Now, the most amazing gamesmanship goes on in the whole domain of yoga and spiritual
 practice.
 You would be astounded.
 So I mean, one of the games in all this is to find a little flaw in you, see?
 Everybody has a place where they can be jiggled a bit.
 Something they're a bit ashamed of, and so you think, "Does this person really know my
 secret?"
 He's not saying anything because he's polite, but does he really see through me and know
 that somewhere are the awful awfuls, and that I'm a little bit upsettable?
 This is all part of religious competition.
 If you go to the Roman Catholics and you've studied, you've been psychoanalyzed, you see?
 They'll say, "Well, that's fine, but of course it's not nearly enough.
 I mean, that's all very well so far as it goes."
 But, or if you're a Roman Catholic and you go to a Buddhist outfit that's on a missionary
 basis, they'll say, "Yes, of course through your Catholicism you've learned some of the
 basic virtues, but of course Catholicism doesn't go anywhere near the heart of things, and
 it doesn't have an elaborate system of meditation like we have."
 Then you go over to the Hindu school and they say, "Yes, the Buddhists go to a certain point.
 They do attain a very, very high stage of realization, but there is nevertheless something
 higher than that, which they don't quite get."
 And you'll find this all round the world, everybody claiming to have that little special
 extra essence which the others don't have.
 Now why are they doing that?
 Are they all frauds?
 Are they all out to get you into their society?
 Sometimes yes.
 But sometimes they're trying to see whether you fall for this, testing you out.
 This is upaya, skillful method.
 And if you become falling for that little extra special thing that's just supposed to
 be around the corner, no?
 Then they've got you.
 Or rather, you've got yourself in the mix.
 And you have to work at that, and work at that, and work at that, until you find out
 that you were being made a monkey of.
 But you were being made a monkey of because you could be made a monkey of.
 You hadn't really arrived where you are.
 You didn't have the nerve to be you.
 That is to say, to be the Self.
 And so you had always to feel that there was something beyond that, a stage higher.
 So that's why, for example, masonry is such a success.
 It has thirty-three degrees.
 And you know, you can go up that ladder and get higher and higher status.
 The more degrees, the merrier.
 There have been things that have vented hundreds of degrees, and they're an immense success.
 Because you can postpone it longer and longer.
 Like Achilles overtaking the tortoise.
 He doesn't overtake it in the problem, because we keep dividing and dividing the space between
 Achilles and the tortoise as he approaches the tortoise.
 What delays Achilles overtaking the tortoise is not Achilles, but our calculations about
 how he approaches it.
 We make the calculations more and more complicated as he gets nearer and nearer to the tortoise.
 It's only the calculations that put it off.
 Achilles, in fact, runs right by.
 So in the same way, you can calculate yourself out of liberation.
 You can put it off indefinitely by inventing new degrees and new stages.
 But actually, when you get it, you don't get it, you suddenly see it.
 It happens instantly.
 It happens instantly whether you put in thirty years' practice or whether you put in three
 minutes.
 It's the same.
 Suddenly it dawns on you that that's the way things are.
 That's what it's like.


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