Well now, you see, this involves certain ideas that are quite alien to the West.
 One, the idea of the world as play. Our Lord God in the West tends to be over-serious,
 and no great Christian artist has ever painted a laughing Christ or a smiling Christ, nothing
 that I've seen of any of the great masters. Always this figure is tragic and has that
 sort of look in the eye which says, "One of these days you and I have got to get together
 for a very serious talk." So you see, there is some difficulty about the notion of the
 world as dramatic play for us. There's another difficult notion here, and that is cyclic
 time. See, most of us live in linear time. This originated with Saint Augustine and his
 interpretation of the Bible. Now, I don't know how true this really is, but it's certainly
 a big fashion in modern scholarship to say that it was Judaism that gave us the idea
 of history. Hindus have no interest in history whatsoever, or not until recent times. To
 the total exasperation of historians, there is no way of finding textual evidence of the
 age of most of the Hindu scriptures, because they aren't interested in history as such.
 They are only interested in human events as archetypal occurrences, as repetitions of
 the great mythological themes over and over again. So if in a document started out that
 a certain adventure happened to King So-and-So, whom everybody knew at the time, in the next
 generation they'd change the name of that king to the current king, because the story
 was typical anyway. They just wanted to say a king everybody knew. They altered things
 in that way, and so they know no kind of chronology. And if you ask even quite intelligent Asians
 about this, they have difficulty in understanding what kind of a question you're asking. What
 is this history thing? Whereas on the other hand, according to our scholars, the Jews
 were historically minded, because they remembered the story of their descent from Adam and Abraham,
 the great event of the liberation from Egypt, and then the triumphant reign of King David,
 and then things go sliding downhill as other political forces become stronger and stronger.
 And so they get fixed on the idea that one day is going to be the day of the Lord, and
 the Messiah will come and put an end to history, and there will be the restoration of paradise.
 But this is linear. They don't think of the world having been created many, many times
 before, and come to an end many, many times before. It's one clear ascent from start to
 finish, from Alpha to Omega. Well, when St. Augustine was thinking about this, he thought
 if time is cyclic, Jesus would have to be crucified for the salvation of the world once
 in every cycle. But for some reason he had it firmly fixed into his head that there was
 only one historical crucifixion in time, what they call the one full, perfect, sufficient
 sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. Once is enough. Now
 of course, he got his hierarchies confused. It's true there is one sacrifice, but that's
 on the plane of eternity. On the plane of time, eternal things can be repeated again
 and again and again. But so, as a result of that, we are handed down, not a Greek - the
 Greeks also had cyclic time, like the Hindus - but we have been handed down linear time,
 and therefore we are always thinking of a progression that will take us steadily, steadily,
 steadily, faster and faster to a more and more perfect world. And it will get better
 and better and better and better all the way along, if we keep our heads. Now, this shows,
 I think, a rather naive view of human nature. Human beings tend to smash what they create
 and say, "Let's do it again." There is that in man which is also in the child. Rub it
 out. What fun. And so, it isn't really too realistic to suppose that human beings will
 simply get better and better and better and better and better, because they'll soon get
 tired of it. They say, "Let's be as awful as possible." See, there was that element
 in Nazism. How awful can you get? How brutal can you be? How destructive? And that, it
 isn't just Germans, you know, who have that. See, we are converting all the living world
 around us into excrement and pretending it doesn't happen that way. And we are the most
 marvelous vortices in this stream of food which whirls around as us and then disappears
 into excrements which again fertilize the soil and we keep on at it. So you see, there
 is that thing in us which is represented by Shiva-Kali and it's always there. The Hindu
 looks at the world with very, very hard-boiled realism in this way and sees terror and magnificence,
 love and fury as two faces of the same thing. And you could say, "Well, is there any peace
 possible?" After you've looked at this picture for a long, long time and you've conceived
 the endless, endless cycles, because this thing goes on always and always and always,
 "Per omnia saecula saeculorum," world without end. And the Hindu sometimes feels, "Oh,
 Brahma, don't you ever get tired of it?" No, because Brahma doesn't have to remember
 anything. And you only get tired of things you remember. That's why from the standpoint
 of Brahma, there's no time, only an eternal now. So the secret of waking up from the drama,
 the endless cycles, is the realization that the only time that there is, is the present.
 And when you become awake to that, boredom is at an end and you are delivered from the
 cycles. Not in the sense that they disappear, that you no longer go through them. You do
 go through them, but you know, you realize that they're not going anywhere. Now then,
 supposing you liken the rhythm of these cycles to music. Why, surely, you don't hurry it
 up. You don't say, "Let's get to the end faster." You know how to listen to music only when
 you slow down time and sit back and let that be. And so, in the same way, you can see every
 little detail of life in a new way. You say, "Oh my, look at that." And so, one's eyes
 are opened in astonishment by being living totally here and now.
 [Music]
 (gentle music)


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