Behold the Spirit by Alan W. Watts

Author:Alan W. Watts [Watts, Alan W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78433-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-05T16:00:00+00:00

II

No system of philosophy or theology, no precise intellectual structure, can ever fully embrace the mystical experience of God. Not only is the divine Spirit as living and ungraspable as the wind, but the experience itself contains paradoxical elements which no ordinary logical procedure can reconcile. While we cannot hope for a theology which explains it, we may be able to find one which neither suspects nor conflicts with it—a theology in real sympathy with mysticism. Among the reasons for which the prevailing theology has been dubious of mysticism is that theology sets so great a value upon precise and definite beliefs and their necessity for salvation. This is partly due to the fact that a certain type of mind is frightened by the mutability, the elusiveness, and the mystery of life, and thinks of salvation as a state of everlasting fixity and certainty from which the disconcerting elements of spontaneity, surprise and mystery are largely removed. Yet in these same elements another type of mind discerns the activity of a living Spirit. For him salvation is an entire union with and acceptance of this mysterious Spirit, and with the expression of its liveliness and spontaneity in the elusive flux of life as we experience it from day to day. For this type of mind fixity is death, and instead of trying to catch and possess the wind of the Spirit, he lets it blow freely around and through him, finding peace, joy and salvation in its very movement. He surrenders the desire to possess it in any fixed state or form, and lets it possess him, affirming and joining in its unceasing and ungraspable movement as in some divine dance or melody.

It is not that Spirit comes or goes, shifts or changes in itself. Like the present moment, it is elusive when the mind tries to pursue and hold it. The true movement is in its creative expressions, in the activity of Spirit rather than the agent, and this movement is not so much the quest for an attainment as a dance celebrating fulfilment. God is himself “unmoved, all motion’s source,” and in union with him the mystic feels with Dante that

ma già volgeva il mio desiro e il velle,

sì come rota ch’egualmente è mossa,

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.6

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