If you clearly come to a realization that this is how things are, it gives you a certain bounce. You can enter into life with an abandon, with a freedom from basic terror, which you would not ordinarily have.
You can be very hooked on the form of life which you are now living. You can consider that myself—say, as Alan Watts—is an immensely important event, and one which I wish to preserve and continue as long as possible. But the truth of the matter is that I know I won’t be able to, and that everything falls apart in the end. But if you realize this fundamental energy, you have the prospect of appearing again in innumerable forms—all of which, when you’re in them, will seem just as important as this one you have now. Just as problematic, perhaps, too.
Success in education or religion is a deadly thing. I know many worthwhile causes that started out struggling and had something really great. And then, when they succeeded, they became sloppy and eventually fell apart. Worse still, instead of falling apart, they just go on and on and on being dull. That so easily happens.
Let’s take the Baháʼí thing: now here was an attempt to form a universal religion composed of nine major religions in the world, and all it succeeded in doing was creating another divisive sect claiming to be a sort of in-group. And so I feel rather strongly in this day and age that joining religions is intellectually not so very respectable; that it is a thing of the past.
I watch the claims people make, and whether they manifest those claims in the way they live. And if they say, “Well, you know, this way of life that we follow is going to improve us and make us better human beings from a moral point of view”—alright, that’s what they said it is. So I watch to see if they are in any way distinguished. And it’s very rarely true that they are. To a large extent, people’s religious beliefs are a rationalization of some kind.
Religions are always involved in some kind of sales pitch. They say: if you would do what I tell you or what we preach, it will be good for you, it will make something better. And endlessly, endlessly, it doesn’t.
If you read the literature of the great religions, time and time again you come up against descriptions of what is called spiritual experience. And you find that, in all the various traditions, there is a modality of spiritual experience which seems to be the same thing—whether it occurs in the Christian West, the Islamic Middle East, the Hindu world of Asia, or the Buddhist world, it is quite definitely the same experience: the sense of the transcendence of individuality, and of being one with the total energy of the universe.
You can only get it when you discover that you don’t need it. You can only get it when you don’t want it. And so you say, “How do I learn not to want it, not to go after this—either by the long-term method or by the instant method?” And obviously, if you ask that, you still are seeking it, and thereby not getting it.
Insofar as you accord spiritual authority to someone, you must recognize that you did that on your own authority. It was you who set this guy up as your master.
We’ve been taught by a social convention to restrict the concept of myself to what I do voluntarily and consciously, which is very narrow. Certainly, if you say, “Oh, I—by my ego and my intelligence—I created all this,” you would be conceited, and you know you would be a liar. But “you” is much deeper than that. “You” includes far more than your conscious mind, and it’s that total “you” that not only is responsible for the infinitely complex structure of your physical organism, but also for the environment in which you find yourself. “You” runs that deep. So it’s “you” in that sense, the total “you,” which is the root and ground of everything.
It is the interval between people, the space between lives, that constitutes the bond between.
From a biological point of view it is clear that every individual instance of life is a function of the whole universe.
In the ordinary way we are conditioned to think, “I, me, myself lies only on the inside of my skin.” When you do this flip, you discover that your outside is as much you as your inside. You can’t have an inside without an outside. So if the inside is yours, the outside is yours. You have to acknowledge that the world outside the skin is as much yours as the world inside the skin. Everybody’s outside is different, just as everybody’s inside is different. But eventually, everybody’s outside is all the same outdoors, see? And it’s in this way that we are one. Your body is in your soul, not your soul in your body.