I wonder, I wonder what you would do if you had the power to dream at night any dream
 you wanted to dream. And you would, of course, be able to alter your time sense and slip,
 say 75 years of subjective time into eight hours of sleep. You would, I suppose, start
 out by fulfilling all your wishes. You could design for yourself what would be the most
 ecstatic life. Love affairs, banquets, dancing girls, wonderful journeys, gardens, music
 beyond belief. And then after a couple of months of this sort of thing at 75 years a
 night, you would be getting a little taste for something different. And you would move
 over to an adventurous dimension where there were certain dangers involved and the thrill
 of dealing with dangers. And you could rescue princesses from dragons and go on dangerous
 journeys, make wonderful explosions and blow them up, and eventually get into contests
 with enemies. And after you'd done that for some time, you'd think up a new wrinkle to
 forget that you were dreaming, so that you would think it was all for real and to be
 anxious about it. And then, because it'd be so great when you woke up. And then you'd
 say, well, like children who dare each other on things, how far out could you get? What
 could you take? What dimension of being lost, of abandonment of your power, what dimension
 of that could you stand? You could ask yourself this, because you know you'd eventually wake
 up. And after you'd gone on doing this, you see, for some time, you would suddenly find
 yourselves sitting around in this room with all your personal involvements, problems,
 et cetera, talking with me. How do you know that that's not what you're doing? Could be.
 Because after all, what would you do if you were God? If you were what there is, the self.
 In the Upanishads, the basic texts of Hinduism, one of them starts out saying, in the beginning
 was the self. And looking around, it said, I am. And thus it is that everyone to this
 day, when asked who is there, says it is I. And thereafter gives whatever particular name
 he may have. For if you were God, and in the sense that you knew everything, and you were
 completely transparent to yourself through and through, you would be bored. Because if
 looking at it from another way, we push technology to its furthest possible development, and
 we had, instead of a dial telephone on one's desk, a more complex system of buttons, and
 one touch, beep, would give you anything you wanted. Aladdin's lamp. You would eventually
 have to introduce a button labeled surprise. Because all perfectly known futures, as I
 pointed out, are past. They have happened virtually. It is only the true future is a
 surprise. So if you were God, you would say to yourself, man, get lost. And it's strange
 that this idea is obscurely embedded in the Christian tradition, when in the Epistle to
 the Philippians, St. Paul speaks of God the Son, the logos, the Word of God, who is incarnate
 in Christ, and says, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being
 in the form of God, thought not equality with God a thing to be clung to, but made himself
 of no reputation, and humbled himself, and was found in fashion as a man, and became
 obedient to death." Same idea. Same idea as the idea of the dream. You get that very far-out
 dream of getting as extreme as you can get. And so this, then, is the basis of the Hindu
 view of the universe and of man. The Hindu looks upon the universe as a drama. The Westerner,
 of course, looks upon the universe as a construct, as something made. And it is not, therefore,
 insignificant that Jesus was the son of a carpenter. The Chinese looks upon the universe
 as an organism, as we shall subsequently see. But the dramatic idea is basic to Hinduism.
 Now you can speak about Hinduism on two levels, at least. One I will call the metaphysical
 level, and the other the mythological level. If you speak on the metaphysical level, you
 can speak only in negative language. You can say what the divine, the ultimate reality,
 is not. If you speak on the mythological level, you may speak of what the divine is like,
 because myth is not a falsehood, as one uses the word in a sophisticated way. A myth is
 an image, a concrete image, in terms of which man makes sense of the world. And thus the
 idea of God the Father or God the Maker is a myth, because it's an image. And Christian
 theologians distinguish equally between two kinds of theological language, which are respectively
 called cataphatic and apophatic. Apophatic language is negative, as when we say God is
 infinite and eternal. Cataphatic language is mythological, as when we say God the Father,
 God is love, and all the positive designations. We are not saying God is a cosmic male parent,
 but is analogous with the Father. So with Hinduism. But what I'm going to speak to you
 in first of all is the mythological language of Hinduism, the idea of the universe as the
 big act. The universe is God playing hide and seek with himself. For God is thought
 of fundamentally to the Hindu as the self, the self, the cosmic I. And it is a basic
 proposition for the Hindu that only the self, the Godhead, is real. There is nothing other
 than the Godhead. So that the appearance, the feeling that there are other things than
 the Godhead is called maya. We ordinarily translate that word illusion. But you must
 be careful about the word illusion. Illusion is related to the Latin ludere, and that means
 play. And this is why the analogy of the world is dramatic. It's a play, in the sense of
 a stage play. Now, when you go to the theatre, you know what you're going to see is not for
 real. Because the proscenium arch tells you that. That everything that happens on the
 far side of that arch is only in play, not serious. But the actor, and you will hope
 that he will be good at it, is going to try and persuade you that it's for real. So that
 he will so move you that you are crying or sitting in anxiety upon the edge of your chair.
 And so the audience is almost persuaded to be taken in. Now, what about if this would
 happen with the very best actor of all, the great actor? The audience would, of course,
 be completely taken in. But in this case, of course, the actor and the audience are
 the same, the self. The self has, thus, the capacity to abandon itself, to forget itself,
 to hide from itself, and thus to make the most completely convincing illusion. But in
 play. And so the activity, the creative activity of the Godhead in Hinduism is called Leela,
 which means play. Our word, lilt, is related to it, I think. But so also in the book of
 Proverbs, you will find a discourse being given by the divine wisdom. "The Lord possessed
 me in the beginning of His ways, before His works of old." I think it's the 22nd chapter
 of Proverbs, in the course of which the wisdom says that its delight was to rejoice, the
 King James Bible says, in the presence of God and with the sons of men. But the Hebrew
 translated rejoice says play. Rejoice is a sort of dignified Elizabethan, but it says
 play. And St. Thomas, aware of this, said that the divine wisdom was above all to be
 compared with games, because games are played for their own sake and not for any sort of
 ulterior motive. So also music is a kind of non-purposive thing, because you don't either
 play music to reach a destination, nor do you dance to reach a particular place on the
 floor. It is the doing of it itself that is important, because after all, if the object
 of music were to gain a certain destination, those orchestras that played fastest would
 be considered the best. So the idea is that dancing and music, more than other arts, represent
 the nature of this world, that it is playful, that it is sport, that it may be sincere,
 but is definitely not serious. And as G.K. Chesterton well put it once, the angels fly
 because they take themselves lightly. How much more so the Lord of the angels. So if
 a beautiful lady should say to me, "I love you," and I were to reply, "Are you serious
 or are you just playing with me?" That would be quite the wrong response, because I hope
 she's not serious and that she will play with me. I should say, "Are you sincere or are
 you just toying with me?" Because you see, the word "play" has many different senses.
 A person who is playing the organ in church is certainly not doing something trivial.
 When you go to see a play called Hamlet, you are not seeing something trivial. When the
 concert artist plays Mozart, he is certainly entertaining you, but it's not a trivial entertainment.
 But on the other hand, we would use "play" in quite a different sense when we mean just
 fooling around, doing it for kicks. So it is fundamental, as a matter of fact, to both
 the Hindu and the Christian traditions that the universe is the play of God. But the Christian
 thinks of it in the terms of a construction play, like building with blocks, and the Hindu
 thinks of it as dramatic play, of the actual participation of the Godhead in the creation,
 so that every being whatsoever is God in disguise. Hinduism speaks of the Godhead as--uses the
 word "brahman." This is a neuter form in Sanskrit from the root "bhri," which means "to grow,
 to expand, to swell." The neuter form "brahman" does not have quite the connotation, then,
 you see, of kingship that we will find attached to the Western idea of God, but is also referred
 to as "atman." And this word we translate ordinarily "the self." So you can have the
 "para," "param," you put the M in to connect the particle, "paramatman," which means "para,"
 the supreme self, or sometimes just the "atman" alone, and that means the self in you. But
 the fundamental principle of Indian philosophy is "atman" is "brahman." Your self is the supreme
 self, or it is expressed also in the formula "tat tvam asi," colloquially translated "you're
 it," or "tat," "that," "tvam," Latin "tuam," "you," "asi," "are," "you're," "you are that,"
 "that thou art." "Tat," of course, is the first word uttered by a baby, "da, da, da,
 da, da." And fathers flatter themselves that it's saying "da-da." It's not. It's saying
 "that." "Da, da, da, da, da." And so it's pointing to "thatness" in everything. It's
 very important to see this, because everything is just that. I can say it in a negative way,
 which you won't appreciate at first, perhaps. Everything is meaningless. Only words have
 meaning, because they point to something other than themselves. The sound "water" is undrinkable,
 but it points to the drinkable reality. But you say, "What is that pointing at the water?"
 And somebody says, "Water." He's not being correct, because what you're pointing at is
 not the noise water. So it's not water. It's that. "Da." And water's a kind of jazz. And
 it's just doing that. And you can get to see, too, people are a kind of jazz. They talk
 and communicate with each other, but what does that mean? Well, they get together, and
 they make more people, and they do this, and they do that, and they eat, and they go on
 doing this jazz. But it's just jazz. And you begin to see, as you do that, everything's
 like music, you see. It's all these complicated vibrations, going, "Ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo,
 ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo,"
 in all kinds of ways. That's "that," or "thatness." "Ta, ta, ta," also called in Sanskrit. So
 anyway, this is the fundamental notion, that you are really what there is, the works. Only
 you're playing hide and seek with yourself. And on a stupendous scale, Hindus measure
 time in units which in Sanskrit are called kalpa. And a kalpa is a period of 4,320,000
 years. And there are two kinds of kalpa. One is called manvantara, and the other is called
 pralaya. Manvantara is the kalpa in which the universe is manifested, in other words,
 in which God puts on his big act. And pralaya is the kalpa, succeeding kalpa, in which the
 universe is unmanifested. And the Godhead does not dream, but is awake to its own nature.
 So that for-- these are called respectively the days and the nights of the Brahman. And
 this goes on forever and ever and ever and ever, the days and nights adding up into years
 and centuries and eons. They speak of kral. There's a Sanskrit measure, kral, C-R-O-R-E,
 sort of a word that really, I think, means umpteen, crawls of kalpas. And this is the
 in-breathing and the out-breathing. There's the word hamsa. In this word in Sanskrit,
 hamsa means a swan or a big water bird, like a gander. There's a myth that there is in
 the beginning the divine bird which lays the egg of the world. And the egg splits, and
 the upper is the heavens and the lower is the earth. Now, so when the worlds are manifested,
 the Lord breathing out says, "Hung." And when the worlds are withdrawn, the breath comes
 back, "Sa hung, sa." But if you say, "Hung, sa, hung, sa, hung, sa hung," it becomes,
 "sa hung, sa hung." Sa, a hung. That means-- sa means that, the truth, a hung, I am. I am
 that. It's like, imagine when we get to the final moment in which the world is blown up.
 You know, imagine the countdown. This is the end. Somebody's pushed the button. Eight,
 seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
 What are you listening to? The sound of the waves. And you can sit and listen to the little
 waves on the sea shore. And you get back here into this kind of thinking, and you're hearing
 the ocean of the universe going. And that's your breathing, too. It's all one rhythm.
 So it may be that every star was once a planet populated by intelligent people who found
 out about the fundamental energy of the universe and blew themselves up. And as they blew up,
 they scattered all kinds of stuff out, which became little planets, which in a long time,
 life started all over again. Because the Hindu theory is very odd. Every kalpa in the manvantara
 period, where there's a manifested world, is divided into four subdivisions of time,
 each one of which is called a yuga. That means roughly an epoch or an era. And there are
 four yugas, and they're named after the different throws in the Indian game of dice. There are
 four such throws, and the first is called krita. That means-- kri means to do. That's
 when we say something is done, truly done. It's the perfect throw of four. The second
 is called treta, which is the throw of three. The next is called dvapara, which is the throw
 of two. And the final one is called kali, which means the worst throw, which is the
 throw of one. Now, each of these periods of the kalpa are of different lengths. Krita
 is the longest, and kali is the shortest, and so ranged. So that when the world is first
 manifested, as in those dreams that I were mentioning to you, the world is in a golden
 age to begin with. It's perfect. And that is the longest period of time.
 Then when we get a little bit more adventurous, you see, the treta means that in this era,
 a kind of disharmonious element enters into things. It's like a three-legged chair isn't
 so secure as a four-legged chair. It's just a bit inclined to tip. And as it were, there's
 a fly in the ointment, a snake in the garden. Then comes dvapara, in which the forces of
 good and evil are equally balanced. And finally, kali, which is the shortest period, where
 the forces of evil are triumphant, and the world is destroyed at the end of it. For then
 the Godhead appears in the form of Shiva, who represents the destructive aspect of the
 divine energy, and whereas Brahma is the creative, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer.
 But Shiva is always the destroyer in the sense of the liberator, the guy who breaks up the
 ruts. And he comes on with a blue body and ten arms and a necklace of skulls. Indian
 gods have many arms because they are cosmic centipedes. They do all things without having
 to think about it, like the centipede doesn't have to think about how to manipulate its
 legs, like you don't have to think how to grow your hair. And as Shiva dances what is
 called the tandava, which is the dance of destruction at the end of the cycle, at the
 end of the kalpa, you will see that his hands contain clubs and knives and bells, but one
 hand is like that. And that gesture means don't be afraid, it's a big act. It is all,
 as it were, the outflowing of your own consciousness, of your own mind.
 Now then, Hindu life is related to this cosmology. And the objective of life is, of course, in
 the end, to wake up from the dream when you've had enough. And so the dreaming process is
 called sometimes saṃsāra. Saṃsāra is the round, the rat race. And saṃsāra is
 divided into six divisions. I'd better draw a map, I think. This is common, you see, cosmology
 to both the Hindus and the Buddhists.
 (feet shuffling)


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