This tape comes from MEA, Box 303, Sausalito, California, 94965. Now Alan Watts. Now as announced, the subject of this seminar is Hinduism and Christianity. And I'm going to make a comparison between these two entities, treating them primarily as mythologies. And I want to start out by explaining quite carefully what I mean by mythology. The word is very largely used today to mean fantasy, or something that is definitely not fact, and it's used therefore in a pejorative or put-down sense, so that when you call something a mythology or a myth, it means you don't think much of it.

[01:03]

But the word is used by philosophers and scholars in quite another sense, where to speak in the language of myth is to speak in images, rather than to speak in what you might call plain language, or the language of fact, descriptive language. You can sometimes say more things with images than you can say with concepts. As a matter of fact, images are really at the root of thinking. One of the basic ways in which we think is by analogy. We say a certain thing is, say, we think of the life of human beings might be compared to the seasons of the year. Now, there are many important differences between a human life and the cycle of the

[02:06]

seasons, but nevertheless, one talks about the winter of life or the spring of life, and so the image becomes something that is powerful in our thinking. Furthermore, when we try to think philosophically and think in abstract concepts about the nature of the universe, we often do some very weird things. You see, it's considered nowadays naive to think of God as an old gentleman with a long white beard who sits on a golden throne and is surrounded with winged angels. And we say now, no sensible person could possibly believe that God is just like that. Therefore, if you get more sophisticated, you believe that God is, say, if you follow St. Thomas Aquinas, you think of God as necessary being. Or if you think with Buddhists, you think of God as the undifferentiated void, or as

[03:12]

the infinite essence. But actually, however rarefied those concepts sound, they are just as anthropomorphic, that is to say, just as human and in the form of the human mind, as the picture of God as the old gentleman with the white beard or Delord in green pastures wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar. Because all ideas about the world, whether they be religious, philosophical or scientific, are translations of the physical world and of worlds beyond the physical into the terms and shapes of the human mind. So there is no such thing as a non-anthropomorphic idea. The advantage of Delord in talking about these things is that nobody takes it quite seriously, whereas the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum could be taken seriously.

[04:15]

And that would be a great mistake, because you would think you understood what the ultimate reality is. So I'm going to use very largely naive mythological terms to discuss these matters. And if you are a devout Christian, you mustn't be offended by this, because you will naturally think that you have risen now to a more superior idea of these things than these very simple terms derived from the imagery of the Bible and of the medieval church. But I shall discuss Hinduism in the same way. And I'm going to begin with Hinduism to give you a sort of fundamental account of what it's all about. I imagine some of you were present at the lecture I gave in the university on religion and art. And I discussed the view of the world as drama. Now, I want to go more thoroughly into this, because the Hindu view of the universe is fundamentally

[05:22]

based on the idea of drama. That is to say, of an actor playing parts. The basic actor in this drama is called Brahma. And this word comes from the Sanskrit root br, which means to swell or expand. And the Hindu idea of Brahma, the supreme being, is linked with the idea of the self. In you, deep down, you feel that there is what you call I. And this word, when you say I am, that in Sanskrit is aham, A-H-A-M.

[06:22]

And everybody, when asked what his name is, replies, I am I. I am I myself. And so there is the thought that in all life the self is the fundamental thing. It means the center. And so the Brahma is looked upon as the self and center of the whole universe. And the idea fundamentally is that there is only one self. And each one of us is that self. Only it radiates like a sun or a star. And just as the sun has innumerable rays, or just as you can focus the whole sun through a magnifying glass and concentrate it on one point, or as an octopus has many tentacles, or as a sow has many tits. So in this way, Brahma is wearing all faces that exist and they are all the masks of Brahma.

[07:29]

Not only human faces, but animal faces, insect faces, vegetable faces, and mineral faces. Everything that there is, is the Supreme Self playing at being that. Because the fundamental process of reality is according to the Hindu myth, hide and seek. That or lost and found, that is the basis of all games. And it's true, isn't it, that when you start to play with a baby, and you take out the book and you hide your face behind it, and then you peek out at the baby, and then you peek out this way, the baby begins to giggle. Because the baby, being near to the origins of things, knows intuitively that hide and seek is the basis of it all. And children like to get on, they sit in a high chair, or they have something on the tray, and make it gone. And then somebody picks it up and puts it back, and they make it gone again, you see. Now then, that's a very sensible arrangement. It is called, in Sanskrit, it is called Leela.

[08:34]

And that means sport or play, but the play is hide and seek. Now let's go a little bit into the nature of hide and seek, because don't let me insult your intelligence by telling you some of the most elementary things that exist. Really everything is a question of appearing and disappearing. For example, if I sit next to a beautiful girl and I put my hand on her knee and leave it there, after a while she'll cease to notice it. But if I gently pat her on the knee, because now I'm there and now I'm not, it will be even more noticeable. So all reality is a matter of coming and going. It is vibration, it is the waves of positive and negative electricity, it's up and down. And things like wood appear to be solid, because in much the same way that the blade of a fast moving electric fan appears to be solid.

[09:36]

So the vast agitation that is going on in the electrical structure of solid things is a terrific agitation, which will not allow the agitation called my hand to go through it. Other kinds of agitation, like x-rays, are so constructed that they can get through. So everything is basically coming and going. For example, sound. If you listen to sound and slow the sound down, in the same way, you see, you can slow sound down in the same way as you can use a magnifying glass to look at the structure of something visible. And as when you look at the magnifying glass, you find that solid things are full of holes, so when you magnify sound, you find it's full of silences. Sound is sound hyphen silence. There is no such thing as pure sound, just as there is no such thing as pure something. Something always goes together with nothing. Solids are always found in spaces, and no spaces are found except where there are solids.

[10:41]

You might imagine there being a space without any solid in it, but you will never, never encounter one, because you will be there in the form of a solid to find out about it. You see, they go together, these things. The solid in the space, the positive and the negative, the here we are and here we aren't, go together in the same way as the back and front of a coin. And you can't have a coin that has a back and no front. The only thing that gets anywhere near that is a Mobius strip, which is a mathematical conceit in which the back and the front are the same, but that only shows in a more vivid way how backs and fronts go together. Now so the whole thing is based on that, you see. Now once we've got this game, that there are two different things, but they're really the same. See, the Brahma is what is basic, but the Brahma manifests itself in what are called the Dvandva, and that means the pairs of opposites, duality.

[11:49]

Dva, you see, is the Sanskrit word for two, which becomes duo in Latin and duel in English. Two is the basis, you can't go behind two, because one has an opposite. The opposite of one is none. Now what is in common between one and none? No one can say. You can't mention it. It's called Brahma. It's sometimes called Om, O-M. But you can't really think of what is in common between black and white. There is obviously a conspiracy between black and white, because they're always found together. Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle. See, there's always an agreement underlying this difference. But that is what we call implicit. The difference is explicit. So the first step in what you might call the hide phase of the game of hide and seek is to lose sight of the implicit unity between black and white, between yes and no, between

[13:00]

existence and non-existence. And that losing sight of the fundamental unity is called maya. Maya, a word that means many things, but primarily it means creative power or magic, and also illusion. The illusion that the opposites are really separate from each other. And once you could think that they are really separated from each other, you can have a very thrilling game. The game is, oh dear, black might win, or we must be quite sure that white wins. Now which one ought to win? Sometimes when you look at this, you would say, or this, the reality here is the writing.

[14:05]

That is what is significant. And yet there are many patterns that one can have when you're undecided in your mind as to what is the figure and what is the background. It could be a black design on a white sheet, or it could be a white design on a black sheet. And the universe is very much like that. Space or the background of things isn't nothing. But people tend to be deceived about this. If I draw that, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say that I have drawn a circle or a disc or a ball. Very few people will ever suggest that I've drawn a hole in a wall. Because people think inside first, rather than thinking out here. But actually the two sides go together. You can't have what's in here unless you have what's out there. So all artists, all architects, all people concerned with the organization of space,

[15:09]

think quite as much about the background behind things and containing things as they do about the things so contained. It's all significant and it's all important. But the game is, let's pretend that this doesn't exist. So that's the pretending, oh black might win, or oh white might win. And so you see that is the foundation of all the great games that human beings play. Of checkers, of chess, and of the simple children's games of hide and seek. And it's of course, you see, the tradition of chess that white gets the first move because black is the side of the devil. So all complications and all possibilities of life lie in this game of black and white. Of, you can put it in another way, in the beginning of the game, when the two pairs

[16:15]

are divided, that is to dismember, to cut, to separate. In the end of the game, when everything comes together, they are remembered. To dismember is to hide or to lose. To dismember is to seek and to find. To remember is to seek and to find. And so the Hindu mythology is this, that the Brahma plays this game through periods of time called a Kalpa, and every Kalpa is four million three hundred and twenty thousand years long. And for a Kalpa, he forgets who he is and manifests himself or pretends he acts the part of, as the great actor, of all of us. And then for another Kalpa, he wakes up, remembers who he is, and is at peace.

[17:17]

So the period in which he manifests the worlds is called a Manvantara, and the period in which he withdraws the game is called a Pralaya. And these go on and on and on forever and ever and ever. And the whole thing is that it never becomes boring, because the forgetting period makes you forget everything that's happened before, so that each time, for example, a baby comes to birth, a baby is although inheriting genes from the most distant past, the baby always confronts the world anew and is astonished and surprised at everything. But as you get old, you get heavy with memories. You get like a book that people have written on and written on and written on as if I was

[18:20]

to go on writing on this, and eventually the whole thing would become black, and I'd have to take out a white chalk and start doing it that way. Well, that would be like the change, you see, between life and death. Now in popular Hinduism, it is believed that each one of us contains not only the Supreme Self, the one ultimate reality, the Brahma, who looks out from all eyes and hears through all ears, but there's also an individualized self, and this self reincarnates from life to life in a sort of progressive way, or a regressive way, according to your karma, the Sanskrit word which means your doing. Karma from the root kri, to do. And so there is a time then, you see, in which we become involved and get more and more tied

[19:25]

up in the toils of the world, more and more subject to desire and to passions and to getting ourselves hopelessly out on the limb. Then there follows a later time when the individual is supposed to withdraw and gradually evolve until he becomes a completely enlightened man, what is called a mukti. A mukti is a liberated person who has attained the state called moksha, or liberation, where he has found himself. He knows who he is. He knows that he, deep down in himself, and that you, deep down in yourselves, are all the one central self, and that this whole apparent differentiation of the one from the other is an immense and glorious illusion. Now you see, I said at the beginning that this is a dramatic idea.

[20:33]

In drama, we have a convention of the proscenium arch and the stage, and we have a convention of on-scene and off-scene. There is the curtain or backdrop in front of which the actors appear, and behind that there's a dressing room called the green room. And in the green room, they put on and take off their masks. And in Latin, the word for the masks worn by the players in classical drama was persona. That, the Latin word per means through, sona, sound, that through which the sound comes, because the mask had a megaphone-shaped mouth which would throw the sound in an open-air theater. So dramatis personae, the list of the players in front of a play, means the list of masks

[21:38]

that are going to be worn. And insofar as we now talk about the real self in any human being as the person, are you a real person, we have inverted the meaning of the word, and we have made the mask word mean the real player underneath. That shows how deeply involved we are in the illusion. Because you see, the whole point of a play, the skill of the actor, is to persuade the audience, despite the fact that the audience knows it's a play, is to have them sitting on the edge of their chairs or weeping or in terror because they think it's real. And so, of course, the Hindu idea is that the greatest of all players, the master player behind the whole shebang who's putting on the big act called existence, is so good an actor that he takes himself in. He is at once the actor and the audience, and he is enchanted by his playing.

[22:39]

So the word maya, illusion, also means to be enchanted. You know what to be enchanted is? Is to be listening to a chant and to be completely involved in it. Or he is amazed. What is to be amazed? It is to be caught in a maze or spellbound. How do you get spellbound? What do you spell? You spell words. And so by the ideas we have about the world and through our belief in the reality of different things and events, we get completely carried away and altogether forget who we are. There is a story about a great sage, Narada, who came to Vishnu. Vishnu is one of the aspects of the Godhead, Brahma. Brahma is usually the word given to the creator aspect, Vishnu to the preserving aspect, and

[23:41]

Shiva to the destructive aspect. But when Narada came to Vishnu and said, what is the secret of your maya, Vishnu took him and threw him into a pool. And the moment he fell under the pool, he was born as a princess in a very great family and went through all the experiences of childhood and being a little girl, finally married to a prince from another kingdom, and she went to live with him in his kingdom. And they were in tremendous prosperity and palaces and peacocks and all that kind of thing. Then suddenly there was a war, and their kingdom was attacked and utterly destroyed. And the prince himself was killed in battle, and so he was cremated, and she as a dutiful wife was about to throw herself weeping on the funeral pyre and burn herself in an act of sati or self-sacrifice, when suddenly Narada awoke to find himself being pulled out of

[24:42]

the pool by his hair, and Vishnu said, for whom were you weeping? So that idea of the whole world being a magical illusion, but done so skillfully, by whom? By you, basically. Not you, the empirical ego, not you who is just a kind of focus of conscious attention with memories that are strung together into what you call my everyday self, but the you that is responsible for growing your hair, for coloring your eyes, for arranging the shape of your bones, the deeply responsible you is what is responsible for all this. And so then, there are the people who are what we'll call far out. They are far out into the illusion, and they are really lost.

[25:45]

And they are the kind of people we would call squares. They are deeply committed to the human situation. Then on opposite them are the far in people, who are in touch with the center. Now the very far out people, you see, are to be commended, because they are doing the most adventurous thing. They are as lost, they're the explorers, they're way out in the jungles, you see. But they, in a way, in all societies, in some way or other, the far out people keep in touch with the far in people. Far in people are there, they may be monks, they may be yogis, they may be priests, they may be philosophers, but they remind the far out people, after all, you're not really lost. But it's a great thrill and very brave of you to think that you are. And so, then the function is, you see, there is a far in people, some of the far in people

[26:57]

act as what is called a guru. And the function of a guru is to help you wake up from the dream when your time comes. Now, in the ordinary life of the primitive Hindu community, as you know, there are four castes. The caste of priests, the caste of warriors, the caste of merchants, and the caste of laborers. And every man who belongs to the Hindu community belongs to one of the four castes into which he is born. That seems to us rather restrictive, because if you were born the son of a university professor, you might much prefer to be a water-skiing instructor. And that would mean a shift in caste from what's called the Brahmana, because the professor

[27:58]

would, in Hindu life, come under the priestly caste. But you see, in a time when there were no schools, and everybody received his education from his father, and the father considered it a duty to educate the boys, and the mother considered it her duty to educate the girls, there was no choice of your being something else than your father. You were apprenticed to him very young. And a child, as you know, naturally takes an interest in what the parents are doing and tends to want to do it too. So it was based on that, primitive to our ideas, but still that's the way it was. But when a man attained the age of maturity, and he came to the middle of his life, and he had raised a son now old enough to take over the family business, then he abandoned caste. He became an upper outcaste, what is called a sannyasin, and he goes outside the village

[28:59]

back to the forest. So there are these two stages of life. One is called the stage of grihasta, which means householder, and vanaprastha, which means forest dweller. Back to the forest. See we came out of the forest, and we formed civilized villages. The hunters settled down and started agriculture. But that, then they formed into castes, and every man, as it were, had a function. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. But those are all parts, those are big acts. Who are you really, behind your mask? So at the middle of life, it's considered it's up to you now to find out who you are. You're going to die in a few years, but before you die, wake up from the illusion, so that you won't be afraid of death. So when you become vanaprastha, you go to a guru, and the guru teaches you yoga, which

[30:14]

is the art of waking up. You see, yoga is from the root yug, and that means to join, from which we get in Latin yungo, to join, and we get union, it's all the same word, and yoke in English. It's all the same, to join. In other words, to remember, as distinct from dismember, to find out again that our separateness is maya, is in seeming only. It is not the fundamental reality. We are all one. Now how does the guru teach you that? He does it mostly by kidding you. He has a funny look in his eye, as if to say, Brahma, old boy, you can't fool me, or the

[31:21]

person, the basic question that all gurus ask their students is, who are you? If you ask him a question like the great guru of modern times, Sri Ramana Maharshi, you know, wealthy, theosophical ladies from the United States used to go to him and say, who was I in my former incarnation? They wanted to find out. They were Cleopatra, or something like that. And he would say, who asked the question? Who is it that wants to know? Find out who you are. Well, you know, if you want to find out who you are, you get in a very funny mix-up, because it's like trying to bite your teeth. Who is it that wants to know who I am? It's like doing this, you see, if only I could catch that thing, whoops! And he, the guru, really says, by now, let's go on this, let's concentrate, you see, and

[32:22]

get that thing. So he has all these people meditating on their own essence, and all the time he's looking at them with a funny look in his eye. And they think, oh dear, that guru, he knows me through and through, he reads all my secret and impure thoughts, he realizes my desires and how badly I concentrate, and ugh! But really the guru is laughing himself silly inside, because he sees that this is the Brahma, being quite unwilling to wake up, or not really ready yet. And so suddenly there comes a shock. It's like at the moment when you realize, you see, that that thumb you were catching, oh dear, it's after all the same hand, you see. And there's a shock of recognition, suddenly you wake up, you see, of course! Now that moment, you see, is Moksha, liberation. And we call it, we have many names for it, but no very clear names, in the West.

[33:25]

We call it mystical experience, or cosmic consciousness, or something of that kind. And we find it very difficult to express in our religious language, because we would have to say at that moment, I have at last discovered that I am the Lord God. And we put people in asylums who discover that, or at least if that's the way they express it. Because that really is for us, the one sure sign of being completely out of your head. Whereas in India when somebody says, I am the Lord God, they say, well naturally, congratulations at last you found out. Well now, that is because our idea of the Lord God, as we shall see, is different from the Hindu idea. You notice that Hindu images of the divinities usually give them many arms. And that is because they are conceived as sort of cosmic centipedes.

[34:27]

Because you see, the centipede doesn't think how to use each leg. Just as you don't think how to use every nerve cell in your nervous system. They just seem to use themselves. They work automatically. Well that, everything, many things working automatically together, is the Hindu idea of omnipotence. Whereas our idea is more technical. The person in supreme control would have to know how he does every single thing. So that if you ask God, God how do you create rabbits, I mean as if he doesn't just pull them out of hats like a stage magician, but actually knows in every detail down to the last molecule or subdivision thereof, how it's done and could explain. Whereas the Hindus would say, if you ask God how do you make a rabbit, he'd say it's no

[35:31]

problem at all, I just become it. Well how do you become it? Well you just do it. Like you open your hand or close it. You just do it. You don't have to know how, in words. Because what we mean by understanding things and explaining things is being able to put them into words. And we do that first by analyzing them into many bits. In the same way, you see, when you want to measure the properties of a curve, which is complicated, you see a thing like that. In order to say how that curve is shaped, you've got to reduce it to tiny points. And measure them. So you put, say, a grid, a graph paper or something across this, and so by telling the position on the graph of where the curve is at everything, you get an accurate description

[36:31]

of what that curve is or how it is in what we would call scientific terms. That's what we mean when we talk about understanding things. But obviously there is another sense of to understand. You understand how to walk, even if you can't explain it, because you can do it. Can you drive a car? Yes. How do you drive a car? If you could put it into words, it might be easier to teach people how to do it in the first place. But one understands and learns many things about driving a car that are never explained in words. You just watch somebody else do it and you do the same thing. So, in this way then, the Hindu idea of God and the Western idea are somewhat different. And so when the Hindu realizes that he's God, and you are too, and he sees the activity and the dance of God in everybody all around him in every direction, he does not assume

[37:36]

certain things that a Western person might assume if they had the same experience. For example, you know the difference between what you do voluntarily and what happens to you involuntarily. When I see someone else at the far end of the room move, that comes to me with a signal attached to it, that experience, involuntary. When I move and I'm scratching my face, it comes to me with a signal, voluntary, tagged on it. Nevertheless, both experiences are states and changes in my nervous system. But we don't ordinarily realize that. When we see somebody else doing something, we think that's outside my nervous system. It isn't at all. It's right inside it. It's happening, you know it as a happening in your own brain.

[38:37]

Now if you should discover that that is a happening inside you, it might very well come to you with the voluntary signal attached to it. And so you would say, you'd say, I've got the feeling that I'm doing everything that everybody else is doing. Everything that I see, everything I am aware of, is my action. Now if you misunderstood that, you might think that you were able to control everything that everybody else does, and that you really were God, in that kind of technical sense of God. So you have to be careful what sort of interpretations you put on these experiences. You see, it's one thing to have an authentic experience of the stars. It's quite another thing to be able to describe accurately their relative positions. It's one thing to have an experience of cosmic consciousness or liberation, but quite another

[39:45]

thing to give a philosophically accurate account of it, or a scientifically accurate account. But at any rate, this experience is the basis of the whole Hindu philosophy. What you might say is, if I could sum it up, the nature of this experience, it is as if one comes into the world in the beginning, having what Freud called the oceanic consciousness of a baby. And a baby does not distinguish, apparently, I don't know how we know this, but lots of psychologists say so. A baby doesn't distinguish between what experiences are experiences of itself, and what experiences are experiences of the external world. Therefore it's all one. Furthermore, a baby has for a long time been part of its mother, and it's floated in the

[40:50]

ocean of the womb, and so on, and so has this sense from the beginning of what is really, to an enlightened person, totally obvious, that the universe is one single organism. Now our social way of bringing up children is to make them concentrate on the bits, and to ignore the totality. Say, we point at things, and we give them names, and we say, look at that, but children very often ask you, what are things which you realize you don't have names for them? They point out backgrounds, and the shape of spaces between things, and say, what's that? And you brush it aside, well that's not important, that doesn't have a name, you see? So you keep pointing out the significant things to them, and above all, what everybody around

[41:52]

the child does, is to tell the child who he is, and what sort of part he's expected to play, what sort of mask he must wear. So that I remember very well as a child, that I knew I had several different identities, and I'd probably have to settle for one of them, but the adult world was pushing that on me. I was one person with my parents at home, I was another person altogether at my uncle's home, I was still quite another person with my own peer group, and so it went. But what society was trying to do, was now make up your mind who you are really. So I'd imitate some other child who I admired, and I'd come home, my mother'd say, Alan, that's not you, that's Peter, and you're putting on his game. You be yourself now, see, otherwise you're somehow phony. And the point is not to be phony, to be real. Whereas this whole thing is phony, you see, it's a big act, but a marvelous act, you see,

[42:59]

and what a genuine person is, is really, is one who knows he's a big act, and does it with complete zip. He is what we would say committed, and yet he's free by becoming completely committed in knowing that the world is act, there isn't anybody doing it, like we think things stand behind processes, and things do the processes. That's just a convention of grammar, it's because you have verbs and nouns, whereas every noun, obviously, can be described by a verb. Mat, the mat, we can also say the matting, so likewise you can say catting for cat, only when we want to say the catting is sitting, we say the cat sits, using a noun and a verb, whereas it's all a verb, it's all a big act. So, then, this in sum, then, is this Hindu dramatic idea of the cosmos, as an endless

[44:06]

hide-and-seek game. Now you see it, now you don't. And so it's saying to everybody, really, of course you worry, and you're afraid of disease and death and pain and all that sort of thing, of course. But it's all an illusion, there's nothing to be afraid of. And you think, well, but my goodness, supposing when I die, there just won't be anything, be like going to sleep and never waking up, isn't that awful, I mean, that's just terrible, nothing forever, that doesn't matter. You know, when you go into that period called death or forgetting, that's just so that you won't remember, because if you did always remember, it'd be a bore. But you are wiser than you know, because you arrange to forget, you arrange to die, and keep going in and out of the light.

[45:07]

But underneath, at the basis of all this, between black and white, between life and death, is something unmentionable, that's really you, that's the secret. And you don't give the show away, see. All of you are now privy to a secret, you're initiates, you see, you know this little thing, but you may not have experienced it, but you know about it. But you mustn't give the show away, don't run out in the street suddenly and say to everybody, I'm God, see, because they won't understand you. You've been listening to a lecture by the late Alan Watts entitled The Mythology of Hinduism.

[45:57]

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