The whole universe is seen as a marvelous technical accomplishment and
if it is made there must be an explanation of how it is made and the
whole history of Western thought has in many ways been an attempt to discover
how the Creator did it what were the principles what were the laws laid down
what in other words was the blueprint that underlies this creation and this
image has therefore persisted throughout Western history and continues on into a
time when very many people do not believe in Christianity or Judaism or
Islam they are you might say agnostics or atheists but they still carry on
something of this idea of the world as an artifact if you are a Christian or a
Jew you believe that the world is the artifact the creation of the intelligent
spirit called God but if in this culture you are an atheist or an agnostic you
believe that the world is an automatic machine without a creator something
which made itself we might say then that our original model of the universe was
the ceramic model and the Bible is full of references to God as the putter who
makes the world out of obedient clay but when Western thinkers in the 18th
century began to drop the idea of a personal God they kept the idea of the
artifact and so we could say that after the ceramic model of the universe we got
the fully automatic model and still you see underlying our way of thinking about
things is the question how are they put together and if you want to find out one
of the obvious where is to proceed is to take them to pieces
everybody knows that if you want to find out how something is made you unscrew
the parts and see what the secret is inside the box and so Western science in
its beginnings took everything apart it took animals apart it took flowers
apart it took rocks apart and then when they
got it reduced to its tiniest pieces they tried to find methods of taking
those apart too so that we could eventually discover what the very
smallest small things were and so know what building blocks the creator or the
fully automatic model used in order to put it all together hoping that that
would lead us to an understanding of how life works man himself in all this was
looked upon as a creation something made only there was some difficulties about
this because if you believe in the world in accordance with the idea of the fully
automatic model you've really got to admit that man too is fully automatic in
other words he's a machine rather than a person man is something in other words
that says Duff sits hat to you and says how do you do I'm a person I'm alive I'm
sensible I talk I have feelings but you wonder do you really where are you just
an automaton am i real or am I just an automaton the general result of the
Western image of man hasn't been quite that what it's come down to under the
dispensation of the fully automatic model is this we are living beings we're
very sensitive and inside the human skin by an extraordinary fluke of nature
there has arisen something called reason and there have also arisen values such
as love but this was a fluke because it happened inside a fully automatic
universe which is stupid because it's merely automatic you won't
in other words find anything really intelligent outside human skins and
therefore if that is so the only thing that people can do if they want to
maintain reason and love in this universe is to fight nature and beat the
stupid external world into submission to the human will and so the war against
nature is the great project thus far of Western technology because you see each
one of us because we have inherited from thousands of years of history a view of
man as something made and almost of a a sort of breath breathed into a pot of
clay or an image of clay a kind of each one feels himself as a globule of
consciousness or mind living inside a vehicle called my body and since the
world outside that body is stupid we feel estranged from the world when we
find out how enormous the universe is that makes us as individuals feel
extremely unimportant and rather lonely
because you see we consider ourselves our basic image of ourselves is our soul
or an ego or a mind all by itself in its little house looking out at a world that
is strange and that is not me I am there for a brief interval of consciousness
between the darkness and the darkness and that isn't too
happy I would like to be able to believe that it was more than that if I could so
many of us say if I could only still believe that there is an intelligent and
eternal God in whose eyes I am important and who has the power to enable me to
live forever that would be very nice but for many people that's an extraordinary
difficult thing to believe now I want to contrast this image of the world with
another what I call the dramatic image as distinct from the image of the Potter
or the ceramic image and this will be the presiding image of Hinduism their
idea is this that God didn't make the world like a technologist but he acted
it that is to say every person and everything for that matter every tree
every flower every animal every star every Rock every grain of dust is a role
or part which the Godhead is playing you must understand of course that the Hindu
image of God is a little bit different from the Jewish the Christian and the
Islamic when I was a boy little boy I used to ask my mother interminable
questions and when she got sick of it she said my dear there are some things
in this life that we are just not meant to know well I said will we ever know
she said yes if you die and then go to heaven God will explain it all and so I
used to hope that on wet afternoons in heaven we would all be able to sit round
the throne of grace and say to the Lord why did you do this and why did you do
that and he would explain every child in the West asks his mother how was I
and nobody knows but they know that perhaps somebody does and that'll be God
and he'll be able to explain likewise if anybody gets mentally
deranged and claims to be God we always humor such people by saying by
asking them technical questions how did you make the world in six days or if you
are God why couldn't you change this plate into a rabbit
but that is because in our popular image of God God is the supreme technocrat he
knows all the answers he understands everything in detail and could tell you
all about it but the Hindus don't think of God that way if you ask the Hindu god
how did you create the human body he would say look I know how I did it
but it can't be explained in words because words are too clumsy in words I
have to talk about things slowly I have to string them out because words run in
a line and lines add up to books and books add up to libraries and if I
explain to you how I made the human organism it would take all eternity for
me to tell you unfortunately for me I don't have to understand things in words
in order to make them happen nor do you you don't have to understand in words
how you breathe you just breathe you don't have to understand in words how to
grow your hair how to shape your bones how to make your eyes blue or brown you
just do it and somebody who does understand to some extent maybe a
physiologist he can't do it any better than you can
so that you see is the Hindu idea of divine omnipotence and that is why there
are images of the gods very often have many arms you'll often see the god Shiva
with ten arms or the Buddhist Avalokitesvara with 1000 arms and that
is because there are image of the divine is a sort of centipede a centipede can
move a hundred legs without having to think about it so Shiva can move ten
arms there dexterously without having to think about it and you know what
happened to the centipede when it stopped to think how to move 100 legs it
got all balled up so in this way the Hindus do not think of God as being a
technician in the sense of having a verbal or mathematical understanding of
how the world is created it's done in a simpler way just like that only if we
had to describe this simple way in words it would be very complicated but God in
their idea doesn't need to do so but the remarkable difference is that the Hindu
doesn't see any fundamental division between God and the world the world is
God at play the world is God acting now how could you possibly arrive at such an
idea very simply when he tries to think why there is a world at all because if
you think about it it is extraordinarily odd that there is anything it would have
been much simpler and required a great deal less energy father it'll be nothing
but here it is and why well what would you do if you were God now let me put it
in a simple way supposing that every night you could
dream any dream you wanted to dream what would you do
well first of all I'm quite sure that most of us would dream all the marvelous
things we wanted to happen we would fulfill all our wishes and we might go
on that way for months besides you could make it
extraordinarily rich by wishing to dream 75 years in one night
full of glorious happenings but after you are done that for a few months you
might begin to get a little tired of it and you would say what about an
adventure tonight in which something terribly exciting and rather dangerous
is going to happen but I'll know I'm dreaming so it won't be too bad and I'll
wake up if it gets too too serious so you do that for a while you rescue
princesses is in distress from dragons and all sorts of things and then when
you've done that to some time you say now let's go out a bit further let's
forget it's a dream and have a real thrill whoo but you know you wake up and
then you get after you've done that for a while you get more and more nerve
until you sort of dare yourself as to how far out you can get and you end up
dreaming the sort of life you're living now
now I have why would the baddest one do that why would one do that the reason
the Hindu would say is that the basic pulse of life the basic motivation of
existence is what we call the game of hide-and-seek now you see it now you
don't you see everything's based on that because all life is vibration pulsing
light is a pulsation of light darkness sound is a pulsation of sound silence
everything is going 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 for example you can't have here without there because if you didn't
know where there was you wouldn't know we're here was you can't have is without
isn't because you don't know what you mean by ears 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 brahmanas they call it said at
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 who that was a relief and then after a rest
period in which everything is of course a peace 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 four million three hundred and twenty
thousand years a period called a cow per ka l pa in sanskrit and then the sikh
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 four million three hundred and twenty thousand 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 that
there's 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 in 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 and so the Hindus feel that behind
the scene that is to say in reality under the surface you are all the actor
but behind the scenes in the green room you might say in the very back of your
mind and 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
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 but there's
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 in 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 into 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 1/3 of the time the forces of the light side for 2/3 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 you case let's suppose this isn't a
lecture tonight but a show and you 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 scenes here
there are real people like you but they so that you don't see them that
they're going to put on their costumes and their makeup and then they're going
to come out and 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 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 would 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 that is a 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 para sona 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 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 forgotten that and so Harry Emerson Fosdick could write
a book called how to be a real person which you've 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 you think you're the person you've been taken in by your own role you're
enrolled you'll be witched spellbound and chanted 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're acting some kind of an on play which doesn't have any
story but all fundamental stories start out with the status quo where everybody
is 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 the villain and play the dark
side and then the hero plays against him if you want if you go to the theatre 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 but 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 in 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
and so 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 and 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 hint edgy danke 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 if 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 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 fundamental question 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
thought 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 Atman eighty ma
n is what there is it's the works it's the which that which
there is no which er the root and ground of the universe and of reality the next
problem that this 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 the Hindi
in the Christian tradition you have to attribute evil to something else besides
God their 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 oh man there was a
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 for good and the evil for the
reasons that I explained to you you have to have the evil father 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
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 and say
well if 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 2/3 what sort of a game do you want
anyway you will find out you see that all good games games that are worth
playing and that arouse our interest are constructed like this if you have the
good in 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 the 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 go to mate
in 16 moves and nothing could be done about it they abandoned 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 I'm really serious danger of
losing but managers 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 that 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's going to get them out of the difficulty only he
mustn't do it too obviously because he 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 them that this our 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 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 that Christian Hebrew Islamic view that you can't admit
the Hindu view because if you're a Christian you the one thing you cannot
believe if that's if you say you're at all Orthodox you're a 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 - no no because is 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 was indeed God in the flesh all right 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 that 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 he are 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 are 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 pre-eminently the gamblers religion
imagine you know at some great casino late at night there is some marvelous
master gambler who's 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 Christians
extraordinary reckless gamble this is that's a beautiful game if 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 now you would say perhaps yeah you ought to
be involved give your whole self to this make an act of commitment you know once
to every man a nation comes the moment to decide in the strife tricks truth and
falsehood for the good or evil side then it is the brave man chooses well a
coward stands aside etc that sounds great isn't it commitment
stand up and be counted it is a virtue but on the other hand you see another
virtue what we call being a good sport
if your enemy in the battle of life is to be regarded as an absolute M&E who is
pure evil black as black could be can't be a good sport you can accord him
no chivalry no honors of battle you've got to annihilate him by any
means possible fair or foul and that leads to some pretty sticky situations
especially when he has the means of annihilating you in just the same way
but if on the other hand in all contests you know that while you're going to take
it seriously and regard it is very important in the back of your mind and
that little hint again anchor 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 is live you mean life is nothing but a game the
Hindus indeed call the creation of the universe The Leela 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 illusion
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
you
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