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And so, in turn, you are some kind of a little wiggle in some other sort of stream which constitutes a larger organism yet. But, really and truly, this tremendous network doesn’t have any separate parts. It’s not like a machine.
A machine is a lot of separate parts that are put together, whereas this is different. The parts of this network don’t come into it from outside. I mean, when you drive your car up to the shop and you want a new carburetor or something, they pull the old one out and they take another one off the shelf and jam it in.
So it comes off the shelf into the car. But in this network of life that we live in things don’t come in from outside. Everything that comes into it comes from inside—which is a giveaway that the whole thing is really one process, and it’s all a game.
Because… in the sense that it has no other object than doing what it’s doing. That’s the fun of it. But it plays, you see, parts.
It varies itself. And in playing—playing always involves a certain element of make-believe, that is to say, illusion. And the word “illusion” is from the Latin ludere: “to play.” It involves the illusion of the parts being separate.
And so, then, there are these variety of games: the tree game, the beetle game, the butterfly game, the bird game, the cat game, the people game, the human game. And if you will look on all these things as differentiated in the same way as chess and backgammon and football and hockey and polo are, as rhumba, waltz, twist, minuet, or again as concerto, partita, fugue, sonata, you will begin to see that it’s a perfectly reasonable attitude to look at the world as a game system. Now, you see, we’ve been looking at the fundamental games of what we call physical and biological entities or events.
But over and above those we have the social institutions: the subdivisions of the human game. Now, then, the social institution is of many kinds. It’s not simply things like marriage and the family, the various forms of government, the institutions of the government (like the public health department).
It’s not just things like hospitals, and banks, and business corporations. It’s not even money—only, that’s a social institution. So are all our weights and measures, our systems of timing; our clocks.
And, you see, what makes these things social institutions is that they are, in another sense, conventions: things that we agree upon. From the Latin convenere: to come together. We come together in agreement about where the equator is and where longitude zero is.
And by agreeing about these things we can order our lives, order our communal intercourse. I have sometimes mentioned the Buddhist and—well, they’re mainly Buddhist—divinities who you see guarding temple gates. And they’re called the heavenly kings, and they’re always very fierce, and they carry weapons.
And they are the guardians of the ten directions. In Buddhist philosophy there are ten directions: the eight points of the compass and up and down. And it’s terribly important to keep the ten directions clear, because if I’m not clear about it I could never meet you at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.
So I wouldn’t meet you at all, I could never have a date, without knowing the ten directions. And so these dharma kings are the cosmic traffic cops, and they’re keeping everything straight so that everybody can know where they are. So these are the guardians of the social institutions.
The agreements we have to make about money, and language, and law. And also about certain values. Some of these values vary startlingly, but they are still social institutions.
Did you realize pain is a social institution? In some cultures, like ours, it’s very unpleasant to go to the dentist. But there are cultures in which dentistry is no problem at all, but on the other hand, they have extreme pain when their fingernails are cut or their hair is cut.
We are very largely talked into pain in extreme childhood. And it varies enormously as to what may be considered painful, and I think it’s not only human beings who do this, but animals do. Experimentation with hypnosis shows that pain is an extremely relative thing.
Maybe you have to have some pain, but where you have it is very, very variable. Also, we know, too, that social institutions govern what we notice. An American male pays relatively little attention to the back of a girl’s neck.
And it’s perfectly okay for her to grow her hair down long and cover it. But to a Japanese, the back of a girl’s neck is the most exciting sexual feature. And so, when you see a well-dressed Japanese girl, her kimono hangs a little bit down the back, like this, exposing her neck.
They pay no attention, though, to breasts—which seem to so fascinate the American male. It just doesn’t seem to appear. And the way that a traditional Japanese woman clothes herself is exposing the neck but looking very flat in front and not at all showing the hips.
She is willowy. She doesn’t look very willowy underneath, as a rule, but she does when dressed in a kimono. So, you see, it isn’t just that nature has built into the human organism certain attractive features about other people.
It’s the social institution of what is to be attractive. And, of course, this comes out very, very strongly in the vagaries of fashion, and how to do one’s hair, paint one’s face, et cetera, et cetera. But now, social institutions go a great deal deeper than anything we’ve mentioned.
And the most important kind of social institution is that which has to do with role-playing: who you are. Now, when we ask the question “Who are you?” people think of this question in two different ways. One person, when asked “Who are you?” will answer, “I’m a doctor.” Another person will fall silent because he realizes how profound the question is.
He realizes that he’s been asked what his ego is. But a lot of people don’t realize that when they are asked, “Who are you?” I noticed just a little bit of difficulty in my investigations of discussing identity with people; that they fix on their role and use that to describe their identity: their name, their family, their place in society, what they do, what their hobbies are, and so on—all these are roles. And then, also, there is the role of character-playing.
All people are more or less taught to act. We’re all hams from the beginning. And we were schooled in acting in our childhood, although it wasn’t called that.
It was called education, it was called upbringing. But a great deal of it is schooling in acting. And you very soon learn, as a child—from your peers and from your parents—what acts are appropriate and what are not.
It is the concern of all parents that their child learns a role in life and has an identity by which the child can be recognized. It would be extraordinarily disconcerting, wouldn’t it, if a child had one personality one day and another the next. But children can do that.
Don’t you remember, as a child, that you were many different personalities depending on your environment? That you were one person at home with your parents, you were quite a different person out alone with other children. Then, when you went to visit your uncle and aunt, you were somebody else altogether.
And so on. And finally, the whole trend of education is to shake all this down and make you more or less constant in every sort of social environment that you enter so that everybody knows who you are. Otherwise it’s disconcerting, you see?
So we are made to believe that we have a real self—that is to say, somebody who we really are, and whom we have to find. To find yourself, to settle down, to grow up, you see, means to fit into a role. And there are a lot of people, you see, who are troubled in our society, and who seem to be misfits and are terribly unhappy, because they just can’t find the role that they’re supposed to fit.
They don’t know who they are. There is an inner pandemonium and conflict. But it’s obvious—isn’t it?—that the role you play is a social institution.
Because you can’t be an object to your own consciousness—at least not in the ordinary way. You are a subject, from your own point of view. And you can only become an object to the extent that you adopt the attitudes that other people take towards you.
Other people, from the beginning of life, are mirrors. And by the way they respond to you, you begin to learn what they think of you, and therefore, who you are. We all tell each other who we are.
And so the role we play, the identity that we have in that sense, is a social institution. But going further, there is the ego itself. There is this feeling that, inside us, there is an I-center which receives experience and directs action.
And this is the inmost myself. And we have all, of course, been taught in this day and age that if this is not our soul, it is a function of our body; it is a chemical efflorescence of the brain—the feeling of “I.” Now, as I have told many of you before in various ways, this sensation of being a separate “I” cut off from all other “I”s is an illusion. It’s a pure hallucination, because that is not the way we are functioning physically.
We are functioning physically not as separate entities, but as beings that live in such a close relationship with everything else that there really is no way of dividing us from it. And so, you see, the mystic in all times and places discovers the illusory nature of this ego, and realizes with a glorious shock that the true “I, myself”—the thing that one really is, fundamentally—is the entire game; the works. Some people call it God, or Brahman, or the Tao, or whatever you want.
The name doesn’t make the slightest difference. Fundamentally, what you are is the which than which there is no whicher. And so, relax!
Don’t worry! Because, you see, this doesn’t ordinarily come into consciousness in just the same way that the structure of your brain doesn’t ordinarily come into consciousness. It’s very much there, but you don’t see it directly and you have no memory of it.
So, in the same way, you have no memory of being the which than which there is no whicher. But there’s no need to have a memory of that! Because the thing doesn’t need a memory.
Memories are only necessary for creatures that have to defend themselves and creatures that have problems; they need memories. But the perfectly, gloriously happy person wouldn’t remember anything, because every experience would be completely satisfactory. All memory is really a form of regurgitation of undigested experience.
But, you see, don’t forget (as we all know): memory can be fun. And so can burping. But memory isn’t necessary for the whole thing, except in certain brief forms of memory, where the continuance of anything at all—you see, of any particular form—is a sort of memory in the sense that it’s a repeated gyration of certain physical vibrations.
But it’s possible, you see, to wake up and realize that your ego is a game, and that what we call the necessity for survival is also a game. But society is playing a very, very weird game, the first rule of which is: this game is not a game. This game is serious.
And so the great, great social institutions that we inherit from the past, like the church, are places to be serious. I don’t think there ever was a jester in church. Of course, the church formed itself around a particular jester who couldn’t be stood and so had to be crucified; he was just too much.
But the whole attitude, you see, of the church is that you are standing in the presence of the most serious God the Father, who really is in earnest and no fooling, you see? And everybody has to keep a straight face. And so, also, in the court of law.
In our excessively serious society I was giving evidence not so long ago, and the two defendants were smiling at each other. And the judge suddenly rapped his gavel and said, “You young men ought to realize that you’re on trial for a very serious crime, and it’s no joking matter. And I want to see proper behavior and conduct in this court.” And the attorney stood up and said, “Your honor, this is the first time they’ve ever been on trial and they’re not used to these things.” And he said, “Well, it’s about time they learned!” So, you see, the thing is that the game—there’s always the fear, the underlying fear, that the game may be given away.
Now, that fear isn’t altogether unreasonable. Because part of the fascination of games is that it’s to get involved and, in a way, to forget that they are games. The actor on the stage does his damnedest to persuade you that he is moving in the real world.
And children love to get completely absorbed in their games and get the actual thrill of adventure in playing at war and so on. And, you see, one reason why people don’t really want to know the future—why a really expert fortune teller gives most people a little bit of trepidation—is that, if you know what the future’s going to be, it is less worthwhile going ahead towards it. If you know the outcome, why bother?
See, this is one of the ways we’re trying to stop war. The Rand Corporation is trying to make computer systems that, at any immediate future date, can predict the outcome of a war so that it won’t be necessary to fight it. “If we did fight, this would happen.” So the winner claims the diplomatic advantage, and we go on.
So this is the reason, you see, why we don’t want to know that the game is only a game. Now, if we can make believe that the game is real—whatever that means; we’re not very clear about that—but somehow we know what it means in our bones, if we don’t know very well in our heads what is for real. And we’re always testing things out.
What is for real? But when the whole world game becomes too real and people become too earnest, it’s highly necessary to play a new game, which is the game of game against non-game. How far can you get away with giving the show away about the game?
Nobody really wants to go the whole hog until you’re ready for final nirvāṇa. You know? Then you give the show away so far as you’re concerned, and that’s it.
But in the meantime, the fascination of seeing how to put together knowing it’s a game and still playing it. And doing this is what, in Mahayana Buddhism, is called being a bodhisattva. A bodhisattva is a person who doesn’t give his show away completely.
He doesn’t simply release his consciousness from playing the human game. He is released and yet still in it. He knows the human game is the game, but he goes on playing it with considerable gusto.
And his gusto derives in a great deal from the fact of knowing it’s a game. You see, you can do that, and it’s one of the peculiar properties of self-consciousness: to be able to know it’s a game and yet enjoy doing it. It’s like being happy and knowing you’re happy.
Now, a lot of people are afraid of that. They feel that, if the moment they say, “Well, I’m happy,” that it’ll somehow stop. That it’ll be like being too conscious of digesting your food.
There is a point there where enjoying dinner very slowly merges into disgust. But it needn’t be like that. The real gourmet never gets into that bind.
And so, in the same way, doing something—being happy and knowing that you’re happy—has about it a certain quality of what I would call resonance. For example, if I talk in a room which is completely soundproofed, it’s terrible. I can’t stand it.
There’s no resonance. No little tiny echo. I feel I’m talking into the proverbial wet blanket.
But if there’s a little resonance, if there’s a feedback, you see, that makes the thing vibrate a bit more than it ordinarily would. So one gets feedback from an audience. And it’s much easier to talk to an audience than it is to a microphone.
Because there’s feedback. And so consciousness is feedback. So, for that reason, your voice sounds better when you’re singing in the bathtub than it does when you’re singing out in an open room: because you get resonance.
And so we put resonators—say, a guitar or a violin has a sounding box in it. That’s a resonator, to make it echo a bit. And so great churches at one time—or still are—built by acoustic experts, and so are concert halls, to give them the proper resonance.
But when resonance gets too much, you know, it starts chattering. It gets a system of echoes set up. And some of the old cathedrals which weren’t built with acoustical knowledge, you can hear the echoes of a choir going on for ever and ever and ever.
It sounds very marvelous from a certain point of view, but it’s not from a musical point of view. It’s a kind of a… it’s more sentimental. And we used to, even, be taught to sing in church with an echo technique in the voice.
So that, even if you weren’t in a great cathedral with its echoes, you’d slightly sound as if you were. Isn’t that trickery for you? That’s real showbiz!
So to play the game and to know it’s a game can be quite fascinating. And not really giving the show away, but giving it away enough, somehow. And that, you see, is the joker’s function.
So what he’s doing, then, is: he is in a point of view where he sees all that is going on as a game. He doesn’t take anything seriously. But don’t forget that that doesn’t mean that he is simply shallow and frivolous.
Because, for example, if somebody were to say to me, “I love you,” and I turned to them and said, “Are you serious?” she might say, “No. I’m sincere.” Because love isn’t necessarily serious. You see, we use the word “serious” very frequently where we should be using the word “sincere.” And the lack of proper delineation between these two words causes a great deal of confusion.
It’s like the confusion about the word “must.” “You must do this.” Whether it’s a commandment or whether it’s a condition, a state of affairs that simply is so. And so, in the same way, we need a clarification of “must” and we need a clarification of “serious.” And it can be divided down into serious on the one hand, or sincere on the other. What is sincerity?
Sincerity is being integrated, being all of a piece. Now, you see, we often think that the person who doesn’t take life seriously isn’t all of a piece. That is to say, his heart’s not really in it.
He is out here living, you see, and going along, and talking to people. But the feeling is, of an insincere person, there’s something in the back of his mind that isn’t participating. That’s what worries people about actors.
Are they acting in real life? Are they still playing the part? Is this person I’m introduced to as Charlie Chaplin the same man as or different from the funny little man with the Derby hat?
And so, actors occasionally bother and bug people. And people may be apt to say, “Well, they’re always on the stage. They’re never really genuine.” And we have a feeling, you know, when you know when somebody is being genuine.
See? But mark it: when you know somebody is being genuine, they are not necessarily being serious. They’re not necessarily being grave or solemn.
What I want to give the idea of is sincere laughter. And also sincere play. There is a perfectly sincere laughter.
And it may be—ideally, I mean, the sincere laughter expresses a spirit of irrepressible gaiety. And it is not, in other words, a defense mechanism. Laughter is often a defense mechanism—what we call a nervous laugh.
Or laughing someone to scorn can very often be a forced laugh that isn’t really funny at all. But the real laugh is, of course, the resolution of anxiety. See, anxiety is serious.
And anxiety is a state of palpitation; of the trembles. Anxiety comes upon us when we cannot decide which way to go or which way things are going to go. And so we tremble between alternatives.
Because, of course, we tremble between alternatives because we are under the illusion that it matters very much which of these two things happens. Now, once one has seen the nature of the game, you realize that it matters superficially which of these two things happens, but it doesn’t fundamentally matter because all negative things pair with positives. There is no positive without negative, and there is no negative without positive.
I heard a very amusing story which kind of goes with these rugs. The question is, is a zebra a yellow horse with black stripes or a black horse with yellow stripes? The answer is: it is an invisible horse which has been striped yellow and black so that people won’t bump into it.
Now, in a similar way, reality is an invisible state of affairs beyond all description and thought, but it has been striped black and white so as to be seen. And this is life and death, up and down, sound and silence—the whole vibratory character of being. And the fundamental game that the universe is playing is to forget that this is so.
You see, what you might say in theological language: the invisibility of God is his self-forgetfulness. And the visibility of the world is the game being played. Now, the nature of the game—I think I’ve told some of you this before, but I see some I haven’t—the nature of the game is: let us pretend that the positive and the negative are not really identical.
You see, they’re explicitly different but implicitly the same, because they always go around together. And that reveals a hidden, implicit conspiracy between black and white, and the truth is you can’t have one without the other. But if we can pretend that they don’t go together, that they are actually enemies, then we can have all sorts of games.
The first game of which is: oh dear, black might win! The next game is: but white must win! And from that position you can develop all the games you want.
And it’s interesting, isn’t it, how so many of our table games—like chess and dominoes and checkers and so on—use the black and white pieces. And you can find, in the conventions of chess—one could discuss all this problem in terms of chess. Now, to revise a little bit about this morning’s talk so that we’re all up to date: I have been discussing the role of a certain person called the joker.
The joker being the one who has insight into the fact that all our social institutions are games. The social game is played with an initial rule. The first rule being: this game is serious.
Or: this game is not a game. And therefore, there is a tendency within society to resist very strongly any notion that what it is doing is not altogether serious. And at a still deeper level, beneath the level of social institutions, there is also the recognition on the part of the joker that the basic forms of nature are also games: the human game, the rabbit game, the mouse game, the bee game, the tree game, the stone game.
Because all these are forms of a musical nature; that is to say, they are forms played for themselves. They are played in the most intimate interconnection and interrelationship with each other. But they don’t have any purpose beyond what is happening, in the same way as music and dancing.
But when people take games seriously—and part of the fun of a game, you must remember, is to take it seriously—they acquire an attitude which strikes the joker as being half funny, and sometimes a little pitiful. A good joker is inclined, really, not to laugh at people because, if a person is terribly seriously involved—in the sense of the kind of person we call, colloquially, a square—the joker feels sorry for them because they live a deprived life. But the point is that he is the one who is a wild man, which is to say he has no fixed role.
He can play, as the joker can in the deck of cards; any role. And in a way, in that sense, all of us are roles of the joker. Because the real joker—of whom any human joker is a manifestation—the real joker is Brahman, is the ultimate player of the game, the divine ground of the universe.
So, then, if you look upon the world as play—as what the Hindus call the Viṣṇu līlā. Viṣṇu being one of the names of God, and līlā meaning “sport” or “play,” from which we get our word “lilt.” Then Viṣṇu or Brahman is the big joker, and anyone who realizes this is the little joker. And the art of the joker is very paradoxical because it is to give the show away that it is a game, and yet keep the show going on.
There is something about a joker of a “now you see it, now you don’t” character, so that even when, somehow, you find in studying all these Hindu and Buddhist texts, that when they’re discussing one’s awakening to the very final secret, somehow there is the feeling of… well, what did we get? Because you step into a new dimension. You see from the standpoint of this sort of awakening that, really and truly, you were awakened all the time.
So from that standpoint, you see, everybody is seen to be a perfect manifestation of the godhead—or of the void; whatever you want to call it. Everybody. And even though the very fact that they don’t know it, and that they’re unhappy, that they quarrel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is still a manifestation of this.
The whole thing is seen like this. Just as I was discussing the balances of a garden, in which the birds eating the worms and the snails eating the lettuce—all these processes of conflict build up the ongoing miracle of the garden itself. So, in the same way, things that you see in yourself as neuroses, as forms of ill health, as things that you shouldn’t be, they are your slugs and worms.
And there is nothing at all in your whole being that’s unnatural. All of it is an integral part of the game. And if you weren’t as awful as you are, you might be creating very serious trouble.
Now, I don’t want to say that so that you can say, in turn, “Well, let me be more awful still.” You know, St. Paul got all tangled up in this. He, having explained that without sin there could be no grace, he said, “Shall we then sin, that grace may abound?” And—he’s Greek, you know—mythi genito; “Heaven forbid!” But this is, of course, a problem that simply has to be faced: that the universe in its grand design has nothing special to do with morality, or rather, no more special connection with morality than with anything else. Morality is a part of the universe.
It’s a way of playing the human game. But the thing itself is really beyond good and evil. Now, as I see it, that’s the way it is, whether one likes it or not.
It’s always still up to you how you want to behave. If we try to get people to behave decently by scaring them and saying that, if they don’t behave decently, they’ll be out of sorts with God—this doesn’t help at all. Because it merely inculcates a new kind of fear and a new kind of false basis for morality.
One can only be moral because you like to do it that way. There really is no other reason whatsoever, and to try and find other reasons always perverts morality. In just the same way, the powers of the universe—the power of fire, the power of electricity, the power of steel—they are neither good nor evil.
You can use either one for the blessing of people or for their destruction. And so the truth itself—I mean, the foundation reality of the world—is something like that. Although it does have this certain edge to it.
And so does all human activity. And the edge is something like this. Those powers that we call positive are always in a process of overcoming those that we call negative.
It’s the nature of the positive to win and the nature of the negative to lose. But win and lose always go together. Nobody wins unless somebody loses, nobody loses unless somebody wins.
Their relationship is transactional in the same way as buying and selling. But if it were the other way around—you see, if the negative were always in the situation of overcoming the positive—you would get a universe that would not be a continuing game. It would be 100 percent tragedy.