So then, if you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white,
 self implies other, life implies death, or shall I say, death implies life, you can feel
 yourself not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something
 that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely
 fundamental.
 What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure
 of existence itself.
 So say, in Hindu mythology, they say that the world is the drama of God.
 God is not something in Hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on the throne and
 that has royal prerogatives.
 God in Indian mythology is the self, sat-cid-ananda, which means sat, that which is, cid, that
 which is consciousness, that which is ananda, is bliss, and in other words, what exists,
 reality itself, is gorgeous, it is the plenum, the fullness of total joy.
 Wow-wee!
 And all those stars, if you look out in the sky, is a firework display, like you see on
 the fourth of July, which is a great occasion for celebration, the universe is a celebration,
 it is a firework show, to celebrate that existence is.
 Wow-wee!
 And then they say, but however, there's no point just in sustaining bliss.
 Let's suppose that you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and
 that you could, for example, have the power, within one night, to dream seventy-five years
 of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
 And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfil
 all your wishes.
 You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive.
 And after several nights, of seventy-five years of total pleasure each, you would say,
 "Well, that was pretty great, but now let's have a surprise.
 Let's have a dream which isn't under control, where something is going to happen to me that
 I don't know what it's going to be."
 And you would dig that, and come out of that and say, "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't
 it?"
 And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out
 gambles as to what you would dream.
 And finally, you would dream where you are now.
 You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.
 That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have, of playing that
 you weren't God.
 Because the whole nature of the Godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he's not.
 The first thing he says to himself is, "Man, get lost."
 Because he gives himself away.
 The nature of love is self-abandonment, not clinging to oneself.
 Throwing yourself out, as in, for example, in basketball, you're always getting rid of
 the ball.
 You say to the other fellow, "Have a ball."
 And that keeps things moving.
 That's the nature of life.
 So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality.
 Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep,
 down, basic whatever there is.
 And you're all that, only you're pretending you're not.
 And it's perfectly okay to pretend you're not.
 To be absolutely convinced, because this is the whole notion of drama, when you come into
 the theater, there is a proscenium arch and a stage, and down there is the audience.
 And everybody assumes their seats in the theater, and are going to see a comedy, a tragedy,
 a thriller, or whatever it is.
 And they all know, as they come in and pay their admissions, that what is going to happen
 on the stage is not for real.
 But the actors have a conspiracy against this, because they're going to try and persuade
 the audience that what is happening on the stage is for real.
 They want to get everybody sitting on the edge of their chairs.
 They want to get you terrified, or crying, or laughing.
 Completely captivated by the drama.
 And if a skillful human actor can take in an audience and make people cry, think what
 the cosmic actor can do.
 Why he can take himself in completely.
 He can play so much for real that he really believes it is.
 Like you sitting in this room, you think you're really here.
 Why you've persuaded yourself that way.
 You've acted it so damn well that you know this is the real world.
 But you're playing it.
 It's because the audience and the actor is one.
 Of course, behind the stage there's the green room.
 Off scene.
 Obscene.
 Where the actors take off their masks.
 You know that the word "person" means mask.
 The persona, which is the mask worn by actors in Greco-Roman drama, because it has a megaphone
 type mouth, which throws the sound out in an open air theater.
 So per, through, sona, what the sound comes through, that's the mask.
 How to be a real person.
 How to be a genuine fake.
 A mask.
 So the dramatis personae at the beginning of a play is the list of masks that the actors
 will wear.
 And so in the course of forgetting that this life is a drama, the word for the role, the
 word for the mask, has come to mean who you are genuinely.
 The person.
 The proper person.
 Incidentally, the word "parson" is derived from the word "person."
 Person of the village.
 Person around town.
 The parson.
 Funny.
 So anyway then, this is a drama.
 I'm not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it.
 I want you to play with it.
 I want you to think of its possibilities.
 I'm not trying to prove it.
 I'm just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about.
 So then, this means that you're not victims of a scheme of things.
 Of a mechanical world, or of an autocratic god.
 The life you're living is what you have put yourself into.
 Only you don't admit it, because you want to play the game that it's happened to you.
 In other words, I got mixed up in this world.
 My parents, I had a father who got hot pants over a girl, and she was my mother.
 And because he got, he was just a horny old man.
 And as a result of that, I got born.
 And I blame him for it, and say, "Well, that's your fault.
 You've got to look after me."
 And he says, "I don't see why I should look after you.
 You're just a result."
 [laughter]
 And, but let's suppose we admit that I really wanted to get born, and that I was the ugly
 gleam in my father's eye when he approached my mother.
 That was me.
 I was desire.
 And I deliberately got involved in this thing.
 Look at it that way instead.
 And that even if I got myself into an awful mess, and I got born with syphilis and the
 Great Siberian Itch and tuberculosis, and in a Nazi concentration camp, nevertheless
 this was a game which was a very far-out play.
 It was a kind of cosmic masochism.
 But I did it.
 Isn't that an optimal game rule for life?
 Because if you play life on the supposition that you're a helpless little puppet who got
 involved, or if you play it on the supposition that it's a frightful, serious risk, and that
 we really ought to do something about it, and so on, it's a drag.
 There's no point in going on living unless we make the assumption that the situation
 of life is optimal.
 That really and truly we are all in the state of total bliss and delight.
 But we are going to pretend we aren't just for kicks.
 You play non-bliss in order to be able to experience bliss.
 And you can go as far out as non-bliss as you want to go.
 And when you wake up it'll be great.
 You know, you can slam yourself on the head with a hammer because it's so nice when you
 stop.
 And it makes you realize, you see, how great things are when you forget that that's the
 way it is.
 And that's just like black and white.
 You don't know black unless you know white.
 You don't know white unless you know black.
 This is simply fundamental.
 *Applause*


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