It's Time To Wake Up - Alan Watts on Religion

Many people don't know at all how we got the Bible. We Westerners got the Bible thanks to the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church and church members wrote the books of the New Testament and took over the books of the Old Testament. which even in the

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of Christ had not been finally decided by the Jews, the Jews did not close the Old Testament Canon until 100 AD. more or less at the Synod of Jamnia and then finally decided which were the canonical books of the Hebrew scriptures and incorporated them into the Masoretic text whose oldest copy dates back to the 10th century.

At the beginning of the 10th century AD. The books to be included in the New Testament were not finally decided until 382 AD. again at the Synod of Rome under Pope Damasus, so it was the Catholic church that promulgated the Bible and said we are giving you these scriptures under our authority and by the authority of the informal tradition that has existed among us from the beginning , inspired by the Holy Spirit to historically receive the Bible in the churches they say so and the Catholic Church therefore insists 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 based in the first place on the Bible itself.

I can write a Bible and claim in that book that it is in fact the word of God that I have received and you are free to believe me or not. Hindus believe that the Vedas are divinely derived. revealed and inspired with as much fervor as any Christian or any Jew. Muslims believe that the Quran is divinely inspired and some Buddhists believe that its sutras are also of divine or rather Buddhist origin. The Japanese believe that ancient Shinto texts are also of origin. divine origin and who should be judged if we are going to argue about this about which version of the truth is correct, we will always end up in an argument where the judge and the Lawyer are the same person and you would not want that if you were brought before a court of law, would you?

Because if I say that, on second thought, I find that Jesus Christ is the greatest being that ever came to this Earth, by what standards do I judge him? Why obviously not? Judging by the kind of moral standards that I have been given as someone raised in a Christian culture, there is no impartial person who can decide between all the

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s because more or less everyone has been influenced in one way or another by one of them. If the church says the Bible is true, ultimately it all depends on you, are you going to believe the church? or if no one believes in the church, it will be perfectly clear, won't it?

Could it not be that the church has no authority because the people are always the source of authority that's why detoxville said that the people get the government they deserve, you can say, well, God himself is the authority, we must show that that is your opinion, but you say, will you wait and see that the day of judgment comes and then? I will find out who the authority is, yes, but at this moment there is no evidence for the day of judgment and it remains until there is evidence, just your opinion that the day of judgment is approaching and there is nothing more to go on, accept the opinion. from other people who hold the same point of view and whose opinions you bought, so I really won't deny anyone's right to hold these opinions.

In fact, you can 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 can be your opinion and you are free to hold it. I do not agree with you. On the other hand, I think there is a sense in which the Bible is divinely inspired, but by inspiration I mean something completely different. from a dictation, receiving a message dictated by an omniscient Authority. I think inspiration rarely comes in words, in fact almost every auto-written word from psychic information I've ever read seems a bit weak to me when a psychic starts trying to write Deep Mysteries instead of telling you what your illness or who your grandmother was.

He begins to be superficial and communicates psychically. Philosophy is never as interesting as carefully thought out philosophy, but divine inspiration is not that kind of communication. Divine inspiration is for example, feeling for reasons that you cannot really understand that you love people, divine inspiration is a wisdom that is very difficult to express with words like mystical experience, which is divine inspiration, and you could say that a The person who writes from that experience is divinely inspired or it could come through dreams through archetypal messages from the collective unconscious through which the Holy Spirit could be said to act, but since inspiration always comes through a human vehicle, it is likely to be distorted, in other words, I am speaking to you through a sound system and it is the only one available now if there is any problem with this sound system, any truth I can tell you will be distorted, my voice will be distorted.

It will distort and you may confuse the meaning of what I said now, therefore, everyone who receives divine inspiration and I am using it in a very vague way, you can refer to anything you want by Divine, that is your option, but whoever receives it will express it within the limits of the language he knows and by language here I don't mean just English Latin Greek Hebrew or Sanskrit I mean language in the sense of what kind of terms are available to you. What type of

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did you grow up with? Now you see, if you grew up in the Bible Belt, you came out of Arkansas somewhere and that's it. all the religion you knew and you had a mystical experience of the kind where you suddenly discover that you are one with God, then you are prone to stand up and say "I am Jesus Christ" and a lot of people are fine with the culture in which we live.

I simply cannot allow there to be only one Jesus Christ, so if you don't look like you are Jesus Christ returning because he says in the scriptures that when he returns there will be no doubt about it. You appear in the heavens with legions of angels and you're not doing that, you're just an old Joe joke we knew years ago and now you say you're Jesus Christ, well it says that when Jesus Christ said he was God, no one believed him. and you don't believe again, you know you can't respond to that argument, but you see that he says it that way because he is trying to express what happened to him in terms of a religious language limited to the Holy Bible that he has never read. . the upanishads never read the Diamond Sutra he never read the Tibetan Book of the Dead or the E Jing or out loud and therefore there is no other way to say this but if he had read the upanishads he would have had no difficulty and neither would the culture, the society in which he was speaking would have no difficulty because it says in the upanishads that we are all incarnations of God.

Now my assumption, in my opinion, is that 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 type of religion to get this experience. It can affect anyone at any

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. Obviously, there are several of you in this building who have had it to a greater or lesser degree, but it is found all over the world and when it hits you, you know, sometimes it comes after a long practice of meditations and spiritual discipline.

Sometimes it comes for no reason that anyone can determine. We say it's the grace of God, that there comes this overwhelming conviction that you've mistaken your identity, that what you thought, what I thought, was just old Alan Watts, who I know very well, it's just a big act in a show, but what I thought was in you know me, it was just completely. superficial that I am an expression of something eternal or another I don't feel any limit between what I do and what happens to me I feel that everything that happens is my doing just like my breathing is your voluntary or involuntary breathing you do it or it happens to you so that you can feel it both ways, but you feel everything as breathe and it's not like you've become a puppet, there's no separate self anymore, there's just something great happening and if you have the name in your background, you'll say this. what is happening is God or God's will or God's action or if you don't have that word in your background you will say with the Chinese that it is the flow of the Dao or if you are Hindu you will say that it is Maya of Brahman Maya means the magical power , the creative illusion, the work, so you can understand very well how people to whom this happens feel genuinely inspired because very often it is accompanied by an extremely warm feeling because you see the Divine and that of everyone else.

When Kabir, a great Hindu Muslim mystic, was a very old man, he used to look at the people around him and say, Who should I preach to? for he saw the Beloved in every eye, but there each one is there in his own peculiar way, playing an essential part in this colossal cosmic drama.