This is the world of the Deva.
 And this is the same root from which we get both divine and devil.
 But Deva means angel.
 The highest and most successful beings in the universe.
 And so opposite, this is the world of Naraka, who are the most unsuccessful.
 These are the purgatorial worlds of extreme suffering.
 This is the world of Ashura.
 They are also angels, but they're angry angels, representing the wrath potential of energy.
 This is the world of animals.
 This is the world of Preta, for which we have no English equivalent, hungry or frustrated
 spirits who have enormous stomachs but mouths only the size of needles.
 Vast appetite and no means of fulfillment.
 And this is the Manu world, that is to say, the world of man.
 You don't have to take this literally.
 You could say when you are extremely happy or ecstatic, you're here.
 When you are miserable, you're here.
 When you're dumb, you're here.
 When you're mad, you're here.
 When you're frustrated, you're here.
 But when you're more or less your normal, rational self, you're here.
 Now so, all life through the period of the Kalpas goes grinding around this wheel.
 And if you go up and you succeed and you get to the top, you have to come down.
 They don't look, they don't see success, in other words, in the world as a method of liberation
 because it implies failure.
 So the idea of liberation, which is called moksha, is the ideal of Hindu life.
 Wake up, it's a dream.
 And in time, there is no hope in time.
 Everything is going to get worse in time because, as you know, it does.
 We all fall apart in the end.
 Everything falls apart, institutions, buildings, nations, it all crumbles.
 And people say, "Well, that's an awfully pessimistic philosophy."
 Well, is it?
 I would rather say that the people who have hope in the future are the miserable people
 because they're like donkeys chasing carrots that are dangled before their noses from sticks
 attached to their collars.
 And they pursue and they pursue in vain, always hoping that tomorrow will be the great thing
 and therefore incapable of enjoying themselves today.
 People who live for the future never get there because when their plans mature, they are
 not there to enjoy them.
 They're the sort of people who spend their lives saving for their old age and trying
 to teach their children to do the same thing so that when they retire at 65, you know,
 they have false teeth and wrinkles and prostate trouble and all that sort of thing.
 Where were you going?
 What did you think it was all about?
 Furthermore, the fact that life is transient is part of its liveliness.
 The poets, in speaking of the transience of the world, always utter their best poetry.
 You know, "Our revels now are ended.
 These our actors, as I foretold you, are all spirits and are melted into air, into thin
 air.
 And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
 the solemn temples, the great earth itself, I, all which it inherits, shall dissolve.
 And like this insubstantial and pageant-faded, leave not a rack behind.
 We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
 And said so well, it doesn't seem so bad after all, does it?
 You see, there's always in the poetry of evanescence a kind of funny nostalgia.
 Moralists will say, "Those lovely lips which you so delight to kiss today will in a few
 years rot and disclose the grinning teeth of a skull."
 So what?
 The skull says, "Lying in the grass, chattering finch and water-fly are not merrier than I.
 Here among the flowers I lie, laughing everlastingly."
 No, I may not tell the best.
 Surely friends, I could have guessed.
 Death was but the good king's jest.
 It was hid so carefully.
 And monks used to keep skulls on their desks.
 And people nowadays think that was very morbid.
 But it's only-- I went and visited a chapel in the Via Veneto in Rome where there's a
 crypt where all the altar furnishings are made out of human bones.
 The altars are piles of skulls.
 There are rib bones arranged across the ceiling like floral patterns with vertebrae representing
 flowers.
 And they're all dead Capuchin monks.
 And there's a funny little monk collecting the admissions up at the top.
 And he has one of the funniest grins on his face I've seen in a long time.
 I said to him, "You know, on the day of resurrection, there's going to be an awful lot of scuttling
 up this narrow staircase."
 People try to reassemble their bones.
 "Oh dear father, isn't that my fifth metatarsal?"
 So the whole idea, you see, is that everything's
 falling apart.
 So don't try and stop it.
 When you're falling off a precipice, it doesn't do you any good to hang on to a rock that's
 falling with you.
 See?
 But everything is doing that.
 And so again, this is another case of our completely wasting our energy in trying to
 prevent the world from falling apart.
 Don't do it.
 And then you'll be able to do something interesting with the free energy.
 So that's moksha.
 Because when the Hindu says, "Everything is unreal," the Westerner reacts and says, "No,
 no.
 You can't treat life as a dream.
 It's serious.
 It's real.
 It's for real."
 And what do you mean by that?
 How real do you want it to be?
 This is, in other words, everything, insofar as it's falling apart, everything is changing,
 it is like smoke.
 And we all feel that smoke has a lesser degree of reality than wood.
 It's an image of the evanescent, of the ghostly.
 So this idea of the whole world is this mirage.
 That doesn't mean it's a bad thing.
 It's only bad if you cling to it, if you try to lean on it.
 But if you don't lean on it, it's a grand illusion.
 So the word maya means not only illusion, but it means art, it means magic, and it means
 creative power.
 So this is the big act.
 And it's perhaps easier to feel the world in that way in a tropical country where death
 is very common and where you just watch things dissolve before your eyes and yet burst out
 and grow again.
 The whole world is changing.
 Maybe easier to think that way than in our environment.
 So when you're out in California, the human landscape changes so fast that no town is
 the same for two years.
 Any mailing list that you have changes one third addresses per annum.
 Nothing stays put.
 The hills are shadows and they flow from form to form and nothing stands.
 Now this, you see, is not a pessimistic attitude, therefore, at all.
 To be able to realize that this world is simply a dream, a dancing play of smoke, fascinating,
 yes, but don't lean on it.
 Life is a bridge, says one of the Hindu sayings.
 Pass over it, but build no house upon it.
 And so immediately you see that.
 This is responsible for the enormous gaiety of certain Hindu sages.
 This is a thing that often puzzles Westerners.
 The element of-- they expected anybody who's an ascetic or a sage or something to be rather
 miserable, with a glum face.
 But on the contrary, you take this character who's going around these days, Maharshi Mahesh,
 he's always laughing because he's seen through it.
 He looks on every side and there is the face of the beloved, of the divinity, in everybody,
 in every direction, in everything, playing at being you.
 And you can look down into a person's eyes, way, way in, and you see the self.
 The eternal divine.
 And what is so funny, when it puts on an expression, saying, what, me?
 And the guru, the teacher.
 When people go to a guru, they get all sorts of funny ideas.
 They think, oh, he's looking right through me.
 He sees me through and through.
 He knows how awful I am, reads my most secret thoughts.
 Because he has a funny look in his face.
 He isn't even interested in your secret thoughts.
 He is looking straight at the godhead in you, with a funny expression on his face, which
 is saying, why are you trying to kid me?
 Come off it, Shiva, I know who you are.
 But therefore, you see, his role is to gently humor you into waking up as to your true nature.
 Now, of course, as I intimated earlier, the Hindu is therefore saying, everybody is God.
 And this is why, when a Hindu greets you, he does this.
 That is the act of puja, or worship, to the godhead in you.
 And our theologians get rather worried about that, because, you see, the two conceptions
 of God are different.
 Our conception is of the boss man, the king.
 This is of the cosmic centipede with the many arms, who does not have to think how to make
 the world, or rather to act the world.
 That would be an insufferable nuisance.
 You may think it rather wonderful when St. Thomas tries to explain that God is fully
 aware of everything that happens, and in every detail is willing each single vibration of
 any mosquito's wing.
 But when you really begin to think about it, that approaches intellectual elephantiasis.
 Imagine the Lord being aware of all the prayers, and having to listen to the sort of prayers
 that go on every night.
 "God heard the embattled nation shout, 'Godstrafe England, and God save the king!
 God this, God that, and God the other thing!
 Good God said, God, I've got my work cut out!'"
 But so therefore, when somebody in India suddenly announces that he's God, nobody accuses him
 of blasphemy or of being insane.
 They say simply, "Congratulations, at last you found out."
 And they don't immediately request a miracle.
 As you see, if we get across someone who says, "I'm God," or "I'm Jesus Christ," they say
 what they said to Jesus Christ in the first place.
 "Come on, let this bread, these stones, be made bread."
 And you know, he used to wangle out of it by saying, "A wicked and deceitful generation
 seeketh after a sign, and there shall no sign be given."
 The Hindu would say, "But there is no point in changing it.
 It's going the way I want it to anyhow.
 Only really and truly, there is not this idea of God the technician, but rather the power
 of omnipotence is not to be able to do anything, but to be doing all things, whatever it is
 that's going on, and spontaneously, without having to think about it, which is very clumsy.
 Now then, I must say something about how then this relates to the life of the Hindu.
 Hindu divide life into certain stages, what are called the ashramas.
 The first is called brahmacharya, the second grihasta, and the third vanaprastha.
 Brahmacharya means the stage of the student, the apprenticeship.
 Grihasta, the stage of the householder, and vanaprastha, the stage of the forest dweller.
 This is related to cultural history of early India.
 Before we have agrarian communities, we have a hunting culture, which is on the move.
 In a hunting culture, every male knows the whole culture.
 There is no division of labor.
 And the holy man of the hunting culture is, of course, called a shaman.
 A shaman is a realized man, a man who knows the inner secret.
 He's seen through the game, and he finds it by going away alone into the forest, and cutting
 himself off from the tribe, that is to say, from social conditioning.
 And he goes maybe for a long period into the forest and comes back.
 He's found out who he is, and he sure isn't who he was told he was.
 But as hunting cultures settle into agrarian patterns of life, what do they do?
 They build a village.
 And around the village, they set up a stockade, which is known as the pale.
 And the village is always, of course, standing at crossroads.
 And there you get in an agrarian society a division of labor.
 And the division of labor comprises four.
 In medieval Europe, we call them lords spiritual, lords temporal, commons, and serfs.
 In India, they are brahmins, kshatriya, that means fighters, vaisya, merchants, traders,
 shudra, laborers.
 So you've got the priests, the warriors, the merchants, and the laborers.
 Division of labor.
 The four sections of town.
 And so the four basic castes.
 So when you are born, you are born into a caste.
 And your duty as a grihasta, or householder, is to fulfill your caste function and to bring
 up a family.
 When you've done that, you go back to the forest, back to the hunting culture.
 And you drop your role.
 And you become nobody, a shaman again.
 So a Hindu calls one who does this a shramana, which is, of course, the same word as shaman.
 And the Chinese call him a shaman.
 A shaman is an immortal.
 Why immortal?
 Because it's only the role that's mortal, the big front, the persona.
 The one who you really are, the common man, that is to say, the man who is common to us
 all, which you could call the son of man, that's the real self.
 That's the guy who's putting on the big act.
 And of course, he has no name.
 Nobody can put the finger on him, because you can't touch the tip of the finger with
 the tip of the finger.
 So that means in practice, then, that when you hand over your vocation in life, which
 is called your svadharma, that means sva, that's the same as the Latin suus, one's own.
 Dharma means function, your own function, or we would call your vocation.
 When you've completed it, you drop out and become nobody, because you're going to find
 out now who you really are.
 You're no longer Mr. Mukhopadhyaya, who is a cloth salesman.
 You drop that name, and you take on one of the names of God, Swami Brahmananda, Swami
 Bliss of Brahman.
 And you may go quite naked, like the Shivaite holy men.
 No clothes.
 And they just go out and wander and don't make any provision for anything.
 They literally take no thought for the morrow, what you shall eat, what you shall drink,
 or wherewithal they shall be clothed.
 But you see people respect them.
 They say, "Yeah, we've got to have those people up there, because they are doing what human
 being is ultimately supposed to do, and we shall do it in our turn.
 And so give them some food."
 Now, naturally, caste, holy men, and all that kind of thing can be exploited.
 Anything can be exploited and abused.
 And we can look at it all and say, "What a mess.
 Why don't you do something for yourselves?
 Why don't you kill the sacred cows and eat them?
 Why don't you clean up?
 Why do you permit all this disease?"
 Just try and see something from another point of view for a change.
 I'm not saying that we should do what the Hindus do, but just look at it from another
 point of view.
 And they would smile at us and say, "You really think it's as real as all that?
 Have you never experienced what's on the inside of this game?"
 See, the trouble with you Westerners is you've never experienced bliss.
 You've never got down to the root of reality.
 You don't know that state of consciousness.
 And so you're frantically trying to patch everything up and pin it all together and
 screw the universe up so that it's fixed.
 You can never do it.
 All you do is go wildly rushing around and creating trouble.
 Of course, Western educated Hindus think the same way.
 They are now for rushing around and patching India up.
 And what's going to happen is they're going to arm all the millions of people in India.
 And they're going to create a lot of trouble in Asia one of these days when they become
 powerful society.
 You're already scared of the common man.
 Yeah.
 Scared of death, though, are you both?
 Of course.
 Is that an idea in Christianity of struggling and not resting?
 Yeah, that's true, you know, because of the big fight with the devil, you see?
 The war in heaven, you see?
 Now the funny thing about that is when you read Milton's Paradise Lost, long before Lucifer
 decided to rebel, the whole of heaven was armed.
 And he describes the legions of angels with their escutcheons and gonfalons and military
 deportment.
 Who was looking for trouble?
 You know, Lucifer was a good guy back then, you see?
 The bearer of light.
 So the Hindu looks at our Christianity, though, and sort of thinks, my goodness.
 Here is the eternal self.
 But in the idea of Christianity, the godhead is having a real far-out one.
 Because not only is he incarnating himself, say, as some wretched beggar, but he's incarnated
 himself as a Christian soul who believes that in this one short life he will decide his
 eternal destiny.
 And the possibilities of making a mistake are far greater than of being a lousy beggar.
 The possibility involved in the Christian gamble is to fry in hell forever and ever
 and ever and ever.
 Even the Avicii hell at the bottom of the Maraca only goes on for about one calpa.
 But the everlasting damnation, what an idea.
 So the Hindu says, bravo, you know?
 God has really done a dare on himself this time, to be a Christian soul.


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