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Under the influence of a chant. Hypnotized. Spellbound.
Fascinated. And that fascination is māyā. Now then, this works on a little plan.
Let us consider the breakdown of a single kalpa. It consists of four yugas. Yuga: that means an “epoch.” Number one is called krita, or sometimes satya.
And these names are based on the Hindu game of dice. There are four throws in their game, and krita means the perfect throw; the throw of four. Number two is treta, the throw of three.
Number three is dwapara, the throw of two, and number four is kali—that’s the worst throw, the throw of value one. Now, you will see that these yugas divide up a period of 4,320,000 years. (I never remember numbers too well.)
So the first yuga is 1,780,000 years long. The second is 1,296,000 years. The third—the dwapara—is 864,000, and the kali yuga is 432,000.
Now, you see what’s happening here? When the manifestation starts it’s as good as possible; everything is just glorious. Because you know well that if you were dreaming anything you wanted to dream you would start out by having the most luscious dreams imaginable.
Now, when we get, you see, to the treta yuga, something is a little bit wrong. Krita is “four square”—everything’s perfect, like the symbol of the square is an ancient symbol of perfection. Treta is the triangle—something’s missing; there’s a little bit of uncertainty, and danger now enters.
By the time we get to dwapara, the forces of light and darkness are equal—duality, the pair. But when we get to kali, the force of darkness overcomes. But now, you see, what happens is: if you take one third of the treta yuga as being on the bad side, half of the dwapara yuga as being on the bad side, and all of the kali yuga, and you add those figures up, you will get the bad side occupying only one third of the total time.
So what’s going on here? It is not quite a situation, you see—it is not a view of the cosmos in which good and evil are so evenly balanced that nothing happens. ‘Evil’ is just troublesome enough to give ‘good’ a run for its money.
It’s as if the game that is being played here is playing order against chaos, but you gotta have some chaos in order to play the game of order against it. But if order wins there’s no further game. If chaos wins there’s no further game.
If they’re equally balanced it’s a stalemate. So what happens is this: chaos is always losing, but is never defeated. It’s the good loser.
And that is a game that is worth the candle. Let’s take playing chess. If you get an opponent who can always defeat you, you stop playing with him.
If you get an opponent whom you can always defeat, you stop playing with him. But so long as there is a certain uncertainty of outcome and you win some of the time, then it’s a good game. And this is simply a number symbolism—as I said, again, not to be taken literally—of the way this thing works.
So the mythology says that we are now in the kali yuga, which started a little before 3,000 B.C.—so we’ve got a long way to go to the end of it, if you’re going to take this literally. But of course, people have a way of always being in the kali yuga. We can go back to Egyptian inscriptions from 6,000 B.C., which say that the world is going hopelessly to the dogs.
That’s always been the complaint. But according to this mythology there are—you have to realize the Lord, the Brahman, in three aspects. One is Brahma, the creative principle; two is Vishnu, the preserving principle; and three is Shiva, the destroying principle.
And Shiva is very important here. Shiva is always represented in Hindu imagery as a yogi. He is the destroyer in the sense of being the liberator, the cracker of shells so that chickens can come forth.
The breaker-up of mothers so that their children can be un-smothered. The liberative destruction. The bonfire.
That’s why devotees of Shiva like to do their meditations along the banks of the Ganges where they burn dead bodies—because through destruction, life is constantly renewed. Shiva has a paramour, and her name is Kālī, but that is a different word than this kali (yuga); you mustn’t confuse the two. And Kālī is much worse than Shiva.
She’s black, and she has a long, long tongue, and her teeth are like fangs—but she’s very beautiful… otherwise; has a lovely figure, but she’s black. And in one hand—her right hand—she carries a scimitar, and in her left she carries a severed head hanging by the hair. And Kālī, who is Shiva’s—you see, Shiva is normally considered wedded; all the gods have their paramours, and they’re all examples of the one central Self—she’s called Pārvatī.
But that’s her bright aspect. But her dark aspect is Kālī. And Kālī is the awful awfuls.
The thing about all that men most dread. Kālī is outer darkness, Kālī is the end. She may be represented as a blood-sucking octopus, as a spider-mother that eats its spouse.
And Kālī is the principle of total night. And yet, there are those in India like Sri Ramakrishna, for whom Kālī is the supreme mother goddess. Because she is two-faced.
She is playful and terrifying, loving and devouring, destroyer and savior. And the cult of Kālī has as its importance helping one to see the light principle in the very depth of darkness. I have some suggestions for meditation on Kālī, which you can all practice very easily.
You go to the aquarium and you find out there the monsters of the deep that make you feel most uncomfortable, and you study them. So in this way, Kālī is studied by her devotees. And if you meditate on those, this will be like putting manure on the soil.
And out of all this apparently morbid and dismal thinking, bright things will begin to arise—because you will realize that what Kālī is is the most far out act that the supreme Self can put on. The symbol of complete alienation from itself. So what happens, you see, is this: in the process of the game of hide-and-seek the supreme Self tries to see how far out it can get.
Just like children like to sit around and have a competition as to who can make the most hideous face. And so this gets worse and worse as the time cycle goes on, until—at the end of the kali yuga—Shiva puts in an appearance, and he’s all black and has ten arms, and he dances a dance called the Tāṇḍava. And in dancing the Tāṇḍava the whole universe is destroyed in fire.
But, of course, as Shiva—having done this wreckage—turns around to leave the stage, you find that on the back of his head is the face of Brahma, the creator. And it starts again. Well now, you see, this involves certain ideas that are quite alien to the West.
One, the idea of the world as play. Our Lord God in the West tends to be over-serious, and no great Christian artist has ever painted a laughing Christ, or a smiling Christ. Nothing that I’ve seen of any of the great masters.
Always, this figure is tragic and has that sort of look in the eye which says, “One of these days you and I have got to get together for a very serious talk.” So, you see, there is some difficulty about the notion of the world as a dramatic play; for us. There’s another difficult notion here, and that is cyclic time. See, most of us live in linear time.
This originated with Saint Augustine and his interpretation of the Bible. Now, I don’t know how true this really is, but it’s certainly a big fashion in modern scholarship to say that it was Judaism that gave us the idea of history. Hindus have no interest in history whatsoever—or, not until recent times—to the total exasperation of historians.
There is no way of finding textual evidence of the age of most of the Hindu scriptures—because they aren’t interested in history as such, they are only interested in human events as archetypal occurrences, as repetitions of the great mythological themes, over and over again. So if a document started out that a certain adventure happened to king so-and-so—whom everybody knew at the time—in the next generation they had changed the name of that king to the current king, because the story was typical anyway. They just wanted to say a king that everybody knew.
They altered things in that way, and so they know no kind of chronology. And if you ask even quite intelligent Asians about this, they have difficulty in understanding what kind of a question you’re asking. What is this history thing?
Whereas, on the other hand—according to our scholars—the Jews were historically minded, because they remembered the story of their descent from Adam and Abraham, the great event of the liberation from Egypt, and then the triumphant reign of King David, and then things go sliding downhill as other political forces become stronger and stronger. And so they get a fix on the idea that one day is going to be the day of the Lord, and the Messiah will come and put an end to history. And there will be the restoration of Paradise.
But this is linear. They don’t think of the world having been created many, many times before, and come to an end many, many times before. It’s one clear ascent from start to finish, from alpha to omega.
Well, when Saint Augustine was thinking about this, he thought, “If time is cyclic, Jesus would have to be crucified for the salvation of the world once in every cycle.” But for some reason he had it firmly fixed into his head that there was only one historical crucifixion in time—what they call the one, full, perfect, sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. Once is enough. Now, of course, he got his hierarchies confused.
It’s true—there is one sacrifice, but that’s on the plane of eternity. On the plane of time, eternal things can be repeated again and again and again. But so, as a result of that, we are handed down not a Greek—the Greeks also had cyclic time, like the Hindus—but we have been handed down linear time, and therefore we’re always thinking of a progression that will take us steadily, steadily, steadily, faster and faster to a more and more perfect world.
And it will get better and better and better and better all the way along—if we keep our heads. Now, this shows—I think—a rather naïve view of human nature. Human beings tend to smash what they create and say, “Let’s do it again!” There is that in man which is also in the child.
Rub it out—what fun! And so it isn’t really too realistic to suppose that human beings will simply get better and better and better and better and better, because they’ll soon get tired of it. They’ll say, “Let’s be as awful as possible.” See, there was that element in Nazism: how awful can you get?
How brutal can you be? How destructive? And that—it isn’t just Germans, you know, who have that.
See? We are converting all the living world around us into excrement and pretending it doesn’t happen that way. And we are the most marvelous vortices in this stream of food which whirls around as us and then disappears into excrements, which again fertilize the soil—and we keep on at it.
So you see, there is that thing in us—which is represented by Shiva-Kālī—and it’s always there. But the Hindu looks at the world with very, very hard-boiled realism in this way and sees terror and magnificence, love and fury; those two faces of the same thing. And you could say, “Well, is there any peace possible?” after you’ve looked at this picture for a long, long time, and you’ve conceived the endless, endless cycles because this thing goes on always and always and always.
Per omnia secula seculorum: world without end. And the Hindu sometimes feels, “Oh, Braham, don’t you ever get tired of it?” No. Because Brahma doesn’t have to remember anything—and you only get tired of things you remember.
That’s why, from the standpoint of Brahma, there’s no time—only an eternal now. So the secret of waking up from the drama, the endless cycles, is the realization that the only time that there is is the present. And when you become awake to that, boredom is at an end and you are delivered from the cycles.
Not in the sense that they disappear; that you no longer go through them. You do go through them, but you know—you realize—that they’re not going anywhere. Now then, supposing you liken the rhythm of these cycles to music—why, surely, you don’t hurry it up.
You don’t say, “Let’s get to the end faster.” You know how to listen to music only when you slow down time, and sit back, and let that be. And so, in the same way, you can see every little detail of life in a new way. You say, “Oh my!
Look at that!” And so one’s eyes are opened in astonishment by being, living—totally—here and now. I started out yesterday to discuss what the Self means in Hindu philosophy; the principle tat tvam asi, “that art thou,” meaning that the Self is the basis of all being. And being is not something into which we come, but out of which we proceed.
In popular language we say “I came into this world,” as if you came from somewhere else altogether; from outside. But you don’t. You come out of this world just in the same way as the leaves come from the tree.
And so, in that way, you are an expression of it, and the Self—meaning itself, Self meaning identity, Self meaning basis, ground—is what everybody fundamentally is. Then I went on to discuss the world as the Self in the sense of the cosmos as the Self. The great cycles of time in which, according to Hindu philosophy and mythology, the world is manifested and then again withdrawn.
And now I want to go on to discuss the human world as the Self. Well, now, there have—in the known history of mankind—been about three types of culture. We’ll call them ‘hunting cultures,’ ‘agrarian cultures,’ and ‘industrial cultures.’ The hunting culture seems to have been the earliest, and agrarian cultures arose when hunters learned to farm, and therefore had to settle in certain places.
And it was then that men built cities. And when we pass from the hunting to the agrarian culture, we notice two very important changes occur. In the hunting culture, every man is expert in the whole culture.
That’s because he spends a good deal of time alone in the forests, or on the hills, and so he has to know how to make clothes, how to cook, how to build, how to fight, ride, and all those things. But as soon as people become settled in cities we get a division of labor, because it’s obviously more practical—when you’re all living together—for some people to specialize in some things and some in others. The other important difference is the difference of religion between the hunting culture and the agrarian culture.
The religious man of the hunting culture is generally known as a shaman. And a shaman is a kind of weird individual, and I mean ‘weird’ in the ancient sense of the word—not ‘queer,’ but ‘weird’ in the sense of magic. Because he is a person of a peculiar type of sensitivity who finds initiation into the shaman role by going off by himself for a long time into the depths of the forests or the heights of the mountains.
And in that isolation he comes in touch with a domain of consciousness which is known by all sorts of names: the spirit world, the ancestors, the gods, or whatever. And his knowledge of that world is supposed to give him peculiar powers of healing, of prophecy, of magic in general. The thing that you must note, though, about a shaman is that his initiation is found by himself.
He does not receive initiation from an order or a guru. On the other hand, the religious man of the agrarian community is a priest, and a priest is almost invariably an ordained person. He receives his power from a community of priests or from a guru; in other words, from tradition.
Tradition is all-important in the agrarian community. Now then, reasonably enough, the first communities are stockaded enclosures. They are made of palings.
And so we speak of people being “within the pale” and “beyond the pale.” And the word ‘paling’ we still use in fencing, and you’ll know that the Spanish for a tree is palo. So here is a primitive stockaded community, and—as often as not—this community will settle at a crossroads. For obvious reasons: where roads cross, that’s where people meet.
And so it’s liable to have four gates and these crossing main streets. And that immediately establishes four divisions of the city. And so, oddly enough—in Hindu society—there are four castes based on the four fundamental divisions of labor.
And number one is the caste of priests, and they’re called Brahmin. Number two is the caste of warriors—and also rulers—and they’re called kshatriya. Number three is the caste of merchants and tradesmen, and they’re called vaishya.
And number four are laborers, and they are called śūdra. So those are the four principal roles in the world of settled humanity. It’s interesting; I said people settled in cities because they had to plant, and there are many legends to the effect that what they were mostly concerned with planting were grapes for wine.
And they cultivated vineyards. And it’s said of Noah that, after the flood in the Bible, the first thing he did was to plant a vineyard. Now then, when you enter society you are born into a caste.
And this is very understandable in a community where you don’t have a generalized system of education. You don’t go to school, and therefore you learn what to do in life from your parents and your family. So if you grow up as a carpenter’s son, it never occurs to you to do anything else but carpentry.
Why would you? You might become a better carpenter than your father—but still, that would be the natural thing to do. It’s only when one is exposed to school, and then the people begin to talk about “well, what do you want to be in life?” The people get the idea that they might be anything.
So if this sort of way of life is natural to you, you don’t find it particularly objectionable. Of course, all kinds of weird complications and rituals and prohibitions grow up in the course of time that can make this system very cumbersome, as it has been until quite recently in India. Then, what happens is this: you go through an evolution in your development in this community, which has—first of all—the stage called brahmacharya: ‘studentship’ or ‘apprenticeship.’ After that, you enter the stage of gr̥hastha, meaning ‘householder.’ And a householder has two duties.
One is called artha, and the other kama. Artha means the duties of citizenship; partaking in the political life of the community. Kama means the cultivation of the senses, of aesthetic and sensual beauty, and therefore kama includes the art of love, the arts of beautification, of dress, of cooking, and all that kind of thing.
So that the Kāmasūtra is the scripture about love. Kama—in a sense—means ‘passion,’ and is the great Hindu manual of how to behave sexually. It’s a book that every child ought to read on gaining puberty, so that he would get some sense of how to make love without being a mere baboon.
Then there is also the arthaśāstra, and that is the scripture about rulers and the way of the kshatria caste. Now—so you’ve got these stages now. Brahmacharya, which is studentship.
Artha and kama—they go together, and they constitute the duties of gr̥hastha, of the householder. Beyond that there is the duty of dharma, and dharma has many, many meanings in Sanskrit. It can mean something like ‘law’ or ‘justice.’ It could even mean, slightly, ‘righteousness,’ but not as we have come to understand that word in common speech today.
Perhaps ‘rightness’ would be better than ‘righteousness.’ But dharma has a primary meaning of ‘method.’ So when we speak of the dharma of the Buddha, the Buddha’s doctrine, it is the Buddha’s method—not law. So, a citizen also has to conform to dharma. And, that is to say, to ritual and ethical and moral game rules for the community.
But now, when, in the course of time, he has established his household, he has taught his oldest son to take over the governorship of the household, the father—or, for that matter, mother—may enter into a new stage of life altogether, which is not gr̥hastha, but is called vanaprastha, and that means ‘forest dweller,’ as distinct from ‘householder.’ Now, you see what’s happened? We’ve gone full cycle. We came out of the forest as a hunter, we settled in a community and indulged in what is called—in Sanskrit—lokasaṃgraha.
Saṃgraha means ‘upholding,’ loka ‘the world.’ “Upholding the world-game.” And that is everybody’s dharma, or duty—dharma can also be translated ‘duty.’ And svadharma means ‘your own duty,’—or better, ‘your own function’—which we would translate into English as ‘vocation.’ So everybody’s castework is his svadharma, and of course these castes are subdivided into various other kinds of specializations. When you have fulfilled your svadharma you go into the vanaprastha stage. Now, anciently, that meant that you actually did go out into the forest and you became—of all things, it’s called a śramaṇa in Sanskrit.
And it is thought that that is the word ‘shaman.’ You see, what happens is this, then: that an individual who, all his life long, has played the social game, then says, “Well, now I’ve done that. I’ve assumed this role. I’ve become identified with tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, whatever it was; but now—who am I, really?” In order to find that out I have to go off by myself.
Why? Because you have a role-conception, a mask-conception of yourself, because other people tell you who you are. We are constantly—in every social interchange, in the most common remarks—telling other people who they are.
Everything leads up to that. The way I act towards you, the way you act towards me, tells me who I am and tells you who you are. For example, you come and sit here and listen to me talk.
You are, by doing that, telling me I’m some kind of a teacher. And you’re telling yourselves that you’re some kind of students. And that’s only one thing, you see?
One little incident. In business, everyday, in your housework, and everything you do, everybody around you is telling you what you are and who you are by expecting certain behavior from you, which—if you’re a reasonable and socially inclined person—you perform, because that’s what’s expected of you. So you are told who you are.
So when we come—we’ve had enough of that, you see? This is daft, let’s not listen to this anymore. That’s why the śramaṇa on the vanaprastha—one of the first things he practices is silence.
It’s called mauna. And he may take a vow not to speak for a month, or a year. And after about a month of mauna you don’t only stop talking, but you stop thinking in words.
And that’s a very curious experience when it happens, because all the senses take on a tremendous intensity. You see things which you’ve never seen before, because you stop codifying and classifying the world by thinking. Sunsets appear incredibly more vivid and flowers are enchanting; the whole world comes alive to the mauni.
The only danger is this: the mauni has to be careful because he loses all moral discrimination. In other words, if the mauni gets involved in a riot he just joins the riot, because that’s just the way things are going, you see? And so he has to be careful, and that’s why, in this state of vanaprastha, the new man in the game will seek out a guru—a teacher—who has been through the whole discipline of yoga, or whatever it is, that is practiced by a vanaprastha, and will help him out and see that he doesn’t get into trouble.
That’s why a guru, when he accepts a student, is always said to become responsible for that individual’s karma. Karma, you know, means ‘activity,’ and also the ‘results of activity.’ So you see what’s happened? This man who goes into the vanaprastha stage of life takes off every sign that would identify him as someone.
He does away with his name. He does away with the usual clothes he would wear and puts on, usually, a yellow or some kind of a robe, or he may more often than that be really naked; may have a loin cloth, or not even that. And often these people cover themselves with ashes, and their hair is matted, and they don’t take care of themselves that way anymore, because they’re outside the pale.
You see, they are ‘out-castes,’ but they are upper outcasts. Below them are the lower outcasts, known as the—today—the harijan, the name that Ghandi gave them—the untouchables. And the untouchables were the aboriginal peoples of India.
When the Aryan invasion occurred—at a rather vague date, but shortly after 2,000 B.C.—the Aryans formed these castes, and the people who were originally in the land, like the Indians here, were considered to be outcasts. They were beyond the pale. So you have here a marvelous microcosm.
You have a political and social analog of the manifestation and withdrawal of the worlds. Of the Lord playing the game—or the Self—playing the game of being all of us, and then, as each individual reaches mokṣa, the Self realizes in terms of an individual life that it is the Self. So, exactly in this way, the child representing the Self on the way in comes into this world, plays around for a while, there are four castes just as there are four yugas to the kalpa cycle—you remember?—and then out it goes, back to the forest.
We would say back to nature. But, you see, the outgoing stage of vanaprastha is a much higher state in the course of evolution than the hunting society person, who is primitive. He isn’t simply going back to where he came from; he’s spiraled, he’s come round to an equivalent position, but at a higher level.
And what he has gained in the interim is Self-awareness. I mean that, too, in the ordinary sense, when we speak of self-consciousness. See, it’s not much fun to be happy and not know it.
We need a certain resonance; self-consciousness is an echo in our heads, an echo of what we do, but wouldn’t be aware of doing it if there wasn’t an echo. When you see yourself in a mirror, that mirror is a visual echo of your face. And that’s why, in a room such as this, it’s a very comfortable room for me to talk in because it has resonance.
And so, self-consciousness is neurological resonance. Now, you know how troublesome resonance can get if it’s not properly worked out. You can get echoes that just won’t stop, so you go into a great cave somewhere and you say, “Hi!” And it goes, “Hi!
Hi! Hi! Hi!
Hi! Hi! Hi!
Hi! Hi! Hi!
Hi! Hi! Hi!” all off in the distance, see?
That’s very confusing. That’s the sort of snarl that self-consciousness can get into, and we call it anxiety. When I keep, keep, keep thinking.
“Did I do the right thing?” In the course of some performance, if I’m constantly aware of myself in a kind of anxious, critical way, my resonance becomes too high. And so I get confused and jittery. But if you learn that self-consciousness has limits, that self-awareness cannot possibly enable you to be free of making mistakes, you can learn to be spontaneous in spite of being self-aware, and enjoy the echo.
So what happens—that, having developed self-consciousness through education, through work with other people, having developed all the disciplines of the culture, the vanaprastha then becomes again as a child. But then, you see, he has what Freud says the child has from the beginning; Freud called it the oceanic feeling. And the oceanic feeling is the sensation of being one with the universe.
The vanaprastha gets that back, but it’s not a child’s oceanic feeling, it’s an adult’s oceanic feeling—something which the psychoanalysts don’t discuss, because, according to them, all oceanic feelings are aggressive. But there is a mature oceanic feeling, as contrasted with the immature oceanic feeling of the child, which is as different as the oak is from the acorn. And so you can have this sensation, you see, of total unity with the cosmos, of the—shall I call it expansion to infinity, or contraction to infinity?—of your identity without forgetting society’s game rules with regard to you.
In other words, it doesn’t mean that you forget your address, telephone number, social security number, and the name you were given. You remember all that, and you can play that game when necessary, but you know it’s a game. So there is no way, as a matter of fact, of escaping from playing these games.
And the only thing is that when you find out, you see, that you are thoroughly selfish, you inquire, “What is it—what is the self that I love? What is this thing that I’m so interested in advancing and in protecting?” And you look very closely into what you feel when you think you feel yourself. And you know what you find out?
That your self is everything that you thought was someone else, or something else. You have no knowledge of yourself, you see, except in relation to others. Self and other are as inseparable as back and front.