I want to start by giving what may be to many of you a new definition of the word "myth."
 As normally used, the word "myth" means an idle tale, a fable, a falsehood, or an idea
 that's out of date, something untrue. But there is another, older, and stricter use
 of the word "myth," whereby it doesn't mean something untrue, but it means an image, in
 terms of which people make sense of life and of the world. Supposing, for example, you
 don't understand the technicalities of electricity, and somebody wants to explain them to you.
 He wants to explain about the flow of currents. Well, to do that, he compares electricity
 with water. And because you understand water, you get some idea about the behavior of electricity.
 Or if an astronomer wants to explain to you what he means by "expanding space," he'll
 use the metaphor of a balloon, a black balloon with white spots on it. The white spots represent
 the galaxies. And then if you blow up the balloon, they all get further away from each
 other at the same speed as the balloon blows up. In neither case are we saying that electricity
 is water, or that the universe is a balloon with white spots on it. We are saying it's
 something like it. And so, in the same way, the human being has always used images to
 represent his deepest ideas of how the universe works and what man's place in it is.
 And tonight I'm going to discuss certain aspects of two of the greatest myths in this sense
 of the word which have influenced mankind's thinking. First of all, the myth of the universe
 as an artifact, as something made, as a carpenter makes tables, chairs, and houses, or as a
 potter makes pots, or as a sculptor makes figurines. And on the other hand, the image
 of the world as a drama, in which all the things in the world are not made but acted
 in the same way as a player acts parts. For these are the two great images which govern
 respectively the religions of the West descending from Hebraism, that is to say, Hebraism itself,
 Christianity, and Islam. And on the other hand, the myth which governs those religions
 which have had their origin in India, most particularly Hinduism itself and to a lesser
 extent Buddhism.
 And I want to make it perfectly plain before I go any further that in talking about these
 two great religious traditions, in terms of images, I'm talking about the way they express
 themselves at a rather popular level. Sophisticated Christians and sophisticated Hindus think
 beyond images. For example, a Christian may think of God as the Father, but a sophisticated
 and educated Christian does not imagine that God is a cosmic male parent with a white beard
 sitting on a golden throne above the stars. Nor does a Hindu imagine literally that God
 is the super showman, the big actor. These images are what it is like, not what it is.
 And perhaps when I get through with discussing them, we'll be able to ask the question as
 to whether any of these images still make sense to us in this twentieth century when
 we have a view of the world so powerfully shaped by Western science.
 Now let me begin then with a few things about the image of the world and thus the image
 of man as it comes to us from the Hebrew Bible. It's said in the book of Genesis that the
 Lord God created man out of the dust of the earth as if he had made of Adam a clay figurine.
 And then he blew the breath of life into its nostrils and the figurine became alive. And
 it's said that the figurine was made in the image of God. For God, who is conceived in
 this particular image as personal, as a living, intelligent spirit, creates in man something
 like that. But you must note very definitely that this is a creation as the potter makes
 a pot out of clay. For the creature that the Lord God has made is not God. The creature
 is something less than God, something like God but not God. And you will see some very
 interesting consequences follow from this idea of the world as an artefact. What follows
 from it is that the whole universe is seen as a marvellous technical accomplishment.
 And if it is made, there must be an explanation of how it is made, and the whole history of
 Western thought has in many ways been an attempt to discover how the Creator did it. What were
 the principles? What were the laws laid down? What, in other words, was the blueprint that
 underlies this creation? And this image has therefore persisted throughout Western history
 and continues on into a time when very many people do not believe in Christianity or Judaism
 or Islam. They are, you might say, agnostics or atheists, but they still carry on something
 of this idea of the world as an artefact. If you are a Christian or a Jew, you believe
 that the world is the artefact, the creation, of the intelligent spirit called God. But
 if in this culture you are an atheist or an agnostic, you believe that the world is an
 automatic machine without a Creator, something which made itself. We might say then that
 our original model of the universe was the ceramic model, and the Bible is full of references
 to God as the potter who makes the world out of obedient clay. But when Western thinkers
 in the eighteenth century began to drop the idea of a personal God, they kept the idea
 of the artefact, and so we could say that after the ceramic model of the universe, we
 got the fully automatic model. And still, you see, underlying our way of thinking about
 things is the question, how are they put together? And if you want to find out, one of the obvious
 ways to proceed is to take them to pieces. Everybody knows that if you want to find out
 how something is made, you unscrew the parts and see what the secret is inside the box.
 And so Western science in its beginnings took everything apart. It took animals apart, it
 took flowers apart, it took rocks apart. And then when they got it reduced to its tiniest
 pieces, they tried to find methods of taking those apart too, so that we could eventually
 discover what the very smallest, small things were, and so know what building blocks the
 Creator or the fully automatic model used in order to put it all together, hoping that
 that would lead us to an understanding of how life works. Man himself in all this was
 looked upon as a creation, something made. Only there were some difficulties about this,
 because if you believe in the world in accordance with the idea of the fully automatic model,
 you've really got to admit that man too is fully automatic. In other words, he's a machine
 rather than a person. Man is something, in other words, that says, doffs its hat to you
 and says, "How do you do? I'm a person. I'm alive. I'm sensible. I talk. I have feelings."
 But you wonder, do you really, or are you just an automaton? Am I real, or am I just
 an automaton?
 The general result of the Western image of man hasn't been quite that. What it's come
 down to under the dispensation of the fully automatic model is this. We are living beings,
 we're very sensitive, and inside the human skin, by an extraordinary fluke of nature,
 there has arisen something called reason, and there have also arisen values such as
 love. But this was a fluke because it happened inside a fully automatic universe, which is
 stupid because it's merely automatic. You won't, in other words, find anything really
 intelligent outside human skins. And therefore, if that is so, the only thing that people
 can do if they want to maintain reason and love in this universe is to fight nature and
 beat the stupid external world into submission to the human will. And so the war against
 nature is the great project thus far of Western technology. Because you see, each one of us,
 because we have inherited from thousands of years of history a view of man as something
 made and almost of a sort of breath breathed into a pot of clay or an image of clay, a
 kind of--each one feels himself as a globule of consciousness or mind living inside a vehicle
 called "my body." And since the world outside that body is stupid, we feel estranged from
 the world. When we find out how enormous the universe is, that makes us as individuals
 feel extremely unimportant and rather lonely. Because you see, we consider ourselves, our
 basic image of ourselves, is of a soul or an ego or a mind, all by itself in its little
 house, looking out at a world that is strange and that is not me. I am therefore a brief
 interval of consciousness between the darkness and the darkness. And that isn't too happy.
 I would like to be able to believe that it was more than that. If I could, so many of
 us say, if I could only still believe that there is an intelligent and eternal God in
 whose eyes I am important and who has the power to enable me to live forever, that would
 be very nice. But for many people, that's an extraordinarily difficult thing to believe.
 Now I want to contrast this image of the world with another, what I call the dramatic image
 as distinct from the image of the potter or the ceramic image. And this will be the presiding
 image of Hinduism. Their idea is this, that God didn't make the world like a technologist,
 but he acted it. That is to say, every person and everything, for that matter, every tree,
 every flower, every animal, every star, every rock, every grain of dust, is a role or part
 which the Godhead is playing. You must understand, of course, that the Hindu image of God is
 a little bit different from the Jewish, the Christian, and the Islamic.
 When I was a boy, little boy, I used to ask my mother interminable questions. And when
 she got sick of it, she said, "My dear, there are some things in this life that we're just
 not meant to know." Well, I said, "Will we ever know?" She said, "Yes. If you die and
 then go to heaven, God will explain it all." And so I used to hope that on wet afternoons
 in heaven, we would all be able to sit round the throne of grace and say to the Lord, "Why
 did you do this and why did you do that?" And he would explain. Every child in the West
 asks his mother, "How was I made?" And nobody knows, but they know that perhaps somebody
 does and that'll be God, and he'll be able to explain. Likewise, if anybody gets mentally
 deranged and claims to be God, we always humor such people by asking them technical questions.
 "How did you make the world in six days?" Or, "If you're God, why couldn't you change
 this plate into a rabbit?" But that is because in our popular image of God, God is the supreme
 technocrat. He knows all the answers. He understands everything in detail and could tell you all
 about it. But the Hindus don't think of God that way. If you ask the Hindu God, "How did
 you create the human body?" he would say, "Look, I know how I did it, but it can't be
 explained in words because words are too clumsy. In words, I have to talk about things slowly.
 I have to string them out because words run in a line, and lines add up to books, and
 books add up to libraries. And if I explain to you how I made the human organism, it would
 take all eternity for me to tell you. Fortunately for me, I don't have to understand things
 in words in order to make them happen, nor do you. You don't have to understand in words
 how you breathe. You just breathe. You don't have to understand in words how to grow your
 hair, how to shape your bones, how to make your eyes blue or brown. You just do it."
 And somebody who does understand, to some extent, maybe a physiologist, he can't do
 it any better than you can. So that, you see, is the Hindu idea of divine omnipotence. And
 that is why their images of the gods very often have many arms. You'll often see the
 god Shiva with ten arms, or the Buddhist Avalokiteshvara with one thousand arms. And that is because
 their image of the divine is a sort of centipede. A centipede can move a hundred legs without
 having to think about it. So Shiva can move ten arms very dexterously without having to
 think about it. And you know what happened to the centipede when it stopped to think
 how to move a hundred legs? It got all balled up.
 So in this way, the Hindus do not think of God as being a technician in the sense of
 having a verbal or mathematical understanding of how the world is created. It's done in
 a simpler way, just like that. Only if we had to describe this simple way in words,
 it would be very complicated, but God, in their idea, doesn't need to do so. But the
 remarkable difference is that the Hindu doesn't see any fundamental division between God and
 the world. The world is God at play. The world is God acting.
 Now how could you possibly arrive at such an idea? Very simply, when he tries to think
 why there is a world at all, because if you think about it, it is extraordinarily odd
 that there is anything. It would have been much simpler and required a great deal less
 energy for there to be nothing. But here it is. And why? Well, what would you do if you
 were God? Or let me put it in a simpler way. Supposing that every night you could dream
 any dream you wanted to dream, what would you do? Well, first of all, I'm quite sure
 that most of us would dream all the marvellous things we wanted to happen. We would fulfil
 all our wishes. And we might go on that way for months. Besides, you could make it extraordinarily
 rich by wishing to dream 75 years in one night, full of glorious happenings. But after you
 had done that for a few months, you might begin to get a little tired of it. And you
 would say, "What about an adventure tonight, in which something terribly exciting and rather
 dangerous is going to happen, but I'll know I'm dreaming, so it won't be too bad, and
 I'll wake up if it gets too serious." So you do that for a while, you rescue princesses
 in distress from dragons and all sorts of things, and then when you've done that for
 some time, you say, "Now let's go out a bit further. Let's forget it's a dream and have
 a real thrill." Ooh, but you know you'll wake up. And then you get, after you've done that
 for a while, you get more and more nerve, until you sort of dare yourself as to how
 far out you can get. And you end up dreaming the sort of life you're living now.
 Now, why does one do that? Why would one do that? The reason, the Hindu would say, is
 that the basic pulse of life, the basic motivation of existence, is what we call the game of
 hide and seek. Now you see it, now you don't. You see everything's based on that, because
 all life is vibration, pulsing. Light is a pulsation of light-darkness. Sound is a pulsation
 of sound-silence. Everything is going da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da at various speeds. And in order to have a,
 say, it's like the motion of a wave. Now a wave consists of two pulses, the crest and
 the trough. You can't have crests without troughs, you can't have troughs without crests.
 They always go together. You can't have hide without seek, you can't have seek without
 hide. Just for example, you can't have here without there, because if you didn't know
 where there was, you wouldn't know where here was. You can't have is without isn't, because
 you don't know what you mean by is unless you also know what you mean by isn't, and
 vice versa. So in that way, they think that hide and seek is the fundamental game. As
 if the Lord, God, the Brahman, as they call it, said in the beginning, "Get lost, man.
 Disappear, and I'll find you again later." And then when, you know, the disappearance
 gets very far out, then the contrary rhythm begins, and the dreamer wakes up and finds
 out, "Phew, that was a relief." And then, after a rest period in which everything is,
 of course, at peace, it starts all over again, because the spirit of adventure springs eternal.
 Now then, the Hindus had extremely vast ideas of space and time for their period in history,
 and they have the theory that the hiding part of the game goes on for 4,320,000 years, a
 period called ekalpa, K-A-L-P-A in Sanskrit. And then the seek part, that is to say, let
 me put it this way, the dreaming part, is followed by the waking part. The dreaming
 is the hiding, where the Godhead imagines that it's all of us. Then for another 4,320,000
 years there's a period of awakening, and then at the end of that, again begins the dream.
 Now the dreaming period is further subdivided into four stages. The first stage is the longest,
 and it's the best. During that stage, the dream is beautiful. The second stage is not
 quite so long, and it's a little unsettling. There's an element of instability in it, a
 certain touch of insecurity. In the third stage, which is not, again, so long, the forces
 of light and the forces of darkness, of good and of evil, are equally balanced, and things
 are beginning to look rather dangerous. And in the fourth stage, which is the shortest
 of them all, the negative, dark, or evil side triumphs and the whole thing blows up in the
 end. But then that's like the bang in the dream, you know, when you get shot in a dream
 and you wake up, and it was after all a dream. And so then there's a waking period before
 the whole thing starts again. And so the Hindus feel that behind the scene, that is to say
 in reality, under the surface, you are all the actor. But behind the scenes, in the green
 room, you might say in the very back of your mind and the very depths of your soul, you
 always have a very tiny, sneaking suspicion that you might not be the you that you think
 you are.
 Thank you for your time.


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