There is not a scrap of evidence that the Christian hierarchy was ever aware of itself as one among several lines of transmission for a universal tradition.
To be unaware of the connection is to have one’s heart in the wrong place—far out in the fruit instead of within, in the tree. It is to feel that one’s basic self is isolated within the body’s envelope of skin, forgetting that the self is the whole circulating current from which embodiments come and go season after season, endless variations upon one theme.
Your “I” inside your skin, and my “I” inside mine, pockets of the same current.
How far does my very claim to humanity depend upon protecting my own rights as against those of the collective?
Western cultures have bred a type of human being who feels strongly alienated from everything which is not his own consciousness. He is a stranger both to the external world and to his own body, and in this sense he has lost his connection with the surrounding universe. He does not know that the “ultimate inside” of himself is the same as the “ultimate inside” of the cosmos, or that, in other words, his sensation of being “I” is a glimmering intimation of what the universe itself feels like on the inside. He has been taught to regard everything outside human skins as so much witless mechanism which has nothing whatsoever in common with human feelings and values. This style of man must therefore see himself as the ghastly and tragic accident of sensitive and intelligent tissue caught up in the cosmic toils like a mouse in a cotton gin.
Ecology must take the view that where the organism is intelligent, the environment also is intelligent, because the two evolve in complexity together and make up a single unified field of behavior.
We need a natural history of theology, wherein the development of religious ideas and practices is studied, not as something good for life or bad for it, but as a form of life itself, like a particular species of flower or bird.
The word māyā is not necessarily used in a bad sense, as if it were a mere dream. I have said that māyā also means art and miraculous power, the creation of an illusion so fabulous that it takes in its Creator. God himself is literally a-mazed at and in his own work.
The juggler, scared out of his own wits, keeping six bottles of nitroglycerin whirling from hand to hand. But in this case the bottles are the stars and galaxies.
Aspects of an eternal present which is “nowever.”
To be quite sure, to be set, fixed, and firm is to miss the point of life. For living and being is a perpetual abandonment of the known and fixed situation. The only true peace is the always slightly uncertain apprehension that No will imply Yes, just as much as Yes implies No.
In India, when someone suddenly declares, “I am God,” they say, “Congratulations! At last you found out.” For them, the claim to be God does not involve the claim to encyclopedic omniscience and completely arbitrary omnipotence. The reason is that they know very well what a completely omniscient and omnipotent being would do. Imagine a world in which all the ambitions of technology have been fulfilled, where everyone has a panel of push-buttons which, at the lightest touch, will satisfy every desire more swiftly than the djinn of Aladdin’s lamp. Less than five minutes after this ambition has been attained, it will be essential to include upon the panel a button marked SURPRISE! For Hindus, the world-as-it-is is the result of having pushed that button; it is terrifyingly magical—at once far, far out of control yet at the same time one’s own inmost will.
Look at a religion, not as something about life, but as a form of life, a way of life, as genuine and authentic as a rose bush or a rhinoceros. For a living religion is not a commentary on existence: it is a kind of existing, an involvement, a participation.
One should not be ashamed of wishful thinking for this is just what all inventive and creative people do. They are dreamers, and they find ways of realizing their dreams because they wish and dream effectively. That is to say, their wishful thinking is not vague; their desires are imagined so precisely and specifically that they can very often be carried out.
Why not ask, therefore, what might be the most esthetically satisfying explanation for one’s own existence in our particular universe? It must be an explanation that will completely satisfy me for the most appalling agonies that can be suffered in this world. Upon what terms would I be actually willing to endure them?
We must therefore imagine a new kind of individuality in which there are two spheres with a common center. The outer sphere is the finite consciousness, the ego, the superficial individual, which believes itself to be the willing agent and knower, or the passive sufferer, of deeds and experience. But the inner sphere is the real self, unknown to the conscious ego. For the latter is the temporary disguise or dream of the former, and the real Self would not only be unafraid of entering into dreams of intense suffering; it would all the time be experiencing the process as delight and bliss, as an eternal game of hide-and-seek.
Perhaps the exploration of space is really the exploration and extension of our own consciousness, a rediscovery of the ignored background of each individual ego.
Delight consists in the total absorption of the mind in these patterns.
Omnipotence must at all costs avoid the stultifying situation of being in total control of itself, and the equally fruitless situation of losing control altogether.
The heart of the problem is that the process of self-consciousness cannot disentangle itself by itself.
There really was no need to mention the Tree of Knowledge. It would have been a safe risk that Adam would never have noticed it if the Lord hadn’t brought the subject up. But when the Lord not only called attention to it, but also issued terrifying warnings about the consequences of eating its fruit, it became perfectly certain that Adam would try it.
He told them that, on this particular round of the Creation, they were to stir up a drama that would have the audience screaming in its seats (and we know, don’t we, who is the audience?), so that when at last the curtain fell all would swear that this was the best show they had ever seen.
Godmanood is to be discovered here and now inwardly.
You must be free. You are responsible for the deliberate cultivation of genuine concern and love for other people. We are thus trying to be human on purpose, as if we felt it necessary to go around making great efforts to have heads.
Just in being alive I am unavoidably responsible for untold misery and pain. Apologies are hollow. Attempts at improvement create new entanglements. Passivity is simple evasion.
What I thought was myself was a phantom. My ego was never an effective agent. My supposed controlling of the world and of myself was a Big Act.
Whatever there is of “I” beyond, beneath, or above the small spotlit circle of the ego goes its own way like the circulation of the blood and the formation of the bones. It is all done without conscious attention; and so, in exactly the same way, the everlasting recurrence of the I-feeling is maintained through the whole body of the universe. For as flocks of birds and clusters of cells or molecules move as if they had a single mind, so the conscious ego belongs in a universal Self.
I did not alight in this universe like a bird arriving upon a branch from some alien limbo. I grew upon that branch like a leaf. For I am something which everything is doing; I am the whole process waving a flag named me, and calling out, “Yoo-hoo!”
There is no need to remember, for, in whatever form, it is always “I” who am there, the mercy of death delivering me again and again from the tedium of immortality.
This is the scandal of biological existence, that I cannot live without killing other creatures.
The moment has arrived when a really thoroughgoing spiritual materialism is the intelligent and essential attitude for the management of technology, and for helping mankind to be something better than the most predatory monster yet evolved.
The whole world has been completely misunderstood: for it has been looked at with a spotlight called consciousness so narrow in scope that it was all but impossible to see how things are actually related.
Whereas political order is maintained by force from above, being imposed, organic order arises through the mutual and reciprocal interplay of forces within a field.
I can only suppose, then, that in a truly post-exilic Church the Mass would indeed be a celebration. It would be—at last—an expression of being unashamedly glad to exist, of being a community without moral humbug and (therefore) mutual mistrust, and of knowing that, though our individual forms come and go like the waves, we are each and all the eternal ocean.
In writing this book, I am to some extent letting the cat out of the bag by publishing things which should be communicated in secret.
We do not want to survive merely, or to survive so as to be tormented forever in hell. We want to survive interestingly, even elegantly.
The community based on mutual assistance makes for a richer and more elegant game than the community based on mutual competition.
Does anyone really want the End, the Final Ground of all things, to be completely serious? No twinkle? No gaity? Something rigid and overwhelming and ponderously real? Such a profound seriousness might be the anteroom, but not the presence chamber.
The image of creatures radiating from God is more elegant and more organic than the image of their crawling around beneath his surveillance.
A universe which grows human beings is as much a human, or humaning, universe as a tree which grows apples is an apple tree.
There is still much to be said for the old theistic argument that the materialist-mechanistic atheist is declaring his own intelligence to be no more than a special form of unintelligence. Uncomplimentary remarks about the universe return like boomerangs to the parts of the universe that make them.
To construct a God in the human image is objectionable only to the extent that we have a poor image of ourselves, for example, as egos in bags of skin. But as we can begin to visualize man as the behavior of a unified field—immensely complex and comprising the whole universe—there is less and less reason against conceiving God in that image.
It is really no problem for an intelligent human being of the twentieth century to conceive that all his experience of the world, together with the world itself, subsists in some kind of unifying and intelligent continuum.
A superior religion goes beyond theology. It turns toward the center; it investigates and feels out the inmost depths of man himself, since it is here that we are in most intimate contact, or rather, in identity with existence itself.
Krishnamurti is right in saying that it should be challenged and tested with the question, “Why do you want to believe that? Is it because you are afraid of dying, of coming to an end? Is this identification with the cosmic Self the last desperate resort of your ego to continue its game?”
That you cannot by any means do it—that IS it! That is the mighty self-abandonment which gives birth to the stars.