Yoga is, of course, the same as the Latin jungo, and the English yoke, meaning “union”—or “integration,” if we want to get a little bit fancier. There are many kinds of yoga, suited to different types of people, but there are three principal types: Jnan Yoga, the way of knowledge; Karma Yoga, the way of action; and Bhakti Yoga, the way of devotion. I imagine that the majority of people in this gathering are Bhaktis. In your contemplation, the method is centrally adoration of the Godhead as manifested in Jesus Christ, and this is Bhakti. I happen temperamentally to be a Jani, and so some of the things that I say may seem rather coldly intellectual and lacking the passion that you would normally expect from a discourse on contemplative meditation. However, even if you go along this Jani way, it is still possible to join in with the Bhakti devotions perfectly easily and with considerable enthusiasm, as I have during this week in this extraordinary and miraculous assembly.
Let us begin with the Bhakti way because it is fundamental for most of us here. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”—not just going through the motions, but “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” This is the first and great Commandment. How can anybody possibly obey it? In the Epistle to the Romans, chapter seven, St. Paul explains that God gave the law through Moses, not in the expectation that it would be obeyed, but in order that man, in attempting to obey it, would find out that he couldn’t, and would therefore be, in Paul’s language, convicted of sin. Now what is sin? Amartanein in Greek, which is the word we translate or mistranslate as “sin,” means to miss the point. To be on the point is what we call yoga or dhyana—concentration—centeredness. And a bishop in Greek is an episcopos, which not only means an overseer, but the man on the spot. The man who gets the point. Similarly, the way of Christ is to be on the mark, not to miss the point.
Well, you will say, what is the point? How can we get it? We’re too big! To enter Heaven you have to go through a pearly gate, and you know that’s not a gate all studded with pearls. A gate of heaven is one pearl. There are twelve of them, because the writer of the Apocalypse designed Heaven according to the Zodiac. So there are twelve gates representing twelve different kinds of people according to the signs of the Zodiac, or the twelve tribes of Israel, or the twelve Apostles. The entrance to into the pearl is the tiny little hole through which the string goes. The string is the self-thread that joins the pearls of all our different incarnations, but is not any one of them. To go through into Heaven you have to be not-you, because, as Jesus said, “Whither I go you cannot come.” You have to leave yourself behind, therefore, in order to get in. How can it possibly be done? How can one give oneself up, and by one’s own power completely abandon oneself to the love of God? That’s the puzzle. That’s what has to be tried. All the disciplines that we undertake, all the devotions that we make, all the meditative exercises that we do are efforts to give ourselves up. Well, you know what it’s like. It’s like having molasses in one hand and feathers in the other, and you clap them together and then try to pick off the feathers. And the more you do it, the more you’re involved; you’re stuck.
When you realize this, you ask yourself a question: “Why do I want to love God? Do I really love God? What do I mean by loving God? I’ve never seen God. I’ve never seen Jesus. I’ve read about him in the Bible, but I don’t really know what kind of a person he was.” Then you get one of those manuals of devotion, little black books with pink edges, and you kneel down before the Blessed Sacrament and you say, “Jesus, I love you; Jesus, I give my heart to you; Jesus, I adore you.” You try, and you say all this and you know you’re a complete phony—if you’re honest! Why you’re saying this is because you think that’s what you ought to do and you want to be on the side of the big battalions. If God the Father is the boss of the universe, you’d better get with it and get close to Jesus his Son. Otherwise, you might be going to hell.
If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, perfect love casts out fear, but how are we going to get perfect love? Nobody can ever give the answer. I remember Bernard Phillips, who’s a great Zen student, going to a Jesuit Father and saying, “Sure, I’ll be a Christian, but I want to be a real Christian. I don’t want just to say I’m a Christian. Tell me how I’m going to be a Christian with absolute devotion and no holds barred.” Well, everybody flunks out. When I was a little boy, I was told, “You must do your work.” And I said, “Sure, be most happy. Love to have books around me, I love the smell of books, I love everything to do with books.” But it was all wrong. They said, “You’re not working.” They couldn’t explain. I even copied the teachers’ handwriting, so that I could reflect their personalities somehow, and I became an expert forger!
In the same way, you can become a spiritual forger. You can have all the outward forms of great spirituality. That’s why I use them, so that you know I’m phony! And they’re fun, anyway. But how are we to love God? Well, this puzzled St. Paul. He said, “The law brought about sin in me. I had not known lust except the Law had said, ‘Thou shalt not covet.’ ” Then he says, “Shall we sin that grace may abound? Oh, heaven forbid!” But the point was, he said, that you are told to come up to a certain standard of selfless behavior, like the Sun of Justice itself, to make you see that you can’t. St. Augustine and Martin Luther saw the same thing, that the reason they were trying to love God was that they were incurably selfish. And what do you do about that? There’s a Chinese saying that when the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way. Preaching religion, telling people they ought to behave this way, that they should have faith, that they should love one another, generates nothing but hypocrisy, unless we get to the depths of hypocrisy and realize we are hopeless hypocrites. Then we start asking, “What am I to do? When I come to the end of my tether, I can’t do anything about it.”
It’s the same if you follow another way. Say your idea is not that you should love God or love Jesus Christ, but that you should let go. Well, that certainly applies to Jesus, too. “Be not anxious for the morrow, consider the flowers of the field, how they grow. …” I’ve never heard a sermon preached on that text, incidentally—it’s completely subversive. It’s all very well for Jesus to follow such a way because he was the boss’s son and it was no problem to him, but we practical people are responsible, and have to do what is known as keeping the world going, earning livings, and things like that. We say, “We can’t be not anxious for the morrow.” That’s one of the troubles about Christianity: Jesus was the boss’s son and therefore had a unique advantage over all the rest of us. So you can’t follow his example. That’s one of the most important things to understand: that you cannot follow the example of Christ. That is the only really good reason for believing that Jesus was the unique incarnation of the Son of God. But this means Christianity becomes an impossible religion, which cannot be practiced by us.
Now what does all this mean? It sounds awfully hopeless. I can’t let go of myself because I have a selfish reason for wanting to let go of myself. It would make me feel better, make me feel more protected against suffering. I’d be like a cat; you know, absolutely, that all is God, and there’s nothing to be afraid of whatsoever? You’d have no attachments or hang-ups, and you’d be full of delight and joy. Wouldn’t you like that? But when we look into ourselves we find a sensitive, quaking mess. And there’s nothing you can do about it. But this not being able to do anything is a concealed positive. When, for example, God is called infinite, without bounds, this could seem very wishy-washy. Something without bounds isn’t there; it would be like meeting an infinitely tall person! But we do not say God is infinite in order to say that God has no effective power. This negative word is affirmative. It’s the same in Hinduism, when it says of the Brahman neti, neti: Brahman is not this, not that, not anything that one can conceive. This is an affirmation. In the same way, when you find there’s absolutely nothing you can do to improve yourself spiritually, to be more loving of God, to be less defensive of self, that there’s nothing you can do, there’s a message there, a very important message.
The reason you can’t do anything is that the “you” you think you are doesn’t exist. What we call the ego has a particular existence. It exists in the same way as the Equator, or a line of longitude, or an inch. It is a social institution, or a convention, but it is not an effective agent, an effective energy, and that’s why you can’t do anything about it. Let’s analyze this ego, therefore, and see what it is. First of all, it arises from a fundamental human confusion between the world of real events and the world as described. The first step is language, and it is typical of all civilized and even many uncivilized peoples that they confuse words with realities, just as we confuse wealth with money, and status with happiness. We are the kind of people who would rather eat the menu than the dinner. You see it going on all the time, and the whole of advertising is based on this confusion, so that the wealthiest among us are not rich. They dress like morticians and drive around in hearses; they don’t enjoy themselves at all like we’ve been enjoying ourselves. We’ve had an absolute uproar here for a week, and we got away with it because we let the world outside know that we were doing something very specially holy. Of course, we know how to enjoy ourselves; and I’m sure that’s “as being poor but making many rich, as having nothing but possessing all things.” But the wealthy of this world, the rich in money, are mostly miserable people. People think, “If only I could get some more money. I’ve got all these mortgages and bills and dependents. I just want a little more money and then everything would be fine.” So you get it. And then you start worrying about whether you’re going to get sick; you can worry about that endlessly. Or about whether the tax collector is going to take it away from you, or whether there’s going to be a revolution. There’s always something to worry about if you’re the kind of person who’s inclined to worry. We confuse the world as it is with the world as described. That’s not a put-down on words, or symbols, or the intellect, but only to say that you cannot use words and the intellect properly unless you know that nothing is what you say it is.
For the word is not the thing,
The word is not the thing,
Hi ho the derry-o,
The word is not the thing.
And, incidentally, there are no things either, but we’ll go into that later. But you definitely can’t get wet in the noise-water, nor will that noise quench your thirst. The confusion of ourselves with our ego is the result of confusing reality with a concept.
The reality of ourselves is our organism, but the organism is inseparable from a particular environment—of other people, plants, animals, air, etcetera, forever. And if you fully felt your organism, if you experienced it thoroughly, you would know it was inseparable from the entire universe—that the entire universe is simply your extended body. But the concept of the ego does not include the organism. We say, “I have a body”; we don’t say, “I am a body.” Now, what information is there in your ego-concept about how you circulate your blood? How you work your nervous system? How you secrete important fluids from your glands? After all, you do all that, but your concept of yourself contains no information whatsoever about how it’s done. How do you make a decision? You say, “I open my hand.” How do you do it? Well, a physiologist might explain something about it to you, but he can’t open his hand any better than you can. Because when you do it, you know how to do it and, in a sense, you just do it—out it comes. But how? You can’t explain, because your self-image does not contain that information. So your image of yourself is given to you by your parents, your teachers, your relatives, and your peer-group. But don’t blame them, because you bought it. They tell you who you are.
I remember when I was a little boy I admired another boy who lived up the street, and I sometimes came home and imitated his mannerisms. My mother would look at me in a severe way and say, “Alan, that’s not you, that’s Peter.” She was concerned to give me an identity. And when I did something terrible, she said, “It’s not like you to do a thing like that.” So, everybody wants you to know who you are. There are a number of personalities you can choose from—there are certain personality types, like psychological types. You can be an introverted intuitive, an extroverted feeling type, and so on. Everybody has to have one. Is you is or is you ain’t? Are you a Christian or a Jew, Catholic or Protestant, Republican or Democrat, male or female? (That’s a very tricky one—there are twelve sexes not just two.)1 Everybody’s got to be in a compartment of some kind. And we identify ourselves with an image. It’s called a personality, the word persona meaning mask, that through which the sound comes, the megaphonic mask of Greek or Roman drama. It’s an act, and we are increasingly convinced that we are that persona. But the persona is nothing more than a caricature, suggesting something with a few lines and leaving the rest out. All that tremendous complex of human relationships and relationships with nature that we really are is completely ignored.
We say, “I still have a feeling of I which is more than my image. I have a feeling of great reality, a me, a particular me. What do you suppose that is?” Well, it took me a long time, but I found out. When you’re a child, they put you under a basic double-bind: you are required to do things that will be acceptable only if you do them voluntarily. So a mother says at night when a baby is restless, “Darling, try to go to sleep.” “You mustn’t be constipated. You have to have a bowel movement every day after breakfast.” “As a good child, you ought to love your mother, not because I say so but because you really want to.” Imagine what happens later in life, when you get married and you get up in front of an altar because you’re itchy, and say—you’ll swear anything to get hold of that girl—that you will love that woman till death do you part! Of all things! That is the greatest expression of disrespect for God the Almighty because eventually, as you know, you won’t have these excited feelings. It becomes, after all, everyday. Some people have luck in this respect and sometimes it doesn’t happen, but most people get bored. And then she says, “Darling, do you really love me?” What answer does she want? “I am trying my best to do so?” That’s not what was wanted at all. If the beloved would say, “I love you so much I’m your helpless slave,” that would be more like what was wanted.
I sat next to a boy in school who had great difficulty in reading. He wanted to show that he really was trying. He made noises, he made a special effort so the teacher wouldn’t get angry and have him beaten. We learn early that concentration is something you do with the muscles in your forehead. What do you do when somebody says to you, “Now take a hard look at this, carefully”? You will immediately find that in ordinary conditioning there is tension around the eyes. “Now listen. Be very attentive to this!” You will find muscles straining around the ears. “This needs grit. You’ve got to go through with this. It’s a painful situation. Tighten your jaws or clench your fists.” Or, “Control yourself,” and you go tight in the solar plexus or in the rectum. All these muscle strains become chronic habits and they’re all perfectly futile because they don’t have any effect on the efficiency of the nervous system. They get in the way of it. If you look at something, such as a clock in the distance, and you can’t read the time, you start staring. But it will just become blurred. If you want to see a clock in the distance, you should close your eyes and imagine that you’re looking at a black velvet curtain on a pitch-black night, then open your eyes and let the light shine through. Then you might by chance see the clock.
In all operations of the nervous system we use the intelligence. The reason why neurologists don’t fully understand the nervous system is that it’s more intelligent than they are. Therefore, what we call our ego is not only the image of ourselves; it’s also a chronic sensation of muscular strain, which in some people is centered in the solar plexus and in others in the region of the heart. In Japanese it’s called kokoro. And you feel that chronic strain there, and that is “I.” The true individual (I’m not saying that the individual is unreal) is a total organism in relation to its environment. That’s why the half-baked science (it is at least half-baked) of astrology draws a picture of the soul by drawing a picture of the universe as centered on the particular individual organism. Of course, it’s a very crude picture of the universe. Many things aren’t there, and I don’t think most astrologers know how to read the map, but the idea is fundamentally sound.
Now we come to the point where we have discovered that what we call ourselves is a mere symbol, plus vain strainings. So what are you going to do about that? Here’s the beginning of the religious life, where “man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” But what can you do? There you are, stuck with this illusion, and when you say, “What can I do about it?” you’re asking what the illusion can do to get rid of itself. It is absolutely important to see that nothing, nothing, nothing can be done about it. So then what? Go out and shoot yourself? Well, it does occur to you that, somehow or other, something is going on. You’re still breathing. Or are you breathing? Or does it breathe you? The vibration that we call existence is still there. What is it?
You may get frightened at this point and begin to ask, “Who’s in charge around here? If I’m not in control, if nobody’s in control, how will I know that I can speak the English language five minutes from now?” Here I am giving you a talk, and I don’t know how this talk is happening. I might lose my nerve at any moment, but somehow it talks and I don’t really think ahead what I’m going to say. But it goes on. So I might begin to wonder, “Am I simply the puppet of some god or universal process other than myself?” But where’s the puppet? I can’t find this puppet. Then am I God? Am I in charge of everything? That’s a frightful responsibility—I’m terrified of it. There was once a young man in Los Angeles who got LSD in the wrong way and thought that he was God, and was terrified. He turned himself into the police with a note saying, “Please help me.” Signed: Jehovah. But supposing both things are true? Or both untrue? That there is no puppet being pushed around and there is no boss pushing things around. Supposing there is simply a happening, what the Chinese call Tzu-jan, their word for nature, which means “what is so of itself.” In Thomistic theology it is called aseity, to be so of itself. Aseity is one of the attributes of God you don’t hear much about. So there is God—the great Happening, what is, in other words, on the mark, or “where it’s at.”
You realize that you cannot understand the world through concepts. The word is not the thing, so you become silent. There’s nothing you can do, so you watch. But there’s nobody watching! The idea that there has to be an experiencer of experience is merely a concept. What you call the experiencer is just one of your thoughts. It’s rather that the happening, the universe is aware of itself though your eyes. You’re an aperture through which the universe is aware of itself, and you realize nobody ever was in charge. Things have gone along reasonably well, most of the time. (I can prove from Hindu cosmology that seven parts of life in ten are good, three are bad, but we won’t go into that now.) But it muddles through reasonably well, and so you watch and you hear yourself thinking to yourself. All this chatter going on inside your skull. You try to stop it, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do. You want peace, you want silence, you want to stop thinking about what you must do tomorrow, what you did wrong yesterday, and all that stuff. You say, “Couldn’t we have peace for a while?” but you’re trying to get peace because you want to escape reality. Eventually you see that you just can’t help thinking. It goes on like the birds outside or the noise of the air-conditioning. So you treat your thinking as just that. Just nonsense and hubbub going on inside your head. “You have to pay the rent, you have to pay the rent.” Eventually you see the futility of all that, and your mind of itself becomes still. Left alone, it clears itself of the mud, the waves cease, and you get clarity. Clarity is very important. This is the meaning of “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Pure in heart doesn’t mean that you don’t tell dirty jokes: it means clear like crystal. “Purity” or “clarity” suggests two things to us. First, it’s complete emptiness—the sky, with no clouds. But “clarity” also means absolutely articulate form: you’ve made it clear. That’s why in Buddhism it is said that the form is the same as the void, and the void is the same as the form.
When you realize that you’re not your ego, you unaccountably disappear, and become what is absolutely obvious to you from the beginning. What does your head look like from your eyes? Do I experience my head as a black spot in the middle of everything, or a fuzzy place? No—it just isn’t there. I’m completely headless. All of you have heads; I apparently don’t. Nevertheless, out of this absolutely blank spot, I see. In the same way the stars shine out of space. We think space isn’t there, it’s nothing, it’s not important—until you stop to realize that you can’t have stars without space. How could you have a universe without space? How could there be a solid without space? The truth of the matter is that every something comes out of nothing. Listen with your ears—concentrate with that sense as we were listening yesterday morning to all the small sounds in and around the chapel. You hear sounds coming now out of silence. They arise spontaneously out of silence, because in this moment you are witnessing the creation of the universe. When you stop thinking (Yoga is the cessation of vritti in the mind or chitta) with concepts, you suddenly find that there is no past and no future. There is an eternal now, but you don’t know what that means, because now has meaning only in relation to then. When there is no then, there’s no now. So you really don’t know what to say about it. It says in one of the Zen texts that you’re like a dumb man who’s had a marvelous dream. Everybody wants to tell everybody else about a marvelous dream, but when he opens his mouth he can’t say anything. If I try to tell you what this state is, all I do is weave a pattern of words, which I’m clever at, because the art of the poet and the philosopher is to say what cannot be said—to describe the indescribable, to eff the ineffable, and unscrew the inscrutable. But so long as one talks, he never gets there.
That is why I want to emphasize the value of the contemplative life, of that silence of the mind. But the moment I say it’s valuable, that you ought to pursue it, I’ve said the wrong thing. There is no other reason for it than doing it. There is no external or ulterior reason whatsoever to participate in that superessential joy that is called God. It’s not your duty, it won’t be good for you. If you think, “I’m doing this for a reason, because it will be good for me,” you won’t see that meditation is the one thing in which you are completely here and now. There’s no reason for it; there’s nothing in mind as a consequence. You must treat all that chatter (“I’m meditating, I ought to be doing this or that”) as gobbledygook. See? That’s all it is. Then you’re centered in the only place there is; you’re on the mark; you’re not sinning. I feel this has to be said as a corrective to the excessive verbosity of our religiousness. Contemplation means what we do together in the temple. And when we gather in the temple, it is primarily for silence of the mind. It doesn’t mean we can’t have chickens and babies and cats and all sorts of comings and goings, such as happen in any temple in India, because you cannot meditate at all unless you can do it in a boiler factory, since all sound is the manifestation of the energy of the universe. Just listen to it as you would listen to classical music. When you listen to the New York Philharmonic playing Beethoven, you don’t ask what it means, because music means music. Music is a symphona spectacale, an end in itself, and therefore to be likened to the Divine Wisdom as a game, because games are to be played not for anything beyond them, but for their own sake. In the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom speaks and says that her delight is to play in the sight of the Almighty, playing among the sons of men. The Divine Wisdom, incidentally, is a lady—Sophia, and she’s the other aspect of Logos. Then you make the fundamental discovery that life is not serious—it may be sincere, but not serous. Wouldn’t it be awful if God were serious? I always love to quote G. K. Chesterton saying that angels fly because they take themselves lightly. And if they, how much more the Lord of the angels? There would be no reason whatsoever for God to take himself seriously. God doesn’t preach, God woos. He speaks in the language of the Song of Songs, the language that convinces. That’s not the language of “throwing the Book,” though people love being scolded, especially in church.
Mental silence does not involve the absence of physical sound. That’s why music, chanting and all sorts of sublimely nonsensical activities are supports for contemplation. But remember, in our mantra service, I made the distinction between nonsense and claptrap. Nonsense is something of a very high order—that which is transcendent of what is sensible. So we make holy nonsense and joyful noise to the Lord as we have been doing in our marvelous devotions these past days. I think we have all discovered here that in the total silence of contemplation and the sublime “non-sense” of mantric prayer we have arrived at a tacit and firm understanding, which cannot and should not be formulated or defined. Speaking for myself, I have found unity of heart with people whose formal religious concepts are very different from mine. This is not sentimental friendship. We have met at a level of the spirit in which there is nothing to argue about, whether we be Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, or Hindus. This is, in Christian terms, the Grace of God. It is happening and will go on happening, and it is in this grass-roots, spontaneous and unofficial way that a truly catholic and ecumenical religion is coming into being—a unity that appreciates and fosters our wonderfully different disciplines of meditation and forms of worship. One morning the “official” world will wake up to find that this unity is a fact—in the light of which our ancient disputations have become irrelevant. But it will be so, not through our mutual subscription to vague platitudes such as the Golden Rule, but through exploring together the silent depths of mystical experience and practice. A Zen Buddhist verse puts it, laughingly, this way:
When two masters meet on the road,
They need no introduction.
Thieves recognize one another instantly.
In conclusion, I want to offer my thanks to the monks of St. Benedict of this community, and to say that this place is an island of sanity in a mad world. I am not a monk; I like women too much. But those of you who are so called do the most unbelievable service in establishing these islands of constant prayer, scholarship and manual work. It’s a very balanced Rule, and you Benedictines, being the most ancient Order in the Church, are like true aristocrats. You don’t have to blow your own trumpet. Please keep this going! Do not lose courage. It is such a great service to the rest of us. Naturally there are members here of many other Orders, but I speak particularly to our hosts. It is essential that there be people in the world who are sitting on the mountain peaks, because if there isn’t someone around who is contemplating God, the life of the rest of us is absurd. Someone must be there to give the rest of us, as it were, a center.
1. [Watts is referring to a typology of sexual identity developed by his father-in-law, Gavin Arthur (1966)—Eds].
Arthur, G. A. (1966). The circle of sex. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books.
Presented at Word Out of Silence: A Symposium on World Spiritualities, Mount Saviour Monastery, 1972. Reprinted from Cross Currents, 1974, 24(2–3), 367–377. Copyright © 1975 by Convergence, Inc. Used by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., publisher of Cross Currents.