Imagine that you’re God and that you can have anything you want. Well, you’d have it for a quite long time. And then, after a while, you say, “This is getting pretty dull because I know in advance everything that’s going to happen.” And so you would wish for a surprise, and you would find yourself this evening in this church as a human being.
You do not have to be any particular kind of religion to get this experience. It can hit anyone any time, like falling in love. There are obviously a number of you in this building who’ve had it in greater or lesser degree. But it’s found all over the world. And when it hits you, you know it. Sometimes it comes after long practice of meditations and spiritual discipline, sometimes it comes for no reason that anybody can determine. We say it’s the grace of god: that there comes this overwhelming conviction that you have mistaken your identity. That, what you thought (what I thought) was just old Alan Watts (who I know very well) is just a big act and the show. But what I thought was me was only completely superficial. That I am an expression of an eternal something-or-other, X—a name that can’t be named, as the name of God was taboo among the Hebrews. I am. And that I suddenly understand exactly why everything is the way it is. It’s perfectly clear. Furthermore, I feel no longer any boundary between what I do and what happens to me. I feel that everything that’s going on is my doing, just as my breathing is. Is your breathing voluntary or involuntary? Do you do it or does it happen to you? See, you can feel it both ways. But you feel everything like breathing. And it isn’t as if you had become a puppet. There is no longer any separate “you.” There is just this great happening going on.
You are not serving your country if you think that it’s necessarily the best of all possible countries. That is doing a disservice to your country. It is refusing to be critical where criticism is proper. So of religion: every religion should be self-critical, otherwise it soon degenerates into a self-righteous hypocrisy.
Supposing we are really quiet and we don’t think; be absolutely silent through and through. We say, “Well, you will just fall into a blank.” Oh? Ever tried?