Recently, I have been thinking about what is implied by a blanket rejection of anything supernatural. I’m tending to think that a conception of nature as impersonal, unconscious, and value-neutral implies that we are supernatural or influenced by something supernatural, since we take things personally, are conscious, and value some things more than others. On the other hand, to conceive of nature as conscious, with a personality and values is no different from theism, which is commonly thought of as embracing supernaturalism. We can’t honestly get away from believing in something or, rather someone, who is beyond or above impersonal nature. I recalled that Alan Watts wrote a book called Nature, Man and Woman and wanted to refresh my memory of what he said about the topic. I looked through my books, found my old paperback copy with its yellowed pages, and reread it. I also downloaded the Kindle edition of The Joyous Cosmology, a book of which I had fond memories, and reread it also.
The Joyous Cosmology is a beautiful account of a psychedelic trip, although Watts admits that what reads as the description of a single trip is a composite of several different trips. As a description of the aesthetic, psychological, and social “feel” of a psychedelic trip and its course over a day that feels like an eternity, it has no equal that I know of. It also is an excellent representation of how LSD makes possible the most vivid, concrete experiences of abstract philosophical/religious concepts. For these reasons, I think it is by far the better of the two books. It is closer to God, so to speak. And yet I cannot happily and wholeheartedly endorse it the way I would have when I first read it so many years ago. And that is because I think he misses the point when he contrasts philosophical Taoism with Christianity, and that he goes wrong in his preference for monistic Hindu and nihilistic Buddhist philosophic/religious concepts over the Christian concepts of a personal relationship with God and the promise of life everlasting—not life in general, but the life of each and every individual.
The philosophic/religious view he expressed in The Joyous Cosmology is no different from the one he expounds in Nature, Man and Woman or any of his other books, and I have found it easier to make my disagreement clear by quoting from the latter. What follows are quotations of passages from that book along with my comments on them in which I try to explain why I think he never really realized in this life that God loves him and will see to it that he, his very own self, won’t ever go out of existence.
On God and Nature and the Tao and Nature
From Nature, Man and Woman, by Alan Watts
“The form of Christianity differs from the form of nature because in the Church and in its spiritual atmosphere we are in a universe that has been made. Outside the Church we are in a universe that has grown. Thus the God who made the world stands outside it as the carpenter stands outside his artifacts, but the Tao which grows the world is within it. Christian doctrine admits, in theory, that God is immanent, but in practice it is his transcendence, his otherness, which is always stressed. We are permitted to think of him as within things and within the world only on the strict condition that we maintain an infinite qualitative distance between God and the creature which he inhabits. Even on the inside he is outside, as the architect is still really outside the house which he builds, even when he goes in to decorate the interior.” P. 40 in the Vintage Books edition of 1970
[My comments are those not enclosed in quotation marks.]
Jesus says God is like a father, and we are His children. He is not like a master and we are not like His slaves. There is no infinite qualitative distance between a father and his children. Jesus says we are heirs to the kingdom.
The Tao is nature with personal attributes. Watts quotes from the Tao Te Ching:
“To its accomplishments it lays no claim.
It loves and nourishes all things,
but does not lord it over them.”
He goes on to quote a passage from Revelation, which contrasts sharply with the one from the Tao Te Ching. But before looking at that one, let’s look at something Jesus says:
“So Jesus called them and said to them, ‘You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” Mark 10:42, also Matt. 20: 24-28, Luke 22:25-27
Now here is Revelation 19: 12-16, which Watts quotes to show what he sees as the difference between Christianity and Taoism: “His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called the Word of God. . . . And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron; and he treadeth the wine press of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written: King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.”
This certainly sounds like God lording it over us, and it is undeniably an element in the Christian vision. In fact, it reads quite literally like a description of a visionary experience. The Tao Te Ching is certainly stylistically different from the Bible, but here is a passage, from chapter V, which expresses a ruthless element in the Taoist vision of nature which is not as hot and emotional as the wrath of God, but contrasts just as sharply with the claim that the Tao loves and nourishes all things as does the passage from Revelation with the above quoted passage from Mark about the son of Man:
“Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs; the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw dogs.”
A footnote in the Penguin Classics edition explains: “In the T’ien yun chapter in the Chuang tzu it is said that straw dogs were treated with the greatest deference before they were used as an offering, only to be discarded and trampled upon as soon as they had served their purpose.”
These passages call into question Watts’s claim that in Christianity God’s otherness is always stressed, in contrast to the Tao that doesn’t lord it over the creatures. As a psychedelic Christian, I would say that nature is personal because God is immanent in nature. God transcends impersonal nature, and so do we.
On Death and Resurrection
Watts: “But once again, the association of God with being and life to the exclusion of nonbeing and death, and the attempt to triumph over death by the miracle of resurrection, is the failure to see that these pairs are not alternatives but correlatives.” Pp. 46-7
Not only God but everything excludes nonbeing. God doesn’t exclude death. He just excludes death without resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection, as witnessed by his followers, was a miracle, in the sense of an event that defied reasonable expectations, but, as C. S. Lewis has pointed out, in God in the Dock, Jesus’s miracles teach us to see the miraculous nature of things we take for granted. Jesus turned water into wine in an instant, but over a growing season water that is soaked up by the thirsty roots of grapevines is turned into grape juice which in turn becomes wine, and that is just as much a gift of God as the wine that Jesus produced from water in an instant. Jesus heals a lame person instantaneously, but healing that takes place over time is also God’s work. Jesus healed particular sick, lame, blind, deaf and mute individuals, and resurrected from the dead particular people when he was asked to do so by people who believed in him. And he did it in each case instantaneously. Why didn’t he heal everyone in the world who was suffering and resurrect everyone who had died? Because it is no less a miracle and God’s work that in the fullness of time or at the end of this age everyone will be healed, the lame will walk, the blind will see, the deaf hear, the mute speak, and everyone will have life everlasting; just as I am able to walk or to see after I wake up from a dream in which I was paralyzed or blind, and just as I am still alive when I awake from a dream in which I was facing imminent death; and just as it is no less miraculous that I am the particular person I am and you are the particular person you are, and everyone is the particular person he or she is, and we are all alive and conscious and each of us has his or her own cross to bear, in the first place.
Everyone will have life everlasting? Isn’t it only the ones who believe in him? I believe it is everyone, even those who don’t believe they will be saved. But in the meantime believing is its own reward, and not believing is its own reward but a distinctly inferior and unsatisfying one.
Watts: “To be or not to be is not the question, for pure being and pure nonbeing are alike conceptual ghosts. But as soon as the ‘inner identity’ of these correlatives is felt, as well as that which lies between man and nature, the knower and the known, death seems simply to be a return to that unknown inwardness out of which we were born. This is not to say that death, biologically speaking, is reversed birth. It is rather that the truly inward source of one’s life was never born, but has always remained inside, somewhat as the life remains in the tree, though the fruits may come and go. Outwardly, I am one apple among many. Inwardly, I am the tree.”
It is the inwardness that I know, that is, what it is like to experience the world from my own first-person perspective, that I cannot imagine going out of existence. If I am told going out of existence is just a return to an unknown inwardness, that doesn’t help. Watts says that life and death are correlatives, but one’s own life and one’s own death are correlatives only if one has life after death as well as death after life. Otherwise, they exclude each other, and there is a terrible temporal asymmetry between a finite lifespan and an unlimited time, before that and after it, of not being alive. It would be like comparing a finite length and an infinite one as if their relation were simply that the finite one is shorter than the other.
The Buddhist “No self” Doctrine and the Gospels
Watts quotes Buddhist doctrine (p. 102):
“Suffering alone exists, none who suffer;
The deed there is, but no doer thereof;
Nirvana is, but no one seeking it;
Path there is, but none who travel it.”
But then comments:
“And again, unexpectedly, the dissolution of the egocentric contraction (sankocha) of consciousness by no means reduces the personality to a flabby nonentity.”
But this is inconsistent with the plain meaning of the Buddhist text. He says that “Buddhist doctrine denies the reality of a separate ego.” But the Buddhist text doesn’t say anything about the ego. It says flatly that suffering exists but no one who suffers.
Watts quotes Jesus, “Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,” and comments that “we should understand this ‘save’ as ‘salvage,’ as enclosing and isolating. Conversely, we should understand that the soul or personality lives just to the degree that it does not withdraw, that it does not shrink from the full implications of being one with the body and with the whole realm of natural experience. For although this seems to suggest the absorption of man into the flux of nature, the integrity of the personality is far better preserved by the faith of self-giving than the shattering anxiety of self-preservation.”
So, Watts treats the Buddhist text as hyperbole and doesn’t seem to realize it. (Elsewhere, he takes the Buddhist view literally. See the quote from p. 116, below.) His commentary is more consistent with the Christian (and Jewish and Islamic) view that each of us is a self, a subject of experience, and that what we do and what happens to us make all the difference. When Jesus says, “Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,” I think he means that whoever thinks he can save his soul through his own efforts, whether by amassing worldly wealth and power, hiring the finest doctors, or by earning a reputation of being an upright and moral person in the eyes of the world—as a “self-giving” person rather than a “self-preserving” one, for example—is sorely deluded and is going to die anyway.
Jesus goes on to say, “but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.” I take this to mean that if you realize that you cannot save your life by your own power, you are more likely to realize also that just as you don’t have this life in the first place by your own power, you will have life again after you die from this life, by the same power that gave you this life.
Let’s look at another passage from the Gospels, this time from Luke, that contains another of Jesus’ “hard sayings”:
Luke 14:26-35 (Richmond Lattimore’s translation)
“Many multitudes followed him along the way, and he turned and said to them: If someone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and even his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. He who does not take up his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you who desires to build a tower does not first sit down and reckon the cost, to see if he has enough for its completion? For fear that, after he has set down the foundation and cannot finish it, all the people watching him may begin to tease him and say: This man began to build, and he could not finish. Or what king, on his way to encounter another king in battle, will not first sit down and think out whether with his ten thousand he is strong enough to meet the man who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he is not, while the other is still far off, he sends an embassy to ask for peace. So, therefore, any of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple. Salt is good: but if the salt loses its power, with what will it be seasoned? It is fit for neither the land nor the dung hill. They throw it out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
Elsewhere, he tells us that a second commandment which is like the greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as your self. In the passage just quoted, he implies that unless you violate that commandment, you cannot be his disciple. Well, do you violate that commandment? If you don’t sometimes hate your neighbor, hate those you love, and hate your own life, you should be satisfied with how things are, and you have no reason to take up your cross and follow Jesus. He isn’t saying you should hate your father, mother, wife or husband, children, and brothers and sisters. He is saying you do, not that you do all the time, but that your love for them and even for your own life is inconstant and imperfect. If you say “Oh, well, I may get angry and frustrated with them at times, and I may get depressed and dissatisfied with my life from time to time, but overall I love my family and I’m happy with my life,” he says, “Fine. Then don’t take up your cross and follow me.” What is at stake is whether you will realize that you cannot follow the greatest commandment on your own, and you will suffer and will die in your own particular way, and that is your cross to bear, but that by following Jesus you will be resurrected and have life everlasting. If you think you can follow the commandments on your own and can somehow escape having to bear your cross and following Jesus, you will fail to realize this and will experience your sufferings and death as meaningless tragedies.
Sleeping without ever waking?
Then Watts returns to taking the Buddhist text literally (p. 116). I have inserted comments [enclosed in brackets and in italics, like this] directly after the sentence to which it refers:
“Depressing or frightening as it may appear at first sight, the thought of sleep without waking—ever—is strangely fruitful, since it works
‘To tease us out of thought, as doth eternity.’
Such a contemplation of death renders the hard core of ‘I-ness’ already insubstantial, the more so as we go into it thoroughly and see that sleep without waking is not be confused with the fantasy of being shut up forever in darkness. [Nothing is more substantial than being just the person one is and no one else. I can imagine everything else as not existing. It could have been a dream, and I could have awakened to find a different reality instead. But it would be I who had the dream and I who woke up.] It is the disappearance even of darkness, reducing the imagination to impotence and thought to silence. At this point we ordinarily busy our brains with other matters, but the fascination of the certainty of death can sometimes hold us wonder-struck until the moment of a curious illumination in which we see that what dies is not consciousness but memory. [How can I be certain of what I can’t imagine? I feel certain I will die from the point of view of others, but not from my own point of view. If he is saying that consciousness will still exist but it won’t be my consciousness, then I think he is being consistent with the Buddhist view, but I don’t understand how to imagine what that would be like. How can I imagine myself away? I can imagine suffering from amnesia, and I can imagine losing consciousness and later regaining it. What I can’t imagine is being permanently unconscious.] Consciousness recurs in every newborn creature, and wherever it recurs, it is ‘I.’ And insofar as it is only this ‘I,’ it struggles again and again in hundreds of millions of beings against the dissolution which would set it free. To see this is to feel the most peculiar solidarity—almost identity—with other creatures, and to begin to understand the meaning of compassion.”
What is “the dissolution which would set it free”? Death? Being unconscious? Being abstract “consciousness”? He just said that whenever consciousness recurs, it is ‘I.’ “And insofar as it is only this ‘I,’ it struggles again and again. . . .” Is it ever not this ‘I’? I can imagine I am experiencing the world from someone else’s point of view, but I can’t really be someone else. Compassion, or loving my neighbor as myself, is the result of seeing that the next person has his or her own first-person perspective on the world just as I do. It doesn’t come from thinking that there is an ‘I’ that isn’t any particular ‘I.’ Everyone dies, so I am going to die. The question is: Am I, this ‘I,’ going to stay dead? Alan Watts says Yes. I say No.
Watts continues:
“For in seeing fully into his own empty momentariness, the Bodhisattva knows a despair beyond suicide, the absolute despair which is the etymological meaning of nirvana. It is complete disillusion from every hope of safety, or rest, or gain, suicide itself being no escape since ‘I’ wakens once more in every being that is born. [But suicide would be an escape if it is not this ‘I’ who will awaken again.] It is the recognition of final defeat for all the artfulness of the ego, which, in this disillusion, expires—finding only emptiness in its most frantic resistance to emptiness, suffering in escape from suffering, and nothing but clinging in its efforts to let go. But here he finds in his own dissolving the same emptiness from which there blazes the whole host of sun, moon, and stars.”
Yet there is no such thing as the ego, so there is no artfulness of the ego. My first-person point of view is not another object among the objects I experience from it. And thus there is no such thing as the “frantic resistance” or the “clinging” of the ego either. I might frantically resist or cling, but I am not “the ego.” Or, I might, and do, at least sometimes, realize that I have life everlasting. I can’t imagine my own non-existence, and I don’t believe anyone else can imagine his or her own non-existence either. I can imagine the sun, moon, and stars blazing away in emptiness only by neglecting the fact that they are doing so in my imagination, which is full of them and many other things besides. Existence that is not experienced is meaningless, and experience is always from a first-person point of view. This is not a defeat. It is victory over the illusion of eternal death, the fear of going to sleep and never ever waking up, of permanent unconsciousness. Our continuing to exist is just as sure as our existing in the first place.
Watts, p. 129: “For as the nonsense of the madman is a babble of words for its own fascination, the nonsense of nature and of the sage is the perception that the ultimate meaninglessness of the world contains the same hidden joy as its transience and emptiness.”
It does not give me joy to imagine that life is meaningless. For something to be meaningless, something else must be meaningful. Otherwise, we don’t know what we’re talking about. And likewise, for something to be meaningful, something else must be meaningless. So, to say that ultimately everything is meaningless is itself meaningless, but so is it to say that ultimately everything is meaningful. In fact, every thing being meaningful and everything being meaningless are equally frightening. Fortunately, there is no good reason to believe either one is true.
Watts, pp. 150-1: “Sanctity or sagehood as an exclusive vocation is, once again, symptomatic of an exclusive mode of consciousness in general and of the spiritual consciousness in particular. Its basic assumption is that God and nature are in competition and that man must choose between them. Its standpoint is radically dualistic, and thus it is strange indeed to find it in traditions which otherwise abjure dualism.”
He goes on to discuss the mistake in Hinduism of confusing the illusions of human conventions with nature and thus treating nature itself as an illusion. He is right that it is a mistake to think that God and nature are in competition. The contrast in the Gospels is not between God and nature. It is between the value of what a human can do for himself or herself, or what humans working cooperatively can do for themselves and what God has already done for him or her or them. We humans did not give ourselves life in the first place, and we are unable in the long run, which is really not very long, to keep from dying or to give ourselves new life after death. But we have life, we die, and we live again. We only need to see what a gift that is, and that it is a gift from God, not from secular humanism, nor from scientific research, nor from financial security, nor from a good reputation, nor from either political revolution or political incrementalism in the quest for social justice. If we have life, and die, and don’t live again, then all those other pursuits are worthless.
When I believed that I won’t live again after dying, I didn’t want to believe and didn’t believe that living once and dying was worthless. I thought that it will always be objectively true, no matter what anyone knows or remembers in the future, that I lived my life just as I did, in every detail, so that death can’t go back and retrospectively wipe out either the joys or sorrows that expressed the value I felt in this life. But now that I am convinced I have good reasons to believe I will live again and continue to feel both joy and sorrow overlying an ultimate pure joy, I think that if I could become permanently unconscious, the objective fact that I had once been alive and conscious with all the particular joys and sorrows of my life, would be just something else of which I would be permanently unconscious and so of no value to me. Furthermore, any value, if any, I had contributed to the lives of others would similarly be just something else for each of them of which he or she would be permanently unconscious after his or her death.
But it is that idea of losing consciousness and never regaining it which is emotionally and intellectually repugnant and produces the fear that one’s life might be meaningless. I repudiate it with all my heart and all my soul and with all my mind. It doesn’t console me that other people or Brahman or the universe itself will continue to be conscious. I want to live life from my own first-person perspective, from which there are countless others each of whom has his or her or its own first-person perspective also. And I believe it makes perfect sense to believe in this kind of personal immortality for each one of us. God has made it so that I am just the particular person I am, and you are the the particular person you are, and likewise for everyone else. We know that we didn’t do it, and it makes no sense to think of this most personal fact as given by an impersonal nature. None of us has ever been permanently unconscious, and none of us has any reason to expect to become permanently unconscious. It makes sense to think that dying is like the transition from dream to waking life or from waking life to dream.