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Sound is a pulsation of sound/silence. Everything is going da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da at various speeds. And in order to have, say—it’s like the motion of a wave.
Now, a wave consists of two pulses: the crest and the trough. You can’t have crests without troughs, you can’t have troughs without crests. They always go together.
You can’t have hide without seek, you can’t have seek without hide; just as, for example, you can’t have here without there, because if you didn’t know where there was, you wouldn’t know where here was. You can’t have is without isn’t, because yon don’t know what you mean by is unless you also know what you mean by isn’t, and vice versa. So, in that way, they think that hide-and-seek is the fundamental game.
As if the lord God—the Brahman, as they call it—said in the beginning, “Get lost, man! Disappear, and I’ll find you again later.” And then, when, you know, the disappearance gets very far out, then the contrary rhythm begins and the dreamer wakes up, and finds out: whoo, that was a relief! And then, after a rest period—in which everything is, of course, at peace—it starts all over again, because the spirit of adventure springs eternal.
Now then, the Hindus had extremely vast ideas of space and time for their period in history. And they have the theory that the hiding-part of the game goes on for 4,320,000 years; a period called a kalpa in Sanskrit. And then the seek-part, that is to say—let me put it this way: the dreaming-part is followed by the waking-part.
The dreaming is the hiding, where the Godhead imagines that it’s all of us. Then, for another 4,320,000 years, there’s a period of awakening. And then, at the end of that, again begins the dream.
Now, the dreaming period is further subdivided into four stages. The first stage is the longest and it’s the best. During that stage the dream is beautiful.
The second stage is not quite so long, and it’s a little unsettling. There is an element of instability in it, a certain touch of insecurity. In the third stage—which is not, again, so long—the forces of light and the forces of darkness, of good and of evil, are equally balanced and things are beginning to look rather dangerous.
And in the fourth stage, which is the shortest of them all, the negative, dark, or evil side triumphs, and the whole thing blows up in the end. But then, that’s like the bang in the dream—you know, when you get shot in a dream, and you wake up, and it was, after all, a dream. And so then there’s a waking period before the whole thing starts again.
But you will notice, if you compute—I haven’t gone to the mathematics of it—but if you do, you will find out that in this drama the forces of the dark side are operative for one third of the time, the forces of the light side for two thirds of the time. And this is a very ingenious arrangement, because we are seeing here the fundamental principles of drama. Consider drama: here is a stage, and over the stage, here, is what we call the proscenium arch, and out there is the audience.
Now, you’re supposed to be in the world of reality. Let’s suppose this isn’t a lecture tonight, but a show. And you’ve come outside into the show, and you know you’re real people living in the real world, but you’re going to see a play which isn’t real.
There are actors coming on the stage, but behind the scene here, they’re real people like you. But so that you don’t see them that way, they’re going to put on their costumes and their makeup, and then they’re going to come out in front here and pretend to various roles. But, you know, you want to be half convinced that what they’re doing on the stage is real.
And the work of a great actor is to get you sitting on the edge of your chair in anxiety, or weeping, or roaring with laughter, because he’s almost persuaded you that what is on the stage is really happening. That is the greatness of his art: to take the audience in. And of course, in the same way, the Hindu feels that the godhead acts his part so well that he takes himself in completely.
So that each one of you is the godhead, wonderfully fooled by your own act and—although you won’t admit it to yourself—enjoying it like anything. Because you mustn’t admit it! That’d give the show away!
Now, it’s a funny thing: when you say, “I’m a person,” the word “person” is a word from the drama. You know, when you open a play, the script, you’ll see the list of the actors, and it’s called dramatis personae: the “persons of the drama.” And the word “person” in Latin is persona, that means “through sound.” “Something through which sound comes.” Because the persona (in Greco-Roman drama) was the mask worn by the actors, and because they acted on an open-air stage, the mouth was shaped like a small megaphone, and that would project the sound. So the person is the mask.
Isn’t it funny, now, how we’ve forgotten that? And so Harry Emerson Fosdick could write a book called How to Be a Real Person, which—if translated literally—is: “how to be a genuine fake.” Because in the old sense, you see, the person is the role, the part played by the actor. But if you forget, you see, that you are the actor and think you’re the person, you’ve been taken in by your own role.
You’re en-rolled, you’re bewitched, spellbound, enchanted. So then, look at something else about the drama and its nature. In the drama there has to be a villain—unless, of course, you are acting some kind of a non-play which does not have any story.
But all fundamental stories start out with the status quo where everybody’s sort of going along, and then something has to come in to upset everything. And the interest of the play is: how are we going to solve it? It’s the same when you play cards.
Supposing you’re playing solitaire: you start by shuffling the deck, and that introduces chaos. And the game is to play order against chaos. So in the drama somebody has to be a villain and play the dark side, and then the hero plays against him.
If you go to the theater for a good cry, then you let the villain win and you call it a tragedy. If you go for a thrill, you let the hero win. If you go for laughs, you call it a comedy.
There are different arrangements, then, between the hero and the villain. But in all cases, when the curtain goes down at the end of the drama, the hero and the villain step out hand in hand and the audience applaud both. They don’t boo the villain at the end of the play, they applaud him for acting the part of the villain so well.
And they applaud the hero for acting the part of the hero so well. Because they know that the hero role and the villain role are only masks. And so, you see, behind the stage, too, there is the green room where, after the play is over and before it begins, the masks are taken off.
The Hindus feel that, behind the scene—that is to say: in reality, under the surface—you are all the actor, marvelously skilled in playing many parts and in getting lost in the mazes of your own minds and the entanglements of your own affairs, as if this were the most urgent thing going. But behind the scenes, in the green room (you might say in the very back of your mind, in the very depths of your soul) you always have a very tiny sneaking suspicion that you might not be the you that you think you are. The Germans call it a Hintergedanke: a thought way, way back in your head that you will hardly admit to yourself.
Because, of course, you’ve been brought up (most of you) you were brought up in the Hebrew-Christian tradition. It would be very wicked indeed to think that you were God. That would be blasphemy, and oh-oh-oh!
Don’t you ever dare think such an idea! Which, of course, is all as it should be, because the show must go on—until, of course, the time does come to stop. Now, you will see that this involves two quite different ways of dealing with the two fundamental questions.
One: what is man—that is, who are you? And in the Hebrew-Christian answer, we more or less say, “Well, I’m me. I’m Alan Watts.
I’m John Doe. I’m Mary Smith. And I firmly believe I am, because I really oughtn’t to think anything else, ought I?” And that “me” is a finite ego, or a finite mind—whatever that is.
On the other hand, the Hindu will say that the real self—which he calls Ātman—is what there is. It’s the works, it’s the which than which there is no whicher. The root and ground of the universe and of reality.
The next problem where they differ so sharply is: well, why have things gone wrong? Why is there evil? Why is there pain?
Why is there tragedy? Now, in the Christian tradition you have to attribute evil to something else besides God. There, God is defined as good, and he originally created the scheme of things without there being any evil in it.
But there was a mysterious accident in which one of the angels, called Lucifer, didn’t do what he was told. There was the fall of Man. Man disobeyed, he went against the law of God.
And from this point, evil was introduced into the scheme of things and things began to go wrong—that is to say, against the will of the perfectly good creator. Now, the Hindu thinks in a different way. He feels that the creator, or the actor, is the author of both the good and the evil.
For the reasons that I explained it to you, you have to have the evil for there to be a story. And in any case, it isn’t as if the creator had made evil and made someone else its victim. It isn’t like saying, “God creates the evil as well as the good, and poor little us are his puppets, and he inflicts evil upon us.” The Hindu says, “Nobody experiences pain except the godhead.
You are not some separate little puppet which is being kicked around by omnipotence. You are omnipotence in disguise.” And so there is no victim of this; no helpless, defenseless, poor little thing. Even the baby with syphilis is the dreaming godhead.
Now, this makes people brought up in the West extremely uneasy, because it seems to undercut the foundations of moral behavior. They say, “If good and evil are created by God, isn’t this a universe in which just anything goes? I mean, if I am God in disguise, surely if I realize that, I can get away with murder!” Well, think it through.
Didn’t I point out that in the game, as the Hindus analyze it, the evil part has one third of the time and the good part has two thirds? What sort of a game do you want, anyway? You will find out, you see, that all good games—games that are worth playing, that arouse our interest—are constructed like this: if you have the good and the evil equally balanced, the game is boring.
Nothing happens, it’s stalemate. The irresistible force meets the immovable object. On the other hand, if it’s all good and there’s hardly any evil—maybe just a weeny little bit of a fly in the ointment—it also gets boring.
Just in the same way, for example: supposing you knew the future and could control it perfectly. What would you do? You would say, “Let’s shuffle the deck and have another deal.” Because, for example, when great chess players sit down to a match and it suddenly becomes apparent to both of them that white is going to mate in sixteen moves and nothing can be done about it, they abandon the game and begin another.
They don’t want to know. There wouldn’t be any “hide” in the game, any element of surprise, if they did know the outcome. So a game with good and evil equally balanced isn’t a good game.
A game with the positive or good forces clearly triumphant isn’t an interesting game. What we want is a game where it always seems that the good side is about to lose, in really serious danger of losing, but manages always to sneak out. You know how it is in serial stories, when they get the hero at the end of an installment in some absolutely impossible position, where it seems he’s going to be run over by a train because he’s tied with his girlfriend to the rails.
And you know, somehow, in the next installment, the author is going to get them out of the difficulty—only, he mustn’t do it too obviously, because you won’t go on reading the next installment. So then, what’s necessary is a system in which the good side is always winning but never is the winner, where the evil side is always losing but never is the loser. That’s a very practical arrangement for a successful, ongoing game which will keep everybody interested.
And you must watch this in practical politics: every in-group (or group of nice people) needs an out-group of nasty people, otherwise they wouldn’t know who they were. And you must recognize, then, that this out-group is your necessary enemy, whom you need. He keeps you on your toes.
But you mustn’t obliterate him. If you do, you are in a very dangerous state of affairs. So you have to love your enemies in this sense, regard them as highly necessary, and to be respected chivalrously.
We need the communists and they need us. The thing is to cool it and play what I call a contained conflict. When conflicts get out of hand, all sides blow up.
Oh, of course, I suppose then there’s another deal; maybe a million years later. Now, let me see if I can for a moment put these two visions of the world together. It seems that, if you believe the Christian-Hebrew-Islamic view, that you can’t admit the Hindu view.
Because if you’re a Christian, one thing you cannot believe—that’s if you, say, you’re at all orthodox; you’re an orthodox Protestant Bible type, or if you’re a Roman Catholic—you can’t believe that you are God. And so that excludes Hinduism, apparently. But let’s go back to Judaism for a minute and ask this question: if Judaism is the true religion, can Christianity be true, too?
No. No, because there’s one thing in Christianity that the Jew can’t admit, and that was that Jesus Christ was God. That is unthinkable for a Jew; that any man was indeed God in the flesh.
Alright, second question: if Christianity is the true religion, can Judaism be true, too? The answer is: yes. Because all Christians are Jews.
That is to say, they have taken in the Jewish religion—lock, stock, and barrel in the Old Testament—into their own religion. Every Christian is a Jew, plus something else—which is his particular attitude to Jesus of Nazareth. Now then, let’s play this game once again.
If Christianity is true, can Hinduism be true? The answer is: no, for the reason we’ve seen: the Christians will say, “Jesus of Nazareth was God. But you aren’t, I’m not.” Now then, if Hinduism is true, can Christianity be true?
The answer is: yes, because it can include it. But how? What would be the attitude of a Hindu to a very sincere and convinced Christian?
He would say, “Bravo! Absolutely marvelous! What an act!
Here, in this Christian soul, God is playing his most extraordinary game. He is believing and really feeling that he’s not himself. And not only that—but that he is living only one life, and in that life he’s got to make the most momentous decision imaginable.
In the course of this four score years and ten, he’s got to choose between everlasting beatitude and everlasting horror. And he’s not quite sure how to do it.” Because in Christianity there are two sins to be avoided, among others. One is called presumption, and that is knowing surely that you’re saved.
The other is called despair, which is knowing surely that you’re damned. There’s always a margin of doubt about this. Work out your salvation in fear and trembling.
So you might say that this is preeminently the gambler’s religion. Imagine, you know, at some great casino, late at night, there is some marvelous master gambler who has been winning, winning, winning all night. And then suddenly he decides to stake his whole winnings on whether the ball lands on red or black.
Sensation! Everybody gathers from all over the casino to watch this terrific gamble. So, in the same way, the predicament in which the Christian soul finds itself is this colossal gamble, which is saying: this universe can possibly contain in it ultimate tragedy.
There could be such a thing as an absolute, final, irremediable mistake. And what a horror that thought is! And so the Hindu is sitting in the audience, fascinated by this Christian’s extraordinary, reckless gamble.
He says, “That’s a beautiful game!” The Christian doesn’t know it’s a game, but the Hindu suspects it is. And he’s a little bit admiring it, but not quite involved. But if, on the other hand, in all contests you know that while you’re going to take it seriously and regard it as very important, in the back of your mind—in that little Hintergedanke—you know it is not ultimately important; although very important.
And this saves you. This enables you to be a good player. You may worry about the word “play” because we often use the word “play” in a trivial sense.
“Oh, you’re just playing.” “You mean life is nothing but a game?” The Hindus indeed call the creation of the universe the līlā, or the game, or the play, of the divine. But we also use “play” in other senses. When you see Hamlet—which is by no means trivial—you are still going to a play.
In church the organist plays the organ. And in the Book of Proverbs it is written that the divine wisdom created the world by playing before the throne of God. Play also, you see, has a deep sense.
When we say music, even the music of Bach, as a great master of what we call serious music, is still playing. And so in the deeper sense of play, the Hindu sees this world as play, and therefore that the intense situations—personally, socially, and so on—that we are all involved in are seen not as bad illusions, but as magnificent illusions; so well-acted that they’ve just about got most of the actors fooled. So that they’ve forgotten who they are.
And man thinks of himself, when he’s been fooled, as a little creature that comes into this world, which is all strange and foreign, and he’s just a little puppet of fate. And he’s forgotten that the whole thing has at its root the Self, which is also yourself. If you were told that you were going to be given half an hour’s interview with God, and you had the privilege of asking one question, I wonder what you would ask.
You might be given some preparation, too. Because when you think: what is your ultimate question, you’ll probably do many things before you arrive at it. And I know many people would discover that they had no question to ask.
The situation would be altogether too overwhelming. But many people to whom I’ve put this problem say that the question that they would ask is: “Who am I?” And that is something we know very little about, because whatever it is that we call I is too close for inspection. It’s like trying to bite your own teeth or to touch the tip of your finger with the tip of the same finger.
And although other people can tell you who you are—and do—they only see you from the outside (as you see them from the outside), and you don’t see from the inside. And so the nature of what it is that we call “I” is extremely puzzling because there is some confusion as to how much of us is “I.” We talk in ordinary ways about “my body,” “my feet,” and when we go to the dentist to have out teeth fixed we regard him rather as a mechanic. Like, you take your car to the garage, so you take your body to the surgeon (or the dentist or whatever it is) to be fixed; to have the parts changed, or something of that kind.
And they’re really getting to work on that now! And so the question is: when somebody has a heart transplant, that sounds very radical because we say, “In my heart of hearts.” But nowadays, most of us seem to feel that whatever it is that “I” is, is located in the head. Somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears is the center, and the rest of us is an appendage, a vehicle, which carries the self around.
Now, popular speech also reflects the sensation that “I” am very different from what we call the “other:” other people, other things. Anything that we can become aware of is sort of other. There is an opposition, apparently, between the knower and the known.
And so we talk about “facing” reality. We talk about “coming into” this world—as if somehow we didn’t belong, as if instead of being leaves growing out of a tree we were a lot of birds that had alighted on bare branches. And it has become common sense for most people living in the 20th century today to adopt the 19th century philosophy of science which interprets the physical universe outside human bodies as being a mechanical contraption which is essentially stupid, unfeeling, automatic, composed of mainly geological elements—rocks, gases, and so forth—and therefore we feel rather alone and left out of this thing in contrast with the ideas of Ptolemaic astronomy.
Instead of being at the center of the universe, we are on the outer limits of a minor galaxy revolving around an unimportant star on a small, minute ball of rock. And therefore that astronomical way of looking at things is simply overwhelming. It makes us feel not only of no importance, but also very much left out.
And that is the common sense of most people living today. We did, of course, have a religious view of our nature that we were the children of a loving God who is in charge of this whole operation. But very few people actually believe that anymore.
A great many people think they ought to believe it and would like to believe in it, but they don’t. Most ministers that I know don’t believe it, but they feel guilty about this because they feel they ought to. But it became implausible.
There never was a serious argument against it. It simply became unthinkable in comparison with the dimensions of the universe as we now see it. So, having lost a way of looking at the world, an image of the world which gave us some sense of meaning, we now have an image of the world which gives us none at all.
And so we feel rather inclined to put up a fight against the whole show. Interestingly enough, when in the 19th century we switched our common sense from supernaturalism to naturalism, one would think that a naturalist would be a person who loved nature, just as a materialist ought to be a person who loves material but certainly isn’t, with what is called the philosophy of scientific naturalism. Naturalism is used in a negative way.
It has nothing to do with being natural. It has something to do with being not supernatural. Merely natural.
And all sorts of phrases were coined in that epoch, which I would call put-down phrases. Freud spoke of the basic psychic energy as libido, which means blind lust. People like Ernst Haeckel spoke of the universe as being a manifestation of blind energy.
Think of that put-down word, “blind.” And therefore we also speak of unconscious mental mechanisms. And the very word, “unconscious,” as being the deeper aspect of our psyche is a negative word and a put-down word. So it’s to say: what you are—functioning as a rational ego with values and with a capacity to love—is simply the epiphenomenon of a purely mechanical process.
To bad! So, as a result of this so-called naturalism we began to put up the most whopping fight against nature that was ever engaged in. And that fight is an expression of our fury and of our feeling of being left out.
So that the technological experiment which became possible as a result of the mechanical sciences has largely been conducted in a spirit of rage. And the results are evident all around us. Here in Palm Springs you are gradually getting all the smog from Los Angeles.
This great cloud of poisonous gas put up by a city which is exemplary in this whole civilized world for fouling its own nest. Perhaps only Calcutta could be a bit worse, or some such terrible slum. But we have done it by technology: by ruthless beating about of nature without consideration for what the scientist would call our ecology.
Ecology is that aspect of science which deals with the relationship between organisms and their environments. Ecology is the study of the balance of nature, of the way in which every living being depends upon innumerable other living beings of all species, and also upon inanimate forces—air, water, temperature, gases, vegetation, and all sorts of things. And this is one of the most important sciences that we can possibly study today, because we are in a position where we realize that we cannot help interfering with the world.
To be alive is to interfere. You interfere. You cannot go back and say, “Hands off nature!
Let’s leave it all alone.” Because you’re stuck with it. Especially once you’ve started to interfere in a major way. We have so altered our environment that there is no hope for it but to go ahead.
But we can, to some extent, change direction. But the only way that I can see of our effectively changing direction is through a transformation of the feeling that we have of our own existence and of what we mean by “I.” The reason for this is simply that all kinds of intelligent and even powerful people—like, say, Laurance Rockefeller, who are interested in ecology and in conservation of our natural resources—they can scream their heads off, but nobody pays any attention. There is, as yet, no really serious program at the government level to do anything radical about the pollution of water, the waste of water, the pollution of air, and the general ravaging of the United States of America.
I’m amazed that congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities. Which is, in a way, at the heart of the trouble, because what we think of as “I” is much more a symbol than it is a reality.
The living organism, the whole mind-body, is much more than anything we mean by “I.” “I” largely stands for your personality, your role in life. And the very word, “person” (as you probably know) comes from the Latin persona, a word originally used for the mask worn by actors in Greco-Roman drama. “That through which sound comes,” because the mask had a megaphonic mouth to carry the voice in open air theaters.
So when you speak of being a real person, it really means being a genuine fake. Because the personality is only the front. What is behind it?
Well of course the organism is behind it; the whole organism. And we must be very careful not to confuse the organism with various symbols that we have for it, because those symbols can be extremely misleading. If we say the organism is the body, what we usually mean by the body is an impoverished meaning.
When we speak of “my body”—that is to say: my vehicle, my physical automobile—that is an unenriched meaning of the word body. Because what you really are as a body, as a living organism, is not some sort of separate existence coated by a skin which divides you from the rest of the world. Shakespeare has King John saying to Hubert: “Within this wall of flesh there is a soul counts thee her creditor.” “Within this wall of flesh:” the skin considered as a barrier, when actually, from a biological point of view, the human skin and all skins are osmotic membranes.
You know, when you get something by osmosis, by sort of soaking it in. So, in the same way, one’s skin is a spongy construction full of holes. Full of communicators; nerve ends.
And your skin is simply a vibrating membrane through which the so-called external world flows into you and through you. So that you yourself, actually, are not so much an entity that moves around in an environment, you are much more like a whirlpool in a stream. And, as you know, the whirlpool is constant only in its doing—that is to say, in its whirling.
And you could recognize individual whirligigs in a stream. But the water is flowing through them all the time. They are never the same for a second.
And so it is also with us. Or imagine it in another way: supposing you have a rope, and one foot of the rope is made of hemp, one foot of it is made of cotton, one foot of it is made of silk, one foot of it is made of nylon, and so on. Now, tie a simple knot in the rope.
Now move the knot along the rope. And one minute it will be hemp, the next cotton, next silk, next nylon, and so on. Same knot.
It will be recognizable as a continuing knot; as that knot. The knot in that rope. But the constitution of it will change as it moves.
And so our constitution is changing constantly. Imagine, for example, a university: the student body, undergraduate, changes every four years. The faculty changes every so often.
The buildings keep changing more and more. What constitutes the University of California? It certainly isn’t the faculty, it isn’t the students, it isn’t the governors, it isn’t the administration, it isn’t the buildings.
What is it? Why, a doing! A behavior.
A university-ing process of study and experiment and so on. So it is exactly the same with you. You flow.