a form of moral violence, of trying to change human conduct by saying: “Look, if you don’t mend your ways, there’s going to be a terrible thing to happen.” Either the police are going to catch you, or hellfire—which is, of course, the celestial police force is going to catch you—or a dreadful doom is going to occur.

You realize that, before the Second World War, beginning with Remarque’s book All Quiet on the Western Front, there was an enormous propaganda against war based on the horrors of war. And in Japan they had innumerable movies taken during the First World War, which was an unbelievably brutal holocaust, where those British and French generals really sacrificed men. Do you know that on the day that the armistice was declared, and the victory was announced for the Allied forces, when the commanding officers ordered three cheers for His Majesty the King, a great many of the men blew raspberries instead. It was an absolutely inhuman thing. Well, the Japanese had all these very uncensored photographs and movies, but this did not deter the Japanese from trying it themselves. Because horror, the doom, has a fascination for everybody. The same thing kind of vertigo, which one gets looking over a precipice; the temptation to jump.

I know a young man—I did know him; he’s dead—he had tried everything. He had tried all possible changes of consciousness, all possible drugs and experiments. And finally he did something to die. And I am sure I know why. He had to find out what death was about. He had found out everything else, but he was completely fascinated. And so always, when you paint the picture of doom and say, “This is what’s going to happen to you if…” you’re simply asking for trouble. People will go to their doom. And so the preaching lesson is no good.

The only way to change human behavior is to woo instead of preach, to make love instead of threatening disaster, to point out how glorious something could be, and in some way to live it. This is the real—if it has any meaning and if it has any guts to it, the idea of “make love, not war” would be to live here and now, starting today a magnificent life. And you don’t need a great deal of money to do it. You need more imagination than money.

I know innumerable people who’ve got lots and lots of money and who are absolutely miserable, because they have no imagination. And they are full of fears because of their wealth. They always think someone’s going to take it away, and instead of now, will I starve, will I get sick? There’s no protection against that. Who knows when anything strikes, when any accident strikes. We have no real defense against that.

So, from a social point of view, the important thing in religion is no longer preaching the possibility of doom, because nobody is threatened by doom. Doom doesn’t deter anyone, because we know we’re all doomed anyway. Why rub it in? We’re all going to die. And because the Christians and the Islamic people—and to some extent the Hindus and Buddhists—try to rub it in and say, “You think death is the bad thing. Here, you just wait till when you’re dead, because we’ve got eons of time in which you can be tortured in our very special hells. And stop and consider that!” Well, everybody read about it. It’s like people think about the atom bomb: nobody is anymore deterred by thinking about that. We’re so used to it. And at the same time, it’s inconceivable. There’s nothing anyone can do about it. There’s no way of defending San Francisco against an atomic attack. So therefore, everybody stops thinking about it, because it’s insoluble. So the terror thing does nothing. If anything at all, we would say, “Okay, let’s get it over with so we don’t have to dread this anymore.” Push the button and end it.

So what is necessary to do instead, and not for any reason that there might be death and hell at last, but to get up the nerve to live the joyous good life today, using imagination rather than money. And the difficulty for Jews and Christians in particular—other people have difficulties, too—but the difficulty for them is they’re feeling that if you do presume to live the good life today, you will make the gods mad. It’s like saying to people, “You may well laugh now, but you just wait! It’s going to happen to you.”

So then, we have, you see, an enormous terror of pleasure; of enjoying ourselves. Because when we enjoy ourselves, we feel guilty. We know—I mean, if you eat a good dinner, there’s an obscure feeling that somebody somewhere is not having a good dinner. Therefore, what right of you to enjoy your dinner when there’s somebody going hungry? Well, what are you going to do about that? If it just gives you a bad digestion because you can’t assimilate your own dinner, it does no one any good, it doesn’t do the hungry person any good, it doesn’t do you any good. Guilt, in other words, is an absolutely, one hundred percent destructive emotion.

And one of the real reasons why people don’t do anything about the hungry—and something could be done about it—is their guilt hangup. They’d rather be guilty than practical. It’s perfectly possible to abolish starvation throughout the world. People would spend as much energy doing that as they would do, motivated by groundless fears, getting together to cooperate to defend themselves against the unspeakable threat of yellow communism or something like that. It’s to me absolutely unbelievable the wealth that is wasted and poured into projects of violence, when any practical person would have seen that for half the cost you could have everybody in Asia—all the millions of Chinese, Vietnamese, Hindus—living a nice prosperous life for half the cost of what it is taking to defend ourselves against the alleged menace. But it is curious, you see, that people will be united for reasons of terror, not for reasons of love. And yet the union, the associations they form, to defend themselves against an alleged terror are in the end always and invariably destructive. They solve nothing and build up massive historical hatreds.

So if there is to be any sort of future for religion, it’s one of the most obvious lessons of history that it must stop preaching and do something else. I was a minister in the Episcopal Church. I was a university chaplain at Northwestern for five years. And finally, when I got through, the thing that embarrassed me most of all was preaching. You see, the problem of being a minister—you have your collar turned around—is that once you set yourself up in that position, people look at you and they start respecting you. Cops don’t give you tickets. They give you a discount at the liquor store. You know? You get all these funny little privileges. And why? Well, people say, “You’re living vicariously for us the good life that we don’t live.” See?

Now, what does that mean? It means essentially this: that you don’t screw around. That’s all. And that’s all! Because if you take the practical test: what do the churches do socially today? They are not interested in anything. They’re not interested in mysticism, they’re not interested in God, they’re not interested in abolishing poverty. A few of them are; the Quakers. A few people get mad about war and really try to do something. But, by and large, all that churches are doing is: they are family and sexual regulation societies. And the truth of the matter is the test: for what can a preacher get kicked out? For owning shares in an armaments corporation? General dynamics? Not on your life! You can live, as I say—quoting the litany of the Church of England—in a state of envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, hardness of heart and contempt of God’s word and commandment, and be a bishop in good standing. But the minute you sleep with your secretary, you’re out. That’s the test. And, after all, even sleeping with somebody in an irregular way is a loving thing to do. It’s not a hateful thing to do. It’s an action of affection. However, whatever rationalization you may bring forth to show that it shouldn’t be done, Jesus certainly regarded it as one of the minor sins. He was far more angered by the money-changers in the courts of the temple than he was about the woman taken in the sin of adultery. And yet this is magnified. This is the thing.

So this whole position of a religion geared to repression—essentially what it is. Freud was right, but Freud didn’t have the courage of his convictions. This is why Norman Brown’s book, Life Against Death, is such a marvelous piece of work, because here you get a very sophisticated classical scholar putting forward the preposterous notion that repression is a bad thing. And he’s advocating it with all the historical knowledge and literary expertise of a professor of his standing. It’s very funny indeed.

But insofar, then, as our religion has been repressive, it has one thing to be said for it. And the moment you understand this, the bubble is broken. The one thing that can be said for repression is: the tighter the squeeze, the stronger the jet. And so, in a way, sex has been made more exciting by making it forbidden. But that’s the purpose. In other words, if we go back to the origins of Christianity in the civilization of Rome, where—depending on your social level—you had different kinds of sex life. If you were rich enough to attend the baths, you could have anything you wanted—plenty of it. If you weren’t rich enough to go to the baths, you had the circus. And in the circus you could be entertained with any kind of sadism, masochism, weird bestialities and goings-on. Finally, everybody had got sexually flaccid. And therefore, the revolution of Christianity to stop all this with eventually a disgust for sex was a biological process, however rationalized theologically. It was a biological process to restore sexual interest by making it forbidden. Only, they didn’t know it. But once you see that, you can see what Christianity did, what its function was, but also you can see that it went too far. Instead of simply recreating interest in sex by making it forbidden, it warped all sorts of people’s lives because they didn’t have any sexual delight without guilt at all, and it created what is called leather sex, which is sadomasochistic women in black boots and all that kind of thing. And that’s, again, where love (through its frustration) turns into violence, and where orgasm is confused with pain.

There’s always that possibility, you see. We are getting our wires crossed. For example, many people who’ve got their wires crossed in their heads, when they see something that excites sexual excitement, they feel the emotion or the sensation of disgust. Because they can’t distinguish the nauseating feeling of “I want to vomit,” they can’t clearly distinguish that from the orgiastic feeling of “I want to convulse.” They’ve got their wires crossed. So they feel disgust when they should be feeling lust. That’s what we call being mixed up.

So then, from a social point of view, it seems to me obvious that a social community must have a religion—and, above all, a religion about which we all agree. There’s no point in having a religion about which we don’t agree. I mean, you know, you have the Baptist church, the Episcopal church, the Roman Catholic church, the synagogue, Jehovah’s witnesses, and all these people fighting with each other and playing their various one-upmanship games with each other, and the vast majority of the public who couldn’t care less; don’t go anyway. So there is no religion today. We’ve got all these survivals from the past, and they fight with each other.

To belong to a religion today is, to my mind, not intellectually respectable. Because all you do when you join a church: you become a divisive force. This is where Krishnamurti is so clear and marvelous in his discussion of this problem. He shows again and again, he asks people: you want to believe in a God, you want to believe in a life beyond death. Why? Why, really, do you want to believe this? And he drums it in and drums it in. He says the reason is you want to protect yourself. And so long as you’re trying to protect yourself, you have put up a shell between you and everything you define as not being you. And for this reason, then, all your beliefs are simply sources of strife and disharmony. And then he puts himself in a very odd position. Because you can’t be a disciple of Krishnamurti. You can’t join anything. He has no organization. And so he’s surrounded with non-disciples. And he gets terribly frustrated, because he keeps seeing that the people who follow him and who come and listen to him, they just don’t understand what he’s trying to get across. The smart people would leave, you know? They would get the word and disappear. How fast can you get out? But they think that there’s still some special secret he’s got up his sleeve, and if they hang around long enough, they’ll get it. But they won’t. He’s said everything right from the start.

So then, we cannot—much as there is need for a religion in society, a religion which believes in something won’t work. Because the moment you put out a belief, people start to argue. The moment you lay down a law, people start to argue. Should it be this way? Should it be that way? And then there’s this group that says, “We think it should be this, that you should eat meat.” And the other group says, “No, you shouldn’t eat meat.” And so they start yammering at each other.

So there is a possibility, then, that there could be an entirely different basis of religion. Let’s think of some things that we agree about and don’t argue about. There’s a pretty close agreement among people living in the United States, of whatever racial origin, to speak the English language. Because no one enforces it. People don’t go around saying, “You will be damned forever if you split an infinitive,” or if you use the word “beluca” instead of “cup.” Nobody fights about that. Therefore, more or less everybody agrees to talk English. It’s convenient. Another thing that we don’t fight much about is music. There are indeed some parties in music. There are the classical people, there are the rock people, there are the jazz people, there are the barbershop quartet people. But there’s a pretty easy tolerance about this. We don’t really take people to law and to get the cops after them because they differ in musical tastes from us. Well, well, well, there’s plenty of room. Now, music is something, therefore, about which people can unite with no argument. What is there to argue about? You just get with it and you swing.

So then, this indicates to me that the only possibly harmonious religion for mankind could be one which has in it no ideology. It would have no doctrines, so there would be nothing to argue about. The principle of Zen is always, of course: instead of theorizing about what is the nature of the universe, to point directly and say, “If you want to understand, see into it directly.” In other words, here I am talking. Anyway, look into the nature of life without thinking, and see for yourself that when you don’t think, you don’t make any division between yourself and the rest of the world. You cannot point to the distinction between your five fingers. You can’t lay your finger on the difference between your fingers. And, in the same way, you cannot touch the difference between yourself and someone else. The difference is a concept, a propriety—a churlish propriety at that. “This is mine, this is yours.” Ya, ya, ya, ya. But when you stop the theorizing, you stop the thinking, then you don’t divide. Then the world is what Buddhists call in its state of suchness, just like that.

So then, it is for this reason that if there were to be a religion about which people could really unite, it would have to have no doctrine, no law that is put in words. But people could unite around what we might at the moment call a nonsense religion. I call it “hum,” which is the religion that is starting—has no hierarchy, nobody is in charge, there are no officers, no organization. It has no doctrine. It doesn’t say any words that mean anything. It has only music and ritual. Because people like to get together and dance. According to the Hindus, the whole universe is the dance of the Godhead. So join in! Get with it!

And so this is what we need. In American life in particular we don’t have any joyous social assemblage. Figure that! We don’t! You may occasionally go to a night spot, at a price, to dance on a small, little, tiny floor, and really not much fun. There is no dancing in the streets. Why, it would be considered somehow subversive. There is no pageantry, except occasional military pageantry on the fourth of July. There is absolutely no occasion upon which anyone and everyone—as people who live on this geographical expression called the United States—there is no occasion on which we get together for a kind of ritual of mutual agreement and love and so on. It doesn’t exist. That’s what the rites of a religion were supposed to be. They were the orgies.

Now we misuse the word “orgy.” We think orgy means simply when all the sexual rules are suspended and you do anything you like. That’s because we’ve made such a big repression out of sex. The real meaning of the orgy goes back to the idea that God created the world in six days, and then took the seventh day off. That’s the holiday, which means holy day. So we have the Sabbath for the Jews and the Sunday for the Christians. But they don’t take a day off. They don’t really celebrate. When I was a minister, I used to tell the students at Northwestern University, “So there’s going to be a celebration of the Holy Communion 7 o’clock next Sunday. 11 o’clock.” And I said, “Now look: I said celebration. And if you come here because you think you ought to come, we don’t want you. Better stay in bed, go for a swim, or something else. But if you want to join with us in this act of celestial whoopee, you’re very welcome.” I came right out and said that, you see—so I had to leave the church. This is the essential thing that we lack. We just don’t have this social institution. And we would find each other out.

For example, let me tell you this story. There was once a retreat meeting for Christians of many different denominations for a discussion of how they could get together. Well, the first time they held this meeting, they talked and they all argued, and nothing came of it. So they decided to do it different the next way. They would spend the first day of the conference in total silence—which they did. And then the following meeting, they really got to understand each other. Because they associated together in a non-verbal, non-discursive way to begin with, with no ideology, no theories. And then they could at last see each other as living human beings and expressions of the divine nature, et cetera, et cetera, and know it instead of merely think it.

So what we should do—if we want to get together the various discordant religions and races and whatsoever—is suspend all discussions and meet in a strictly physical, earthy way, and realize that what is the very earthy, what is the very physical, is after all not different from, not separate from, the spiritual. This is the terrible hangup of western man: this distinction of the physical and the spiritual. They’re the same. One might say that the spiritual is more concrete than matter.

Now, that’s a kind of a tricky paradoxical saying, and mystics are always putting out tricky paradoxical sayings. But a paradox is a truth standing on its head to attract attention. When you say “Is it real?” most people mean, “Is it hard?” You see? There’s a sense, in other words, that reality is the concrete. But spirits like ghosts aren’t very concrete, and they move right through walls. So I’ve often wondered how a body can be moved by a spirit. This is one of the great philosophical problems! But of course the thing is that: what is the very hard from one point of view? Why is matter hard? Because it’s moving so fast. When you get an airplane propeller going, you can’t put your finger through it. It resists you more solidly than a wall of granite. At least you can push against, lean on, the wall of granite. You sure can’t lean on an airplane propeller. It’ll knock you to bits. But let’s get that propeller going still faster, much faster. Why, it doesn’t even have time to cut you. It becomes a wall of granite. You can’t go through it. So all matter is in such tremendously fast agitation that, when you lean on it, it’s hard. But that’s because it’s so alive. It’s going so fast. So energy and matter: the more energy, the more matter. The more spirit, the more matter. They come to the same thing.

So the thing is that when we realize this, when we stop our thoughts and stop our ideas and come to it without thinking, we have a basis for agreement. We will never agree so long as we talk. That’s why talking never leads to any conclusions. People sit around—you know, you always remember how to spell committee. Two M’s, two T’s and two E’s, because they always discuss everything at least twice. And it’s interminable. Now, there are two ways out, you see, of this dilemma. On the one hand you can say, “Alright, the talking is over. Let’s fight.” Because we are so frustrated and we are so sick of this argument that the only thing is to hit people. Nobody ever suggested the other alternative: when talking comes to an end, let’s make love. It might work.

In this morning’s seminar I was talking about the religion of no religion from a social point of view, and I said that this afternoon I would talk about it from an individual or personal point of view. And I was suggesting that society (as a cohesive force) needs a religion, but that what we call today religions act simply as divisive forces around which we play all kinds of one-upmanship games. And therefore, if there would be a religion which was socially unitive instead of divisive, it would have to be one without doctrines and without organization.

In other words, one of the real problems of organized religion today is its commitment to real estate. You may have read an article by Bishop Pike in Playboy about taxing the churches, and I’m highly in favor of taxing the churches, even though I run a non-profit organization. The point is that our non-profit organization is educational, and we don’t own enormous blocks of real estate out of which we derive income by virtue of being a non-profit organization. All we own is what we need to operate with. So nobody wants to tax the church building, but they want to tax the hotels, the apartments, the stores, the enormous real estate, including 51% of the stock of United Fruit, owned by the Catholic Church and other organizations of a similar nature, which they can own tax-free, and have this as a separate income as distinct from that which is given by their regular contributors.

So, as I said in a previous session, I’ve always wanted to preach a sermon at the laying of the foundation stone of a church, where I would take the text from the Bible, “If a man’s son asked him bread, will he give him a stone? The answer is yes.” That’s what you’ve got. It’s no joke that, when Peter acknowledged Jesus as the Christ, he said, “Thou art Peter,” which in Greek means “stone.” Petros: petrified. “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” As I’ve explained, Jesus was a great utterer of kōans, and this was one of the best. Kefas in Hebrew—peter—means same thing: rock. And the good disciple is always the rock upon which the church founders. The church is one foundation.

You know, it’s always the good disciple who ruins the teaching—because he’s a follower. Because he doesn’t have it in himself, he therefore follows somebody else. And anyone, therefore, who is a really effective guru always separates his students from himself and sets them free, so that you don’t have to say, “Oh, I am a follower of this man, of that man, and the other thing.” No! Go free. Don’t founder upon the rock.

And therefore, this is the case of the religion of no religion. There is a saying in Latin about religion. Christianity, of course, revolves around the symbolism of the cross. And in Latin it is said, crux medicina mundi: “the cross, the medicine of the world.” Now, never make your medicine a diet. One shot is enough. And that goes not only for religion, but for LSD, for all these things. Don’t make it a diet. Once you’ve—I don’t say literally one time, but enough of it to see and that’s it. If after that you keep coming back, it means you never got the point.

So in Zen there is the saying, “To know your original mind, to understand your essential nature. That is the great disease of our school.” In other words: to have something that is religion and that is special, and that is over and above everyday experience. And to insist on that is a disease. It means you’re playing games. You’re wanting to one-up yourself and everybody else by saying, “Well, we have an in on something here that you don’t have. We know what it’s really all about. And you outsiders… well, you may be all right. You may be Muslims. You may be Hasidic Jews. You may be Theosophists or Christian scientists, and therefore, as a result of that, you have a partial glimpse of the truth. But we, of course, as the real insiders, have the whole thing.” What a putdown that is, you see? And everybody does it.

So what are we to do? What a predicament! Supposing we say now, “Our school here says that you don’t have to do all that. You don’t have to play one-upmanship. You don’t have to have anything special.” Last time, almost, I met Suzuki—not San Francisco Suzuki, but Japan Suzuki. He signed his name Buji-nen, which means “a man who is nothing special.” Now, what was Suzuki doing? Was he making a special case of himself as a man who was nothing special? This phrase, buji in Japanese, or wuxe in Chinese, means “no business,” “no fuss,” “no special claim,” “nothing important.” And this is used as a characteristic flavor of a person who is experienced in Zen. But then, are the Zen people who have learned to be nothing special, to be natural, to constitute themselves a particular class of one-upping everybody else? Well, they do that. Now, what if they didn’t do it? Then nobody would know they were around.

I think the best psychotherapist I know is a man who teaches photography. Nobody knows he’s a psychotherapist. And he has saved the sanity and the lives of seriously disturbed people that I’ve known just by teaching them how to take pictures. No claim to be anything special. Marvelous! But I’m not going to give his name out, because that would spoil the whole show.

Now, here is the predicament of what is called in Buddhism the bodhisattva. They make a distinction in Buddhist philosophy between a bodhisattva and a pratyekabuddha. Pratyekabuddha means a private Buddha—that is to say, somebody who gets enlightenment, who sees through all the mockeries of life, all the illusions, who attains the final awakening, and then he sits down and enjoys it. The bodhisattva feels, however, that he can’t sit down and enjoy it unless everybody else is in on it. And so he comes back into the world looking like an ordinary everyday person and, through doing this, helps everybody else to become enlightened. But! How is he to get it across without making a little difference? And saying—well, listen to it this way in the form of a Zen story.

A man came to become a monk at a Zen monastery, and the master said to him, “Where do you come from?” And he gave the name of his hometown, a village. He said, “What did you then do?” He said, “I was a cowherd.” “How did you take care of the cows?” He said, “In the morning I took them out into the fields, and in the night I restored them to the pen.” And the master said, “Splendid is your ignorance!” In other words: here is the perfectly ordinary human being doing his stuff.

Now, in a certain way, the highest enlightened human being is exactly like that. But there is some funny kind of a difference. And the whole quality of this difference is that it mustn’t look too different. As another Zen poem says: it is like the salt in water and the glue in ink. Chinese ink has glue in it to hold this thick together. But the salt in water and the glue in ink, they’re invisible. Yet, you can taste the salt in water, and the transparent glue holds the ink stick together. So there’s some kind of a difference between ordinary everyday life—with its anxieties, attachments, and problems—and something that looks exactly like ordinary everyday life, but doesn’t have the anxieties.

Let me press that just one step further, if you will allow me. You’re still anxious if you’re anxious about being anxious. See? You say, “Well, I feel guilty every time I’m anxious. Because I really ought to be spiritually evolved enough not to have any further anxieties. And so alas, I find myself with a neurotic problem.” So you find, with the great masters that I’ve known in Zen, they don’t have that hangup at all. They’re not afraid to admit that they have toothaches, and have to go to the dentist, and all that’s a nuisance, and that they sometimes get hot and bothered and lose their tempers, and are just human like everybody else. And so you could very well say—you might almost be justified in saying to these masters—you’re putting over a big hoax on us all. You’re just like everybody else and you know it. And yet, in another way, you’re claiming to be special; that you have some special inside information, so that you’re not a man of no special at all, buji-nen. You’re just a human being who’s conned everybody else. In fact, you are a confidence man, a trickster.

And the funny thing about this is that the word that is used in Buddhist philosophy for the method of enlightening people, which is called upāya, it means “trickery.” When that word is used in politics, in a political context, upāya—which means the skill of the teacher in Buddhism—means trickery in politics. And the Buddhists laugh back at themselves and say, “We’re just tricksters. We are people who”— Rinzai, the great Chinese master of Zen, said, “My teaching is like using a yellow leaf to stop a child crying for gold,” or an empty fist. The empty fist trick, see, is: you suddenly say to a child, “What have I got here?” See, see, see, put it behind your back. And the more excited the child gets to find out what is in that fist. And after a long wrestle, there’s nothing in it. Or when a child says, “I want some gold,” you give it a yellow leaf. So, in the same way, the Zen teacher is saying: there is really nothing in Zen to be understood. The secret of life is that there is no secret. Only, you think there has to be a secret, and since you’ve insisted on the idea that I, as the teacher, have some secret—okay, let’s try the closed fist technique with you. In every conceivable way, when you penetrate this closed fist and you find out there’s nothing in it, then the teacher will bring on you another closed fist in a different form. There is always a new kōan following every other kōan. And you think, “Oh yeah, there may be something that I ought to get through to. There’s some special thing.”

And when you suddenly find out that the whole trick is that there isn’t anything to cling to—that is to say: life is falling apart. It’s a totally insecure situation. Well, accept it! For heaven’s sakes, accept it and get with it. See, that’s only the beginning of Zen study. Then they come up with something else. And you think: well, if I really, honestly accepted my insecurity and had no hang-ups at all, I would be capable of all sorts of miraculous performances. Somebody leads you on to the idea that then you would acquire these psychic powers, and be able to do these all supernormal things. And you’re intrigued. Maybe if I really understood, I would be as God.

And so you hang around the master who keeps fooling you until, in the end, you discover you don’t need any miraculous powers, you don’t need to be able to change water into wine, you don’t need to be able to change lead into gold. Because what you have is what you really want, always. And if you want to put up an objection and to say I don’t want it that way, that’s because you want to object. You know: get with yourself. This is always the teaching. And all these things that seem to hang out some goal, something you should pursue, something you should be over and above what you are here and now at this moment—they’re all tricks. And the object of the tricks is to get you to see that here and now, as you are at this moment, is fine. Only: if you make that an objective, and they say, well, we here accept ourselves as we are here and now at this moment, and all you common followers who don’t really understand that, you’re kind of on the out. See, you still haven’t got it.

So then, this is why, always in the history of religion, there is the theme of the religion of being natural. The religion of no religion—you don’t need an idol, because there is the living God. It’s only one step from that to say, as the Quakers say to the Catholics: why do you have a sacrament? Why should the sacrament of the altar in the special service that you have in the mass be anything special? If you really understood Christianity, every meal would be the mass. And the Catholics turn back to the Quakers and say: yeah, that may be true. But when everybody is somebody, then no one is anybody. If you don’t have a special meal that is the special mass, then everybody will forget that there was anything at all. In other words, they will come to a view of life where nothing is sacred. There’s that line in one of Bob Dylan’s songs: “It’s pretty obvious that nothing around here is particularly sacred.”

And so the people who [???] say: no, no, no, no! Wait a minute! There must be something special. Must be something sacred. We must set off a certain part of life. Hey, come off it now! We can’t make everything common property. See? I must be something special. I’m here, see? Especially guarded. You keep out.

Well, what are you doing? Why, obviously, by saying there’s something special, something sacred, you keep out of this, that’s your identity. That’s your ego. Then there are other people who come along and say: to hell with everything sacred! Oh, you’re all just a bunch of crooks. That’s another false technique. This is the democratic parody of mysticism: everybody is equally inferior. You’re all a bunch of bastards, fundamentally, and you haven’t got anything you want to. You don’t need any privacy. That’s the life you live when you’re in jail, when you’re in a mental hospital, or in the army, where everybody is equally a shit. But, you see, that misses the point just as much in that direction as holding something sacred misses it in the other direction. How can you be natural? See, either either of those two ways are unnatural.

So the challenge which the the teacher of Zen gives you is, he’s saying to you: “Okay, be natural.” Now, so long as you feel that you have to prove that you’re natural, he can defeat you. Because he can catch you off guard all the time. It’s only when you feel that you don’t have to prove that you’re natural that you can get by his tricks. Only, he’s got this one underlying you: that you can say, “Well, I don’t have to prove anything.” And he says, “Well, what are you doing around here, anyway? Why are you coming to see me?” And then you’re embarrassed, you see. You’re still out after something, as if there was something to be, something to arrive at, more than what you are at this moment. And what you are at this moment is of course the perfect expression of the universe in exactly the same way that a tree is, or a fish is, or a mountain, or a star, or anything else.

Only, it’s because people don’t believe this that they do all their excessive things—that they have to have extra power, extra possessions, extra this, that, and the other. They want to be loved more than anybody else, because they don’t realize that, as you are at this moment, you’re the complete works. And they don’t want to know it, because the whole game is pretending you’re not. Hide and seek. So you’re all right, even when you’re not all right!

Now, you see, you can think this in circles. You can go round and round with this with this game indefinitely and hang yourself up and hang everybody else up. And the meaning, then, is that so long as we’re dealing with ideas and with words, and with everything we can say in words about realizing buddhahood and liberation, we never get there. Because there’s always games within games within games within games, see? So it’s only as you get beyond words that the thing is clear. But so long as I say that in words, I’m designating a special class of people who get beyond words. When you’re beyond words, you’re not in a special class of people. You are only so long as we’re talking about it.

So then, here’s the problem that, for example, when people go and practice yoga or Zen or whatever, and they define themselves as such and such a group meeting at such and such a place, and they do this, that’s the verbal side of the thing. And so long as that is going on, it must always seem that they are one-upping other people who are not in this in-group. But on the other hand, the moment they are actually doing the yoga or the Zen meditation, they are not one-upping anyone. Because they’re not they’re not verbalizing. It is through verbalizing—through measuring and so on, you see—that you dissect life and break it down into its separate parts, and say: “This part is better than that.” But when you’re not doing that, it isn’t happening. If somebody says—look, it’s like: supposing I say to you, “Everything in this world is relative. You only know ‘to be’ in relation to ‘not to be.’ You only know what it means to move in relation to stillness. You only know time, the measure of change, in relation to a constant.” So on. Then somebody comes and says to me, “Well, if you say everything is relative, then you’re an absolute relativist.” I say, “Yeah.” Because so long as you think about it, you always go around in circles.

Of course, you can’t conceive the idea of the relative without the idea of the absolute. But when you actually do the thing and you don’t verbalize it, that’s a different situation. And the people who are not verbalizing—who do indeed realize the suchness, the Buddha nature in all things—all those people can be talked about by others, and they can say, “Well, are you a special class? Are you a special in-group? Aren’t you really making claims to something?” And they can’t answer and say, “No, we are not,” because if they say no we are not, they say, “Well, then you’re putting your class in the people who are the class of non-hypocrates, and you are one-upping everybody else who is a hypocrite by saying you’re not a hypocrite.” See?

So long as you talk, see, this this game goes on and on and on and on. But if you genuinely are in the state where you don’t think—and I must qualify this for anybody who came in on this discussion late. When I say you don’t think, I don’t mean that I’m an anti-intellectual, that there is a way of living your life all the time without ever thinking. The point is rather that, to get out of the game business of thinking, you have to spend some of your time not thinking. Just in the same way as you have to spend some of your time not talking if you’re going to listen to what other people have to say. To have something to think about, you must sometimes not think—that is to say: you experience directly, without symbolizing the experiences with words. In other words, to pick this up and not say to yourself, “It’s a beer can” or “It has beer in it,” but with your hands and your eyes, see, you know this directly—whatever that is. And you don’t make any comment about it. You can make a comment later. But if you’re commenting all the time, you’re never in relation to it.

So then, I’m trying to say what you cannot say. Because so long as you talk about the class of people who know how to suspend thinking, how to relate to the world directly, how therefore to transcend the division between I and thou, ego and universe—so long as you’re talking about it, you always make those people a special class and, as it were, project upon them that they’re playing the special game “I am holier than you are.” And that’s religion. See? Religion, we call it—in the west we say: oh yes, he has a religion, but it’s a Sunday-only religion. He does this special activity, goes and makes weird noises in a church on Sunday, and listens to all sorts of sermons, and loves his neighbor in the church. But when he gets back to work he’s irreligious. It’s just in a watertight compartment.

So we know, don’t we, that what is religion is supposed to be identical with everyday life. But we don’t get this across, because we think of religion in a very narrow way as morality. We say: all right, if this businessman is so religious that he never makes dirty deals, he never cheats anyone, he is always on the level, we say he’s truly practicing his religion. He’s a genuine Christian. But this is only a fragment of it. It isn’t the question of how you deal with the morals of business. What is the religious way of brushing your teeth? With ten strokes on each position. You might say this is the devoted, determined way of brushing your teeth. But then I say this is still in the realm of moralism.

Let’s get beyond that. See? We’ve got to get beyond this point. All right. There’s a saying: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.” I went to a school in England, the motto of which was age dum agis, which means in Latin: “When you do it, do it!” And this is either an awful platitude. What’s ever worth doing is worth doing well. You know? That’s a terrible platitude! All the Protestant ethic is in that. But there’s another sense to it. Now, we can’t say what it is. See? There’s this other sense to age dum agis, which is not the moralistic sense, not the preacher’s sense, not what you would say as a father to a boy or a mother to a daughter. You know: do your bit, be a good girl> There’s another sense to it, and I cannot tell you what that other sense is until I stop talking. And then you can see the act that is done without somebody commenting on it and saying this is the right way to do it, this is the wrong way to do it, this is really doing it, this is not really doing it. Because when you get into the nonverbal world there is no difference between the act and the doer. There is no difference between the good and the bad.

There’s no difference between, in other words, the secular and the sacred, the religious and the non-religious, once you’ve stepped over the border. And that’s why the entrance to this is in Zen parlance called the no-gate barrier, or the gateless gate. Because it looks like a gate, a barrier: something to be attained, some entrance to a special in-group, so long as you’re standing outside it. But the moment you cross the border, the gate vanishes. So does the wall. And you see everybody at all—everybody in the world as manifestations of the buddha nature; or we’d say in western terms of the divine power—and you see they’re all just behaving marvelously in their ignorance. Blended is your ignorance.

So, like Kabir, when he was an old man—he was a great Hindu Buddhist Mohammedan mystic all run into one, and poet—he would look around and say: “To whom shall I preach?” Because he saw the beloved, the divine face, wherever he looked. He had no recommendations to make. And so, in the same way, you see everyone as doing it in the same way as the pattern of the flag flapping in the wind out there is doing it, the waves are doing it, the fronds of the trees are doing it. And what’s so special about us that we aren’t? Only, of course, if you want to make a difference.