"philosophies of asia - alan watts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Alan)
by Alan Watts
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. The Relevance of Oriental Philosophy
11. The Mythology of Hinduism
111. Eco-Zen
IV. Swallowing a Ball of Hot Iron
V. Intellectual Yoga
VI. Introduction to Buddhism
VII. The Taoist Way of Karma
THE RELEVANCE OF ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY
CHAPTER ONE
When I was a small boy I used to haunt section of London around the h Museum, and one day I came across a shop that had a notice over the window which said: "Philosophical Instruments." Now even as a boy I knew something about philosophy, but I could not imagine what philosophical instruments might be. So I went up to the window and there displayed were chronometers, slide rules, scales, and all kinds of what we would now call scientific instruments, but they were philosophical instruments because science used to be called natural philosophy. Aristotle once said that "The beginning of philosophy is wonder." Philosophy is man's expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect; that is to say, his faculty for thinking. Thinking, of course, is a word used in many ways and is a very vague word for most people. However, I use the word thinking in a very precise way. By thinking, as distinct from feeling or emoting or sensing, I mean the manipulation of symbols-whether they be words, numbers, or other signs such as triangles, squares, circles, astrological signs, or whatever. These are symbols, although sometimes symbols are a little bit more concrete and less abstract than that, as in the case of a mythological symbol, like a dragon. However, all these things are symbols, and the manipulation of symbols to represent events going on in the real world is what I call thinking.
Philosophy in the Western sense generally means an exercise of the intellect, and the manipulation of the symbols is very largely an exercise of the intellect, but it does sometimes go beyond that, as in the specific cases of poetry and music. Yet what philosophy has become today in the academic world is something that is extremely restricted. Philosophy in the United States, England, Germany, and France to some extent has fallen into the realm of two other disciplines: mathematical logic on the one hand, and linguistics on the other. The departments of philosophy throughout the academic world have bent over backwards to be as scientific as possible. As William Earl, who is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, said in an essay called "Notes on the Death of a Culture," "An academic philosopher today must above all things avoid being edifying. He must never stoop to lying awake nights considering problems of the nature of the universe and the destiny of man, because these have largely been dismissed as metaphysical or meaningless questions. A scientific philosopher arrives at his office at nine o'clock in the morning dressed in a business suit carrying a briefcase. He does philosophy until five in the afternoon, at which point he goes home to cocktails and dinner and dismisses the whole matter from his head." Professor Earl adds, "He would wear a white coat to work if he could get away with it."
Of course this critique is a little exaggerated, but by and large this is what departmental academic philosophy has become, and Oriental philosophy is simply not philosophy in that sense. These things, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, are sometimes also called religions. I question the application of that word to them because I like to use the word religion rather strictly. Now I am not going to be so bold as to venture a definition of religion that is supposed to be true for all time. All I can do is tell you how I use the word, and I wish to use it in an exact sense from its Latin root which really means "a bond or rule of life." Therefore, the most correct use of the word religion is when we say of a man or woman that he or she has "gone into" religion; that is to say, has joined a religious or monastic order and is living under a rule of life or is living a life of obedience.
For if Christianity is a religion, if Judaism is a religion, and if Islam is a religion, they are based on the idea of man's obedient response to a divine revelation. Thus religion, as we understand it in these three forms of religion, consists really of three things we will call the three c's: the creed, the code, and the cult. The creed is the divinely revealed map of the universe or the nature of things. It is the revelation of the existence of God, of Allah, of Yahweh, or as we say, God, by His existence, by His will, and in His design of the universe. That is the creed. To this we add the second c, the code, and this is the divinely revealed law, or exemplar, which man is supposed to follow. In the case of Christianity there is a certain variation in this because the principal revelation of the code in Christianity, as well as the cult, is not so much a law as a person. In Christianity, God is said to be supremely revealed in the historic Jesus of Nazareth.. So the code here becomes really the following of Jesus of Nazareth, but not so much an obedience to a law as through the power of divine grace. Then, finally, there is the cult, and this is the divinely revealed method or way of worship by which man relates himself to God through prayers, rites, and sacraments. In these particular religions these methods are not supposed to be so much man's way of worshipping God, as God's way of loving Himself in which man is involved. So, in the Christian religion in the Mass we would say that we worship God with God's own worship, following the saying of that great German mystic, Meister Eckhardt: "The love with which I love God is the same love wherewith God loves me." So, too, when monks in a monastery recite the divine office, the psalms are supposed to be the songs of the Holy Spirit, and so in using the psalms the idea is that you worship God with God's own words, and thereby become a sort of flute through which the divine breath plays.
Now neither Hinduism, Buddhism, nor Taoism can possibly be called religions in this sense, because all three of them significantly lack the virtue of obedience. They do not concede the godhead as related to mankind or to the universe in a monarchical sense. There are various models of the universe which men have used from time to time, and the model that lies behind the judeoChristian tradition, if there really is such a thing, is a political model. It borrows the metaphor of the relation of an ancient Near Eastern monarch to his subjects, and he imposes his authority and his will upon his subjects from above by power, whether it be physical power or spiritual power. It is thus that in the Anglican Church, when the priest at morning prayer addresses the throne of grace he says, "Almighty and everlasting God, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the only ruler of princes, Who dost from Thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth, most heartily we beseech Thee with Thy favor to behold our sovereign majesty, Elizabeth the Queen and all the royal family."
Now, what are these words? This is the language of court flattery, and the title "King of Kings," as a title of God, was borrowed from the Persian emperors. "Lord have mercy upon us," is an image drawn from things earthly and applied to things heavenly. God is the monarch, and therefore between the monarch and the subject there is a certain essential difference of kind, what we might call an ontological difference. God is God, and all those creatures, whether angels or men or other kinds of existence that God has created, are not God. There is this vast metaphysical gulf lying between these two domains. That gives us, as citizens of a democracy, some problems.
There are at least two other models of the universe which have been highly influential in human history. One is dramatic, where God is not the skillful maker of the world standing above it as its artificer and King, but where God is the actor of the world as an actor of a stage play-the actor who is playing all the parts at once. In essence this is the Hindu model of the universe. Everybody is God in a mask, and of course our own word "person" is from the Latin, persona: "That through which comes sound." This word was used for the masks worn by actors in the Greco-Roman theater, which being an open-air theater required a projection of the voice. The word person has, however, in the course of time, come to mean "the real you." In Hindu thought, every individual as a person is a mask; fundamentally this is a mask of the godhead-a mask of a godhead that is the actor behind all parts and the player of all games. That is indefinable for the same reason that you cannot bite your own teeth. You can never get at it for the same reason that you cannot look straight into your own eyes: It is in the middle of everything, the circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.
A third model of the universe, which is characteristically Chinese, views the world as an organism, and a world which is an organism has no boss, and even no actor. This is because in any organism there is not really a boss or "top organ." In our culture we are accustomed,,of course, to think of our head as ruling the rest of the body, but there could well be an argument about this. I am going to put up a case that the stomach is chief because the stomach, the sort of alimentary tract with a digesting process in it, is surely anterior to brains. There may be some sort of rudimentary nervous system attached to a stomach organization, but the more primitive you are, the more you are a little creature that eats. It is a sort of tube, and in go things at one end and out the other, and because that wears the tube out the tube finds means of reproducing itself to make more tubes so that this process of in and out can be kept up. However, in the course of evolution, at one end of the tube developed a ganglion that eventually developed eyes and ears with a brain in it. So the stomach's point of view is that the brain is the servant of the stomach to help it scrounge around for food. The other argument is this: true, the brain is a later development than the alimentary tract, but the alimentary tract is to the brain as John the Baptist to Jesus Christ, the forerunner of the "big event," and the reason for all the scrounging around is eventually to evolve a brain. Eventually man shall live primarily for the concerns of the brain, that is, for art and science and all forms of culture, and the stomach shall be servant.
Now cynical people, like dialectical materialists, say that this is a lot of hogwash. Really, all history is a matter of economics, and that is a matter of the stomach. It is a big argument, and you cannot decide it because you cannot at this stage have a stomach without a brain or a brain without a stomach. They go together like a back and a front. So, the principle of organism is rather like this: an organism is a differentiated system, but it has no parts. That is to say, the heart is not a part of the body in the sense that a distributor is part of an automobile engine. These are not parts in the sense that they are screwed in. When the fetus arises in the womb there are not a lot of mechanics in there lugging in hearts and stomachs and so forth, and fitting them together and screwing them to each other. An organism develops like a crystal in solution or a photographic plate in chemicals. It develops all over at once, and there isn't a boss in it. It all acts together in a strange way and it is a kind of orderly anarchy.
Fundamentally, this is the Chinese view of the world, the principle of organic growth they call tao, pronounced "dow." This Chinese word is usually translated as "the course of nature," or "the way," meaning the way it does it, or the process of things. That is again really very different from the Western idea of God the Ruler. Of the tao Lao-tzu says, 'The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not ford it over them. When merits are accomplished, it lays no claim to them." And so, the Chinese expression for nature becomes a word that we will translate as "of itself so." It is what happens of itself, like when you have hiccoughs. You do not plan to have hiccoughs, it just happens. When your heart beats, you do not plan it; it happens of itself. When you breathe, you cannot pretend that you are breathing. Most of the time you are not thinking about it, and your lungs breathe of themselves. So the whole idea that nature is something happening of itself without a governor is the organic theory of the world.
So, these are the two other theories of nature that we are going to consider in the study of Oriental philosophy: the dramatic theory and the organic theory. I feel that ways of life that use these models are so unlike Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, that we cannot really use the word "religion" to describe these things. Now, what is there in Western culture that resembles the concerns of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism? The trouble is, on the surface, they look alike. In other words, if you go into a Hindu temple or a special Japanese Buddhist temple you will be pretty convinced you are in church (in sort of a Catholic church, at that, because there is incense, chants, bowings, gongs, candles, rosaries, and all the things that one associates with a theistic, monarchical religion). Yet, that is not what is going on. Even though the image of Buddha may be sitting on a throne, covered with a canopy, and royal honors being done, there is no factor of obedience. Probably the nearest thing to these ways of life in the West is, perhaps, psychotherapy in some form, although not all forms of psychotherapy. The objective of psychotherapy is, as you might say, to change your state of consciousness. If you, in other words, are horribly depresse an you are terrified, or if you are having hallucinations, you see a "head shrinker" and he tries to change your state of consciousness.
Fundamentally, these Oriental disciplines are concerned basically with changing your state of consciousness. However, here we part company because psychotherapy is largely focused on the problems of the individual as such, the problems particular to this individual or that individual. Instead, these Asian ways of life are focused on certain problems peculiar to man as such, and to every individual on the understanding that the average human being (and the more civilized he is the more this is true) is hallucinating. The average human being has a delusive sense of his own existence, and it is thus that the very word "Buddha," in Buddhism, is from a root in Sanskrit, buddb, which means to awaken.
To awaken from the illusion is then to undergo a radical change of consciousness with regard to one's own existence. It is to cease being under the impression that you are just "poor little me," and to realize who you really are, or wbat you really are behind the mask. But there is a difficulty in this. You can never get to see what the basic self is. It is always and forever elusive.
And so, if I ask you, "Who are you really?" And you say, "Well, I am John Doe." "Oh? Ha-ha! You think so? John Doe, tell me: How do you happen to have blue eyes?" "Well," you say, "I do not know. I did not make my eyes." "Oh, you didn't? Who else?" "Well, I have no idea how it is done."
"You have to have an idea how it is done to be able to do it? After all, you can open and close your hand perfectly easily. And you say, 'I know how to open my hand. I know how to close my hand because I can do it.' But how do you do it?"
"I do not know. I am not a physiologist."
"A physiologist says he knows how he does it, but he cannot do it any better than you can. So, you are opening and closing your hand, are you not? Yet you do not know how you do it. Maybe you are 'blue-ing' your eyes, too! You do not know how you do it, because when you say 'I do not know how I do it,' all you are saying is, 'I do know bow to do it, but I cannot put it into words!"'
I cannot, in other words, translate the activity called "opening and closing my hand" into an exact system of symbols, that is, into thinking. If you actually could translate the opening and closing of your hand into an exact system of symbols, it would take forever because trying to understand the world purely by thinking about it is as clumsy a process as trying to drink the Pacific Ocean out of a one-pint beer mug. You can only take it one mug at a time, and in thinking about things you can only think one thought at a time. Like writing, thinking is a linear process, one thought after another in a series. You can only think of one thing at a time, but that is too slow for understanding anything at all and much too slow to understand everything. Our sensory input is much more than any kind of one thing at a time, and we respond with a certain aspect of our minds to the total sensory input that is coming in, only we are not consciously aware of it. Nevertheless, you are doing it, but what kind of "you" is this? It certainly is not John Doe. It is not that little ego freak.
There is a lot more to you than you think there is, and that is why the Hindu would say that the real you is the Self, (but with a capital S), the Self of the universe. At that level of one's existence one is not really separate from everything else that is going on. We have something here which I will not call philosophy except in the most ancient sense of basic curiosity. I prefer to call these disciplines ways of liberation. These are ways of liberation from maya, and the following of them does not depend on believing in anything, in obeying anything, or on doing any specific rituals (although rituals are included for certain purposes because it is a purely experimental approach to life). This is something like a person who has defective eyesight and is seeing spots and all sorts of illusions, and goes to an ophthalmologist to correct his vision. Buddhism is, therefore, a corrective of psychic vision. It is to be disenthralled by the game of maya. It is not, incidentally, to regard the maya as something evil, but to regard it as a good thing of which one can have too much, and therefore one gets psychic and spiritual indigestion-from which we all suffer.
Now then, I am going to go into the very fundamental guts of Hinduism and certain documents that are known as the Upanishads. These documents constitute what is called Vedanta, and that is compounded of two words, veda anta. Anta means "end," or completion or summation, and Veda is, of course, related to the Latin videre, to see. Veda is the fundamental revelation of the Hindu way of life contained in its earliest scriptural documents, which are generally dated in the period between 1500 and 1200 B.c. The Upanishads have been the summation of the Veda from over a long period of time, beginning perhaps as early as 800 B.C., although some of the Upanishads are much later than that. However, there is always a doubt in connection with the dating of any Hindu text because unlike the Hebrews, the Hindus have absolutely no sense of history. They view time as circular, as something that just goes round and round again and again, so that what happens today is on the whole very much like what happened yesterday, or a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. They view life as a repetitious process of cycles and so there is very little internal evidence in Hindu manuscripts to give us dates between which we can say it must have been written because they were not interested in references to contemporary events. In fact, until relatively recent times, history was little more than keeping chronicles, and the Hindus were less interested in keeping chronicles than the Chinese.
In all there is a great deal of vagueness, and this is compounded by the fact that many of these scriptures were for hundreds of years handed down orally and memorized before being committed to writing. So there is a great deal of vagueness as to how old the tradition is with which we are dealing and it may be earlier or later than the scholars generally suppose. However it seems there was a migration into the Indian subcontinent by peoples from the north who called themselves Aryans, which may have occurred somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 to 1200 B.C., and they brought with them the faded tradition that merged with whatever aboriginal religions or ways of life that were existing on the subcontinent at that time, and produced the complex which today we call Hinduism. I am not going into the Vedas because they comprise a complicated piece of symbolical interpretation having to do with the rites, the hymns, and the myths of the various so-called gods of the Hindu pantheon. In the philosophy of the Upanishads these gods are seen simply as so many different manifestations of one basic principle, which is called brabman, derived from the root bra, which means to expand or to grow. Brahman is also called atman, or paramatman, the supreme self-the "which that which there is no whicher."
The basic position of the Upanishads is that the self is the one and only reality without another, and that all this universe is finally brahman. The universe appears to be a multiplicity of different things and different events only by reason of maya, which is illusion, magic, art, or creative power. Brahman is considered under two aspects: one is called nirguna, and the other saguna. The word una in each case, meaning quality or attribute, and nir, being a negative, nirguna is brahman considered without attribute, while saguna is brahman being considered as having attributes. In Christian theology there are exact equivalents to these terms, which you have probably never heard of. The former is called the apopbatic way of speaking, a Greek term, and the other is the catopbatic. When a Christian speaks of God as the father, he is speaking catophatically, that is to say by analogy. No theologian in his right mind thinks that God is a cosmic male parent. All a theologian intends to say is God is like a father. Even when it is said "God is light," that is still catophatic language. God is like light, but he is not light. The apophatic language states what God is not, so such terms as "eternal," which means nontemporal, infinite, or without limitation, are in this sense negative. When the Hindu speaks most deeply of the ultimate reality of the universe, he applies the phrase neti, neti, meaning approximately "no, no," or "not this, not this." In other words, reality-basic reality-eludes all positive conceptualization whatsoever for the very good reason that it is what you are most basically. That is why the Hindu describes in the Vedanta doctrine of the Upanishads the basic energy of the universe as "the unknown." It is never an object of knowledge, and so it is said in the Kena Upanisbad that if you think that you understand what brahman is, you do not understand. However if you do not understand, then you understand. For the way brahman is known is that brahman is unknown to those who know it, and known to those who know it not. Now that sounds completely illogical, but translated into familiar terms you would say that your head is effective only so long as it does not get in the way of your eyesight. If you see spots in front of your eyes, they interfere with vision. If you hear singing and humming in your ears, you are hearing your ears, and that interferes with hearing. An effective ear is inaudible to itself and then it hears everything else. That is just another way of saying the same thing, and when we translate it into sensory terms it is not all paradoxical.
It is basic to Vedanta that brahman, this intangible, nonobjective ground of everything that exists, is identical with the ground of you. This is put in the formula tat tvam asi. Tat is the same as our word "that." Tvam is the same as the Latin tuus, "thou;" asi is "at." We should translate that into a modern American idiom as "You're it." This, of course, is a doctrine that is very difficult for those brought up in the Judeo-Christian traditions to accept, because it is fundamental to Christian and Jewish theology that whatever you are, you are surely not the Lord God. Therefore, Christians feel that the Hindu doctrine-that we are all fundamentally masks of God-is pantheism, and that is a dirty word in Christian theological circles because of the feeling that if everything is God then all moral standards are blown to hell. It means everything is as good as everything else. Since everything that happens is really God, this must include the good things and the bad things, and that seems to them a very dangerous idea. Actually, when viewed from a social perspective, all religious doctrines contain very, very dangerous ideas. However, we will not worry about that for the moment because what the Hindu means by God, when he says Brahman, is not at all the same thing as what a Jew means by the Lord Adonai, because to the Jew and the Christian it means the boss, to whom divine honors are due as above all others. The Hindu, on the other hand, does not mean the boss. He does not mean the King or the Lord as the political ruler of the universe. He means the inmost energy, which, as it were, dances this whole universe without the idea of an authority of governing some intractable element that resists his or its power.
If a Christian or a person in a Christian culture announces that he has discovered that he is God, we put him in the loony bin because it is unfashionable to burn people for heresy anymore. However, in India if you announce that you are the Lord God, they say, "Well, of course! How nice that you found out," because everybody is. Why then does a great problem arise? Why does it appear that we are not? Why do we think? Why do we have the sensory impression that this whole universe consists of a vast multiplicity of different things, and we do not see it all as one? Consider though, what do you think it would be like to see it all as one? I know a lot of people who study Oriental philosophy and look into attaining these great states of consciousness, which the Hindus call nirvana, moksba, and what a Zen Buddhist would call liberation or satori (their word for enlightenment or awakening). Now what would it be like to have that? How would you feel if you saw everything as really one basic reality? Well, a lot of people think that it would be as if all the outlines and differentiations in the field of vision suddenly became vague and melted away and we saw only a kind of luminous sea of light.
However, rather advisedly, the Vedanta philosophy does not seriously use the word "one" of the supreme self because the word and idea "one" has its opposite "many" on one side, and another opposite, "none," on the other. It is fundamental to Vedanta that the supreme self is neither one nor many, but as they say, non-dual, and they express that in this word advita. A is a negative word like non. Dvita is from dva, same as the Latin duo, two. So advita is non-dual. At first this is a difficult conception because naturally, a Western logician would say, "But the non-dual is the opposite of the dual. Therefore, it has an opposite." This is true, but the Hindu is using this term in a special sense. On a flat surface I have only two dimensions in which to operate so that everything drawn in two dimensions has only two dimensions. How, therefore, on a two-dimensional level, can I draw in three dimensions? How, in logic, is it humanly rational to think in terms of a unity of opposites?
All rational discourse is talk about the classification of experiences, of sensations, of notions, and the nature of a class is that it is a box. If a box has an inside, it has to have an outside. "Is you is or is you ain't?" is fundamental to all classifications, and we cannot get out of it. We cannot talk about a class of all classes and make any sense of it. However, on this two-dimensional level, we can create, by using a convention of perspective, the understanding of a third dimension. If I draw a cube, you are trained to see it in three dimensions, but it is still in two. However, we have the understanding that the slanting lines are going out through the back to another square, which is behind the first one, even though we are still on two dimensions. The Hindu understands this term advita as distinct from the term @4 one' to refer to that dimension. So when you use the word advita, you are speaking about something beyond duality, as when you use those slanting lines you are understood to be indicating a third dimension which cannot really be reproduced on a two-dimensional surface. That is the trick.
It is almost as if whatever we see to be different is an explicit difference on the surface covering an implicit unity. Only it is very difficult to talk about what it is that unifies black and white. (Of course, in a way the eyes do. Sound and silence are unified by the cars). If you cannot have one without the other, it is like the north and south poles of a magnet. You cannot have a one-pole magnet. True, the poles are quite different; one is north and the other is south, but it is all one magnet. This is what the Hindu is moving into when he is speaking of the real basis or ground of the universe as being non-dual. Take, for example, the fundamental opposition that I suppose all of us feel, between self and other-I and thou-I and it. There is something that is me; there is an area of my experience that I call myself. And there is another area of my experience which I call not myself. But you will immediately see that neither one could be realized without the other. You would not know what you meant by self unless you experience something other than self. You would not know what you meant by other unless you understood self. They go together. They arise at the same time. You do not have first self and then other, or first other and then self; they come together. And this shows the sneaky conspiracy underneath the two, like the magnet between the two different poles. So it is more or less that sort of what-is-not-classifiable (that which lies between all classes). The class of elephants opposite the class of non-elephants has, as it were, the walls of the box joining the two together, just, as your skin is an osmotic membrane that joins you to the external world by virtue of all the tubes in it, and the nerve ends, and the way in which the external energies flow through your skin into your insides and vice versa.
But we do see and feel and sense-or at least we think we do-that the world is divided into a great multiplicity. A lot of people would think of it as a collection of different things, a kind of cosmic flotsam and jetsam washed together in this particular area of space, and prefer to take a pluralistic attitude and not see anything underlying. In fact, in contemporary logical philosophy, the notion of any basic ground or continuum in which all events occur would be considered meaningless for obvious reasons. if I say that every body in this universe-every star, every planet-is moving in a certain direction at a uniform speed, that will be saying nothing at all, unless I can point out some other object with respect to which they are so moving. But since I said the universe, that includes all objects whatsoever. Therefore, 1 cannot make a meaningful statement about the uniform behavior of everything that is going on. So in the same way that your eardrum is basic to all that you hear, the lens of the eye and retina are basic to all that you see. What is the color of the lens of the eye? We say it has no color; it is transparent in the same way that a mirror has no color of its own, but the mirror is very definitely there, colorless as it may be. The eardrum, unheard as it may be, is very definitely basic to hearing. The eye, transparent as it may be, is very definitely very basic to seeing. So therefore, if there were some continuum in which everything that is going on and everything that we experience occurs, we would not notice it. We would not be able, really, to say very much about it except, perhaps, that it was there. It would not make any difference to anything, except for the one all-important difference that if it was not there, there would not be any differences.
But, you see, philosophers these days do not like to think about things like that. It stretches their heads and they would rather preoccupy themselves with more pedestrian matters. But still, you cannot help it; if you are a human being you wonder about things like that. What is it in which everything is happening? What is the ground? Well, you say, "Obviously it is not a what because a thing that is a what is a classifiable thing." And so, very often the Hindu and the Buddhist will refer to the ultimate reality as no thing, not nothing, but no special thing, unclassifiable. You cannot put your finger on it, but it is you. It is what you basically are, what everything basically is, just as the sound of an automobile horn on the radio is in one way an automobile horn but basically it is the vibration of the speaker diaphragm. So we are all in the Hindu view "vibrations of the entire cosmic diaphragm." Of course, that is analogy, and I am using catophatic language from the point of Christianity.
The best language is to say nothing but to experience it. The nub of all these Oriental philosophies is not an idea, not a theory, not even a way of behaving, but it is basically a way of experiencing a transformation of everyday consciousness so that it becomes quite apparent to us that that is the way things are. When it happens to you it is very difficult to explain it. So in exactly the same way, when somebody has the sort of breakthrough that transforms his consciousness (and it happens all over the world, it is not just a Hindu phenomenon), somebody suddenly realizes it is all one, or technically non-dual, and really all this coming and going, all this frantic living and dying-grabbing and struggling, fighting and suffering-all this is like a fantastic phantasmagoria. He sees that, but when he tries to explain it he finds his mouth is not big enough because he cannot get the words out of their dualistic pattern to explain something non-dualistic.
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