some years ago i had just given a talk on television in canada when one of the announcers came up to me and said you know if one can believe that this universe is in charge of an intelligent and beneficent god don't you think he would naturally have provided us with an infallible guide to behavior and to the truth about the universe of course i knew he meant the bible i said no i think nothing of the kind because i think a loving god would not do something to his children that would rot their brains because if we had an infallible guide we would never think for ourselves and therefore our minds would become atrophied it is as if my grandfather had left me a million dollars i'm glad he didn't and we have therefore to begin any discussion of the meaning of the life and teaching of jesus with a look at this thorny question of authority and especially the authority of holy scripture because in this country in particular there are an enormous number of people who seem to believe that the bible descended from heaven with an angel in the year 1611 which was when the so-called king james or more correctly authorized version of the bible was translated into english i had a crazy uncle who believed that every word of the bible was literally true including the marginal notes and so whatever date it said it said in the marginal notes that the world was created in 4004 bc and he believed it as the word of god until one day he was reading i think a passage in the book of proverbs and found a naughty word in the bible and from that time on he was through with it you know how protestant can you get now the question of authority needs to be understood because i am not going to claim any authority in what i say to you except the authority such as it is of history and that's a pretty uncertain authority but from my point of view the four gospels are i think to be regarded on the whole as historical documents i'll even grant the miracles because speaking as one heavily influenced by buddhism we are not very impressed by miracles the traditions of asia hindu buddhist taoist and so forth are full of miraculous stories and we take them in our stride we don't think that there are any sign of anything in particular except psychic power and we in the west have by scientific technology accomplish things of a very startling nature we could blow up the whole planet and uh tibetan magicians have never promised to do anything like that and i'm really a little scared of the growing interest in psychic power because that's what i call psychotechnics and we've made such a mess of things with ordinary techniques that heaven only knows what we might do if we got hold of psychotechnics and started raising people from the dead and prolonging life insufferably and uh doing everything we wished in the whole answer to the story of miracles is simply imagine that you're god and that you can have anything you want well you'd have it for quite a long time and then after a while you say this is getting pretty dull because i know in advance everything that's going to happen and so you would wish for a surprise and you would find yourself this evening in this church as a human being so i mean that that is the miracle thing i think miracles are probably possible that doesn't bother me and as a matter of fact when you read the writings of the early fathers of the church the great theologians like saint clement gregory of nissa saint john of damascus even thomas aquinas they're not interested in the historicity of the bible they take that sort of for granted but forget it they're interested in its deeper meaning and therefore they always interpret all the tales like jonah and the whale they they don't bother even to doubt whether jonah was or was not swallowed by a whale or other big fish but they see in the story of jonah and the whale a prefiguration of the resurrection of christ and then even when it comes to the resurrection of christ they're not worrying about the chemistry or the physics of a risen body what they're interested in is that the idea of the resurrection of the body has something to say about the meaning of the physical body in the eyes of god that the physical body in other words is not something worthless and unspiritual but something which is an object of the divine love and so therefore i'm not going to be concerned with whether or not miraculous events happened it seems to me entirely beside the point so i regard the four gospels as on the whole as good a historical document as anything else we have from that period including the gospel of saint john and that's important it used to be fashionable to regard the gospel of saint john's late in other words at the turn of the century of the higher critics of the new testament assigned the gospel of saint john to about 125 a. d and the the reason was just simple those higher critics at that time just assumed that the simple teachings of jesus could not possibly have included any such complicated mystical theology and therefore they said well it must be later now as a matter of fact in the text of the gospel of saint john the local color his knowledge of the topography of jerusalem and his knowledge of the jewish calendar is more accurate than that of the other three writers matthew mark and luke and it seems to me perfectly simple to assume that john recorded the inner teaching which he gave to his disciples and that matthew mark and luke record the more esoteric teaching which he gave to people at large now what about then the authority of these scriptures uh we could take this problem in two steps a lot of people don't know how we got the bible at all we westerners got the bible thanks to the catholic church the catholic church and members of the church wrote the books of the new testament and they took over the books of the old testament which even by the time of christ had not been finally decided upon by the jews the jews did not close the canon of the old testament until the year 100 a. d or thereabouts at the synod of jamnia and then they finally decided which were the canonical books of the hebrew scriptures and embodied them in the masoretic text the earliest copy of which dates from the 10th century early in the 10th century a.
d the books to be included in the new testament were not finally decided upon until the year 382 a. d again at the synod of rome under pope damasus so it was the church the catholic church that promulgated the bible and said we are giving you these scriptures on our authority and by the authority of the informal tradition that has existed among us from the beginning inspired by the holy spirit so you receive historically the bible on the churches say so and the catholic church insists therefore that the church collectively speaking under the presumed guidance of the holy spirit has the authority to interpret the bible and you can take that or leave it because obviously the authority of the bible is not first of all based on the bible itself i can write a bible and state within that book that it is indeed the word of god which i have received and you're at liberty to believe me or not hindus believe that the vedas are divinely revealed and inspired with just as much further as any christian or any jew muslims believe that the quran is divinely inspired and some buddhists believe that their sutras are also of divine or rather a buddhic origin the japanese believe that the ancient texts of shinto are likewise of divine origin and who is to be judge if we are going to argue about this as to which version of the truth is the correct one we will always end up in an argument in which the judge and the advocate are the same person and you wouldn't want that if you were brought into a court of law would you because if i say that well thinking it all over i find that jesus christ is the greatest being whoever came onto this earth by what standards do i judge why obviously i judge by the sort of moral standards that have been given to me as somebody brought up in a christian culture there is nobody impartial who can decide between all the religions because more or less everybody has been in one way or another influenced by one of them so if the church says the bible is true it finally comes down to you are you going to believe the church or aren't you if nobody believes the church it will be perfectly plain won't it that the church has no authority because the people is always the source of authority that's why de tocqueville said that the people gets what government it deserves and so you may say well god himself is the authority well how are we to show that that's your opinion will you say will you wait and see the day of judgment is coming and then you'll find out who's the authority yes but at the moment uh there there is no evidence for the day of judgment and it remains until there is evidence simply your opinion that the day of judgment is coming and there is nothing else to go on except the opinion of other people who hold the same view and whose opinions you bought so really i won't deny anybody's right to hold these opinions you may indeed believe that the bible is literally true and that it was actually dictated by god to moses and the prophets and the apostles and that may be your opinion and you are at liberty to hold it i don't agree with you i do believe on the other hand that there is a sense in which the bible is divinely inspired but i mean by inspiration something utterly different from dictation receiving a dictated message from an omniscient authority i think inspiration comes very seldom in words in fact almost all the words written down by automatic writing from a psychic input that i've ever read strike me as a bit thin when a psychic begins to try and write of deep mysteries instead of telling you what your sickness is or who your grandmother was he begins to get superficial and psychically communicated philosophy is never as interesting as philosophy carefully thought out but divine inspiration isn't that kind of communication divine inspiration is for example to feel for reasons that you can't really understand that you love people divine inspiration is a wisdom which is very difficult to put into words like mystical experience that's divine inspiration and a person who writes out of that experience could be said to be divinely inspired or it might come through dreams through archetypal messages from the collective unconscious through which the holy spirit could be said to work but since inspiration always comes through a human vehicle it is liable to be distorted by that vehicle in other words i'm talking to you through a sound system and it's the only one now available now if there's something wrong with this sound system whatever truths i might utter to you will be distorted my voice will be distorted and you might mistake the meaning of what i said now so therefore everybody who receives divine inspiration and i'm using that in a very loose way you can mean anything you like by divine that's your option but anybody who receives it will express it within the limits of what language he knows and by language here i don't only mean english latin greek hebrew or sanskrit i mean language in the sense of what sort of terms are available to you what is what kind of religion were you brought up with now you see if you were brought up in the bible belt you came out of arkansas somewhere and uh that's all the religion you knew and you had a mystical experience of the type where you suddenly discover that you are one with god then you're liable to get up and say i'm jesus christ and lots of people do well the culture that we live in just can't allow that there's only one jesus christ and sort of you don't look like you were jesus christ coming back again because it said in the scriptures that when he comes back will be no doubt about it he'll appear in the heavens with legions of angels and you're not doing that you're just old joe jokes that we knew years ago and now you say you're jesus christ well he says that when jesus christ said he was god nobody believed him and you don't believe again you know you can't answer that argument but you see he says it that way because he is trying to express what happened to him in terms of a religious language which is circumscribed by the holy bible he's never read the upanishads he's never read the diamond sutra he's never read the tibetan book of the dead or the e jing or the lao tza and therefore there is no other way in which he can say this but if he had read the upanishads he would have had no difficulty and nor would the culture the society in which he was talking have any difficulty because it says in the upanishads we are all incarnations of god only they don't mean by the word god in fact they don't use that word they use brahman they don't mean the same thing that a hebrew meant by god because the brahmana is not personal brahman is we would say suprapersonal not impersonal because that is a negation that i would say suprapersonal brahmana is not he or she has no sex brahman is not the creator of the world as something underneath and subject to brahman but the actor of the world the player of all the parts so that everyone is a mask which is the meaning of the word person in which the brahmana plays a role and like an absorbed actor the divine spirit gets so absorbed in playing the role has to become it and to be bewitched and this is all part of the game into believing i am that role when you were babies you knew who you were psychoanalysts refer to that as the oceanic feeling they don't really like it but they admit that it exists where the baby cannot distinguish between the world and the way it acts upon the world it's all one process which is of course the way things are but we learn very quickly because we're taught very quickly what is you and what is not you what is voluntary what is involuntary because you can be punished for the voluntary but not for the involuntary and so we unlearn what we knew in the beginning and in the course of life if we're fortunate we discover again what we really are that each one of us is what would be called in arabic or hebrew the son of god and the word son of means of the nature of as when you call someone a son of a or in arabic you say ebony kelb which means son of a dog ebony el homar son of a donkey so the son of belial means an evil person son of god means a divine person human being who has realized union with god now my assumption my opinion is the jesus of nazareth was a human being like buddha like sri ramakrishna like ramana maharshi etc who early in life had a colossal experience of what we call cosmic consciousness now you don't have to be any particular kind of religion to get this experience it can hit anyone anytime like falling in love there are obviously a number of you in this building who've had it in greater or lesser degree but it's found all over the world and when it hits you you know it sometimes it comes after long practice of meditations and spiritual discipline sometimes it comes for no reason that anybody can determine we say it's the grace of god that there comes this overwhelming conviction that you have mistaken your identity that what you thought what i thought was just old allen watts who i know very well is just a big act and a show but what i thought was in that you know me was only completely superficial that i am an expression of an eternal something or other x a name that can't be named as the name of god was taboo among the hebrews i am and that i suddenly understand why exactly why everything is the way it is it's perfectly clear furthermore i feel no longer any boundary between what i do and what happens to me i feel that everything that's going on is my doing just as my breathing is is your breathing voluntary or involuntary do you do it or does it happen to you so you can feel it both ways but you feel everything like breathing and it isn't as if you had become a puppet there is no longer any separate you there is just this great happening going on and if you have the name in your background you will say this happening is god or the will of god or the doing of god or if you don't have that word in your background you will say with the chinese it is the flowing of the dao or if you're a hindu you will say it is the maya of brahman the maya means the magical power the creative illusion the play so you can very well understand how people to whom this happens feel genuinely inspired because very often that goes along with it an extremely warm feeling because you see the divine in everybody else's eyes when kabir a great hindu muslim mystic was a very old man he used to look around at people and say to whom shall i preach because he saw the beloved in all eyes and could see sometimes i look into people's eyes and i can look right down and i can see that beloved on in the depths of those pools and yet the expression on the face is saying what me that's the funniest thing but there is everybody in his own peculiar way playing out an essential part in this colossal cosmic drama and it's so strange that one can even feel it in people you thoroughly dislike so let's suppose then that jesus had such an experience but you see jesus has a limitation that he doesn't know of any religion other than those of the immediate near east he might know something about egyptian religion a little bit maybe about greek religion but mostly about hebrew there is no evidence whatsoever that he knew anything about india or china and we people who think you know jesus was god assume that he must have known because he would have been omniscient no uh saint paul makes it perfectly clear in the epistle to the philippians that jesus renounced his divine powers so as to be man let this mind be in you which was also in christ jesus who being in the form of god thought not equality with god a thing to be hung on to but humbled himself and made himself of no reputation and was found in fashion as a man and became obedient to death theologians call that kenosis which means self-emptying so obviously an omnipotent an omniscient man would not really be a man so even if you take the very orthodox catholic doctrine of the nature of christ that he was both true god and true man you must say that for true god to be united with true man true god has to make a voluntary renunciation for the time being of omniscience and omnipotence and omnipresence for that matter now therefore if jesus were to come right out and say i am the son of god that's like saying i'm the boss's son or i am the boss and everybody immediately says that is blasphemy that is subversion that is trying to introduce democracy into the kingdom of heaven that is you are a usurper of the throne no man has seen god now jesus in his esoteric teaching as recorded in the synoptic gospels was pretty cagey about this he didn't come right out there and say i and the father are one instead he identified himself with the messiah described in the second part of the prophet isaiah the suffering servant who was despised and rejected of men and this man is the the non-political messiah in other words it was convenient to make that identification even though it would get him into trouble but to his elect disciples as recorded in saint john he came right out and said before abraham was i am i am the way the truth and the life i am the resurrection and the life i am the living bread that comes down from heaven i and the father are one and he who has seen me has seen the father and there can be no mistaking that language so the jews found out and they put him to death or had him put to death for blasphemy this is no cause for any special antagonism to the jews we would do exactly the same thing it's always done it happened to one of the great sufi mystics in persia who had the same experience now what happened the apostles didn't quite get the point they were awed by the miracles of jesus they worshiped him as people do worship gurus and it's you know to what lengths that can go if you've been around guru land and so the christians said okay okay jesus of nazareth was the son of god but let it stop right there nobody else so what happened was that jesus was pedestalized he was put in a position that was safely upstairs so that his troublesome experience of cosmic consciousness would not come and cause other people to be a nuisance and those who have had this experience and expressed it during those times when the church had political power were almost invariably persecuted guadiano bruno was burnt at the stake john scotus original was excommunicated meister eckhart's theses were condemned and so on and so on a few mystics got away with it because they used cautious language but you see what happens if you pedestalize jesus you strangle the gospel at birth and it has been the tradition in both the catholic church and in protestantism to pass off what i will call an emasculated gospel gospel means good news and i cannot for the life of me think what is the good news about the gospel is ordinarily handed down because look here here is the revelation of god in christ in jesus and we are supposed to follow his life and example without having the unique advantage of being the boss's son now the the tradition both catholic and protestant fundamentalist represents jesus to us as a freak born of a virgin knowing he is the son of god having the power of miracles knowing that basically it's impossible to kill him he's going to rise again in the end and we are asked to take up our cross and follow him when we don't know that about ourselves at all so what happens is this we are delivered therefore a gospel which is in fact an impossible religion it's impossible to follow the way of christ all right many a christian has admitted it i am a miserable sinner i fall far short of the example of christ but do you realize the more you say that the better you are because what happened was that christianity institutionalized guilt as a virtue you see you can never come up to it never and therefore you will always be aware of your shortcomings and so the more shortcomings you feel the more in other words you are aware of the vast abyss between christ and yourself you will have your opportunity to speak in the question period madam so you go to confession and if you've got a nice dear understanding confessor he won't get angry with you he'll say my child you know you've sinned very grievously but you must realize that the love of god and of our lord is infinite and that uh naturally you are forgiven as a token of thanksgiving say three hail marys and you know you've committed a murder and robbed a bank and fornicated around and so on the priest is perfectly patient and quiet well you feel awful i think i have done that to the love of god i have wounded jesus grieved the holy spirit and so on but you know in the back of your mind you're going to do it all over again you won't be able to help yourself you'll try but there's always a greater and greater sense of guilt now the lady objected that i was putting up a straw man and knocking it down this is the christianity of most people now there is a much more subtle christianity of the theologians the mystics and the philosophers but it's not what gets preached from the pulpit grant you but the message of billy graham is approximately what i've given you and of all what i will call fundamentalist forms of catholicism and protestantism what would the real gospel be the real good news is not simply that jesus of nazareth was the son of god but that he was a powerful son of god who came to open everybody's eyes to the fact that you are too and this is perfectly plain if you will go to the 10th chapter of saint john verse 30 there is the passage where jesus says i and the father are one and this is there are some people who are not intimate disciples around and they're horrified and they immediately pick up stones to stone him he says many good works i have shown you from the father and for which of these do you stone me and they said for a good work we stone you not but for blasphemy because you being a man make yourself god and he replied isn't it written in your law i have said you are god's he's quoting the 82nd psalm is it not written in your law i have said you are gods if god called them those to whom he gave his word gods and you can't deny the scriptures how can you say i blaspheme because i said i am a son of god.
