It's time for a lecture from the late Alan Watts. In the first session of the seminar, I was giving you an account of the Hindu myth of the nature of the cosmos, which is based on drama. The idea that all existence is drama, and that this drama is based on the game of hide and seek. It is drama because all creatures whatsoever are parts being played by one actor who is the Godhead, the central self underlying all other selves. And the drama is that he keeps losing himself to find himself, and this goes on through interminable cycles, and never gets boring, because there is forgetting as well as remembering. Only if a system goes on and on, where it records itself all the time, do you get the

[01:06]

overcrowded phenomena called boredom. But this system constantly renews itself, and therefore the individual thinks that he is a perfectly separate entity, but this is a form of adventurous illusion. And in the course of time, the individual can, if he so wants, come again to find out who he is, to become once more aware of being the central self behind all selves. And so, the Hindu view of the world has as quite fundamental to it, both the idea and then the experience, that every individual is basically the ultimate reality.

[02:07]

What there is, eternal, imperishable, beyond space and time, and indeed also beyond the contrast of all oppositions of to be and not to be. A Hindu would not say to be or not to be, that is the question. That is no question to him, because to be and not to be have to exist together, because if you can't have one, you can't have the other. Now I've got to go on this afternoon in the second session, to do something which to some of you may seem rather odd, but I've got to tell you what Christianity is. And I'm going to do it in the same vein, in a mythological way. And when you ask me what do I mean by Christianity, I'm going to reply frankly, Roman Catholicism. I regard that and Eastern Orthodoxy as the only rich forms of Christianity, the rest

[03:09]

being somewhat watered down and attenuated. You may ask me also, wouldn't Christianity properly be the New Testament, or perhaps simply the four Gospels, the teaching of Christ? The answer is no, not possibly, because these documents were not produced in their present form until Christianity as a church was well advanced. And there were many competitive Gospels, which you don't see in the ordinary way. They were rejected by the church in favor of these four. Now subsequent scholarship shows that these four are earlier and probably more authentic historically than the ones that the church rejected. But there are many, if you read M. R. James' translation of these documents called the Apocryphal New Testament, you'll find what a job the early church had in sorting this stuff out, deciding what of it was genuine and what of it was spurious. You simply cannot disconnect the church and the Bible unless you believe superstitiously

[04:15]

that the King James Bible was delivered in the year 1611 by an angel from heaven and precedes all prior documents. Most Bible bangers and fundamentalists had no, absolutely nothing whatsoever about the literary history of the Bible. Well now then, what is Christianity in this full and rich sense of the word? Well of course it starts in a similar way to Hinduism on the assumption that reality is alive and is a conscious self, only this is God. The fundamental and crucial difference between Christianity and Hinduism is this, that whereas in the creation stories of the Hindus the world is the division or dismemberment of the Godhead who pretends to be many. In the story as given on the western side of the Tigris-Euphrates basin, what gets split

[05:22]

is not the creator but the creature. And you will remember that in the Garden of Eden Adam was divided in two, in a sleep, he went to sleep, the Godhead didn't go to sleep, the Godhead didn't enter into any dream, but Adam was put to sleep and he was divided and became man and woman. So in this, and also, Adam was made out of the dust of the ground, he wasn't something which God played, he was something which God created. And so the whole idea of the universe in the west is based on ceramics and carpentry. Remember Jesus was the son of a carpenter. Because the pot and the table or the chair are things made and they are independent of the maker. So although you may believe as a philosophical Christian that God is everywhere and that

[06:25]

all creatures exist within God and God in his entirety exists within each and every creature, nevertheless every orthodox Christian insists on a fundamental gulf or separation between the creator and the creature between God and man. So that there is no sense in which it can be said that you are God, to use the Sanskrit formula, Tat Tvam Asi, that art thou. That thou art not. And remember, O man, that thou art dust, and unto dust shalt thou return, is said to every Catholic as he's anointed with ashes on Ash Wednesday. And you are called into being out of dust, that is to say out of nothing. You exist in a way that is entirely dependent on the creator's will, as a song only exists so long as the singer sings it. And so you are beholden to the Lord God in somewhat the same way that you are beholden

[07:35]

to your father for existence and maintenance as a baby. And in somewhat the same way as the subject is beholden to a king. God is called the king of kings and the lord of lords because the thinking about God is based on the political systems of the ancient Near East. And there was a manner in which in the early civilizations of the Near East, people could not think of themselves as having any authentic reality without their king. And that is why very often when the king died, all his family were killed and buried with him because they considered themselves to be nothing without him. And so from that kind of extremely paternalistic and authoritarian view of the nature of things, we get the concept of God as the father of the world. Who is just and also merciful and loving, but very often in the loving sense of this

[08:40]

is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you. But there it is, you see, the fundamental idea is that whatever there is in the way of a creature is evoked by the creator from nothing. But we go further than that. The creature, whether he be angel or man, is endowed with freedom. The capacity to choose whether to respond to the creator or not, whether to love or whether not to love. And you can see from that that there is the idea underlying Christianity that love must always be dependent on a choice. In other words, if you take a girl out to dinner and you drop into her beer or wine some aphrodisiac drug that will make her fall madly in love with you, you won't respect her love because you will know that it's the drug doing it and not the girl.

[09:41]

So you want to get her to respond to your advances by pitching some kind of woo that persuades rather than compels. And then you respect it, you think, well, she really does love me. But as we're going to see, there are very many deep and dark complications in that. But that is the fundamental idea. Now in the story, before there was ever created what we call the physical world, that is to say the world made of clay, another world was created made of another kind of material, although the analogy with clay follows. This was made of spirit. And there were created the orders of angels in the beginning. The function of angels is very curious. God, as you can see, would be omnipotent and omniscient and could do everything at all and doesn't need any help. But he created these angels as helpers and ministers to do things that didn't need to be done, because the basic idea of the universe is that it's based on a kind of economy, which

[10:51]

is not economical. It is based on exuberance, on sheer high spirits. And all these angels were created for no reason at all to enjoy the divine glory. And to sing forever and ever the choruses of hallelujahs, which are the most complex intellectual and spiritual dances, that's what they mean, of unbelievable intricacy, and to do this forever and ever for the sheer fun of it. Now the very highest of these angels was called Lucifer, the bearer of light. And he was incomparably beautiful, so beautiful that one almost might mistake him for the divinity itself. And as he looked into the depths of the beatific vision of God, he could see everything that God intended to do in future times. And he saw the appalling prospect that the Lord was going to create hairy-bodied creatures like animals, who nevertheless would be exceedingly privileged.

[11:57]

That one of them, who was horror of horrors a woman, was eventually going to be exalted to the position of queen of the angels, whom we now later know as the Virgin Mary. And much worse still, God the Son, who I shall have to explain a little bit about the Trinity in a moment, who is the divine idea of the cosmos, God the Son himself in person was going to become one of these hairy-bodied things. And the devil felt, as we know Lucifer, that this was laissez-majesté, that it was an affront to the dignity of spirit, and that it must be protested against most firmly. But there was no point in protesting against the will of God. God won't change his mind, because he doesn't exist in time. What he does once, he does always, now ever. And so, as a fundamental denial of the wisdom of God, the devil said, I will have no part

[13:07]

in this. And he turned his back on the Godhead, and in agreement with him, several millions of angels, who later became demons. And they walked away from the presence of God, but there is no way in which you can walk away from the presence of God, because it surrounds you everywhere. And so as they went away in disgust, they met the presence in every direction, but now not in the form of glory, but in the form of tormenting fire, so that the domain of the angels who rebelled became hell. So accepting the presence of God, as it were, going to the center, is what is called heaven. But fleeing from it, only to finding it surrounding you in every way, is called hell. And the fires of hell are, of course, for the angels, whose bodies are spiritual, only spiritual fires, but of course for the bodies of physical creatures, when they are finally resurrected at the last day, it will also be a horrendous physical fire.

[14:10]

Now, the dark angel, who is the opposite of Lucifer, the bearer of light, we also, you know, apply the Greek word phosphorus, which is the Greek for Lucifer, the light bearer. Phosphorus also has now come to mean a dark, diabolical fire, brimstone. And a kind of diabolic and destructive light. So the task and work of the devil became primarily the perversion of the human race, you see, because he was opposed to these hairy creatures being given such dignity. And so his task in the world is implacable enmity to man, so that in the Garden of Eden he assumed the form of the serpent coiled around the tree of life.

[15:14]

Now let's take it that point, we've discussed the origin of evil, and you must remember that this is the most important question for Christianity. How did the snake get into the garden? How did evil begin in a universe created by a God who is through and through beneficent and loving and at the same time omnipotent? The answer that is given is that it was cooked up entirely out of the malice of one of the created beings. God was not responsible for this, although he knew that in creating creatures with free will there was the risk that this would happen. And he took a risk, and there is something very significant about that, there's something just to shade Hindu about that. So the official Christianity can never have a good word to say for the devil, or for human

[16:18]

compliance with the devil. And one thing more you must realize about the origin and nature of evil, that the things that we usually encounter and call evil are only remotely related to real evil. Cruelty, murder, lust, greed, jealousy, rage, all those things are the mere shadows of evil. To be a real follower of the devil you don't have to be merely bad, you have to be profoundly perverse in a mysterious way. You have to have an equivalent, an opposite image of holiness, and holiness is something far beyond ordinary goodness. A holy person is not, is way beyond a good person. A good person is sort of socially interested and cooperative and is always helping others out and so on, but a holy person has a strange quality of glory about him.

[17:23]

He's spooky. You feel that the very presence of the Most High hangs around him in some way, and he always also has a certain kind of strange humor, which good people very rarely have. And so the diabolical opposite of this is unknown to most people. I want you to dig this idea, that it'll never be told to you what real evil is, it will always be implied that it's something incredibly ghastly, but beyond your imagination. And all the great writers who, like Arthur Macon and Edgar Allan Poe, who have written of real ghastly horror stories, never fully describe the nature of horror, they hint at it, and it is precisely it being hinted at that is, that is what makes it horrible. In the same way, imagine yourself being accused of a crime. The crime is not specified. You know very well that you've done something, which can't be named in public because it's

[18:28]

so awful, and no right-thinking people could possibly hear these words that describe the nature of the crime you've committed. You see? And that, you begin to wonder, gee, what have I done? What was it? Because everybody has an obscure sense of guilt, just in the same way as you have an obscure sense of ultimate divinity. And the guru, as I explained to you in this morning's talk, works on it in the opposite direction. Oh, he may use the guilt thing, because that will eventually lead you to the other thing. Because you started it, you see, and you are to blame in some mysterious, dark, awful way. There is that aspect of you then, you see, which is Lucifer, and there is that aspect of you which is the bright God. Well anyway, that's the sophisticated theology of evil. Now let's go back a little bit to something about the nature of God. It's a fundamental idea of Christianity that God is love.

[19:33]

And that also means that love, that God is knowledge, because knowledge and love are originally words having much the same meaning. And Adam knew his wife, as the King James translates it, to know, in other words, is to make love. And we say to make love is to have carnal knowledge of the person of the opposite sex. So loving and knowing are connected, because in the whole of Western thought, based on the design of Western language, to love and to know are based on the structure of the sentence. And the sentence has the subject, the verb, and the predicate. I love you. Now there cannot be love in our way of thinking unless there are those three elements. Because if only I love myself, I can't love myself, just as I can't bite my own teeth

[20:36]

But God has to be love. Now if God as creator is independent of the creature, in other words, God is conceived as having existed infinitely long before there was any world. So it isn't the love of the world that makes God love. The world is not the necessary object of God's love. The necessary object of God's love is God the Son. So you have then the genesis of the Trinity doctrine, which goes like this. God the Father is I. God the Son is you. And God the Holy Spirit is the verb, the love between them. Now each one of them is God. But each one of them isn't the other.

[21:41]

See? There's an is-not relationship, a difference. Here's the is relationship of sameness. And that's one of the fundamental diagrams that has been used for centuries to demonstrate the idea of the Trinity as a self-contained, independent system of love. And this constitutes a cycle of vitality, a kind of vortex. And the point of the practice of the Christian religion is to be for the creature, the creatures who are outside and not God, to be drawn into that vortex of their own free will. So the first commandment is, thou shalt love the Lord thy God, not just go through the motions, but with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, with complete and total sincerity. But you can only do it if you have the grace of God, the power to do the act of love. Why is that?

[22:44]

Because for some reason, the power to love on the part of the creature has been lost. The creature, as a result of the defection of Lucifer, and as a result of a subsequent event called the fall of man, has lost the power to love God or even to love his fellow men with true charity, and therefore needs the assistance of God, technically called grace, in order to do it. Now what then was the fall of man? Adam. First of all, you must understand that in Christian theology, the word man with a capital M means more than men with a small m. Mankind or humanity is what in Greek philosophy at the time when the Christian religion emerged was called a substance.

[23:46]

And every human being was considered to be a specific instance of this substance in rather the same way that leaves exhibit the substance of a tree or droplets of water are all of the substance of water. So that when the first man fell, his fall affected the very substance of humanity. So that we are all, as it were, after his fall, parts made of inferior clay, of clay, you know, with a fault in it, so that it doesn't fit together too well and is perverse and always tending to disintegrate. Now what was the occasion of the fall? The Lord went and put a tree in the garden that was the tree of knowledge and went out of his way to say to Adam and Eve, you may eat of all trees in the garden, but you may not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In the Hebrew Bible, the words good and evil mean what is good for us and bad for us, what

[24:57]

is advantageous and disadvantageous. Now he said in the day that you shall eat of the fruit of the tree, you shall become as gods, but also in that day you shall surely die. So, the serpent, who was coiled around the tree, went and said to Eve, why don't you eat this fruit, so you will become as gods, and you will then understand how things work. Because you see, as I pointed out this morning, it is of the essence of the Christian mythology of God, that he understands everything, that he knows in detail how everything happens. I remember when I was a little boy, I used to ask my mother many questions, some of which were impossible for a human being to answer, and she used to say, but my dear, there are some things that we are not meant to know, and well, when will we know them? Well, when we go to heaven and we see God, we shall be able to find out, and I used to

[25:59]

imagine that on wet afternoons in heaven, we would sit around the throne of grace and ask God, why did you do this and why did you do that, and get perfectly satisfactory answers. So he knows. Therefore, to know, to have technical know-how, is to be as God. So what happened when Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree? They acquired what we now call self-consciousness. That is to say, they lost innocence. You see what self-consciousness involves? You know that you know, and the minute you know that you know, you judge yourself, and you become both anxious and guilty. Have I made the right decision? Have I reviewed the whole question rationally enough and

[27:00]

carefully enough? Do I have a good motivation for what I'm doing? And if you look into your motivations, you will find they are always selfish, and therefore you'll feel guilty, because you know you ought to love. And if you examine your decisions, you will find that you've never been careful enough to think them through. There always might be some things that you didn't take into consideration that you should have taken into consideration, and therefore it says in the Book of Common Prayer that we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us. You see? And that's involved in self-consciousness. In other words, this represents, the Fall represents the transition from living innocently on your impulses, to having to take responsibility. Man said, I want to act like God, and God said, OK, you do it, brother. Here's your

[28:02]

chance. But he found then that he got the knowledge of death, because when people live on impulse, they don't worry about dying. Dying is no problem. When the moth flies into the flame, there's a glorious explosion, and that's that. It doesn't matter. You don't have to survive. There'll always be more. But when you know you're going to die, if you make a mistake, then death becomes a punishment for making a mistake. The wages of sin is death. And so from that point, you see, there begin all kinds of human complications. Well the next step in the story is that God sent two messengers to the human race. I don't mean these were specific individuals. The two messengers are the Law and the Prophets. The Law through Moses, who was a very sophisticated, Egyptian-trained Hebrew, who saw a revelation of God, who gave him the tables of the Law, and they said what you must do and what you

[29:03]

mustn't do, and then there was a whole lot of ritual added to that, which was very complicated. The Prophets were sent following this to point out that it wasn't enough to go through the motions of obeying the Law. The Law is a legal document for certain actions that are required and certain actions that are prohibited. The Prophets said it isn't enough to go through the motions. You've got to have the Law in your heart. Jeremiah, you know, said the promise of the day when I will write the Law in the inward parts. That means that you won't just obey the commandments because it's your duty, but you will obey them because you want to obey them. As a mother says to her child, if she's a bad mother, darling, I want you to love me. All good children love their mothers, but of course I wouldn't want you to do it because I say so, but because you really want to. Well, then St. Paul points out that nobody

[30:05]

could obey the Law because he said, I had not known lust except the Law had said thou shalt not covet. So what then is the purpose of the Law? The purpose of the Law, according to St. Paul, is to convince people that they are sinners, to set before them the standard of what they should be, so that in trying to obey it, they know they never can be. The good he said that I would do, I do not. But that the evil that I would not, that I do. And that's the predicament, you see, of everybody who has an ideal and knows that he always falls short of it. So he has chronic guilt. So then the prophets also weren't listened to because they made it still more difficult. They said, in the very act of saying, it isn't enough, it doesn't please God, your burnt offerings and your incense are an offense to me. What I require is to do mercy, to love justice, and to walk humbly with thy God,

[31:10]

or whatever it is. And so the prophets made it much worse because when people looked into their motivations, they found they were really dreadful. So, then the crucial thing is, next thing in the Christian drama, is that since the messengers of the Law and the prophets won't work, there comes the third messenger, who is God the Son in person. And the doctrine of the Church is that in the historical individual, Jesus of Nazareth, the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, the beloved of the Trinity, you see, becomes man. Note most carefully, the creeds do not say he becomes a man. Because there's a very complicated business going on here. You see, this event, the Word becoming flesh, this person of the Trinity also being

[32:11]

called the Word, or the Logos, the Word becoming flesh has to be effective for all people, just as Adam's perversion of human nature was effective for all people, subsequently born. What happens then is just in the same, following the same idea of man as a totality, whereas Adam perverted the whole thing, the coming of God the Son into the human form un-perverts it, so that the bondage of original sin is broken, and the substance of the clay is redeemed, which means brought back, bought back. This comes about by the following process. God the Son fertilizes a human woman who is not fertilized by a human man, so that this is a marriage of heaven and earth, not a marriage of man and woman. So, obviously God the Son

[33:15]

has to be born of a virgin, but she's not a virgin spiritually speaking, she's had an incarnation of the Holy Spirit, and as a result comes the Christ who is the God-man. And this affects all human beings, because the substance of human nature is now radically changed. The divine has touched it and entered into it in a peculiar way. Then, this being the God-man goes on to do something, to clinch this change, to perform a sacrificial act, the crucifixion, whereby he makes a sacrifice of himself. As it were, he offers humanity with perfect love, unselfish love, with divine love, to the Father. And as a result of this perfection, he does in man what man can't do for himself. And so, the sacrifice of the

[34:20]

soul, as a result of this, human nature is divinized, made one with God, whereas it had fallen away. But, oh but, there's a catch. Human nature, you see, consists, so far as you have it, of your substance, that is your common humanity you share with everybody else, but on the other side there's an awkward feature called your person. This in Christian theology doesn't mean the mask any longer. It means the ego. The ego soul. And this is inseparably bound up with the will. The will belongs to the person. So, whereas Christ's sacrifice is effective for your substance, for your humanity, it is not effective for your person unless you make an act of accepting its benefits. In order to do that, you have to believe that all this is so. You see that? So, as a token of your believing, you have to accept baptism,

[35:28]

and you have to belong to the incorporated people who accept this, called the church. The church is, ideally speaking, the universe in process of being transformed into union with God. But you have to make the act. I mean, they baptize babies, but that's kind of potential incorporation in the divine. When you're baptized as a baby, when you grow of age, seven years old or whatever the idea is, fourteen, when you know the difference between right and wrong, you have to say, yes, I agree, I accept it. But that's the crucial thing you have to do. You have to say, please, I believe all this, now give me the grace to live in accordance with it. Now, I want you to notice certain funny points about this whole story. There is a recurrent problem in it. Even to Moses, way back at

[36:33]

that time, God had said the first and great commandment is, thou shalt love the Lord thy God. Here, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God. But then, that commandment goes way back to the most ancient times. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God. And the prophets rubbed it in, not just with the motions, but with your whole heart. You can't do it without your heart. By your own power, say the Christians. You have to have grace to do it. But how do you get grace? Well, you have to believe. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, you see. That's how the revivalists and the Billy Graham's come on. But how do you really believe? You see, not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but whosoever doeth the will of my Father, you see. How do you do it? How do you believe sincerely? It's the same old problem over again. Here,

[37:36]

I have a friend who's a very, very smart Jewish philosopher. And he once said to a Jesuit, look, I want you to convert me. But I don't want you to convert me into a kind of namby pamby Catholic. I want to be a real Catholic who really believes this, you see. Now, how do you do that? And of course, the man had no answer. See, that problem comes up again and again. How do you really believe? And that's the great problem of Christianity. Christians are always lecturing each other. They're saying, we would conquer the world. We would make everything good and bring paradise on earth if only we believed. And so the clergyman gets up and lectures his flock and says, you ought to believe these things. And he knows in his own heart that he doesn't. Because if he really did believe them, he'd be screaming in the streets. Even Jehovah's Witnesses are pretty polite as they go around from door to door.

[38:37]

Because if you don't obey this commandment, you're going to go to hell. And you're going to scream forever and ever and ever. In other words, you are going to be confronted with the possibility of total tragedy, of an irremediable mistake. Now, you see here how crucially, in a certain way, in two ways, the Christian myth differs from the Hindu myth. The creation in the Hindu myth is not ultimately serious. It's a play. It's a drama. And however ghastly it may appear, always behind it, it's a play, a Maya. But in the Hindu view, it's serious. It's terribly serious, because you have to make a choice. And depending on how you make that choice, there's the alternative of everlasting bliss or hopeless tragedy. As if someone said

[39:41]

to you, well, God does say in the Bible, I set before you life and death. Choose life. Which hand will you have, left or right? Be sure to choose the right one. Now, you see what that is? That's the gambler's religion. Imagine the table at Las Vegas, late at night, and there's a man there who's been consistently winning all day. He's some Greek, you know, who are great gamblers. And he's piled up everything and made a fortune. And suddenly, people realize that he's going to stake everything on whether the wheel turns the ball onto red or black. Well, the whole house gathers around to watch this. Will he win everything or lose everything? It's a great moment. And so, this thing in Christianity, the choice. You know, the hymn, once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide. In the fight, tricks, truth and falsehood for the good or evil side. Wow, you see what a thing that is. So, now

[40:46]

when we look at Christianity, you see, and we ask this question. If Christianity is true, it seems that Hinduism is very definitely not true. It's blasphemy, ultimate blasphemy. There couldn't be anything more blasphemous from a Christian point of view than to think that you right deep down are God. These seem to be the absolutely mutually exclusive religions. But just think about this for a minute. Let's take Judaism and Christianity. If Judaism is true, is Christianity true? Can it be true? The answer is no. Because the one thing that a Jew will not admit is that any man was God. So, the claim that Jesus of Nazareth was the Godhead is unthinkable thing for a Jew to accept. But if Christianity is true, is Judaism

[41:48]

true? The answer is yes. Because Christianity includes Judaism. The Jewish scriptures are called by the Christians the Old Testament. All right. If Christianity is true, can Hinduism be true? No. Because just as the Jew will not admit that Jesus of Nazareth was God, the Christian will not admit that everyone is God. All right. If Hinduism is true, can Christianity be true? The answer is yes. Because the predicament of the Christian soul of being, of feeling completely other than God, and involved in a totally critical choice between good and evil, in which he doesn't really know how to decide, is the most far out game that God could play, to pretend to be that. He is right at the end of his tether. He's as far out from himself as he can get. And that's the whole point of the game of hide and seek. So that when the Christian sees the Hindu, he applauds. I mean the Hindu sees the Christian.

[42:51]

He applauds as we would applaud the tightrope walker in the circus. Say, why that man's far out? Bravo! See? So the Hindu, when he really thinks about Christianity, he says this is a marvellous religion. But not necessarily for the reasons that Christians suppose that their religion is marvellous. And so, we see that what is happening in this day and age is a very curious thing. Christians have only recently woken up to the fact that other people besides West Europeans are civilized Only within 50 years has this been appreciated. And so, as a result of that, we are living

[43:52]

in one world, culturally, and increasingly so. And that means that the Christian religion and also the Jewish religion and the Muslim religions find themselves in a new context. They find themselves in a world where Hinduism, say, and Buddhism and Daoism represent dominant and rather closely related forms of thought. This change in context alters the meaning of Christianity, even though it may not alter its form in any respect whatsoever. In other words, you can have the same creed, the same Bible, the same rituals, but in a different context, their meaning is as different. As I showed you, the context can alter the meaning of the word Bach without changing either the pronunciation or the letters. If Christianity becomes one of the games of God, you see, it's altered at its root without any change

[45:00]

in the form. You can go on and say the creed as gaily as ever you did. You wouldn't go to mass and confession and anything you like, you see. You can be a priest and conduct all this thing, and still it is profoundly altered through and through by its context having been altered. So then, what we are going to explore in the two subsequent sessions are what those alterations involve, how the Christian religion and the Muslim religion interact, how the authority figures, God, Jesus, and so on in Christianity begin to play the role of guru, and to be doing just the same thing as the Eastern guru or Zen master, how the commandments become koans, meditation problems, paradoxes, and in what way then it is possible for the institution of Christianity in the West to grow up. So let's have an intermission.

[46:12]

You've been listening to a lecture by the late Alan Watson titled, What is Christianity? For a catalogue of all the available lectures, you can send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to MEA, Box 303, Sausalito, California. That's MEA, Box 303, Sausalito, California.

[46:36]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ