I was discussing an alternative myth to the ceramic and fully automatic models of the
 universe. I'll call the dramatic myth. The idea that life as we experience it is a big
 act and that behind this big act is the player. And the player, or the self as it's called
 in Hindu philosophy, the Atman, is you. Only you are playing hide and seek since that is
 the essential game that's going on. It's the game of games, the basis of all games, hide
 and seek. And so since you're playing hide and seek, you are deliberately, although you
 can't admit this, or won't admit it, you are deliberately forgetting who you really are,
 or what you really are, and the knowledge that your essential self is the foundation
 of the universe, the ground of being as Tillich calls it, is something you have as what the
 Germans call a hintergedanke. A hintergedanke is a thought way, way, way in the back of
 your mind, way back here somewhere. Something that you know deep down, but can't admit.
 So in a way then, in order to bring this to the front, in order to know that that is the
 case, you have to be kidded out of your game. You see, the problem is this. We identify
 in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us. We have
 a certain number of actions that we define as voluntary, and we feel in control of those.
 And then over against that there is all those things that are involuntary. But the dividing
 line between these two is very arbitrary. Because, for example, when you move your hand
 you feel that you decide whether to open it or to close it. But then ask yourself, how
 do you decide? When you decide to open your hand, do you first decide to decide? You don't,
 do you? You just decide, and how do you do that? And if you don't know how you do it,
 is it voluntary or involuntary? Let's consider breathing. You can feel that you breathe deliberately,
 you can control your breath. But when you don't think about it, it goes on. Is it voluntary
 or involuntary? And so we come to have a very arbitrary definition of self. That much of
 my activity which I feel I do. And that then doesn't include breathing most of the time,
 it doesn't include the heartbeats, it doesn't include the activity of the glands, it doesn't
 include digestion, it doesn't include how you shape your bones, circulate your blood.
 Do you or do you not do these things? Now if you get with yourself, and you find out
 that you are all of yourself, a very strange thing happens. You find that your body knows
 that you are one with the universe. In other words, that the so-called involuntary circulation
 of your blood is one continuous process with the stars shining. If you find out that it's
 you who circulates your blood, you will at the same moment find out that you are shining
 the sun. Because your physical organism is one continuous process with everything else
 that's going on. Just as the waves are continuous with the ocean, your body is continuous with
 the total energy system of the cosmos. And it's all you. Only you're playing the game
 that you're only this bit of it. But as I tried to explain, there are in physical reality
 no such things as separate events. So then, remember also when I tried to work towards
 a definition of omnipotence. Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done, it's just
 doing it. You don't have to translate it into language. Look, supposing when you got up
 in the morning you had to switch your brain on, and you had to think and do as a deliberate
 process waking up all the circuits that you need for active life during the day. Why,
 you'd never get done. Because you have to do all those things at once. How can a centipede
 control a hundred legs at once? Because it doesn't think about it. And so in the same
 way you are unconsciously performing all the various activities of your organism. Only
 unconsciously isn't a good word, because it sounds sort of dead. Superconsciously would
 be better. Give it a plus rather than a minus. Because what a consciousness is, is simply
 a sort of specialized form of awareness. When you look around the room, you are conscious
 of as much as you can notice. And you see an enormous number of things which you don't
 notice. If for example I look at a girl here and somebody asked me later, "What was she
 wearing?" I may not know, although I've seen. Because I didn't attend. But I was aware,
 you see. And perhaps if I could, under hypnosis, be asked this question, where I would get
 my conscious attention out of the way, through being in the hypnotic state, I could recall
 what dress she was wearing. So then, just in the same way as you don't focus your attention
 on how you make your thyroid gland function, so in the same way you don't have any attention
 focused on how you shine the sun.
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