Thomas Merton
Many of Alan Watts’ books were concerned with reconciling Christian theology with Buddhism. Watts always believed that Christianity and Buddhism had much more in common than was popularly believed, He focused on areas of the Christian tradition that were often ignored by the mainstream church, most particularly the Gnostic gospels - the ‘unofficial’ version the Bible as described in the books of Apocrypha. Some of these gospels focused more on earthly spiritual revelation than faith in a supernatural god.
He was also heavily influenced by Christian Mystics such as Meister Eckhart ((c. 1260 – c. 1327), and John of the Cross (1542 – 1591), and later by modern mystics such as Thomas Merton. He wrote:
“Christian history contains a long list of men and women who could have talked on common ground with Orthodox Hindus and Buddhists”
“ The Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha, begins, ‘All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts. ‘
“This is in effect the same statement that opens St John’s Gospel ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…all things were made by him (The Word) and without him was not anything made that was made’.
“By thoughts, or mental ‘words’, we distinguish or ‘make’ things. Without thoughts, there are no ‘things’, just undefined reality.
“If you want to be poetic, you can liken this undefined reality to The Father, because it is the origin and basis of ‘things’. You can call thought, the Son ‘ of one substance with the Father’ – the Son ‘by whom all things were made’, the Son who must be crucified if we are to see the Father. just as we must look at reality without words to see it as it is.
“Thereafter the Son rises from the dead and returns to heaven, and likewise, when we see reality as it is, we are free to use thought without being fooled by it. It ‘returns to heaven’ in the sense that we recognize it as part of reality, and not something standing outside it”
“It should be clear that eternal life is the realization that the present is the only reality and that past and future can be distinguished from it in a conventional sense only. The moment is the ‘door of heaven, the ‘strait and narrow way that leadeth unto life’ - because there is no room in it for the separate ‘I’.
“In this experience there is no one experiencing the experience. The ‘rich man’ cannot get through this door because he is carrying too much baggage; he is clinging to the past and the future. “
“Suppose that God is the one that is playing all the parts, that God is the child being burned to death with napalm. There is no victim except the victor. All the different roles which are being experienced, all the different feelings that are being felt are being felt by the one who original desires, decides, wills, to go into that very situation.
“Curiously enough there is something parallel to this in Christianity. There’s a passage in St Paul’s epistle to the Phillipinians in which he says a very curious thing.
“ Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being a form of God, did not think identity with God a thing to be clung to but humbled himself and made himself of no reputation and was found in fashion as a man and became obedient to death, even to death of the cross”
“Here you have exactly the same idea, the idea of God becoming human suffering all the human beings suffer, even death. And St Paul is saying, ‘Let this mind be in you’.
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Watts also believed that Christianity contained the same concentration on the importance of the now-moment as Buddhism does. He quotes Meister Eckhart.
“ The Now-moment in which God made the first man and the Now-moment in which the last man will disappear and the Now-moment in which I am speaking are all one in God in who there is only one Now. The person who lives in the light of God…lives in the Now moment, that is, unfailingly, ‘in verdure newly clad’.”
Watts comments
“ When you are dying and coming to life in each moment, would-be scientific predictions about what will happen after death are of little consequence. To know God, man must give himself up. But how can a self, which is selfish, give itself up?”
The Christian religion, Watts suggested, contained a hidden answer to the question, in the idea that man can only surrender himself ‘In Christ’.
“For Christ stands for the reality that there is no separate self to surrender. To give up ‘I’ is a false problem. ‘Christ’ is the realization that there is no separate ‘I’. ‘I do nothing of myself’.. ‘I and the Father are One’ ’Before Abraham was, I am’.
“Must we also insist that this loss of ‘I’ in God is not a mystic miasma in which the ‘values of the personality’ are obliterated? The ‘I’ was not, is not and never will be part of human personality. There is nothing unique, or ‘different’ or interesting about it. On the contrary, the more human beings pursue it, the more uniform, uninteresting and impersonal they become.
Watts rejected Christianity in the end because he was concerned with philosophy, not religion as such, and he was at pains to point out the difference between the two. Buddhism, he always insisted, was more like a form of therapy, and saw the Buddha as the world’s first psychotherapist, since Siddhartha was simply interested in getting people to abandon beliefs that were harmful to themselves and others and understand that the world could always be viewed through a different psychological prism. And there was no supernatural God in Buddhism – it was ‘The Religion of No-Religion’.
Christianity, as it was practiced, was guilty, for Watts, of being too ‘wordy’ and too bossy. Watts couldn’t accept a religion that was traditionally organized along the lines of a medieval royal court. Religion, he pointed out, and religious services, were too loquacious and didactic. It was nothing but talk.
“You cannot find out the mystery of the universe through talk, only through awareness.
“This throwing the book at people and telling them the Word - I think we’ve had enough. The history of religion is the history of failure of preaching. Preaching is moral violence which excites people sense of guilt and there is nothing more uncreative.
“ You may think of God as a conscious being, but if so, do not place upon it the burden and the bore of holding perpetual court to be flattered, petitioned, whined at, wheedled, apologized to and howled at with hymns. Saint Paul ordered that women should be silent in church, but he himself prayed without ceasing. If you were Jesus, wouldn’t you have turned to him and said ‘ Can’t you be quiet for a while?”
Watts believed this constant talking and urging and thanking was really a sign of lack of faith.
“Sermons are often exhortations to have more faith, which means that we all recognize that we do not really believe it, but we ought to.”
Faith, believed Watts, was almost the opposite of religious belief.
“Faith is letting go. Religion is a ‘rock’ that you hold on to, and therefore the opposite of faith. Belief is crawling into a hole and pulling the hole in after you. Faith is crawling out into great space and pulling the space out after you.
Faith is an act of trust in the unknown.
Fides tota est - Faith is everything.
Faith – in life, in other people, in yourself – is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time. Faith is always a gamble because life itself is a gambling game - with colossal stakes. But to take the gamble out of the game, to try to make winning a dead certainty is to make for a certainty that is indeed dead.\
“To live you must have faith, to trust yourself to the totally unknown, to trust yourself to a nature that doesn’t have a boss. We need faith not belief. Faith is the opposite of clinging, of holding on. Be lief comes from the old English, to wish. A scientist has more faith than a religious man because he is open, but even he has to believe that his own brain is reliable, that as an instrument it is accurate. You have to trust it. There’s no way out. You have to trust a god that you cannot conceive of in any way. You can’t cling to a god, because you strangle it. You have to know that you don’t know. Let go of your efforts to grasp reality.”
“People who hold on to God have no faith at all, because real faith lies in not holding on to anything.
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