Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh Christe eleison [...] Give me an answer Give me an answer

[01:01]

Professor Thomas Berry wishes to speak. One of the very difficult things in relating the traditions is what a person might call the relating primary causality and what's called secondary causality. In many of the traditions there tends to be an effort to eliminate the person that's described as the person, or at least the created agent as an agent. One of the important contributions of St. Thomas Aquinas was the affirmation that the secondary agent, that is the creature, is real. and is an agent, a responsible agent. And I would notice so powerfully, it's one of the things that in the mystical life tends toward is the immersion in the divine, the loss in the divine and all this.

[02:51]

And so you have in China, the Tao does everything or the Brahman in India, the Brahman is everything and so forth. I'll ask Dr. Watts to comment on that. Yes, that is a very important point. But one must realize that the word maya in Sanskrit, which is normally translated illusion, and so gives one the sense that in Hindu philosophy the individual agent or person is nothing more than an illusion. Maya also means magic, creative art, power, from the root matr, which is to measure. And so we get meter, mata, matter. Does it matter? It's only a matter of form, but after all it's the form that matters. Rupa is the Sanskrit word for matter, namarupa, named for.

[03:56]

Now, let's suppose that you are God. What would you do? You know all things. You know all possible pasts and futures. Through and through and through, everything is perfectly intelligible, and everything is in control. Now what? I think that God would eventually think it over and say, this is like making love to a plastic woman. I want a surprise. And so, therefore, in Hebrew theology, when God created Adam, he put into the heart of Adam something called the Yetzarah, which means the wayward spirit. In other words, that something unpredictable would happen. the spirit of the unpredictable. I, of course, call it the element of irreducible rascality that is in us all, and I can't get along with people who don't admit that they have it.

[05:04]

I don't want people who say, you know, I'm a miserable sinner, and they get a sense of virtue through being guilty. But there's a twinkle in the eye of a real person, which is true metania, transformation of mind, by admitting you're a Yathahara, So then, that's the element of surprise that must come into a completely controlled system of creation. So, I might put it in another way. Let us suppose that you were able, by every night when you went to sleep, to dream any dream you wanted to dream. This would be the Maya. Well, you would have all your conceivable wish fulfillments, or maybe a month of nights. And remember that in any night, you could extend the period of elapsed time to maybe 7,500 years. And so having done all that, you would say after a while, hmm, now let's be a little daring about this, a little far out.

[06:08]

Let's dream that we're not really dreaming. Let's dream that we are rescuing princesses from dragons or going on voyages of adventure and all sorts of extraordinary things, you know? And then you would be more and more willing to abandon yourself to surprise, to the element of the other, the uncontrolled. Because you know you would wake up eventually and it would all be all right in the end, but when you got into the dream, you wouldn't know that you were going to wake up. and it would be vividly real. And then on one such night you would dream that you were all here in this room with your particular problems, difficulties, anxieties and so forth. Oh, how do you know that's not what you're doing anyway? Because the great actor, you see, in Hindu view, God is not conceived so much as the ruler and architect of the universe, as the actor in all the parts.

[07:22]

But the superb actor has the superb audience. Now, what is the actor on the stage trying to do? The stage is defined by a proscenium arch, so that when you come to the theater, you know all this is really only in play. It's not serious. Maya. But the actor will, if he is superb, get you crying, laughing, sitting on the edge of your chair. Have you horrified? Because you know it's almost real. But supposing the greatest of all actors and the greatest of all possible audiences, everybody's completely taken in, including the actor. He becomes that part. And so the Maya is the creation of relative reality. So the reality of the persona, the role, the part that the actor plays, is relatively real. It's not absolutely real.

[08:25]

But things don't have to be absolutely real to be real. And the sign of maturity is that you can distinguish that there are more important things and less important things without thinking that the less important are unimportant. So, we are apt to... Theologians sometimes argue in a silly way. They say that unless the distinctions between good and evil are eternal distinctions, they're not real distinctions. And therefore they're saying only that which is eternal is real. And therefore they say, therefore there must be everlasting damnation. If something is really real sin. I mean, if there is a real devil, a real Judas Iscariot, a real snake in the grass, That one is going to be put down forever. But you know there's a Chinese proverb which says, don't swat a fly on a friend's head with a hatchet. Eternal damnation is too heavy a punishment for minor adulteries and petty thieving and so-called most mortal sins.

[09:41]

It's just too much. And it's like the use of judicial torture brings the law into disrespect. But there is a profundity in the idea of eternal damnation. If you have studied Oriental philosophy, you will realize that eternal damnation is the other side of the beatific vision. Hell is God, seen from a left hand as distinct from a right hand point of view. It is at the point where pain turns into ecstasy. There is another point where bliss, ananda, turns into ecstasy, and they meet like that. So, a girl in France who is being made love to and is in a state of extreme passion says to her lover, Tumar, Tumar, kill me, kill me.

[10:45]

because she has reached that mysterious point at which pleasure and pain become one. That's a secret. That's esoteric. See, what is the nature of esotericism? It's that that which is different explicitly is one implicitly. So all the opposites, the good and the evil, the solid and the spatial, being and non-being, are poles of one undefinable. And that's esoteric knowledge. Because you first teach children the exoteric knowledge, so they'll be clear what the distinctions are. But when the distinctions become too distinct, and begin to sort of drift away from each other, then we... there has to follow the esoteric knowledge that they're really one. How come Android Callistos What you have just said about eternal damnation called to my mind the statement of Saint Isaac the Syrian on hell.

[11:59]

He takes the view that in the end there is only the love of God, but the love of God acts in a double way. For the saints it is a source of unending joy, But if you do not have love in your own heart, then the love of God will be a source of torment to you. That is not quite the same as what you were saying, but there are, I think, points of connection. And that, I think, is something very different from the conventional Christian hell. I wanted to ask you a rather different point about the three ways which you mentioned in the beginning. Certainly in the orthodox Hesychast tradition, we would say that there is only one way.

[13:02]

But we would say there are three kinds of people. There are, first of all, the saints, the holy men, those who have true experience, personal experience, and they are the only theologians. The people who have academic degrees and write books and go to conferences and symposia and talk, they are not the true theologians unless they have personal experience. A theologian, it is always said in our tradition, is one who prays, and if you pray in truth, you are a theologian. The second class are the people who do not have personal experience or do not have it yet, but who trust the theologians, who trust the saints.

[14:05]

And the third class are the people who do not have personal experience and do not trust the saints. And the people who are in the second class are on the right path. But there is only the one path, and this is a union of knowledge and devotion. Yes, this is very interesting. First of all, Saint Isaac's comment about hell brings out the point. that the fire of hell is as much the love of God as the radiance of light of the beatific vision. It's how you see it. But St. Gregory of Nyssa, I think, agreed with Oregon about the doctrine of apocatastasis, that the fire of hell was a redemptive, and that in the end

[15:17]

God would be all in all. Now, as to these ways, there are various methods of classifying these sort of three types. It's funny how it always gets into three. You know, you always do everything in three, the beginning, the middle, and the end. There are profound reasons for this. Lao Tzu said, when a superior man hears of the Tao, the way he practices it. When a middling man hears of it, it seems that sometimes he keeps it and sometimes he loses it. But when an inferior man hears of it, he laughs at it. Indeed, it would not be the Tao if he didn't laugh at it. And that's rather like your three kinds. Now, in distinguishing between jnana, karma and bhakti as the three principal differentiations in yoga.

[16:22]

It's true, as you say. Yoga is necessarily experience. It is not mere verbal knowledge. But we've got to be clear about this, because sometimes people say to me, I understand what you're saying intellectually, but I don't really feel it. And I sometimes come back to them and say, I wonder if you really understand it intellectually. Because intellectual understanding, as the word intellect used to be used, is more than being able to put it into the right words. For example, I can put something into the right words, and you will understand the words, but you won't get the idea. Many people, you see, could not understand Einstein's theory of relativity. They read it all, there it was, but they didn't catch the point. In other words, there is a thing that I would rather call intelligence than intellect.

[17:24]

And when your intelligence goes to work and something is explained to you, you say, aha, I see. Now you have got the theory of it in the true meaning of the Greek theoria, which means the vision. Of course, the word has become degenerated, like many words degenerate in time. But theoria was the vision. And a seer is also a sign synonymous with a mystic, is one who truly sees. I see. But because of differences of personal type, we can experience the contemplative state through our intelligence, through our physical actions, and through love. Those are the principal ways of contemplation in which the human and the divine become realized as one.

[18:41]

I have some written questions here which I might deal with. If you were to use the nature-grace language, how would you distinguish them? In what sense is nature grace? In what sense is grace not given simply with nature, conceived as the universal environmental extension of the self. This question depends on whether you start with accepting certain premises of Greek philosophy. And is, in a way, a question based on an extremely profound confusion of words. We, when we use the word nature, mean at least two things.

[19:53]

Of what nature is this? That means, what class does it fit into? Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral? Is it human? Is it mammal? Is it insectual? Is it botanical? Is it mineral? And so on, see? What is the nature? Natural history was classification of specimens. Then we also use nature to mean what is not human. Nature. The birds, the bees, and the flowers. Nature study. Scholastic philosophy distinguished between natura naturans and natura naturata. Nature-naturing and nature-natured. God was natura naturans. The creature was natura naturata. There was a divine nature. There was a human nature. See, this word is very, very ambivalent. Chinese word, nature, means that, as I explained, is aseity, what is so of itself.

[20:58]

What is spontaneous, in other words. Self-originating. What has no boss. What does not move in response to a push. Now, the West has thought, since the Greeks, in terms of cause and effect. Actually, all this culminates in Newtonian mechanics, looking at the world by analogy with the game of billions. What hit you? Who pushed your button? What makes you move? Are you self-moving, or are you not responsible? Are you a puppet of fate, or are you a center of life? All this is billions. And therefore, a fundamentally mechanistic conception of nature. Because the analogy used in the Western world for the creation of the world was the analogy of manufacture. God made a clay statue.

[22:01]

He was a potter. And he made a clay figurine. And then, by breathing on it, made it alive. and so made it a self-soul. This ceramic analogy of the world is not the only one that we could adopt for explaining the ways of God to man. It's just one way of looking at it. And you see, what happened was, historically, that when the West, in the 18th and 19th centuries, got rid of God as a useful hypothesis, they were left with a mechanism. And so, spoke about everything. You see, even psychoanalysis is psychohydraulics. It's Newtonian mechanics of the flow of water applied to the human psyche. And everything now becomes a mechanical object and therefore essentially objectionable.

[23:03]

When you turn that back in behaviorism on the human psyche and explain that as a mechanism, the only thing is left is this, that is objectionable, suicide. Which is of course what we are preparing under this kind of mechanistic technology. Because nothing is anymore the subject. There's only the bunch of objects. But what is meant by God is the subject. That's why we apologize when we change the subject. So, it depends what you mean by nature as to what you mean by grace. If you mean by nature the objects, the artifacts, then of course there is a division between nature and grace. But if on the other hand you mean by nature, aseity, what is so of itself in the Chinese sense of nature, then nature and grace are the same.

[24:10]

What do we mean by grace? I would like some Greek scholar present to give me the etymology of the word grace. I've been asked this question and I can't find the answer to it. But anyway, when we say somebody is graceful, when we say is exactly the same thing of when we say of a certain dancer who is graceful, that they're extremely natural. There seems to be no artifice, no guile, no props, no scaffolding, no gimmicks which produce the final result. So to be graceful and to be natural in those senses are the same. Father Francis Martin has a comment. I'd leave a long etymology to Father Callistos, but basically, caris means benevolence. And the first place you look for caris, grace, is not in the creature, it's in God.

[25:20]

And when God views what he has made with caris, it's an act called carizo. It's an act of looking with benevolence. But whenever God looks or speaks, the thing is, the other model for creation in early Genesis is precisely Word, that God speaks and there is. When God regards, it's Dovmaod, it's, as somebody suggested, very good. So that the question then is, what does God's benevolent regard and benevolent, because God's regard is movement, God's regard is not. We regard and nothing happens. We speak and most of the time nothing happens. But God's regard is an act, karidso. What happens to the creature is our famous word, karisma.

[26:22]

It's the thing, the reality in the creature. Now our problem, and it's a typical western problem, is this karisma, is it different than God? Is it outside of God? How is anything outside of God? When we say existence, a synonym for that is ecstasy. But we mean two ways. Existence puts me outside of God and ecstasy puts me outside myself. And existence and charisma is that regard of God by which I'm outside of God and then outside myself. Now, last night when one question came up about what big idea do you get from this conference or something, I forgot what the question was. The one thought that's been going through my mind is that there is a way that man experiences and knows the One, which is neither one nor not one.

[27:33]

But we can neither think nor say except in two. And so we have nature-grace, which, when it got into Western theology through a famous follower by the name of Peter the Chancellor in Paris, it was like a function in calculus. It was never a thought, there we can, there's nature, there's grace. It was, look at this confusion, as Alan said so beautifully this morning. The experience is that whatever has to happen, I, whoever that is, can't do it. Therefore, it's a radical experience of incompleteness. I know existence, but I don't know ecstasy. And the total experience is kharizma, which only comes from God's kharizo act, which is identical with his khariz, his benevolence. So while I'm standing here and have to go to Los Angeles in a few minutes, I want to thank you all for having been khariz for me.

[28:39]

Thank you so much. Same to you. Well, I have very little to add to that. Archimandrite Callistos has another comment. In Greek, charis, or charisma, is related to hryo, or hryain, or chrisma. And these are words that mean anointing. Anxiety. The idea is of the oil of God's mercy poured out on you. And the two words oil and mercy are very close in Greek. Eleon is oil, eleos is mercy. And last night I was asked for another word on mercy and I wasn't given a word by the Spirit but that is now my word that mercy is the oil of God poured out on you so that you shine. In another way, we could say grace is not a thing at all.

[29:52]

Grace is the whole of the divine nature, the whole of the divine person, insofar as it is communicated to man. For there is a part of God that is never communicated to man. But insofar as it is communicated to man, it is grace. And nature is man as God wishes him to be. That is to say, man living in God and God living in man. When man is separated from God, he is not in a state of nature, natural. He is extremely unnatural. The world that we see around us, the fallen world, the world of illusion, that is not the world of nature. That is the world of un-nature. The world of nature is the world as it is in God. So grace and nature are two sides of the same thing.

[30:54]

Now that has explained the problem to me. So the Christos is the one anointed, the oily man. And when you've got this anointed man, you can't grasp him. He's slippery. So all our concepts fail before the Christos. We can't Grab him. Now then, what is Antichrist? Antichrist is the false oil, gasoline. Christ is anointed with olive oil, which is from the trees. But this gasoline ruined everything, and that is the Antichrist. But you see, oil is not only for healing, it's for lubrication. And so the Christ is slippery. That's why we can talk forever about the gospel and never able to pin it down.

[32:01]

Because it exceeds, as St. Thomas said in another way, but it means the same thing. God, by his immensity, exceeds every concept which the mind of man can form. And therefore we have to proceed to the knowledge of God by way of remotion, that is to say, getting rid of our ideas. Because every idea of God is an idol. And an idol made of thought and imagination is more dangerous than an idol made of wood or stone. There's no danger in an icon or a crucifix. Nobody imagines that this here is the Christ. Nobody ever did imagine whether you have an image of Buddha or of Vishnu or of Ganesh or what have you. Nobody imagined that that image is the Godhead. But a lot of people think their ideal of God is God. And so this is most important to get rid of the idolatry of ideals.

[33:04]

The Bible can be a terrible idol. So we get bibliolatry. And there's a lot of it going around. Because always remember, however sophisticated you are as a theologian, your images will have more influence on your emotions than anything else. And so watch out for those images. And realize fundamentally that although what we call God is as real as real can be, God is no thing. And therefore this is the so-called apophatic theology of Saint Dionysius as distinct from cataphatic in which we say what God is like. God is like a father in that God loves his children like a father loves his children.

[34:07]

But God is not a cosmic male parent. So, we speak more truly of God by saying what God is not than by saying what God is like. But these are two ways of talking. I would like to tell you a brief incident that happened in this connection. The meeting at which some of you were present here, Swami Sachidananda and Rabbi Gelbelman, maybe a few others too, there was a very interesting situation arose in which several Jesuits, Fr. Berry was there too, who is not a Jesuit, I hasten to say, several Jesuits were discussing questions of the kind that we are discussing now and suddenly one of them got very nervous and said, but we are using all these images and we have to penetrate through an apophatic approach to God and we cannot use all these images.

[35:25]

And so there was a moment of great silence, and everybody was kind of perplexed. And Thay San spoke up, the Buddhist of the group, and said, well, what do you want? Use images, but use as many images as you can, and as different ones as you possibly can, and smash one with the other. That's the only way that you'll ever arrive there. Swami Satchitananda has a word. I used to give a small analogy about using something. Even the practices that we do in the name of spirituality are mind-made. We have done many things and to undo it we have to do something.

[36:31]

Only by doing you undo. So the doing something to undo should be a kind of catalytic agent. So the mind has been dirtied from the chitta vritti nirodha, the tranquil pure crystal clear state. Somehow something the images manipulated in it and they got disturbed. Whether it is a golden cage or an iron cage, a cage is a cage for a parrot. So somehow the mind is restless with all kinds of ideas and to make the mind tranquil itself is an act. That's why once in Hong Kong when I was talking about desirelessness, a Zen monk got up and said, don't you think that to be desireless is a desire?

[37:35]

Yes, it is so. Because none other thing except a desire will relieve you from desirelessness. I mean from desires. To give an example, if my cloth is dirty, To get rid of the dirty things, the dirt, what do I do? I go to a shop, pay my hard-earned money to get a piece of dirt, which you call the soap. It's a nice, good-looking, good-smelling soap, dirt. And you apply it, soaking in water. When the newly arrived dirt goes with the other old dirt. Naturally, when some new insane man comes into an asylum, all the other insane will receive him. Takes one to know one.

[38:39]

So, when the old dirt, when they saw some new good smelling dirt coming in, they forgot the cloth and they received this. They say, come on, birds of the same feather. And they were really chumming up together inquiring who are you, how are you, why are you, where are you from? And the laundry man probably knows the exact time. When they are all totally forgetting the cloth and chumming up with this, he just dips in water and takes it out. So the cloth comes out clean while the old dirt and the new dirt remains in the water. So the new dirt is a catalytic agent to take away the old dirt and it should also go along with the old dirt. You can't expect your soap to remain in the cloth while the dirt goes away. Then the cloth is totally clean, totally pure.

[39:41]

That is why the Hindu scripture says, That immortal principle, that unchanging principle could not be experienced by doing something, but by undoing everything. But to undo you do something, But unfortunately we undo many things and we cling on to the thing that we did to undo. So in a way, total dissolving is necessary. My master Swami Sivananda very often used to say this in a simple way. When people go and ask, could you just show me a way to live? I'm very much disturbed, I'm almost dying. Oh, you want to live? Then better die. If you are selfish, and you've agreed to the idea that you are selfish, ask yourself the question, when you love yourself, what is it that you love?

[41:00]

I love myself. I really Now let's have a bill of particulars. What do I love? Well, I start thinking about good food, fine wines, beautiful girls, landscape, fine architecture, beautiful books. But as I keep on compiling a list, none of these things are formally definable as me. So as I think through the question of what I love, I couldn't find me at all. The me has simply disappeared. So it was that when a fellow called Eka came to the man who brought Zen Buddhism to China, who was named Daruma, Eka said to Daruma, I have no peace of mind. Please pacify my mind. And Daruma said, bring out your mind here in front of me. I'll pacify it. And Eka said, when I look for it, I can't find it. So Daruma said, it's pacified. Now, I have another written question here.

[42:12]

Would you be so kind as to interject your feelings concerning the theology of joy as contained in the Song of Songs and the implication and the implications of the Song of Songs for those exploring a contemplative life. Aha! In India and Tibet you will find in temples and on icons images of the divine as a male-female partners enjoying sexual intercourse. And the language of the Song of Songs is likewise extremely erotic. And therefore the Song of Songs is very rarely read in church. And one doesn't hear anthems based on it. Because the whole problem of the erotic, and thus of the sexual, is a taboo.

[43:32]

And you could not imagine the Cathedral of St. Peter's in Rome decorated with angels and saints engaged in sexual love as you might see them at Khajuraho or Konarak in India. Why not? What's so wrong with sex? After all, God arranged it. And when God created the world, he saw that it was good. And a lot of people think that the fall of man was the discovery of sex. It's nothing to do with it. The knowledge of good and evil was the birth of technology. Because the words good and evil in Hebrew have to do with metallurgy. And what is advantageous and disadvantageous in this craft. So sex has nothing to do with it, but it's the big super-Christian hang-up, and it's Hindu as well. Because there's the pervasive notion that if you enjoy sex, you can't be holy.

[44:38]

I think that's bunk, but that's my personal opinion. Now, it's a free country, and everybody has a perfect right to be celibate. for any reason whatsoever, but just don't impose it on other people, and be holier than thou because of it. Because when Freud tried to say, well, all religion is nothing but sex, my reaction is, so what? Because nothing is more metaphysical than sex. Because in order to have something outstanding, you've obviously got to have something instanding. You can't have yang without yin. You can't have the concave without the convex. You can't have the crest of the wave without the trough. And so, therefore, there's nothing more metaphysical than sexual differentiation. Basic. Of course, it's beautiful. But what's so wrong with that?

[45:42]

Sex is used in tantric yoga to be a support for contemplation in the same way as continuous sound. In tantric yoga, the sexual act is not something to be gotten over in a hurry like, wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. It's something to be prolonged. And so that the feeling of it, it becomes that vibration in which the wandering of the mind stops. And the two, male and the female, become each other. There's this actual sensation of exchange of electricity whereby you are fused and you can't make out which is which. When you get a certain Tibetan tantric images of the male and the female bodhisattvas, when you separate them, the penis is on the female and the vagina is on the male. Because they've forgotten which they are.

[46:45]

They're completely merged. But all this has a very holy symbolism. This is the real essence of holy matrimony. Marriage is supposed to be a sacrament, but it's in effect a blessing upon something considered rather naughty, unless it's blessed in practice. Because the incarnation must be extended to the sexual union, or there is no real incarnation. Because Jesus didn't have a wife, so far as we know, because he was the incarnation of both Logos and Sophia. Like Avalokiteshvara in Buddhist imagery, who is male-female and contains both. So there's no necessity for that. It's already done. It's fulfilled. But when God creates us male and female, then the union has to come about.

[47:50]

We have not time in this conference to go fully into this question, which is extremely thorny, but it is one of the real thorny questions about religion in the modern world. And we've got to face it. It's already been widely discussed in the Roman Catholic Church as to whether priests should be allowed to marry, secular priests. Religious don't want to do it. And that's their way. It's perfectly legitimate. But it's a big subject coming up. And we can't avoid it. But the difficulty in it is the confusion of the sexual with the dirty. Instead of seeing in the sexual an image of the divine. Dirty sex in this culture is quite legitimate. But the minute you start talking about the divinity of sex, you're in trouble.

[48:54]

But that's one of the thorny questions that I think at a future meeting of this kind, we should take up. At the present time, we have, I think, to go into these problems. These are really the things on our minds. What are we to do with the long tradition of Jews, Muslims and Christians, and to perhaps a lesser extent Hindus and Buddhists, claiming that each one of them is exclusively the right religion, and if they are sufficiently charitable, damning other ones with faint praise. What are we to do with a passionate devotion to Jesus? where the emotion for Jesus is so strong that this emotion has to insist that this is the only complete incarnation of God that ever occurred. Next, what are we to do with the apparent conflict between Hindu and Taoist

[50:08]

and Mahayana Buddhist pantheism, or what is called pantheism, and Hebrew Christian monotheism, where on the one hand God is conceived as manifested in the creation, and on the other hand God is considered as transcending the creation as a monarch transcends his subjects. which raises the next thorny question, where does evil come from? Because, after all, in a pantheistic universe, evil has only a very relative reality, and it's looked upon more as ignorance than as malice. But in the world of the theistic point of view, The popular religion, not the sophisticated theological religion, the popular religion seems to want to fix on someone for malice, to be able to point to the devil and say, you, you bastard, you did it!

[51:16]

You went out of your way to think up this monstrosity, and you deserve to be punished for it forever. Whereas The Hindus say, well, if one is very ignorant indeed, one may eventually get to Avici, which is a purgatory that lasts for an incredible number of kalpas. But when your karma is worked out, you have another chance. So these are three really critical theological problems. that we've got to come to some understanding about, because if we don't, our fellowship is going to be rather superficial and sentimental. Let me, though, add a qualification to that. Contemplation is not sentimental.

[52:21]

I mean, when we all hug each other and sing songs and so on, that's great, but it's not at the level of contemplation. When we get into that deep silence of the mind, what happens is that the questions we ask disappeared. Once upon a time, a Zen master by the name of Nyogen Senzaki was having tea with a psychiatrist named Fritz Konkel. I was present. And Fritz Kunkel said, Mr. Senzaki, I'm sure that you meet many neurotic people in your work, and I wonder how you handle them. And Senzaki said, I trap them. Well, what do you mean you trap them? He said, I get them where they can't ask any more questions. Supposing, for example, you were going to have an interview with God, and you're allowed half an hour and one question.

[53:29]

What's that question going to be? You think it over. And as you think it over, you will reject question after question after question and say, I know what he's going to say to that one. Finally, the only question you can think of is, what question am I supposed to ask? Who made you think he was supposed to ask a question? Who wrote your script? So we come to the point in contemplation where there is a clarity which leaves no questions to be asked. And so that's why the reason when you ask a Zen master, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism? He can say, there's enough wind in this fan to keep me cool. And you say, well, does that symbolize something? No, it doesn't. It's just a plain statement of what is.

[54:34]

And even that's saying too much, because when I talk about what is, we're already in the domain of abstractions and verbalization. You know, what is this? If you say it's a fan, fan is a noise. This isn't a noise. Alan demonstrates ways of opening and closing his fan. It's this. It's this, or it could be this. Though in the silence of the mind, all these questions disappear, but that is not to be understood as if we were saying that the intellect is the great misleader. We need silence of the mind in order to cultivate the intellect.

[55:36]

The scholar, the intellectual, the mathematician, the scientist must have periods of mental silence in order to pursue his work properly. Curiously enough, science is the child of mysticism. Historically. Because the mystics were more interested in the experience of God than in the doctrine of God. The scholastics were concerned with the doctrine. They had their noses in the books. They were bookworms. But the mystics wanted to see and taste. Oh, taste and see how excellent the Lord is. So in the same way, Galileo wanted to look through his telescope and empirically experience the stars. But the theologian said, we already know the arrangement of the cosmos. And if the telescope shows us something different than what is in the book, the telescope is the work of the devil.

[56:42]

So out of the mysticism of the Flemish mystics came what we later called the philosophy of nature, Goethe, and so on. because the mystics had an empirical approach and were not bookworms that's why I emphasize the danger of the Bible but the Bible is not dangerous if you can have silence of the mind, be still and know that I am God then you are able to handle the Bible as a physician is able to use a poison creatively. But beware of that book. Brother David of Mount Savior has a comment. Alan, in what you said about the Song of Songs, there were many points that I think I would emphatically agree with.

[57:51]

However, In fact, what you proposed that sex isn't dirty and so forth, as you are well aware, in the last, say, 20 years or so, at least in Catholic thought and theology, the opposite has been stressed to such a point that now one has to apologize for celibacy. So we are really right now standing on the other shore. And one has to really, to complete this somehow, also be able to say one word, why celibacy at all? In fact, there may be many people today who feel even drawn to celibacy, but think that if they live a celibate life they are somewhat incomplete or something like that. And so I would like to pick up something that was quite clear in what you said, at least implicitly, and was more explicit in a discussion that we had earlier during these days, namely that the goal

[58:54]

is one and the same. These are just means, these are just ways. The goal is to be together, in the full sense of the word together. But to be together means to be alone, all one, as this word says, all one, alone, all one, not lonely. It's an entirely different thing. Loneliness is a bad thing. It is a loneliness that is not together. But an aloneness that is together is solitude, is true aloneness. And that is the goal of both ways, of matrimony as well as of celibacy. And all depends on what your psychological and physiological makeup is, your psychosomatic makeup, and then choose whatever is your path, not one better than the other. And the goal is anyway the same. Because if we are really together, we are truly alone, and there are those who reach this aloneness, this really being of one peace, one, not just with themselves, but with everything, through togetherness, through an external path of togetherness in matrimony.

[60:09]

And there are those who reach the togetherness through aloneness, and that's the celibate way. Sadaqallahul Azeem, [...] We say Allah, [...] Allah. We say Allah, [...] Allah. We say Allah, [...] Allah.

[61:14]

We say Allah, [...] Allah. Eternal Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, Sibulianum incipio fidelum et sem, et in seum laus tecum laude. Salaam alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu.

[62:18]

We shall walk the path of love with magic. We shall walk the path of love with magic.

[62:41]

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