The Golden Goodie Part 1

"When a human being tries to symbolize what it is that he really wants at the end of the line;
Very often, he thinks of a flower.

There is the celestial rose, in Dante's vision of paradise.
There is the golden lotus of Mahāvairocanax, the great sun buddha. At the center of the Mangala.
There is the Rose Garden of Our Lady. There are rose windows in cathedrals.

Always that flower at the end of the line. And Freud says, "Well, you know what that is. That's where everybody wants to go back to the womb."
Well, what's so attractive about the womb?

You see, to explain the religious imagery of the flower by sex is only to add another puzzle.

What's so great about sex? What's so great about going back to the womb?
Why, because there, I am regressed to the place which psychologist don't really like to talk about. Because, they say in the womb, the baby feels omnipotent. And this is of course a fantasy.

It isn't mature. In other words, in the womb you don't have a 1900's (or in this case 2000's...) personality; because you are not defined in the womb as we define man in our secular philosophies. In the womb, the baby floats. In the womb, the baby doesn't know the difference between what's inside its skin and what's outside. It has what Freud calls the oceanic feeling and that is another form of cosmic consciousness, only the baby hasn't got the language to express it like an adult. But there it is, it's in cosmic consciousness.

And that's what everybody sort of wants, because that is our original nature. So that's why the womb is interesting, and why the flower is interesting, why we symbolize the golden goodie at the end of the line with the golden flower, the oriole around the saint, or the buddha.

And that's why we all envy the bees who float around in gardens and suck honey from flowers. Go into those luminous cups. As Oscar Wilde put it, "the flowers in which the gold bees dream."

But that flower, that golden goodie, isn't at the end of the line. You're in it.

The radiating petals, the mandala, the great circle of the flower, is the galaxy in which you live. It is the whole universe radiating around you in which you are.

And this radiation is also sightly. It's the dance, in which you're involved- if only you'd realize;
That the purpose of life is not the future. And if you think it is, you'll go on and on and on looking for it there, and never find it. Because the future, it its own way, fades out in the same way as the past fades out.

You'll get older, and older, and older;
and if you don't come crash, you'll just Peter-out.

It wasn't there. And you may feel vaguely cheated about the whole thing. You were given the come-on;

There was something coming, there was that thing at the end of the line, the golden goodie, but you've been sitting in the middle of the golden goodie all the time!"

Alan Watts