the always-engaging Alan Watts: God

for a couple of weeks this archive link will work:

www.kpfa.org/archive/id/99873

Alan Watts expounding on ideas of God, the death of the old idea, and considering what a more useful approach might be.

It's been a long time since I've heard NPR voice!

LOL - here he is talking about images of God as king, and here I am translating the chants for Palm Sunday: "Hosanna Son of David, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, the King of Israel, Hosanna in the highest!" and "Israel behold your king, the blessed king who comes in the name of God..." and "Glory, praise and honor are yours, King, Christ, Redeemer..."

The thing is, I do think all these many images, concepts and metaphors express powerful things we can experience at various times in our life (and practice), from a sense of tender intimacy to a sense of awesome majesty, from crushing terror to blinding love, from being known eternally, to being unworthy, from feeling abandoned to simply Being, to silence, to nothingness, and so on and so on.... I sort of like the "put it all in the stew pot" approach of Christianity. The whole guts and glory gets included.

Though I know people can get very uncomfortable around some of these images, too, depending on their individual conditions.

He's good. But he wasn't into Vajrayana was he?

I have some dim recollection about an encounter with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Will check.

aha, here is an account--

vimeo.com/75863902

Kate Gowen wrote: I have some dim recollection about an encounter with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Will check.

aha, here is an account--

vimeo.com/75863902

That's a great short story!!! Everyone else - take a listen. Rinpoche exorcises the ghost of Alan Watts.... it's only 5 minutes long.

drunk post:

we can only exercise our own ghost.

morning after drunk post:

we can only >exorcise< our own ghost, we can only exercise our own body and freedoms!

If so, the only real point in prayer for others or metta practice is to make ourselves feel nice.

I hear you. I wasn't being dogmatic, saying an absolute. I just felt an imbalance when listening to the recording. The gap between self and others is hard to find and sometimes it seems like it's too much on this side or the other. It seems - to me - that a lot of the problems around Trungpa - to my thinking - were he was given too much credit and bought into his own hype. I think he was an innovator beyond innovators, but I also think too much of his stuff was simply unquestioned. I can't help but question it.

I'm linked in this too, I admit. Dig this: my original post was motivated by the fact that these two gentleman spent two periods together, both of which were spend getting drunk. Trungpa critiques Alan's understanding on the first meeting, but they spend their time drinking. Alan dies because of likely complications of drinking and Trungpa thinks his ghost is stuck, so does an exorcism. Then Trungpa winds up dying because of a similar manner, so I'm seeing that Alan is a perfect "shadow" for Trungpa's own fate. Maybe he was seeing some of the ways that he was stuck? And here I am critiquing/pointing at that in a drunk post!

shargrol wrote: I hear you. I wasn't being dogmatic, saying an absolute. I just felt an imbalance when listening to the recording. The gap between self and others is hard to find and sometimes it seems like it's too much on this side or the other. It seems - to me - that a lot of the problems around Trungpa - to my thinking - were he was given too much credit and bought into his own hype. I think he was an innovator beyond innovators, but I also think too much of his stuff was simply unquestioned. I can't help but question it.

I'm linked in this too, I admit. Dig this: my original post was motivated by the fact that these two gentleman spent two periods together, both of which were spend getting drunk. Trungpa critiques Alan's understanding on the first meeting, but they spend their time drinking. Alan dies because of likely complications of drinking and Trungpa thinks his ghost is stuck, so does an exorcism. Then Trungpa winds up dying because of a similar manner, so I'm seeing that Alan is a perfect "shadow" for Trungpa's own fate. Maybe he was seeing some of the ways that he was stuck? And here I am critiquing/pointing at that in a drunk post!

I didn't mean it snarkily, if it sounded so - it's an interesting territory to explore (and one of my current fascinatings is motives for practice and how much selfishness (in the plain English sense) is entangled with practice in various ways.)

And I agree, there's layers of all sorts going on between Watts and Trungpa. For that matter, some consideration to be taken in Watts' view of Christianity and God that he was (British, yes?) an Episcopal minister, which means he had a very specific orientation and place from which he was coming/to which he was reacting, etc.

Yes, and Trungpa was deeply in love with the idea of being a British gentleman-type... and here was Alan, already quite that! Lots of layers.

It seems to me we (modern western academic-y types at least, I can't speak for other cultures) have a fascination with the idea that some people can or should produce "unbiased" information. And the word "bias" is negative, indicating that the purity of information is contaminated by personal tastes, conditions, views, etc. But there is no such thing as information conveyed by a human being (or human-made machine, etc.) that doesn't have "bias". Even just the fact that something interests us is conditioned by our personal history, personality, etc. I wonder why we are so fussed about this, as if it's a system failure, when it's simply normal. Wanting certainty, maybe.

"drunk post:

we can only exercise our own ghost."

-- and here I thought it was a drunk post joking about having our own ghost run laps or do pushups…



-- I didn't see your correction until after my too-hasty jump into the discussion...

Ona Kiser wrote:

Kate Gowen wrote: I have some dim recollection about an encounter with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Will check.

aha, here is an account--

vimeo.com/75863902

That's a great short story!!! Everyone else - take a listen. Rinpoche exorcises the ghost of Alan Watts.... it's only 5 minutes long.

What a delightfully weird story.

It's easy to forget that Trungpa's thoroughly modern, stripped-down Atiyoga/Dzogchen teachings were founded in the Vajrayana that begins in Tantra, with its shamanistic roots. So, yeah-- delightfully weird, and yet not.

Any path or religion or worldview that develops over centuries and millennia seems to grow in spiral fashion, containing its beginning at the heart of further and further elaboration in response to changing contexts.

Kate Gowen wrote: It's easy to forget that Trungpa's thoroughly modern, stripped-down Atiyoga/Dzogchen teachings were founded in the Vajrayana that begins in Tantra, with its shamanistic roots. So, yeah-- delightfully weird, and yet not.

Any path or religion or worldview that develops over centuries and millennia seems to grow in spiral fashion, containing its beginning at the heart of further and further elaboration in response to changing contexts.

Many years ago, when I was in a long depression after leaving Santeria, my husband and I went on a weeklong Tibetan Buddhist retreat. The first day the monks went outside and did some sort of offering to the spirits of the campground where we were staying, pouring libations and burning incense and putting out plates of food. I was baffled. I thought "but that's what I just walked away from! Why are Buddhists (which I imagined being very NOT like that) doing offerings to spirits????"