The Nature Of God - Alan Watts

Now I'm sure 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. And so they said to him, well, what about God? And he said, she is black. And although this is a very well-known and well-worn story, it is very profound. Because, I tell you, I knew a monk who started out in life as pretty much of an agnostic or an atheist. And then he began to read Henri Bergson, the French philosopher who proclaimed the vital force, the élan vital, and so on. And the more he read into this kind of philosophy, the more he saw that these people were really talking about God. And I've read a great deal of theological reasoning about the existence of God. And they all start out on this line. If you are intelligent and reasonable, you cannot be the product of a mechanical and meaningless universe. Figs do not grow on thistles. Grapes do not grow on thorns. And therefore, you, as an expression of the universe, as an aperture through which the universe is observing itself, cannot be a mere fluke. Because if this world peoples as a tree brings forth fruit, then the universe itself, the energy which underlies it, what it's all about, the ground of being, as Paul Tillich called it, must be intelligent. Now, when you come to that conclusion, you must be very careful. Because you may make an unwarranted jump. Namely, the jump to the conclusion that that intelligence, that marvelous designing power which produces all this, is the Be careful. Because that God, contrary to his own commandments, is fashioned in the graven image of a paternal, authoritarian, beneficent tyrant of the ancient Near East. And it's very easy to fall into that trap. Because it's all prepared, institutionalized, in the Roman Catholic Church, in the synagogue, in the Protestant churches, all there ready for you to accept. And by the pressure of social consensus and so on and so on, it is very natural to assume that when somebody uses the word God, it is that father figure which is intended. Because even Jesus used the analogy, the father, for his experience of God. He had to. There was no other one available to him in his culture. But nowadays, we are in rebellion against the image of the authoritarian father. But to reject the paternalistic image of God as an idol is not necessarily to be an atheist. Although I have advocated something called atheism in the name of God. That is to say, an experience, a contact, a relationship with God, that is to say, with the ground of your being, that does not have to be embodied or expressed in any specific image. Now, theologians on the whole don't like that idea. Because I find in my discourse with them that they want to be a little bit hard-nosed about the nature of God. They want to say that God has indeed a very specific nature. Ethical monotheism means that the governing power of this universe has some extremely definite opinions and rules to which our minds and acts must be conformed. And if you don't watch out, you'll go against the fundamental grain of the universe and be punished. But there is this feeling, you see, that there is authority behind the world, and it's not you. It's something else. And therefore, this Jewish, Christian, and indeed Muslim approach makes a lot of people feel rather strange, estranged from the root and ground of being. There are a lot of people who never grow up and are always in awe of an image of grandfather. Now, I'm a grandfather. I have five grandchildren, and so I'm no longer in awe of grandfathers. I know I'm just as stupid as my own grandfathers were, and therefore, I'm not about to bow down to an image of God with a long white beard. Now, naturally, of course, we intelligent people don't believe in that kind of a God, not really. I mean, we think that God is spirit, that God is very undefinable and infinite and all that kind of thing. But nevertheless, the images of God have a far more powerful effect upon our emotions than our ideas. And when people read the Bible and sing hymns, ancient of days, who sitteth thrown in glory, immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes, they still got that fellow up there with a beard on. It's way in the back of the emotions. And so we should think, first of all, in contrary imagery. And the contrary imagery is she's black. Imagine instead of God the Father, God the Mother. Well, she, first of all, feminine, represents what is called philosophically the negative principle. Now, of course, people who are women in our culture today and believe in women's lib don't like to be associated with the negative, because the negative has acquired very bad connotations. We say accentuate the positive. Well, that's a purely male chauvinistic attitude. How would you know that you were outstanding? Unless, by contrast, there was something instanding. You cannot appreciate the convex without the concave. You cannot appreciate the firm without the yielding. And therefore, the so-called negativity of the feminine principle is obviously life-giving and very important. But we live in a culture which doesn't notice it. You see a painting, a drawing of a bird, and you don't notice the white paper underneath it. You see a printed book, and you think that what is important is the printing, and the page doesn't matter. And yet, if you reconsider the whole thing, how could there be visible printing without the page underlying it? What is called substance, that which stands underneath, sub, underneath, stands, stands, to be substantial is to be underlying, to be the support, to be the foundation of the world. And of course, this is the great function of the feminine, to be the substance. And therefore, the feminine is represented by space, which is of course black at night. But were it not for black and empty space, there would be no possibility whatsoever of seeing the stars. Stars shine out of space, and astronomers, very high-powered astronomers, are beginning to realize that stars are a function of space. Now that's difficult for our common sense, because we think that space is simply inert nothingness. But we don't realize that space is completely basic to everything. It's like your consciousness. Nobody can imagine what consciousness is. It's the most elusive whatever it is that there is at all, because it's the background of everything else that we know. Therefore, we don't really pay much attention to it. We pay attention to the things within the field of consciousness, to the outlines, to the objects, to the so-called things that are in the field of vision, the sounds that are in the field of hearing, and so forth. But what it is that ever it is that embraces all that, we don't pay much attention to it. We can't even think about it. It's like trying to look at your head. You know, you try to look at your head and what do you find? You don't even find the black blob in the middle of things. You just don't find anything. And yet that is that out of which you see, just as space is that out of which the stars shine. So there's something very queer about all this. That which you can't put your finger on, that which always escapes you, that which is completely elusive, the blank, seems to be absolutely necessary for there to be anything whatsoever. Behind the father image, behind the mother image, behind the image of light inaccessible and behind the image of profound and abysmal darkness, there's something else which we can't conceive at all. Dionysus the Areopagite called it the luminous darkness. Nagarjuna called it shunyata, the void. Shankara called it brahman, that which can only, of which nothing at all can be said, neti neti, beyond all conception whatsoever. And you see that is not atheism in the formal sense of the word. This is a profoundly religious attitude, because what it corresponds to practically is an attitude to life of total trust, of letting go. When we form images of God, they are all really exhibitions of our lack of faith, something to hold on to, something to grasp. But 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. It's not the you you think you are. No, it's not your opinion of yourself. It's not your idea or image of yourself. It's not the chronic sense of muscular strain, which we usually call I. You can't grasp it. Of course not. Why would you need to? Supposing you could, what would you do with it? And who would do what with it? You can never get at it. So there's just that profound central mystery. And the attitude of faith is to stop chasing it, stop grabbing it, because if that happens, the most amazing things follow. But all these ideas of the spiritual, the godly, as this attitude of must, and we have been laid down the laws which we are bound to follow, all this jazz, is not the only way of being religious and of relating to the ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves in the world.