Now you know that in ancient times all kings had at their courts a court fool.
 And sometimes it probably was true that the fool was a crazy person who had a peculiar
 capacity for making inappropriate remarks.
 And there's something about inappropriate remarks that can be very funny.
 I remember as a child we used to play a game in which we had first of all a booklet with
 a story in it, but every now and then a word was left blank.
 And then you were given a pile of cards that were shuffled around the players and in turn
 as the story was read by one person the players turned up whatever card they had and said
 the word.
 And the most extraordinary things happened.
 And in this way of course the person who could make inappropriate remarks at the right moment
 can sometimes bring the house down.
 But actually as time went on the function of the fool became more sophisticated than
 that and he became a person whose function was not simply to make jokes and to be a funny
 man but to remind the monarch of his humanity so that he would never, never get too stuffy.
 You remember perhaps the lines in Richard II where the king says, "Within the hollow
 crown that rounds the mortal temples of the king keeps death his watch."
 And there the antic sits, the antic being the court fool.
 And there the antic sits scoffing at his state and grinning at his pomp, allowing him a little
 time to monarchize, be feared and kill with looks.
 And then at the last comes death and with a little pin bores through his castle wall
 and farewell king.
 See that was in a way the function of the fool.
 He was reminding you of your finitude, of your mortality and death at the end in somewhat
 the same way as monks used to keep on the desks in their cells a grinning skull.
 And all this is of course nowadays thought very morbid because today we repress death
 very, very strongly and the whole function and role of the mortician in our culture is
 to pretend in some way that death doesn't happen.
 He's a husher-upper.
 He sweeps you under the carpet at considerable expense.
 Now then, I try to think whether there is any institution in modern society that really
 corresponds to the court fool.
 And there isn't.
 There is of course the political cartoonist, there is the satirist, there is the commentator,
 but he doesn't sit in the president's office and the president can ignore him altogether
 if he so chooses.
 We don't like nowadays anyone to suggest that our social institutions are not altogether
 serious.
 We can't stand it because we are much too insecure.
 This is a very dangerous state of affairs.
 And so it really is high time that in many ways the institution of the fool was reintroduced.
 I want to point out a parallel to this.
 In some ways the fool or the joker and the monk have a parallel function.
 The monk is a person who abandons society.
 He is an outlaw, only he's an outlaw on the upper side instead of on the lower side.
 As the ordinary criminal is, as it were, below caste, the outlaw in the sense of the monk
 is above caste.
 And in the Buddhist religion, at its inception, the followers of the Buddha wore those dark
 yellow robes because those were the garments of criminals.
 It's just as if today we were to take the kind of blue jeans they wear over in San Quentin
 and go around in those, or the old-fashioned striped things that were put on jailbirds.
 And so they took on the garments and external appearance of the lower outcast, but they
 were in fact respected as upper outcasts.
 But in modern society it is very, very difficult to be in that position.
 For example, in such a true republic as France, every monk and priest is subject to military
 service.
 That is not true in the United States, nor is it true in England.
 They are not quite so republican as the French.
 But in this kind of modern society, more and more, you must belong.
 As Thoreau said, "Wherever you may go, men will seek you out and compel you to belong
 to their desperate company of oddfellows."
 And the monks that exist today, Catholic monks and Anglican monks, are really a little bit
 of a freak in our society.
 They don't, they represent, in other words, the opinions and the discipline of a particular
 sect.
 They are not really, they have no actual official and social recognition.
 Because you see, our society cannot stand non-participation.
 It cannot stand really fundamental criticism.
 And so it's in a very, very weak state.
 I remember as a boy in London going often to Hyde Park Corner and listening to people
 arrate against anything they wanted to arrate against.
 They could criticize and vilify even the most sacred institutions, and the police would
 stand by and pay no attention, sort of lean against the lamppost and let it all go on.
 And that's because the people as a whole in those days had a tremendous sense of security.
 They knew they were right, and therefore there was no point in stopping anybody from criticizing
 them.
 But when you're not sure you're right, you have to stifle criticism completely.
 And the worst kind of criticism is the person who pokes fun.
 Non-participation of the monk isn't so bad, but the person who somehow suggests that society
 occasionally is something that needs to be giggled at.
 You see, this is the whole position.
 The joker doesn't outrightly deride things.
 He's not a slapstick comedian.
 He gives people the giggles about things that they thought were terribly sacred.
 And that is extremely demoralizing.
 So in our day and age, you see, you must belong.
 And we need to relax on this and allow for non-participation under certain conditions,
 and these are the ancient conditions, that the person who does not participate in society
 cannot call upon society for certain things.
 He cannot call upon the protection of the police or of the army.
 He cannot call upon education for his children.
 He's not supposed to have any children.
 He may, I suppose, in this day and age, make what arrangements he chooses about his love
 life, but he mustn't be the head of a family, and he mustn't feel entitled to the protection
 and support of the community.
 If the community respects him and wants to support him just out of its own free will,
 then that's their affair.
 So that's the way of the monk.
 But the fool is in a different class from the monk.
 And to understand his role fully, we have to go into a number of preliminary things,
 the most important of which is to understand the nature of a social institution.
 As you see, the standpoint of the fool is that all social institutions are games.
 He sees the whole world as game-playing, and that's why when people take their games seriously
 and put on stern and pious expressions, the fool gets the giggles, because he knows it's
 all a game.
 Now, when I say that he sees everything as a game, this does not mean mere game.
 Hamlet, although it's a play, is not mere entertainment.
 Or when you go to listen to a great orchestra, it is playing music indeed.
 But you are not seeing something purely frivolous.
 The idea of game basically is this, that the nature of the world is musical.
 That is to say, it is doing all these forms of trees and stars and people and all their
 complexities just to do them.
 It has no purpose beyond doing it.
 And in exactly the same way, in music, music has no destination.
 It isn't aimed at the future.
 It does travel in time, that is true.
 But it doesn't aim at a goal in time.
 The point of music is every phrase as it unfolds itself, and as you perceive the relationship
 of those phrases to earlier and later phrases.
 But music itself is dance.
 It's dancing with sound, and likewise in the art of dancing, you are not traveling.
 You are not aiming at a particular place.
 You are dancing to dance.
 And so what you might call the musical or game theory of the world is that everything
 that is happening is its own point.
 It's true that things do develop.
 For example, the seed develops into the tree.
 And you might say from one point of view then that the point of the seed is the tree.
 That's the purpose of the seed.
 But that doesn't really hold up, because then the tree goes and has seeds again.
 And so you might say then that the purpose of the tree is the seed.
 Which is which?
 The whole thing is one process, you see.
 They really aren't parts.
 The seed isn't one event and the tree another.
 It's all one long continuous event going on and on just for the sake of going on and on.
 Now of course you can read purpose in it in another way.
 That is to say that a tree is only possible in a certain kind of environment.
 There have to be, for there to be trees, there has to be a certain kind of temperature, a
 certain kind of atmosphere, and there have to be insects, and there have to be bacteria
 in the soil, and there have to be weeds, there have to be birds.
 All kinds of things are necessary if trees are to live.
 So you could say this is symbiosis.
 That the tree lives to look after the birds and provide them with perches.
 That the birds live to eat the worms which might destroy the roots of the tree.
 And so everybody lives to support everybody else.
 Well the word "to" or "in order to" is not quite correct.
 It's a little clumsy.
 What we should see rather than that is that the whole relationship of trees and birds
 and worms and bees and so on is a network.
 And every aspect of the network, you might say every part of it, depends for its existence
 on every other part.
 That means you see that the network as a whole is a single organism.
 Just as in your own physical body, and you call yourselves a single organism, there are
 billions of creatures of very different kinds.
 And they're all running around inside your bloodstream and doing their stuff.
 They're having battles, love affairs, all kinds of things.
 And this huge variety of stuff going on constitutes your life as an individual.
 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 look on all these things as differentiated in the same way as chess and backgammon and
 football and hockey and polo, or as rumba, 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 look 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 Buddhism, 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 5th 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.
 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's willowy.
 She doesn't look very willowy underneath as a rule but she does when dressed in a kimono.
 Now so you see it isn't just that nature has built in to 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, etc., etc.
 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.
 And a lot of people don't realize that when they're asked "Who are you?"
 I've 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 are 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 sort of 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.
 Anyway, fundamentally what you are is the witch than which there is no witcher.
 And so relax, don't worry.
 Because you don't, 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 witch than which there is no witcher,
 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 to 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, also, 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 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.
 It was just too much.
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