The chances are 50/50 always, that it will be either heads or tails.
 And this becomes very boring.
 One wants to cheat a little, to liven it up, and so introduce a bit of skill.
 But where a game depends on pure skill, and especially a very complex kind of skill, it
 becomes too tiresome.
 So you could put at opposite ends of a spectrum of games, say tossing coins or tic-tac-toe,
 or something very simple, which is mostly chance, because tic-tac-toe, when you know
 how to play it, reduces itself to that you either win or draw if you get the first move.
 At the other end of the scale, a highly complex game like, well I've suggested three-dimensional
 chess, but just imagine three-dimensional Go, where you would play on eight boards to
 give yourself a cube to play in, or whatever number of boards Go would be more than that,
 wouldn't it?
 But you would be in such a complex thing that you'd just lose track of it.
 Eventually the game would just become totally confused for most people.
 So we get optimal games in the middle, like bridge, or poker, or checkers, or chess, where
 there is this interplay of skill and chance.
 So we look for this optimal point where there is a risk, there must be a risk, there must
 be chance, it mustn't all be predetermined, because any game where the result is known
 is not worth playing.
 That's to say, when in chess the players suddenly realise that white is going to mate in five
 moves, they abandon the game and say, "Let's begin again."
 And so in life, that's why a lot of people don't like going to fortune tellers.
 They don't want to know the future.
 If I know exactly what's going to happen to me, in a very real sense, I've had it.
 So let's finish it up and begin again, turn in the check.
 You see, the whole fun of the situation of a game is that you don't know the outcome,
 and that's why it's worth playing.
 So then, this is one characteristic of a viable game, a certain combination of skill and chance.
 Now there's another, which is of a much more ethical type, and that is, I will call it
 trusting the game, because if you don't do this, in other words, if you won't gamble,
 you won't play.
 And here is the point of the necessity of the gamble.
 That corresponds a little bit to the necessity of having chance as well as skill in any game
 that really works.
 But the necessity of gambling is very much overlooked, I think, in our contemporary culture,
 because this is a culture where we are trying as much as possible to take the risk out of
 things, and when the risk is taken out of human relationships, they become impossible.
 We have, I think, in the United States, a very naive faith in law and in law enforcement.
 We're always saying there ought to be a law against it, as if law could solve things.
 And we don't realize the extent to which law makes life increasingly more difficult.
 Because law is simply a process of trying to define what may be done and what may not
 be done.
 But the moment you start talking, the definitions become increasingly complicated.
 And lawyers love this.
 They live on it.
 So it's always an interminable discussion of what did they mean when they said that?
 What was the intent of this law?
 And as laws multiply, with the avowed object of protecting us from each other, they do
 not so much succeed in protecting us as they do in making it impossible for us to act.
 And so the ultimate police state is, of course, the safe state, the security state, where
 everybody is checked.
 And you see what this is?
 Mechanically speaking, it's a system of very elaborate self-consciousness.
 See, when you get self-conscious and you watch everything you do, because you're anxious
 about making a mistake, you find in that you're all tied up and you can't act.
 So in exactly the same way, a community of people, which is always watching itself through
 its agents, so that, you know, in a Nazi state, they're not only the ordinary policemen on
 the beat, but there's a block captain for every area, and there's some kind of a sneak
 or a traitor who's going to inform the authorities everywhere, you see, hidden.
 So this community is watching itself all the time, because it's a community that doesn't
 trust itself.
 And a community which constantly watches itself is like a person who's always watching himself
 and holding a club over his head to go clunk the minute he might be in danger of doing
 something wrong.
 And so this person is like this.
 If I say now my right hand is my main active hand, but I don't know whether I can trust
 it, I don't know what it's going to do, so I've got to keep control on it with my left
 hand, see?
 So always the left hand is controlling the right hand.
 Whatever - if I want to pick something up, the left hand will have to push the right
 hand down and squeeze the fingers together and then lift it up so it'll come up.
 See, I've lost a hand by doing that.
 And so in exactly the same way, when any community of people is founded on mutual mistrust, it
 sort of loses half of itself.
 It becomes clutched up.
 It becomes paralyzed and unable to move.
 So the basis of any community, and thus the basis of any game, is the act of faith that
 I will gamble.
 I will bet my life on this scene.
 And you see, that also is fundamentally not only the attitude of faith, but it's the attitude
 of love.
 Love is self-giving.
 When you love someone, say you fall in love with a member of your opposite sex or whatever,
 and you got mixed up with someone now, you've really committed yourself to heaven only knows
 what.
 Because love is a letting go of direct control.
 And you might say, going back again to the Christian images of God, that God creates
 the world by constantly disappearing, giving himself away.
 The Hindu would agree with this too.
 That insofar as everyone here is God in disguise, but doesn't know it, this is because you as
 God are constantly giving yourself away to you.
 And feeling lost, you know, how did I get mixed up in this world?
 Well unbeknownst to myself I made a gamble on being this person.
 And so this giving of oneself away is what's called a divine love.
 So then in playing the game, if you don't make the assumption that I can let go of myself
 in the act of faith and in the act of love, you may just as well commit suicide right
 now.
 Because you can't play it on any other basis than that.
 Any attempt to do so will merely make the whole thing clutch up and become insupportable,
 and will in any case be suicide.
 See when we get the ultimate weapon, with which we know we can be safe because nobody
 else has it, just because we wanted to get that ultimate safety and get that ultimate
 weapon to defeat our enemies, it will be suicide.
 Because life really is not the avoidance of death.
 Death is the avoidance of death.
 The constant terror of death, the constant putting it off.


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.64 sec
Decoding  : 0.63 sec
Transcribe: 825.07 sec
Total Time: 826.33 sec