[silence]
 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 wrapped 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 about time they learned. [laughter]
 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 is going to be, it is less worthwhile going ahead towards it.
 If you know the outcome, why bother? This is one of the ways we are 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 person who gets the winner claims a 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 are not really 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 are 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.
 As how far can you get away with giving the show away about the game?
 Nobody really wants to go the whole hog until you are ready for final nirvana.
 You know, then you give the show away so far as you are 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 a 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 will somehow stop.
 That it will be like being too conscious of digesting your food.
 There is a point there where enjoying dinner, it 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 go, 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, like 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, so concert halls, to give them the proper resonance.
 But when resonance gets too much, you know, it starts chattering. 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 the choir going on forever 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 to 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 is 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 turn 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 we 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.
 We laugh 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.
 The 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.
 Now, 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 game, 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 the problem in terms of chess,
 when I bring up the joker, of course we are in a way discussing it in terms of the game of cards.
 Because the joker is the card beyond roll, the card that's wild, that can be any card in the pack.
 In other words, it's delivered from being a particular someone and can be in anyone.
 And it pops up here, and it pops up there, and it pops up here.
 And you never know where is the joker, who is the joker.
 You see? The thing that we have to understand, really, is that all the rolls are the joker playing them.
 And the joker is looking at you out of all pairs of eyes. There he is.
 Only he is pretending very often that he is not the joker at all. "Oh no, it's just me. I'm not the joker."
 Where is the joker?
 Well, let's have an intermission.
 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.
 A 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 that is still a 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 Vishnu-lila,
 Vishnu being one of the names of God, and lila meaning sport or play from which we get our word "lilt",
 then Vishnu 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 are 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.
 Imagine going through a gate in a wall.
 Here is this great barrier.
 You walk through it, you turn around and the wall and the gate have both disappeared.
 And you see you were always there.
 One of the most extraordinary things that happens in entering into a sort of mystical state of consciousness,
 one of the most delightful things about it, is the discovery that you don't have to stay in ecstasy.
 That ordinary consciousness is alright too.
 That is part of the whole total fitness of things.
 You see that everybody is, as it were, right in the place where he stands.
 Imagine a pearl necklace, how it's arranged.
 Down in the center they put the big pearls and then they trail off slowly until there are very tiny pearls at the back.
 And so it doesn't matter whether you are a big pearl or a little pearl.
 You all constitute the harmony of the whole.
 So they say in Zen Buddhism, "A long thing is the long body of Buddha, a short thing is the short body of Buddha."
 Or in the spring scenery, there is nothing superior, nothing inferior.
 Flowering branches grow naturally, some short, some long.
 So from that standpoint, you see, everybody is seen to be a perfect manifestation of the Godhead,
 or of the void, or whatever you want to call it. Everybody.
 And even though the very fact that they don't know it, and that they are unhappy, that they quarrel, etc., etc., etc., 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, 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 his Greek, you know, "Mi figenito." "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 nothing, 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.
 And, uh, but the thing itself is really beyond good and evil.
 Now, as I see it, that's the way it is, and 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% tragedy.
 You see, the positive and the negative together constitute existence.
 We have to use existence as a neutral word that doesn't have as an opposite non-existence.
 [BLANK_AUDIO]


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.63 sec
Decoding  : 1.21 sec
Transcribe: 2616.80 sec
Total Time: 2618.63 sec