When I was about six years old, I once took part in an egg and spoon race.
 The object was like this, that every child was given a wooden spoon and a pot egg.
 I don't know what you call pot eggs in America, but they are artificial eggs that are put
 in chickens' nests to encourage them to lay.
 And you put the pot egg on the spoon, and you go from start to finish as fast as you
 can, but you have to arrive with the egg on the spoon.
 And if you drop it, you have to stop and pick it up on the spoon without using the other
 hand.
 And I was way out in front, and all the other children had dropped their eggs.
 And I was suddenly in this position of being way out in front and could easily have won
 the race.
 And I stopped and turned around and watched all the other children picking up the eggs
 and waited for them.
 But the crowd all along the side was saying, "Go on, go on, make it, make it, make it!"
 And I didn't win the race.
 I've often thought about what the meaning of that was.
 And I think that what it comes down to is that we have in us a certain terror of being
 on our own.
 When somebody says, "Well, it's up to you.
 You take charge."
 And this is why the deep mystical experience can be viewed with a certain degree of terror.
 And if you were to discover, you see, that you are really God, and that you are doing
 all this, that in a way that you've concealed from yourself, in a way that you're not aware
 of at all, you are actually doing it.
 And in certain mystical states this comes through, you see.
 And you think, "It's a surprise to me, too.
 What am I going to do next?
 How far out can I get?"
 Because you see, the spectrum of possibilities of experience is very wide.
 Think of the world as consisting of a woven fabric.
 It's not a flat woven fabric.
 It's a fabric in which many different spectra cross each other and add up to what we see
 and feel.
 There's the spectrum of colors, the spectrum of sounds, the spectrum of emotions, the spectrum
 of sensations of all kinds, you see, all these interlocking, intercrossing spectra.
 Now they're all kind of mutually necessary to each other, just as in ordinary weaving,
 the warp maintains the woof and the woof maintains the warp, and so the cloth holds together.
 And so in exactly that way, the physical universe holds together because it's a collaboration
 of many different spectra.
 But what are the extremes of these spectra?
 How far out can you go?
 How far can you go in the direction of pleasure?
 How far can you go in the direction of pain?
 I mean, one always remembers that the human existence involves the possibility of torture,
 and of most ingenious and excruciating tortures.
 Why does that go on?
 Why do I imagine?
 Why do I project a world in which such possibilities exist?
 It involves the spectrum of being out of control to the depths of real madness, where you feel
 absolutely lost.
 So you see, in this sort of situation it's very nice indeed to feel that someone else
 is in charge, to whom the responsibility can be shifted.
 Well, what are the options in this thing, actually?
 You can say God is in charge, and God may be a real, loving, beneficent Father.
 And if you believe that way, and that God is in charge, and he is loving and is a beneficent
 Father, and he knows best, and you can always somehow consult the divine wisdom, that's
 very comforting for you.
 But what about God?
 Do you love God?
 If you do, you're not going to shift that burden onto his shoulders, are you?
 The next option is that it's you who are God, or God pretending to be you, and therefore
 you're really responsible for everything that goes on.
 The next option is that no one is responsible, that the thing just happens, and that most
 of it, therefore, because it just happens, is stupid.
 It's just a wobbling gyration of energies, in which, of course, occasionally there are
 some patterns and some sort of orders, but basically it's just no sense at all, it's
 just blather.
 And a human being who has learned to have certain values of reason and emotion will
 therefore feel himself trapped in a meaningless system, and you get the philosophy of Sartre
 and his brand of existentialism, where there is no meaning in the world except that which
 we ourselves create, and when you look at a flower that seems absolutely nonsensical,
 because there obviously is design.
 You only have to look at the books of George Kettis, where he studies design in nature,
 gorgeous books, to see that the human being is not the only intelligent being.
 What other options are there for figuring out what sort of energy system we're living
 in?
 Well you can share the responsibility, but what does that really come down to?
 How is there a situation through which responsibility can be shared?
 The Buddhists have evolved what they consider their highest philosophy, is the doctrine
 of mutual interpenetration, which is that every part of the energy pattern which can
 be considered either a thing or an event, is interlocked with every other part.
 And each one of them depends upon all, and all depend on each one.
 So you get the image called Indra's net, where you have a spider's web in the dawn
 view covered with little drops, and you look into any one little drop and you see the reflection
 of all the others.
 And of course in each reflection of a drop, in a drop, is the reflection of all the drops,
 forever.
 So but what this comes down to is just what we've been talking about.
 This is what it would be if every one of us was God.
 And therefore all mutually responsible.
 And yet the responsibility is shared, yes, but he is yet one.
 And so each dewdrop, when it suddenly realizes that all the others are depending on me, says
 what do I do next?
 How are we going to run the show?
 And in this you see there's a moment of terror.
 And this is why many people who get into a mystical experience prematurely, without an
 adequate preparation, especially an adequate philosophical background, they may often get
 into this through the use of psychedelic chemicals, can have the horrors of suddenly realizing
 that you are something upon which everything else depends.
 What are you going to do?
 Because the spectrum of experience contains these frantically different possibilities.
 And when you think of the concentration camps of the Nazis, what the French did to people
 in Algeria, the ingenious things the Chinese have thought out, that's pretty weird.
 So in that moment you are inclined, very happily, to project someone else in charge and say
 let George do it.
 Let the other kind of intelligence take care.
 But who is George?
 What is the other kind of intelligence?
 What is happening in this situation where you get the cosmic terrors, is that you are
 looking upon the job as if your ego were doing it.
 And this is of course a mistake.
 It is not your ego.
 In other words, you are very grateful to your physical organism for digesting your food
 for you, even though you don't know how to digest food.
 You as ego, or from the point of view called ego, are very grateful to your heart for circulating
 your blood, but you don't know how to do it.
 You're also very grateful to the healing processes when you get a cut, how miraculously the skin
 heals itself, it closes up.
 You don't know how it's done.
 And so the psalmist says to God, "Behold I am fearfully and wonderfully made."
 We would say, awesomely and wonderfully made.
 The point being then, that the trust in God, which our forefathers so much recommended,
 is I think for our world today translatable into trust in oneself, where oneself is considered
 as the total organism, because the total organism is furthermore one with the total environment.
 The organism environment, we can hyphenate the two words, is a single process, a single
 field of pattern energy.
 And it is more intelligent, you see, than what we call intelligence in the academic
 sense.
 That is to say, it is more intelligent than anything we can put into words or numbers.
 Because words and numbers are linear, and they represent a style of understanding which
 can comprehend things only in series, by, as it were, running a spotlight along a set
 of events and seeing them one after another.
 The universe is, however, a much more complex system, where everything is happening altogether
 everywhere at once, and that kind of linear understanding of it finds the world excessively
 complicated.
 Now the world, as a matter of fact, is not complicated.
 The world is complicated only when you try to translate it into a linear pattern.
 What is complicated is the task of translating a non-linear world into a linear pattern.
 There's the complexity.
 The world in itself is completely simple.
 It is not a problem.
 It just does it.
 In other words, nothing is simpler for you than to do this.
 In other words, to move your arms and open and close your hands.
 It's the simplest thing in the world.
 You don't even have to think how to do it.
 But when we begin to analyze it from the point of view of physiology, and try to give a physiological
 description of what is happening here, that is a complicated thing to do.
 Therefore we say the structure of the muscles of the arms and the neurological things involved
 are very complex.
 Yes, they are complex from the point of view of verbal or mathematical description.
 But as you feel it, directly, you just do it, and there's no complexity to it at all.
 So this is the way we've created a problem of control, because if you rely simply upon
 the kind of wisdom which enables you to open and close your hands, whereas we say you just
 follow your instincts, we find that if we live that way, if we live thoughtlessly, we
 are sometimes enormously successful, but at other times we collapse.
 That is to say, we cease to survive.
 It's a very grave question as to whether we shouldn't live that way, or should live that
 way.
 Would we save all of ourselves a great deal of trouble if we lived by whim?
 Of course, it would mean that a lot of people wouldn't live as long as they do now.
 But since they wouldn't worry about it, wouldn't that be really better than what we do now,
 which is trying to control everything, make it extremely complicated, not use our neurological
 intelligence but merely this limited intelligence of the verbal concentrated conscious attention?
 We really developed that, we really are anxious to succeed through using that.
 But we may be creating a much worse situation than we would have if we had never used it
 at all.
 Because we had remained rather highly evolved animals.
 We don't know the answer to this yet.
 See, this goes back to the whole question of mistakes.
 We could suppose that at a certain point when human beings evolved words, technique, prediction,
 conscious attention, analysis, that the biological order went off and made a frantic mistake,
 leading to its swift dissolution.
 And we might think that it would have been better if we had never done that, but stayed
 in the state that we suppose animals to be in, simply responding spontaneously in every
 situation.
 Another question then arises out of this.
 Actually has our twist into analytic thought, is it really a departure at all from spontaneous
 behavior?
 In other words, is there such a thing as artificial behavior as distinct from natural behavior?
 Planned behavior as distinct from spontaneous behavior?
 My own preference in this question is to say that actually artificial behavior is a new
 gimmick in spontaneous behavior.
 That's really the way I've seen it in what must to me an extremely profound cosmic consciousness
 experience.
 That there are no mistakes.
 We never do get off the track.
 And this is, I would say, my grounds for faith in myself, which a Christian might call faith
 in God, but considered as somebody else who's taking charge.
 But what I mean when I say this is that I'm taking charge, but not at the level of the
 conscious ego.
 Which is simply the level at which I understand things in verbal terms.
 At the level I understand things in non-verbal terms, like I know how to move my hands, then
 I'm in another level of me.
 And I know how to do this, but it's not the same I that knows how to construct the English
 language and make sense of it.
 Or really are the two the same?
 Because you see, the linguistic way of understanding things stands in relation to the non-linguistic
 in the same way as the artificial to the natural.
 So once again, you didn't make a mistake.
 There is more to it than you thought.
 There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.
 Yes, there is more to it than you thought because the nature of the whole game is one
 of surprise.
 Don't forget that.
 That a person we would say who thinks he's God, we say, "Oh, he thinks he's God, he thinks
 he knows everything."
 And we say, "There's a surprise in store for you, my boy.
 Something's going to happen which is going to put you down."
 Of course.
 You could say that to God himself.
 "There's a surprise in store for you because it would be no fun to be God if there weren't."
 So do you see how you're all in this situation?
 How you can see the point of view from which everything that happens to you is the same
 as what you do?
 You say, "I don't think I can face that because it's too big a responsibility.
 I don't feel in control of it.
 I think it's rather, as a matter of fact, blasphemous or impertinent or stuffed up."
 And there are a lot of people going around today who as a result of psychedelic experiments
 believe themselves to be God and are actually what Jung would call "inflated."
 That is to say, confusing the ego with God.
 And as we would say, giving themselves airs and graces as if somehow or other I were more
 God than you.
 But if you understand this thing of being God thoroughly, you understand naturally that
 everybody else is in the same situation.
 There are not many gods, there's just one.
 And that's you, and that's you, and that's me.
 Or that's I.
 I am that I am.
 But the point is that when you are frightened of this possibility, and you'd say, "Oh no,
 I can't understand what I...
 Good heavens, if I were God I might drop it."
 You know?
 You see, that big egg.
 Imagine Shiva standing there with ten arms, and he has ten eggs for each arm, and he's
 juggling.
 What a show, you see?
 For the whole fun of the show, people watch it, because he's using eggs!
 And eggs are very fragile.
 You know, a man with ten arms in the first place would be quite a show.
 And a juggler is still more of a show if he just had billiard balls.
 But he's using eggs.
 You see, that's the thing we really like to see in a circus.
 Somebody do something outrageous like that, and they're watching breathless for the moment
 in which he drops an egg.
 And then suddenly he drops one.
 See?
 And as these eggs are enormous, you know, each one is a cosmos, everybody covers their
 eyes, you know, and there's a terrific crash.
 And suddenly all the fragments of the egg spattering all over the place turn into myriads
 of reproductions of ten-armed Shivas, each arm juggling with ten eggs.
 See?
 Now that's the way the scheme works.
 And this is what is called glory.
 Glory is a funny word.
 Nobody really seems to know what it means.
 We say, for example, "Glory to God in the highest, all glory be to the Almighty God."
 The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
 What is glory?
 Pronounce it "glory."
 Glow.
 Because we use the English word "glory" to translate the Hebrew word "shekina."
 And shekina means the radiance of God.
 Light.
 Beauty.
 "O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness."
 This sense that it roughly corresponds really, I've tried to find the nearest Sanskrit word
 to glory, and it's not easy, but I think it's "ananda," which is usually translated "bliss."
 And the Brahman, the ultimate reality, is defined in Hinduism as "satchitananda," which
 is "sat," reality, "chit," consciousness, "ananda," bliss, a combination of all three.
 It is the feeling that ultimately the world game, the hide and seek, the Shiva's performance
 with the eggs, Indra's net, all these other images that one could use, they are glorious.
 You know, like, "Glorious, glorious, one keg of beer for the four of us, glory be to God,
 that there are no more than four of us," you know.
 Glorious, see, that it's a great show, worth of applause.
 And the applause that we give when we consider the show is glorious.
 It's in the heavenly imagery, the angels, you see, all singing the song which Dante
 compared to the laughter of the universe.
 It's really, the game is worth the candle.
 Because if it weren't, I think it would stop.
 See, this is the fundamental thing.
 When we, it all comes down in a way to a theory of games.
 And we saw that when we know the outcome of the game for certain, we stop the game.
 Under what other circumstances do we stop the game?
 Well they're all really rather like that.
 When for example, the rules of a game are so thoroughly understood that they become
 boring as in tic-tac-toe, we stop the game.
 What we want, what we consider a game, and a game in a way means an entertainment, a
 pastime, a way of passing time, we want a nice mixture of randomness and order, of chance
 and skill.
 The games that are completely dependent on skill, say chess, are not, I think, quite
 so much fun as those which involve an element of chance as when one deals cards after a
 shuffle.
 It's this nice combination that gives us the proper element, you see, the proper combination
 of skill and surprise.
 And that's why I said in referring to power, we know that the complete power game is not
 what we want.
 Complete control is not what we want.
 But just as in poker, we want some control, but based on chance.
 It's fun to not know what the deal is going to be when you pick up your hand.
 What have you got?
 Think of the anticipation, see, what have you got?
 The deal, the bum deal.
 Then do what you can with it.
 Try and outface the other fellow, pretend that your hand's the winner.
 See, that's a great game.
 And it seems, therefore, you see, we judge it great because it touches something absolutely
 fundamental in human desire, and whatever is the fundamental structure of human psychology
 is going to tell us something about the fundamental structure of energy.
 Because we're not different from it.
 We exemplify in a very high way what the energy patterns of the universe are doing, and therefore
 that's why it said, "Know thyself and thou shalt know the universe and the gods."
 If you understand how you work, basically, you'll understand how everything else works.
 So through the study of games, and our enjoyment of games, we can get an idea of what is going
 on.
 So then we say, when we see that what is going on is of the same nature as our own inner
 workings, we're going to take another step.
 We're going to say, "But it could be awful.
 Everything could go wrong."
 Sometimes in death, people get the queer sensation that just everything is going wrong.
 And one can only say, "I feel awful.
 I feel absolutely that the bogeys are in every direction.
 Everything is wrong."
 See?
 But as I tried to explain this morning, that being absolutely out of control feeling is
 a great source of life.
 So then, when you finally come to the realization that nothing can go wrong at all, but that
 the goodness, the overall glory, you see, of things, is a composite of light and shadow,
 of black and white.
 You know, somebody does a great show with black and white, "Biddy biddy biddy biddy
 biddy biddy."
 See?
 And then, boom, you see one of these op art paintings where this fantastic combination
 of black and white sets up a mosaic reaction in your eyes, and you look at it and say,
 "Wow!
 It's only black and white."
 Life and death, see?
 Then you suddenly discover that black doesn't cancel white, but manifests it, because the
 white can't be there without the black.
 White doesn't win over black, because it needs the black to be there.
 And that you're in a cosmos where there's a different kind of no exit from what Sartre
 means.
 You are amazed.
 And that amazement may be also described as an enlightenment.
 You see, in other words, that both white and black are forms of light.
 That indeed, they are the vibration which is light, because light is a thing that can
 only be manifested by going on and off.
 It's a wave process, and a wave has a crest and a trough.
 The troughs are the offs and the crests are the ons.
 Then the discovery of that, that the light and the darkness are one, this is the difference
 between ordinary light, which we contrast with darkness, and Shekinah, which is the
 light of glory.
 The light of glory is including the darkness.
 It is both.
 It is therefore eternal light, of which the requiem mass says, "Rest eternal ground unto
 them, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them."
 Light perpetual, you see, is this new kind of light that is light-dark.
 Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, see?
 And so, when we say that all things work through the glory of God, that means that it doesn't
 matter what happens, because there are only two kinds of things that can happen, light
 things and dark things, good things and bad things.
 You can't tell one without the other.
 From one point of view you may say, "That's utterly frustrating.
 You mean I feel as if I'm on a seesaw, that if I push this end down the other goes up,
 but then I have to keep sitting there, and push it down and the other end goes up, and
 all we have is a do-de-do-de-do, but that's not the case."
 But it's true if you analyze it from a fundamental point of view that you have nothing but black
 and white, nothing but zero and one, nothing but yang and yin.
 But look what you can do with it.
 See the whole vision that goes on in front of you right now is nothing but black and
 white, but so arranged and so structured in terms of different kinds of positive and
 negative, that we get back to the multidimensional fabric all woven together and you get this
 tremendous complexity.
 Let's raise this question.
 Let's take the example of a photograph that has been reproduced for printing.
 If you examine it under a magnifying glass, you see nothing but different intensities
 of dots arranged in a grid pattern.
 There are large dots and small dots, and the smaller they get the more you get a white
 area in their neighborhood, and the larger they get the more you get a black area in
 the neighborhood.
 What we come down to is a formal arrangement of dots, some big, some little.
 Stand back from it, take the magnifying glass away, and you see the face of President Johnson.
 Or stand back from it, take the glass away, and you get the image of Mao Zedong.
 What is the relationship between the grid and the face?
 You might say, the grid is irrelevant, because the grid can carry any face.
 Say or we'll say technically in photography, the screen used in printing photographs.
 Or let's take the television tube.
 The television tube also has this way of animating all sorts of little point units by a scanning
 process behind it.
 You can see anything on television.
 What's the relationship between the structure of the television camera and the receiver
 and the forms shown on it?
 At first we say none at all, because the same structure is neutral.
 In England they call it the telly.
 What it's telling you is that all that you see is the interplay of light and shadow.
 Only we've blown it up for you a bit, so now you can see what's going on.
 The interplay of yes and no.
 You can see all the news of the world and all the participants in the drama.
 They'll all come on and stand in front of you on this thing, and but maybe you know
 the truth about it is that they're all combinations of black and white dancing.
 So you can get quite a profound realization out of this.
 The fact that one reduces it to nothing but black and white, it sounds at first to be
 a sort of oversimplification and a sort of dismissal of that element in things which
 is not the grid.
 You see?
 Again, we get back to the question, which is a very difficult question to formulate
 in words.
 What is the relationship between the grid and the form?
 It's a very old philosophical problem.
 What is the relationship between form and matter?
 Between shape and substance?
 And you know, these questions were abandoned because scientists decided that there was
 nothing except form, structure.
 There's no such thing as matter.
 Matter is merely the patterns of form seen out of focus and therefore they appear to
 be fuzzy and the fuzzy is what we call stuff.
 Like stuffing in a pillow.
 It's fuzz.
 But we can't get away from the fact that the grid has form.
 The grid of a photograph has the same relation, you see, to the form of what you see as the
 atomic structure of anything as to, say, a body or a table or a flower.
 It's the basic jazz on which the world of forms is being played.
 In other words, it's like the strings of a harp.
 And anything can be done with a harp in music.
 It depends on which strings you pluck, what you do with it.
 This of course is the clue to Hermann Hesse's bead game.
 What are the beads in the bead game?
 The beads are the dots in the photograph.
 The atomic units.
 And you can show a relationship, you see, the bead game was constructed so as to show,
 for example, you took a hexagram from the I Ching, a Scarlatti sonata, a verse from
 the Upanishads and the design of a Chinese house.
 And then with these very apparently disconnected elements you played them all together and
 showed all the marvellous correspondences between them.
 But to do this you need the beads.
 You reproduce each one of them in terms of the beads.
 In other words, in terms of the little alternations of black and white.
 And that immediately enables you to apply the I Ching hexagram to any one of the pictures.
 Because that is simply something you play in terms of black and white.
 You see, binary arithmetic comes from the I Ching and therefore the digital computer
 relates back directly to the I Ching.
 Because Leibniz studied the I Ching in Latin and invented binary arithmetic which we now
 use for the computer.
 So logically now what comes up is that the computer people are turning back to the I
 Ching to see if they can use it for a decision system.
 Now this is the bead game, you see.
 Now look, you see, if this interests you and you get excited about these prospects, you
 are beginning to understand what is meant by glory.
 I see the light.
 Aha!
 I see the possibilities of a new game coming up.
 And with this game we can befuddle all the politicians by inventing a much more interesting
 game than their game.
 And we'd better set about doing it fairly soon.


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