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And you mustn’t do that. Because—why? Because this is simply a biological analogue of the great taboo, which is to discover who you really are.
Going back to Big Papa. And that… crrrk!, that’s out. But that’s what is discovered when you discover you are a phony, you see?
What is a phony? A phony is a mask. And the masks used—as I have told most of you—in classical drama were megaphones.
They had mouth pieces so that the voice would be projected in an open-air theater. So we get the phone. And the mask was the persona.
That’s the Latin for “that through which the sound passes.” So the persona is the mask, the phony. So to discover that you are a phony through and through and through is to discover that you’re a big act, that you’re a game. And when you discover that, then you wake up to find out who’s the player.
Now, I have been discussing four fundamental attitudes that are found in the various religions of the world towards the human predicament. And as you see still on the blackboard, they are given to be four Rs instead of the three Rs: repentance opposite rebellion and resignation opposite reincarnation, the latter word being used in a special sense—not in the ordinary sense of rebirth, but of an affirmation of the human predicament, of getting with life. And this morning I discussed the attitude of repentance: the frame of mind in which it is felt that there is something profoundly wrong about being a self-conscious, isolated individual human being.
And I tried to show that, when this attitude is carried to an extreme point, it results in your discovering that you are a total phony. And I said that the difficulty of the repentance attitude is that people don’t carry it to an extreme point. And they use the attitude of repentance and the indulgence in punishment for whatever they think is wrong about themselves as a kind of lifestyle which assures you that you’re in the right because you hurt, and because you insist that you’re wrong.
I’ve sometimes suggested that this statement, “I am a sinner,” is logically equivalent to the statement, “This statement is false.” Because, you see, if that is a true statement, it’s a false statement. And if it’s a false statement, it’s a true statement, and so on forever. And to say “I am a sinner” is really the same thing, because it implies that the statement itself—since it is the statement of a sinner—is a sinful statement.
And it’s a trap called a double-bind. And so I’ve often twitted my clergy friends about this to their great amusement, because the clergy aren’t as bad as you might think—at least a good many of them. They have trouble in making it with their congregations, and they expect that their congregations will want the good old religion of wallowing in sins because many congregations, I’ve found out, love to be scolded.
And if you make everybody feel temporarily guilty, but also make each individual feel assured that everybody else is more guilty than he is, this is a much sought-after emotional experience. But the point that I was making was that, if you pursue this idea—of being sinful, of being phony, of being insincere—to its ultimate point where you discover that all you do and all you are is a big act, then this raises the question of: what is reality? What lies behind phoniness?
And so, then and there, you have an initiatic experience because it leads into the discovery that the Upanishads call tat tvam asi (“that art thou”): that the real you is not the isolated conscious ego. That is only a game being played all over the place by what there is. Tat [???]
“that,” and what there is, is coextensive with the whole cosmos and is the imperishable reality, and everyone is that. But the game—since we started on the premise that existence is a game—the game is hide-and-seek, the game is pretending that it’s not so. We then move on, you see, to another possible response: not repentance, but resignation.
“I quit the game. I won’t play it.” There are all sorts of ways of doing this. But basically, this is an aristocratic posture.
“You ordinary mortals, with all your desires and all your involvements, are deluded. You get attached to things. But there are a certain minority of us who are above it all.
And we simply resign. We’re not going to follow this.” Now, this, as I say, is aristocratic, but it may be aristocratic in two ways. There’s the aristocracy of the Hindu sannyasin: the people who are outside and above caste.
And there’s also the aristocracy of the actual aristocrat. (I get so mixed up with my British and American pronunciation on this word.) The aristocrat who comes on with a pose of always being bored, who has complete sang-froid, who is imperturbable.
Keyserling’s study of this mentality is marvelous: in his book Europe, the essay on Hungary portrays the type he calls the grand seigneur, and he always identified himself with this type, this role. The grand seigneur who cannot be fazed, who can always rise to the occasion under any social circumstances whatsoever without trying to do so, or without apparently trying to do so. In other words, if he goes to the opera wearing blue jeans, he will somehow make it apparent that everybody else is improperly dressed.
This is a very interesting type of person. You know, there was an essay—written by someone whose name I can’t remember—in the Centennial Review which contrasted the attitude to time of the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. They said the aristocrat lives in the past because his ancient forebears have achieved everything, and by the fact of his birth, his existence, he has nothing to strive for.
And he somehow never need overdo it. He’s always cool. The bourgeois, on the other hand, feels that it’s necessary to arrive.
And he’s always striving for the future, whereas the aristocrat lives in the past. On the other hand, the proletarian lives in the present, because he doesn’t care about his reputation and he just lives. And so, of the three, the bourgeois is the sucker.
Because the poor bourgeois is always cheated. Because… well, it’s going to come some day, see? You’re going to get it.
Even your money, when you pull it out of your pocket, says on it: “promise to pay.” Watch out for that! It’s promises. And the bourgeoisie, you see, lives on promises.
The whole economy of the United States—being the great bourgeois country—is in a state of expectancy; of feeling happy not on what you have, but on what is going to come. The aristocrat is happy of what has happened. These great achievements of the past—there’s nothing left to do, except sort of glory in it.
The proletarian wants it right now, see? And very often gets it. But the poor bourgeois.
As my uncle once said, “The poor have it given to them. The rich have it anyway. But the middle classes do without.” So both the aristocrat and the sannyasin have resigned.
Now, the more interesting of the two types is, of course, the sannyasin who resigns from the world game. Let me review for you the role of the sannyasin in Indian culture. You know there are four castes: the caste of priests (or brahmins), the caste of warriors and rulers (called kṣatria), the caste of merchants (called vaishya), and the caste of workers (called shudra).
And to belong to a caste means that you are in the state called gr̥hastha, which is “householder.” That is to say, you are one who is involved in the world. You are engaged in what is called lokasaṃgraha. And loka means “the world,” saṃgraha means “upholding:” upholding the going-on of the great illusion.
And so you are playing for money, for position, for status, for success, and hoping above all that you could win; you can beat the game. But it’s supposed, in the same culture, that every man who attains the age of 45 or so, who has now a grown son to take over his work, will quit the game, will resign. And so at that age you’re supposed to move from the state of gr̥hastha (householder) to vanaprastha, which means “forest dweller.” You give away all your possessions to your son, you change your name, you take off your clothes and go more or less naked—because you have abandoned status.
So the sannyasin has no status. He is, however, respected in the culture for being an upper outcast, whereas the aborigines of the Indian Peninsula are untouchables; the lower outcasts. And the upper outcast always mimics the lower.
For example, Buddha had his disciples wear ocher robes because ocher robes were worn by convicts. So in the same way, today, in San Quentin they all wear blue jeans of a special kind: pants and a kind of a blue denim jackets. This could well become the uniform of a new kind of sannyasin in the Western world, and to some extent this is happening.
So, this guy says, “The game is not worth the gamble. The richer I get, the more miserable I get.” You know how this is? You think that your problems may be monetary, and you get more money—what do you do then?
When you’ve got enough money you start worrying about your health. And you can never, never stop worrying about that. Or, if you’re not worried about your health, you worry about politics: if somebody is going to take your money away from you.
You worry about taxes, about who’s cheating you. And so a person who goes through all that sees, finally: “I don’t think the game’s worth it. I’m going to resign.” And so resignation, or renunciation, is different from repentance.
It hasn’t got the same kind of passion in it at all. The repentant person feels he’s wrong, has made mistakes, has committed sins, and wants to get better. But the renounced person isn’t concerned with that kind of thing.
He knows that better, progress—whether moral or material—is an illusion. And you have to understand this when you approach, for example, the study of Buddhism. I think one of the most withering remarks I ever heard from an Oriental—he was Japanese—he said once: “You must never forget that, whereas Jesus was the son of a carpenter, Buddha was the son of a King.” You know… wow!
Take that! And it’s true, you see? There is something always of that about it.
That this is not… there’s a sense, you see, in which Christianity historically was the protest of the slave class against the Roman establishment. Buddhism was different. It was the abandonment of position by an aristocracy saying, “We’ve done it, we’ve seen it all, we’ve had it.
And so now we check out. And we will therefore resign from all games.” And if you follow this attitude to an extreme, you’re going to make (because it all goes to the center) the same discovery that is made by the person who follows repentance to an extreme. Just as the repentant person discovers that his contrition is phony, the person who tries to resign will discover that he can’t—that there is no way of not playing games.
Let’s go a little bit, then, into this game theory. There are a lot of games that we play. And it’s not only the game of “can I get one-up on the universe”—of pretending that I’m me, this is ego with its name and its role; the mask—but also we have what I call meta-games.
For example the game “my game’s better than your game.” I won’t play with you because your game is vulgar, stupid, banal, inferior. Or one of the most, therefore, effective games in saying “my game is better than your game” is that “I’m not playing games at all.” You are. Now, at the lowest level we find that in the form of “you’re not sincere.
I am sincere.” “You are fooling. I’m not fooling you. I’m being honest with you,” you see?
Now, that’s a great game. And this game of resignation is a form of it. That’s to say, you are children playing with toys, and you haven’t ever really woken up with the important concerns of life.
You haven’t reached the dimension of ultimate sincerity. All that is to say ultimate reality. And in order to reach it you have to resign from distractions.
You hear a great deal in the literature about meditation of getting rid of distractions, wandering thoughts. Well, you might ask when you think about all that: “What are wandering thoughts? What are wrong thoughts?
What shouldn’t I be doing with my mind?” “Well,” they all say, “actually, every day you think about this and then you think about that, and your thoughts run on in an undisciplined way from one association to another. And you can’t keep your mind fully on the job.” Or whatever it is. So, you see, you’re supposed to renounce that.
Because that’s triviality. All those wandering thoughts, they’re not about the important thing. Now, what’s important?
What should you keep your mind on? Well, something. Just so long as you keep your mind on it.
In an instruction of one of the Buddhist scriptures it says about concentration: one may concentrate on a yellow square on the ground, on the burning tip of an incense stick, on your navel, on the tip of your nose, on the center between the eyes, or anything. And in a footnote the commentator adds: but not on any wicked thing. You know, that’s commentators the world over: they never have any humor.
So anything will do just so long as you keep your mind on it. Don’t wander. Stick to it.
So wandering is involvement in games by this kind of definition. So, then you try to get out. Can you now get out?
Can you stop competing with other human beings? In ancient Greek society there was a place in the center of the community called the agon, and this was a place of contests where they had wrestling matches and other athletic events, because all the men were constantly trying to show who was the better. And from this word, the agonia—which means the contest itself—held in the agon, we get our word “agony.” The struggle and striving to be superior.
And a lot of people which you meet—you will recognize this among your friends all the time—are not happy unless they are involved in a contest. It doesn’t matter what it is. So long as they are trying to beat something, they’re happy.
And you may say, “Oh, for heaven’s sakes. You know, can’t we just sit around and talk instead of having to play a game or bet or do something to prove who’s the stronger?” I was once married to a girl who was never happy unless she was engaged in some kind of contest. Well, of course I had a game that didn’t look like one.
And so it was a very superior game. Just because it didn’t look like one. But it was a form of the game “my game is better than yours.” So you can’t really not play.
You may go through the motions of not playing, but you still are. And one of the most marvelous examples of this is the Buddhist sangha. Sangha means the order of Buddhist monks, or… “monks” isn’t quite the right word because the basis of Buddhist monkhood is a little different from Christian, but I don’t want to go into that technicality.
Here are these people—living in, say, Burma, Ceylon, Thailand, and so on—who go around in yellow robes and have renounced the world. But of course they’ve become, as a community, very prosperous and powerful. And everybody, you know, makes an obeisance to monks and feeds them.
And they don’t they don’t feed just on the rice gruel. Important monks get called into the houses of wealthy laity and get given fine dinners, because the layman feels he’s acquiring merit by being so generous to the monks. And you should see the scene in Japan.
Although today the monks have lost their power to a large extent, you can see the traces of the power they once had. In the city of Kyoto, the Buddhist orders—Zen, Tendai, and especially Shinshū sect—have the best parts of town. If you stay a night in a Zen monastery as a guest and go into one of the rooms there, you are not in any hovel, you’re in a palace.
You live differently from the way we are accustomed to, but you are liable to get shown into a room where the walls are entirely covered in gold leaf and painted by the greatest masters of Japan. You’ll, say, sit down to sleep by a Kanō Motonobu screen. And the landscape around you, the gardens, the view, are gorgeous beyond belief.
This is the life of resignation. Now, it’s true—I know most about Zen monks, rather than the other orders—Zen monks live a pretty rough life. But it’s extremely toney.
It’s healthy. It’s absolutely non-masochistic. They have studied the art of enjoying poverty.
Now, this is a terribly important thing in the understanding of Far Eastern culture. When a man in Japan—if he sort of inherits an old-fashioned tradition—makes a killing in business, he doesn’t go around showing off how much he possesses. He goes around showing off how little he possesses.
Even though he may drive to his office in a Mercedes or a Rolls Royce, his house is relatively barren. And he chooses objects of art and paintings that look extremely simple. And he will as likely as not have a separate house from his main huge establishment where it’s like a hermitage.
I mean, it’s almost as absurd in its own way as Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess after reading Rousseau and having a little cottage, rustic cottage, in the grounds of Versailles. But it’s not quite as absurd as that, because even the main house has an austerity about it. And they learn, you see, to love that austerity.
To them it has the feeling of great comfort. Now, you see, what happened was this: that, long ago, the best part of Kyoto—the hills that ring the north side and east of the city—being so beautiful, were owned by a bunch of brigands who were later the noble Daimyō, (or lords) of Japan—the great feudal barons. And these people work as tough as all get-out.
They were always fighting. And so the Buddhist monks moved in and decided they would take this property away from the Daimyōs by out-competing them, by playing the game “our game is more interesting than your game.” So they said to all those brigands: “So what? You’ve attained all these conquests, you have your castles, you have your great estates.
But then what?” It all falls apart. You know, especially when the brigand is getting a little elderly, and has stomach troubles and dizziness and so on, and this monk comes along and says—and furthermore, the monk says, “You can’t scare me.” And the brigand says, “HA!” And he pulls out his sword and points it at this monk. But now, the point is: he can’t kill the monk then and there, because if he does that he won’t find out whether the monk was scared or not.
And so the monk looks straight in the eye. And nothing happens. He doesn’t flinch.
And the brigand has him now in a contest, he thinks. And he puts the sword—point right against his throat. The monk sits there.
Well, the monk has it. Right there. But you see how, in a way, easy the game was.
Because the monk knows that he wins his point. If the brigand kills him before the monk flinches, he’s obviously cheated. Now, since there is honor among thieves, the chances are—although there will sometimes be a brigand who will feel put down by this contest and therefore kill the monk—the chances are that he won’t.
But look what the monk stands to gain! If he wins, the brigand says, “Wow! Would I like to have that courage!
Because if I had that courage I would be that much better a warrior.” So the monk says, “I’ll teach you.” And as a result of that, the monk does teach him. He teaches him the practice of Zen, zazen, meditations, and all this kind of thing, and puts him through the works. And so he comes to understand what the monk did understand anyway, which was that it really doesn’t matter if you live or die.
Because the thing goes on. It’s perfectly indestructible. If you happen to die it just goes on in a new way.
Because you are the works. So… fine. But the monk is playing a game.
And so, as a result, all the Zen communities got given the old palaces. The brigands all moved to Tokyo and set up their business all around the great court, and the gorgeous temples and grounds went to the monks, where—although none of them owns anything personally; which is a great idea, you know, because you don’t have any responsibility then. The community owns it.
And you don’t have to pay any taxes. And since you’re a nonprofit organization you’re not taxable anyway. Oh, it’s a great setup.
And they really did it beautifully. What they did, in effect, was to con those brigades out of the best land in Kyoto—by resignation, by playing a higher game. But, you see, anyone who goes through that—goes through the Buddhist process of resignation—will come to a point where he knows that he didn’t resign at all.
And this is what makes the difference between pedestrian Buddhist monks—who think they’ve resigned, and feel a little bit guilty because it’s such a prosperous affair to resign, because you live in the best place and so on—and those ones who know, who go right through, who constitute a small residue of great Buddhist masters, who discover that they can’t resign at all. Let’s consider an extreme example of resignation: the life of a hermit. Far Eastern literature is full of the idealization of the hermit’s life.
The wonderful idea of an old man somewhere in the mountains, far off in the forest. Hakuin’s books describe such an individual who can’t be found: nobody knows where he is. He leaves no trace.
And they consider that as admirable. The poem, you know, which says: And that idea of the far-off man, way, way, way off in some forests. But what does a hermit discover?
If you try this and get as lonely as you can get, you become vividly aware that you can’t get away from it. Because when you get very lonely and very quiet, you become extremely sensitive. And everything that goes on that’s ordinarily unnoticed comes to your attention.
First of all, you will find there’s a community of insects. And they are tremendously interested in you, and not necessarily hostile. I mean, maybe sometimes, but alone in the forest when you get really quiet you will notice little creatures will come and inspect you, look you all over.
And they will go away and tell their friends, and they’ll come and look to see what it is. And you become aware of every single sound. And you realize that, alone, you’re in the midst of the vast murmuring crowd.
May not be human. But it’s everything else. So that the point of being a hermit, the discipline, leads you to understand that you can’t resign.
The lonelier you are, the more you’re joined together with everything else, because you get more sensitive. So then I find, then: I cannot give up playing the game. Look at it, too, from another point of view.
Supposing I say everybody is playing the game “me first.” Now, I’m going to play the game “you first”—to use the phrase of Bonhoeffer, who called Jesus the man for others. Now, let’s see if we can play that game. Instead of “me first,” “you first.” “After you, please.” Will you please?
You know, what a way this is at putting everybody down! See, I’m the one who’s so generous. I’m the one who’s so loving, so self-effacing.
And all you inferior brats can go first. You can play “me first.” I’ll play “you first.” I’ll try and convince you to play “you first.” But the success of convincing you on that is relatively small and therefore the in-group will always be the people playing “you first.” And therefore they will get the honors. So, when you think that through and you say, “I cannot stop playing ‘me first’.” There’s no way of not doing it!
Well… and what does it mean when I’m in a trap that I can’t get out of? There’s no way of getting out of this trap! Well, what it means is that you and the trap are the same thing.
You’re not caught. Because when there’s nobody in the trap, there’s no trap. See that?
As long as you think you’re in a trap, then the trap’s got you. But when you know you are the trap, then what has the trap got? If you’re trying to get out of the game, you’re trapped.
No way out. But when you have found that you and the game are the same, there’s no game to get out of. There’s no one to get out of the game.
And that’s true resignation. And then you can take the point of view of the bodhisattva as distinct from they arhat. The arhat, in Buddhist terminology, is the person who escapes from the wheel of birth and death, the saṃsāra, and gets out of the game.
So he stands here. The bodhisattva is the arhat-plus. He’s the arhat who’s gone on to find out that you can’t get out of the game at all.
So the bodhisattva’s found over here. In other words, he goes back into the cycle of reincarnations and doesn’t bother about escaping anymore. So, in just the same way as to repentance leads to the understanding that you’re a phony—even in repenting—resignation leads to the understanding that even in resigning you can’t resign.
It isn’t as if someone were saying, “You must play this game,” and you felt yourself under some sort of compulsion. It’s rather discovering that the game is what there is. And if you got out of it, you would be nowhere.
You don’t have to play. This is the point. I’m going to repeat this because this is crucial: it isn’t that you have to play, because that would make you feel a victim of some process beyond yourself that has been compelling you.
It is that the playing is you. And nobody is shoving you around. Because you and the universe which seems to constrain you are not two things.
If you play the game that you are only here, then you will feel pushed around. But when—through trying to resign from either pushing around or being pushed around—you discover that it can’t be done, you then become very much aware there is no point getting away from anything. Where is away?