THE
WORLD'S MOST DANGEROUS BOOK
by
Alan Watts (1915-1973)
For
many centuries the Roman Catholic Church was opposed to translating the
Holy Scriptures into the "vulgar tongue.” To this day, you can still
get rid of a Bible salesman by saying, "But we are Catholics and, of
course, don’t read the Bible.” The Catholic hierarchy included subtle
theologians and scholars who knew very well that such a difficult and
diverse collection of ancient writings, taken as the literal Word of
God, would be wildly and dangerously interpreted if put into the hands
of ignorant and uneducated peasants. Likewise, when a missionary
boasted to George Bernard Shaw of the numerous converts he had made,
Shaw asked, " Can these people use rifles?” "Oh, indeed, yes,” said the
missionary. "Some of them are very good shots.” Whereupon Shaw scolded
him for putting us all in peril in the day when those converts waged
holy war against us for not following the Bible in the literal sense
they gave to it. For the Bible says, "What a good thing it is when the
Lord putteth into the hands of the righteous invincible might.” But
today, especially in the United States, there is a taboo against
admitting that there are enormous numbers of stupid and ignorant
people, in the bookish and literal sense of these words. They may be
highly intelligent in the arts of farming, manufacture, engineering and
finance, and even in physics, chemistry or medicine. But this
intelligence does not automatically flow over to the fields of history,
archaeology, linguistics, theology, philosophy and mythology which are
what one needs to know in order to make any sense out such archaic
literature as the books of the Bible.
This may
sound snobbish,
for there is an assumption that, in the Bible, God gave His message in
plain words for plain people. Once, when I had given a radio broadcast
in Canada, the announcer took me aside and said, "Don’t you think that
if there is a truly loving God, He would given us a plain and specific
guide as to how to live our lives?”
"On the
contrary," I
replied, "a truly loving God would not stultify our minds. He would
encourage us to think for ourselves." I tried, then, to show him that
his belief in the divine authority of the Bible rested on nothing more
than his own personal opinion, to which, of course, he was entitled.
This is basic. The authority of the Bible, the church, the state, or of
any spiritual or political leader, is derived from the individual
followers and believers, since it is the believers’ judgment that such
leaders and institutions speak with a greater wisdom than there own.
This is, obviously, a paradox, for only the wise can recognize wisdom.
Thus, Catholics criticize Protestants for following their own opinions
in understanding the Bible, as distinct from the interpretations of the
Church, which originally issued and authorized the Bible. But Catholics
seldom realize that the authority of the Church rests, likewise, on the
opinion of its individual members that the Papacy and the councils of
the Church are authoritative. The same is true of the state, for, as a
French statesman said, people get the government they deserve.
Why
does one come to the opinion that the Bible, literally understood, is
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Usually because
one’s "elders and betters," or an impressively large group of ones
peers, have this opinion. But this is to go along with the Bandar-log,
or monkey tribe, in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books , who periodically
get together and shout, "We all say so, so it must be true!" Having
been a grandfather for a number of years, I am not particularly
impressed with patriarchal authority. I am of an age with my own
formerly impressive grandfathers (one of whom was a fervent
fundamentalist, or literal believer in the Bible) and I realize that my
opinions are as fallible as theirs.
But many people
never grow
up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for eternal
authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.
Nevertheless, it is their own judgment, willy-nilly, that there exists
some authority greater than their own. The fervent fundamentalist
whether Protestant or Catholic, Jew or Moslem is closed to reason and
even communication for fear of losing the security of childish
dependence. He would suffer extreme emotional heebie jeebies if he
didn’t have the feeling that there was some external and infallible
guide in which he could trust absolutely and without which his very
identity would dissolve.
This attitude is not
faith. It is pure
idolatry. The more deceptive idols are not images of wood and stone but
are constructed of words and ideas and mental images of God. Faith is
an openness and trusting attitude to truth and reality, whatever it may
turn out to be. This is a risky and adventurous state of mind. Belief,
in the religious sense, is the opposite of faith because it is a
fervent wishing or hope, a compulsive clinging to the idea that the
universe is arranged and governed in such and such a way. Belief is
holding to a rock; faith is learning how to swim and this whole
universe swims in boundless space.
Thus, in
much of the
English-speaking world, the King James Bible is a rigid idol, all the
more deceptive for being translated into the most melodious English and
for being an anthology of ancient literature that contains sublime
wisdom along with barbaric histories and the war songs of tribes on the
rampage. All this is taken as the literal Word and counsel of God, as
it is by fundamentalist Baptists, Jesus freaks, Jehovah’s Witnesses and
comparable sects, which by and large know nothing of the history of the
Bible, of how it was edited and put together. So we have with us the
social menace of a huge population of intellectually and morally
irresponsible people. Take a ruler and measure the listings under
"Churches" in the Yellow Pages of the phone directory. You will find
that the fundamentalists have by far the most space. And under what
pressure do most hotels and motels place Gideon Bibles by the bedside
Bibles with clearly fundamentalist introductory material, taking their
name Gideon from one of the more ferocious military leaders of the
ancient Israelites?
As is well known, the enormous
political
power of fundamentalists is what makes legislators afraid to take laws
against victimless "sins" and crimes off the books, and what corrupts
the police by forcing them to be armed preachers enforcing
ecclesiastical laws in a country where church and state are supposed to
be separate ignoring the basic Christian doctrine that no actions, or
abstentions from actions, are of moral import unless undertaken
voluntarily. Freedom is risky and includes the risk that anyone may go
to hell in his own way.
Now, the King James Bible
did not, as
one might gather from listening to fundamentalists, descend with an
Angel from heaven A.D. 1611, when it was first published. It was an
elegant, but often inaccurate, translation of Hebrew and Greek
documents composed between 900 B.C. and A.D. 120. There is no
manuscript of the Old Testament, that is, of the Hebrew Scriptures,
written in Hebrew, earlier than the Ninth Century B.C. But we know that
these documents were first put together and recognized as the Holy
Scriptures by a convention of rabbis held at Jamnia (Yavne) in
Palestine shortly before A.D. 100. On their say-so. Likewise, the
composition of the Christian Bible, which documents to include and
which to drop, was decided by a council of the Catholic Church held in
Carthage in the latter part of the Fourth Century. Several books that
had formerly been read in the churches, such as the Shepherd of Hermas
and the marvelous Gospel of Saint Thomas , were then excluded. The
point is that the books translated in the King James Bible were
declared canonical and divinely inspired by the authority (A) of the
Synod of Jamnia and (B) of the Catholic Church, meeting in Carthage
more than 300 years after the time of Jesus. It is thus that
fundamentalist Protestants get the authority of their Bible from Jews
who had rejected Jesus and from Catholics whom they abominate as the
Scarlet Woman mentioned in Revelation.
The Bible,
to repeat, is
an anthology of Hebrew and late Greek literature, edited and put forth
by a council of Catholic bishops who believed that they were acting
under the direction of the Holy Spirit. Before this time the Bible as
we know it did not exist. There were the Hebrew Scriptures and their
translated into Greek the Septuagint, which was made in Alexandria
between 250 B.C. and 100 B.C. There were also various codices, or Greek
manuscripts, of various parts of the New Testament, such as the four
Gospels. There were numerous other writings circulating among
Christians, including the Epistles of Saint Paul and Saint John, the
Apocalypse (Revelation) and such documents (later excluded) as the Acts
of John , the Didache , the Apostolic Constitutions and the various
Epistles of Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp.
In
those days, and
until the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century, the Scriptures
were not understood exclusively in a narrow literal sense. From Clement
of Alexandria (Second Century) to Saint Thomas Aquinas (13th Century),
the great theologians, or Fathers of the Church, recognized four ways
of interpreting the Scriptures: the literal or historical, the moral,
the allegorical and the spiritual and they were overwhelmingly
interested in the last three. Origen (Second Century) regarded much of
the Old Testament as "puerile" if taken literally, and Jewish
theologians were likewise preoccupied with finding hidden meanings in
the Scriptures, for the concern of all these theologians was to
interpret the Biblical texts in such a way as to make the Bible
intellectually respectable and philosophically interesting. Concern
over the historical truth of the Bible is relatively modern, whether in
the form of fundamentalism or of scientific research.
But
when
the Bible was translated and widely distributed as a result of the
invention of printing, it fell into the hands of people who, like the
Jesus freaks of today, were simply uneducated and who, as the depressed
classes of Europe, eventually swarmed over to America. This is,
naturally, a heroic generalization. There were, and are,
fundamentalists learned in languages and sciences (although the
standard translation of the Bible into Chinese is said to be in fearful
taste), just as there are professors of physics and anthropology who
somehow manage to be pious Mormons. Some people have the peculiar
ability to divide their minds into watertight compartments, being
critical and rational in matters of science but credulous as children
when it comes to religion.
Such superstition would
have been
relatively harmless if the religion had been something tolerant and
pacific, such as Taoism or Buddhism. But the religion of the literally
understood Bible is chauvinistic and militant. It is on the march to
conquer the world and to establish itself as the one and only true
belief. Among its most popular hymns are such battle songs as "Mine
eyes have seen the glory" and Onward, Christian Soldiers. The God of
the Hebrews, the Arabs and the Christians is a mental idol fashioned in
the image of the great monarchs of Egypt, Chaldea and Persia. It was
possibly Ikhnaton (Amenhotep IV, 14th Century B.C.), Pharaoh of Egypt,
who gave Moses the idea of monotheism (as suggested in Freud’s Moses
and Monotheism). Certainly the veneration of God as "King of kings and
Lord of lords" borrows the official title of the Persian emperors.
Thus, the political pattern of tyranny, beneficent or otherwise, of
rule by violence, whether physical or moral, stands firmly behind the
Biblical idea of Jehovah.
When one considers the
architecture
and ritual of churches, whether Catholic or Protestant, it is obvious
until most recent times that they are based on royal or judicial
courts. A monarch who rules by force sits in the central court of his
donjon with his back to the wall, flanked by guards, and those who come
to petition him for justice or to offer tribute must kneel or prostrate
themselves simply because these are difficult positions from which to
start a fight. Such monarchs are, of course, frightened of their
subjects and constantly on the anxious alert for rebellion. Is this an
appropriate image for the inconceivable energy that underlies the
universe? True, the altar-throne in Catholic churches is occupied by
the image of God in the form of one crucified as a common thief, but he
hangs there as our leader in subjection to the Almighty Father, King of
the universe, propitiating Him for those who have broken His not always
reasonable laws. And what of the curious resemblances between
Protestant churches and courts of law? The minister and the judge wear
the same black robe and "throw the book" at those assembled in pews and
various kinds of boxes, and both ministers and judges have chairs of
estate that are still, in effect, thrones.
The
crucial
question, then, is that if you picture the universe as a monarchy, how
can you believe that a republic is the best form of government, and so
be a loyal citizen of the United States? It is thus that
fundamentalists veer to the extreme right wing in politics, being of
the personality type that demands strong external and paternalistic
authority. Their "rugged individualism" and their racism are founded on
the conviction that they are the elect of God the Father, and their
forebears took possession of America as the armies of Joshua took
possession of Canaan, treating the Indians as Joshua and Gideon treated
the Bedouin of Palestine. In the same spirit the Protestant British,
Dutch and Germans took possession of Africa, India and Indonesia, and
the rigid Catholics of Spain and Portugal colonized Latin America. Such
territorial expansion may or may not be practical politics, but to do
it in the name of Jesus of Nazareth is an outrage.
The
Bible is
a dangerous book, though by no means an evil one. It depends, largely,
on how you read it with what prejudices and with what intellectual
background. Regarded as sacred and authoritative, such a complex
collection of histories, legends, allegories and images becomes a
monstrous Rorschach blot in which you can picture almost anything you
want to discover just as one can see cities and mountains in the clouds
or faces in the fire. Fundamentalists "prove" the truth of the Bible by
trying to show how the words of the prophets have foretold events that
have come to pass in relatively recent times. But any statistician
knows that you can find correlations, if you want to, between almost
any two sets of patterns or rhythms between the occurrence of sunspots
and fluctuations of the stock market, between the lines and bumps on
your hand and the course of your life or between the architecture of
the Great Pyramid and the history of Europe. This is because of eidetic
vision, or the brain’s ability to project visions and forms of its own
into any material whatsoever. But scholars of ancient history find the
remarks of the prophets entirely relevant to events of their own time,
in the ancient Near East. The Biblical prophets were not so much
predictors as social commentators.
I am not in the
position of
those liberal Christians who reject fundamentalism but must still
insist that Jesus was the one and only incarnation of God, or at least
the most perfect human being. No one is intellectually free who feels
that he cannot and must not disagree with Jesus and is therefore forced
into the dishonest practice of wangling the words of the Gospels to fit
his own opinions. There is not a scrap of evidence that Jesus was
familiar with any other religious tradition than that of the Hebrew
Scriptures or that he knew anything of the civilizations of India,
China or Peru. Under these circumstances, he was faced with the
virtually impossible problem of expressing himself in the peculiar
religious language and imagery of his local culture. For it is obvious
to any student of the psychology of religion that what he needed to
express was the relatively common change of consciousness known as
mystical experience the vivid and overwhelming sensation that your own
being is one with eternal and ultimate reality. But it was as hard for
Jesus to say this as it still is for a native of the American Bible
Belt. It implies the blasphemous, subversive and lunatic claim to be
identical with the all-knowing and allruling monarch of the world its
Pharaoh or Cyrus. Jesus would have had no trouble in India, for this
experience is the foundation of Hinduism, and the Hindus recognize many
people in both ancient and modern times as embodiments of the divine,
or sons of God but not, of course, of the kind of God represented by
Jehovah. Buddhists, likewise, teach that anyone can, and finally will,
become a Buddha (an Enlightened One), in the same way as the historic
Gautama.
If the Gospel of Saint John , in
particular, is to be
believed, Jesus emphatically identified himself with the Godhead,
considering such phrases as "I and the Father are one," or "He who has
seen me has seen the Father," or "Before Abraham was, I am," or "I am
the way, the truth and the life." But this was not an exclusive claim
for himself as the man Jesus, for at John 10:31, just after he has said
"I and the Father are one," the crowd picks up rocks to stone him to
death.
He protests:
"Many
good works have I
shown you from my Father; for which of those works do you stone me?"
The Jews answered him, saying, "We do not stone you for a good work,
but for blasphemy, and because you, being a man, make yourself God."
And
here it comes:
Jesus
answered them, "Is it not written in your law, I said, you are gods
[quoting Psalms 82]? If He [i.e., God] called those to whom He gave His
word gods and you can’t contradict the Scriptures how can you say of
Him whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You
blaspheme!’ because I said, ‘I am a son of God" [The original Greek
says "a son," not "the son."]
In
other words, the
Gospel, or "good news" that Jesus was trying to convey, despite the
limitations of his tradition, was that we are all sons of God. When he
uses the terms I am (as in "Before Abraham was, I am") or Me (as in "No
one comes to the Father but by Me"), he is intending to use them in the
same way as Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita :
He who
sees Me
everywhere and sees all in Me; I am not lost to him, nor is he lost to
Me. The yogi who, established in oneness, worships Me abiding in all
beings, lives in Me, whatever be his outward life.
And
by this
"Me" Krishna means the atman that is at once the basic self in us and
in the universe. To know this is to enjoy eternal life, to discover
that the fundamental "I am" feeling, which you confuse with your
superficial ego, is the ultimate reality forever and ever, amen.
In
this essential respect, the, the Gospel has been obscured and muffled
almost from the beginnings. For Jesus was presumably trying to say that
our consciousness is the divine spirit, "the light which enlightens
every one who comes into the world," and which George Fox, founder of
the Quakers, called the Inward Light. But the Church, still bound to
the image of God as the King of kings, couldn’t accept this Gospel. It
adopted a religion about Jesus instead of the religion of Jesus. It
kicked him upstairs and put him in the privileged and unique position
of being the Boss’s son, so that, having this unique advantage, his
life and example became useless to everyone else. The individual
Christian must not know that his own "I am" is the one that existed
before Abraham. In this way, the Church institutionalized and made a
virtue of feeling chronic guilt for not being as good as Jesus. It only
widened the alienation, the colossal difference, that monotheism put
between man and God.
When I try to explain this to
Jesus freaks
and other Bible bangers, they invariably reveal theological ignorance
by saying, "But doesn’t the Bible say that Jesus was the only -begotten
son of God?" It doesn’t. Not, at least, according to Catholic, Eastern
Orthodox and Anglican interpretations. The phrase "only-begotten son
refers not to Jesus the man but to the Second Person of the Trinity,
God the Son, who is said to have become incarnate in the man Jesus.
Nowhere does the Bible, or even the creeds of the Church, say that
Jesus was the only incarnation of God the Son in all time and space.
Furthermore, it is not generally known that God the Son is symbolized
as both male and female, as Logos-Sophia, the Design and the Wisdom of
God, based on the passage in Proverbs 7:9, where the Wisdom of God
speaks as a woman.
"But then," they go on to argue,
"doesn’t
the Bible say that there is no other name under heaven whereby men may
be saved except the name of Jesus? But what is the name of Jesus?
J-E-S-U-S? Iesous? Aissa? Jehoshua? Or however else it may be
pronounced? It is said that every prayer said in name of Jesus will be
granted, and obviously this doesn’t mean that "Jesus" is a signature on
a blank check. It means that prayers will be granted when made in the
spirit of Jesus, and that spirit is, again, the Second Person of the
Trinity, the eternal God the Son, who could just as well have been
incarnate in Krishna, Buddha, Lao-tzu or Ramana Maharshi as in Jesus of
Nazareth.
It is amazing what both the Bible and the
Church are
presumed to teach but don’t teach. Listening to fundamentalists, one
would suppose that if there are living beings on other planets in this
or other galaxies. they must wait for salvation until missionaries from
earth arrive on spaceships, bringing the Bible and baptism. But if "God
so loves the world" and means it, He will surely send His son to
wherever he is needed, and there is no difference in principle between
a planet circling Alpha Centauri and peoples as remote from Palestine
A.D. 30 as the Chinese or the Incas. It should be understood that the
expression "son of" means "of the nature of," as when we call someone a
son of a bitch and as when the Bible uses such phrases as "sons of
Belial" (an alien god), or an Arab cusses someone out as
e-ben-i-el-homa "son of donkey!" or simply "stupid". Used in this
way,"son of" has nothing to do with maleness or being younger than.
Likewise, the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, the
Logos-Sopia, refers to the basic pattern or design of the Universe,
ever emerging from the inconceivable mystery or the Father as the
galaxies shine out of space. This is how the great philosophers of the
Church have thought about the imagery of the Bible and as it appears to
a modern student of the history and psychology of world religions. Call
it intellectual snobbery if you will, but although the books of the
Bible might have been "plain words for plain people" in the days of
Isaiah and Jesus, an uneducated and uninformed person who reads them
today, and takes them as the literal Word of God, will become a blind
and confused bigot.
Let us look at this against the
background
of the fact that all monotheistic religions have been militant.
Wherever God has been idolized as the King or Boss-Principle of the
world, believers are agog to impose both their religion and their
political rulership upon others. Fanatical believers in the Bible, the
Koran and the Torah have fought one another for centuries without
realizing that they belong to the same pestiferous club, that they have
more in common than they have against one another and that there is
simply no way of deciding which of their "unique" revelations of God’s
will is the true one. A committed believer in the Koran trots out the
same arguments for his point of view as a Southern Baptist devotee of
the Bible, and neither can listen to reason, because their whole sense
of personal security and integrity depends absolutely upon pretending
to follow an external authority. The very existence of this authority,
as well as the sense of identity of its follower and true believer,
requires an excluded class of infidels, heathens and sinners people
whom you can punish and bully so as to know that you are strong and
alive. No argument, no reasoning, no contrary evidence can possibly
reach the true believer, who, if he is somewhat sophisticated,
justifies and even glorifies his invincible stupidity as a "leap of
faith" or "sacrifice of the intellect." He quotes the Roman lawyer and
theologian Tertullian Credo, quia absurdum est , "I believe because it
is absurd" as if Tertullian had said something profound. Such people
are, quite literally, idiots originally a Greek word meaning an
individual so isolated that you can’t communicate with him.
Oddly
enough, there are unbelievers who envy them, who wish that they could
have the serenity and peace of mind that come from "knowing" beyond
doubt that you have the true Word of God and are in the right. But this
overlooks the fact that those who supposedly have this peace within
themselves are outwardly obstreperous and violent, standing in dire
need of converts and followers to convince themselves of their
continuing validity just as much as they need outsiders to punish.
Mindless
belief in the literal truth of the Bible and furious zeal to spread the
message lead to such widespread follies, in the American Bible Belt, as
playing with poisonous snakes and drinking strychnine to prove the
truth of Mark 16:18, where Jesus is reported to have said: "They [the
faithful] shall take up serpents: and if they drink any deadly, thing,
it shall not hurt them." As recently as April 1973, two men (one a
pastor) in Newport, Tennessee, died in convulsions from taking large
amounts of strychnine before a congregation shouting, "Praise God!
Praise God!" So they didn't have enough faith; but such barbarous
congregations will go on trying these experiments again and again to
test and prove their faith, not realizing that by Christian standards
this is arrant spiritual pride. Meanwhile, the Government persecutes
religious groups that use such relatively harmless herbs as peyote and
marijuana for sacraments.
What is to be done about
the
existence of millions of such dangerous people in the world? Obviously,
they must not be censored or suppressed by their own methods. Even
though it is impossible to persuade or argue with them in a reasonable
way, it is just possible that they can be wooed and enchanted by a more
attractive style of religion, which will show them that their unbending
"faith" in their Bibles is simply an inverse expression of doubt and
terror a frantic whistling in the dark.
There have
been other
images of God than the Father-Monarch: the Cosmic Mother; the inmost
Self (disguised as all living beings), as in Hinduism; the indefinable
Tao, the flowing energy of the universe, as among the Chinese; or no
image at all, as with the Buddhists, who are not strictly atheists but
who feel that the ultimate reality cannot be pictured in any way and,
what is more, that not picturing it is a positive way of feeling it
directly, beyond symbols and images. I have called this "atheism in the
name of God" a paradoxical and catchy phrase pointing out something
missed by learned Protestant theologians who have been talking about
"death of God" theology and "religionless Christianity," and asking
what of the Gospel of Christ can be saved if life is nothing more than
a trip from the maternity ward to the crematorium. It is weird how such
sophisticated Biblical scholars must go on clinging to Jesus even when
rejecting the basic principle of his teaching the experience that he
was God in the flesh, an experience he unknowingly shared with all the
great mystics of the world.
Atheism in the name of
God is an
abandonment of all religious beliefs, including atheism, which in
practice is the stubbornly held idea that the world is a mindless
mechanism. Atheism in the name of God is giving up the attempt to make
sense of the world in terms of any fixed idea or intellectual system.
It is becoming again as a child and laying oneself open to reality as
it is actually and directly felt, experiencing it without trying to
categorize, identify or name it. This can be most easily begun by
listening to the world with closed eyes, in the same way that one can
listen to music without asking what it says or means. This is actually
a turn-on a state of consciousness in which the past and future vanish
(because they cannot be heard) and in which there is no audible
difference yourself and what you are hearing. There is simply universe,
an always present happening in which there is no perceptible difference
between self and other, or, as in breathing, between what you do and
what happens to you. Without losing command of civilized behavior, you
have temporarily "regressed" to what Freud called the oceanic feeling
of the baby the feeling that we all lost in learning to make
distinctions, but that we should have retained as their necessary
background, just as there must be empty white paper under this print if
you are to read it.
When you listen to the world in
this way,
you have begun to practice what Hindus and Buddhists call meditation a
re-entry to the real world, as distinct from the abstract world of
words and ideas. If you find that you can't stop naming the various
sounds and thinking in words, just listen to yourself doing that as
another form of noise, a meaningless murmur like the sound of traffic.
I won't argue for this experiment. Just try it and see what happens,
because this is the basic act of faith of being unreservedly open and
vulnerable to what is true and real.
Certainly this
is what
Jesus himself must have had in mind in that famous passage in the
Sermon on the Mount upon which one will seldom hear anything from a
pulpit: "Which of you by thinking can add a measure to his height? And
why are you anxious about clothes? Look at the flowers of the field,
how they grow. They neither labor nor spin; and yet I tell you that
even Solomon in all his splendor was not arrayed like any one of them.
So if God so clothes the wild grass which lives for today and tomorrow
is burned, shall He not much more clothe you, faithless ones? . . .
Don't be anxious for the future, for the future will take care of
itself. Sufficient to the day are its troubles." Even the most devout
Christians can’t take this. They feel that such advice was all very
well for Jesus, being the Boss's son, but this is no wisdom for us
practical and lesser-born mortals. You can, of course, take these words
in their allegorical and spiritual sense, which is that you stop
clinging in terror to a rigid system of ideas about what will happen to
you after you die, or as to what, exactly, are the procedures of the
court of heaven, whereby the world is supposedly governed. Curiously,
both science and mysticism (which might be called religion as
experienced rather than religion as written) are based on the
experimental attitude of looking directly at what is, of attending to
life itself instead of trying to glean it from a book. The scholastic
theologians would not look through Galileo’s telescope, and Billy
Graham will not experiment with a psychedelic chemical or practice
yoga. Two eminent historians of science, Joseph Needham and Lynn White,
have pointed out the surprising fact that in both Europe and Asia,
science arises from mysticism, because both the mystic and the
scientist are types of people who want to know directly, for
themselves, rather than be told what to believe.
And
in this
sense they follow the advice of Jesus to become again "as little
children," to look at the world with open, clear, and unprejudiced
eyes, as if they had never seen it before. It is in this spirit that an
astronomer must look at the sky and a yogi must attend to the
immediately present moment, as when he concentrates on a prolonged
sound. Years and years of book study may simply fossilize you into
fixed habits of thought so that any perceptive person will know in
advance how you will react to any situation or idea. Imagining yourself
reliable, you become merely predictable and, alas, boring. Most sermons
are tedious. One knows in advance what the preacher is going to say,
however dressed up on a fancy language. Going strictly by the book, he
will have no original ideas or experiences, for which reason both he
and his followers become rigid and easily shocked personalities who
cannot swing, wiggle, lilt or dance.
In this
connection it
should be noted that the blacks of the South swing and wiggle quite
admirably, even in church but this is because the preacher, starting
from the Bible in deference to his white overlords, very soon reverts
to the rhythms and incantations of some old-time African religion, and
there is no knowing at all what he is going to say. This is perhaps one
of the principle roots of conflict between whites and blacks in the
American South that the former go by the Book and the latter by the
spirit, which, like the wind, as Jesus put it, blows where it wills,
and you can’t tell where it comes from or where it’s going.
Thus,
we reach the seeming paradox that you cannot at once idolize the Bible
and embody the spirit of Jesus. He twitted the Pharisees as today he
would twit the fundamentalists: "You search the Scriptures daily, for
in them you think you have life." The religion of Jesus was to trust
life, both as he felt it in himself and as he saw it around him. Most
of us would feel that this was a ridiculous gamble to the Jews a
stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness but, come to think of it,
is there any real alternative? Basiaclly, no human community can exist
that is not founded on mutual trust as distinct from law and its
enforcement. The alternative to mutual trust, which is indeed a risky
gamble, is the security of the police state.