The Tao of Philosophy

by Alan Watts. Another interesting read which I must share, an extract of it below:

"We speak of coming into this world... we go on to talk about the conquest of nature, the conquest of space, and view ourselves in a kind of battle array towards the whole world outside us...first, I want to examine the strange feeling of being an isolated self.

..it is absolutely absurb to say that we came into this world. We did not: we came out of it! What do you think we are?..Surely everything that we know about living organisms - from the standpoint of sciences - shows us that we grow out of this world, that each of us is what you might call a symptom, of the state of the universe as a whole...

"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these." Then Jesus said, more or less,"And if God so clothed the grass or the field which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe you faceless ones? So do not worry about tomorrow saying,"what shall we eat? What shall we drink? Or how shall we clothe ourselves?" All the rabble seek after these things and sufficient to the day is the worrry of it."

....Well, what do you suppose the Gospel was? It was the good news, but it never got out! You too, are the boss' son: that was the gospel.

If Jesus had lived in India they would not have put him to death, because everyone in India knows we are all God in disguise. So if he had said,"I and the Father are one," in India they would have said,"Hooray! You found out!"

...Imagine that most of you know the old story about the astronaut who went far out into space and was asked on his return whether he had been to heaven and seen God, and he said "Yes." So they said to him "Well, what about God?" And he said, "She is black." Now although this is a very well-known and well-worn story, it is very profound.

...by the pressure of social consensus it is very natural for us to assume that when somebody uses the word "god" it is that father figure which is intended. Even Jesus used the analogy "the Father" for his experience of God because there was no other one available to him in his culture, but these days we are in rebellion against the image of the authoritarian father. However, to reject the paternalistic image of God as an idol is not necessarily to be atheist, although I have advocated something called "athesim in the name of God" as an experience, a contact, or a relationship with God that is the ground of your being and does not have to be embodied or expressed in any specific image.

...We all think we are alive...Now how could you have experience that as a reality unless you had once been dead? What gives us any ghost of a notion that we are here except by contrast with the fact that we once were not, and later on will not be? Life is a cycle, much like the positive and negative poles in electricity. So this, then, is the value of the symbolism of "She is black." She is the womb principle, the receptive, the instanding, the void, the dark and so that is to come into the presence of the God who has no image.

Behind the father-image, behind the mother-image, behind the image of light inaccessible, amd behind the image of profound and abysmal darkness, there is something else which we cannot conceive at all.

Saint Dionysius called it the "luminous darkness."

Nargajuna called it sunyata, the void.

Shankara called it brahman, that of which nothing at all can be said,
neti-neti, beyond all conception whatsoever.

However, this is not atheism in the formal sense of the word. On the contrary, this is a profoundly religious attitude because it corresponds practically to an attitude of life of total trust in letting go.

When we form images of God, they are all really exhibitions of our lack of faith. They are something to hold on to and something to grasp. How firm is the foundation that lies beneath us, the Rock of Ages, or whatever you want to hold on to? However, when we don't grasp, we have the attitude of faith.

If you let go of all the idols you will of course discover that what this unknown is, which is the foundation of the universe, is precisely you. Yet it is not the you you think you are. It is not the opinion of yourself, it is not your idea or image of yourself, and it is not the chronic sense of muscular strain which we usually call "I".

Of course, you cannot grasp it, but why would you need to? Even if you could, what would you do with it..? You can never get at it because it is the profound central mystery. So the attitude of faith is to stop chasing it and stop grabbing it, because if that happens the most amazing things follow.

....."The Tao which can be spoken is not the eternal Tao" - Lao Tzu, 400BC

..The principle of Tao is spontaneity and that "the Great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things but does not lord it over them. It accomplishes merits but lays no claim to them." "