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. But you will notice, if you compute--I haven't
 gone into the mathematics of it, but if you do--you will find out that in this drama,
 the forces of the dark side are operative for one third of the time, the forces of the
 light side for two thirds of the time. And this is a very ingenious arrangement, because
 we are seeing here the fundamental principles of drama. Consider drama. Here is a stage,
 and over the stage here is what we call the proscenium arch, and out there is the audience.
 Now you're supposed to be in the world of reality. Let's suppose this isn't a lecture
 tonight, but a show, and you come outside into the show, and you know you're real people
 living in the real world, but you're going to see a play, which isn't real. There are
 actors coming on the stage, but behind the scenes here, they're real people like you,
 but so that you don't see them that way, they're going to put on their costumes and their make-up,
 and then they're going to come out in front here and pretend to various roles. But you
 know, you want to be half convinced that what they're doing on the stage is real. And the
 work of a great actor is to get you sitting on the edge of your chair in anxiety, or weeping,
 or roaring with laughter, because he's almost persuaded you that what is on the stage is
 really happening. That is the greatness of his art, to take the audience in. And of course,
 in the same way, the Hindu feels that the Godhead acts his part so well that he takes
 himself in completely, so that each one of you is the Godhead, wonderfully fooled by
 your own act. And although you won't admit it to yourself, enjoying it like anything,
 because you mustn't admit it, that would give the show away. Now, it's a funny thing. When
 you say, "I'm a person," the word "person" is a word from the drama. You know when you
 open a play that is the script, you'll see the list of the actors, and it's called dramatis
 personae, the persons of the drama. And the word "person" in Latin is "persona." That
 means "through sound," something through which sound comes. Because the persona in Greco-Roman
 drama was the mask worn by the actors, and because they acted on an open-air stage, the
 mouth was shaped like a small megaphone, and that would project the sound. So the person
 is the mask. Isn't it funny now how we've forgotten that? And so Harry Emerson Fosdick
 could write a book called How to Be a Real Person, which, if translated literally, is
 How to Be a Genuine Fake. Because in the old sense, you see, the person is the role, the
 part played by the actor. But if you forget, you see, that you are the actor, and you think
 you're the person, you've been taken in by your own role. You're enrolled. You're bewitched,
 spellbound, enchanted.
 So then, look at something else about the drama and its nature. In the drama, there
 has to be a villain, unless, of course, you're acting some kind of a non-play, which doesn't
 have any story. But all fundamental stories start out with a status quo, where everybody's
 sort of going along, and then something has to come in to upset everything. And the interest
 of the play is, how are we going to solve it? It's the same when you play cards. Supposing
 you're playing solitaire, you start by shuffling the deck, and that introduces chaos. And the
 game is to play order against chaos.
 So in the drama, somebody has to be the villain and play the dark side, and then the hero
 plays against him. If you go to the theatre for a good cry, then you let the villain win,
 and you call it a tragedy. If you go for a thrill, you let the hero win. If you go for
 laughs, you call it a comedy. There are different arrangements, then, between the hero and the
 villain. But in all cases, when the curtain goes down at the end of the drama, the hero
 and the villain step out hand in hand, and the audience applaud both. They don't boo
 the villain at the end of the play. They applaud him for acting the part of the villain so
 well, and they applaud the hero for acting the part of the hero so well, because they
 know that the hero role and the villain role are only masks.
 And so you see behind the stage, too, there is the green room, where after the play is
 over and before it begins, the masks are taken off. And so the Hindus feel that behind the
 scene, that is to say, in reality, under the surface, you are all the actor, marvellously
 skilled in playing many parts, and in getting lost in the mazes of your own minds and the
 entanglements of your own affairs, as if this were the most urgent thing going. 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. The Germans call it a hintergedanke, a thought way, way
 back in your head that you will hardly admit to yourself. Because, of course, you've been
 brought up, most of you, if you were brought up in the Hebrew-Christian tradition, it would
 be very wicked indeed to think that you were God. That would be blasphemy, and oh, oh,
 oh, don't you ever dare think such an idea, which, of course, is all as it should be,
 because the show must go on, until, of course, the time does come to stop.
 Now you will see that this involves two quite different ways of dealing with the fundamental
 question, two fundamental questions. One, what is man? That is, who are you? And in
 the Hebrew-Christian answer, we more or less say, well, I'm me. I'm Alan Watts. I'm John
 Doe. I'm Mary Smith. And I firmly believe I am, because I really oughtn't to think anything
 else, ought I? And that me is a finite ego, or a finite mind, whatever that is.
 On the other hand, the Hindu will say that the real self, which he calls Atman, A-T-M-A-N,
 is what there is. It's the works. It's the which than which there is no whicher, the
 root and ground of the universe and of reality.
 The next problem, where they differ so sharply, is, well, why have things gone wrong? Why
 is there evil? Why is there pain? Why is there tragedy? Now, in the Christian tradition,
 you have to attribute evil to something else besides God. There, God is defined as good,
 and he originally created the scheme of things without there being any evil in it. But there
 was a mysterious accident in which one of the angels, called Lucifer, didn't do what
 he was told. Man, there was a fall of man. Man disobeyed. He went against the law of
 God. And from this point, evil was introduced into the scheme of things, and things began
 to go wrong, that is to say, against the will of the perfectly good Creator.
 Now, the Hindu thinks in a different way. He feels that the Creator, or the actor, is
 the author of both the good and the evil, for the reasons that I explained to you. You
 have to have the evil for there to be a story. And in any case, it isn't as if the Creator
 had made evil and made someone else its victim. It isn't like saying, "God creates the evil
 as well as the good, and poor little us are his puppets, and he inflicts evil upon us."
 The Hindu says, "Nobody experiences pain except the Godhead. You are not some separate
 little puppet which is being kicked around by omnipotence. You are omnipotence in disguise."
 And so, there is no victim of this. No helpless, defenseless, poor little thing. Even the baby
 with syphilis is the dreaming Godhead.
 Now, this makes people brought up in the West extremely uneasy, because it seems to undercut
 the foundations of moral behavior and say, "Well, if good and evil are created by God,
 isn't this a universe in which just anything goes? I mean, if I'm God in disguise, surely
 if I realize that, I can get away with murder." Well, think it through. Didn't I point out
 that in the game, as the Hindus analyze it, the evil part has one-third of the time, and
 the good part has two-thirds? What sort of a game do you want, anyway? You will find
 out, you see, that all good games, games that are worth playing and that arouse our interest,
 are constructed like this. If you have the good and the evil equally balanced, the game
 is boring. Nothing happens. It's stalemate. The irresistible force meets the immovable
 object. On the other hand, if it's all good and there's hardly any evil, maybe just a
 weeny little bit of a fly in the ointment, it also gets boring. Just in the same way,
 for example, supposing you knew the future and could control it perfectly, what would
 you do? You would say, "Now, let's shuffle the deck and have another deal." Because,
 for example, when great chess players sit down to a match and it suddenly becomes apparent
 to both of them that white is going to mate in 16 moves and nothing can be done about
 it, they abandon the game and begin another. They don't want to know. There wouldn't be
 any hide in the game, any element of surprise, if they did know the outcome. So a game with
 good and evil equally balanced isn't a good game. A game with the positive or good forces
 clearly triumphant isn't an interesting game. What we want is a game where it always seems
 that the good side is about to lose. I'm really serious danger of losing. But manages always
 to sneak out. You know how it is in serial stories when they get the hero at the end
 of an instalment in some absolutely impossible position where it seems that he's going to
 be run over by a train because he's tied with his girlfriend to the rails, and you know
 somehow in the next instalment the author's going to get them out of the difficulty. Only
 he mustn't do it too obviously because he won't go on reading the next instalment.
 So then what's necessary is a system in which the good side is always winning but never
 is the winner, where the evil side is always losing but never is the loser. That's a very
 practical arrangement for a successful ongoing game which will keep everybody interested.
 And you must watch this in practical politics. Every in-group or group of nice people needs
 an out-group of nasty people, otherwise they wouldn't know who they were. And you must
 recognise then that this out-group is your necessary enemy whom you need. He keeps you
 on your toes. But you mustn't obliterate him. If you do, you're in a very dangerous state
 of affairs. So you have to love your enemies in this sense, regard them as highly necessary,
 and to be respected chivalrously. We need the Communists and they need us. The thing
 is to cool it and play what I call a contained conflict. When conflicts get out of hand,
 all sides blow up. Oh, of course, I suppose then there's another deal, maybe a million
 years later.
 Now let me see if I can for a moment put these two visions of the world together. It seems
 that if you believe the Christian, Hebrew, Islamic view, that you can't admit the Hindu
 view. Because if you're a Christian, the one thing you cannot believe, if that's if you
 say you're at all Orthodox, you're an Orthodox Protestant Bible type, or if you're a Roman
 Catholic, you can't believe that you are God. And so that excludes Hinduism, apparently.
 But let's go back to Judaism for a minute and ask this question. If Judaism is the true
 religion, can Christianity be true too? No. No. Because one thing in Christianity that
 the Jew can't admit, and that was that Jesus Christ was God. That is unthinkable for a
 Jew, that any man was indeed God in the flesh.
 All right, second question. If Christianity is the true religion, can Judaism be true
 too? The answer is yes, because all Christians are Jews. That is to say, they have taken
 in the Jewish religion, lock, stock, and barrel, in the Old Testament, into their own religion.
 Every Christian is a Jew plus something else, which is his particular attitude to Jesus
 of Nazareth.
 Now then, let's play this game once again. If Christianity is true, can Hinduism be true?
 The answer is no, for the reason that we've seen. The Christians will say Jesus of Nazareth
 was God. But you aren't. I'm not.
 Now then, if Hinduism is true, can Christianity be true? The answer is yes, because it can
 include it. But how? What would be the attitude of a Hindu to a very sincere and convinced
 Christian? He would say, "Bravo. Absolutely marvelous. What an act."
 Here in this Christian soul, God is playing his most extraordinary game. He is believing
 and really feeling that he's not himself. And not only that, but that he is living only
 one life. And in that life, he's got to make the most momentous decision imaginable. In
 the course of this four score years and ten, he's got to choose between everlasting beatitude
 and everlasting horror. And he's not quite sure how to do it. Because in Christianity,
 there are two sins to be avoided, among others. One is called presumption, and that is knowing
 surely that you are saved. The other is called despair, which is knowing surely that you're
 damned. There's always a margin of doubt about this. Work out your salvation in fear and
 trembling.
 So you might say that this is preeminently the gambler's religion. Imagine, you know,
 at some great casino late at night, there is some marvelous master gambler who's been
 winning, winning, winning all night. And then suddenly he decides to stake his whole winnings
 on whether the ball lands on red or black. Sensation! Everybody gathers from all over
 the casino to watch this terrific gamble.
 So in the same way, the predicament in which the Christian soul finds itself is this colossal
 gamble, which is saying this universe can possibly contain in it ultimate tragedy. There
 could be such a thing as an absolute, final, irremediable mistake. And what a horror that
 thought is. And so the Hindu is sitting in the audience fascinated by this Christian's
 extraordinary reckless gamble. He says, "That's a beautiful game." The Christian doesn't
 know it's a game, but the Hindu suspects it is. And he's a little bit admiring it,
 but not quite involved.
 Now you would say, perhaps, now you ought to be involved. Give your whole self to this.
 Make an act of commitment. You know, "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to
 decide in the strife twixt truth and falsehood for the good or evil side. Then it is the
 brave man chooses while a coward stands aside," et cetera. That sounds great, doesn't it?
 Commitment. Stand up and be counted. It is a virtue, but on the other hand, you see another
 virtue, what we call being a good sport.
 If your enemy in the battle of life is to be regarded as an absolute enemy, who is pure
 evil, black as black can be, you can't be a good sport. And you can accord him no chivalry,
 no honours of battle. You've got to annihilate him by any means possible, fair or foul. And
 that leads to some pretty sticky situations, especially when he has the means of annihilating
 you in just the same way.
 But if on the other hand, in all contests, you know that while you're going to take it
 seriously, and regard it as very important, in the back of your mind, in that little hinter
 gedanke, you know it is not ultimately important, although very important. And this saves you.
 This enables you to be a good player. You may worry about the word play, because we
 often use the word play in a trivial sense. Oh, you're just playing. You mean life is
 nothing but a game? The Hindus indeed call the creation of the universe the Leela, or
 the game, or the play of the divine. But we also use play in other senses. When you see
 Hamlet, which is by no means trivial, you are still going to a play. In church, the
 organist plays the organ. And in the book of Proverbs, it is written that the divine
 wisdom created the world by playing before the throne of God. Play also, you see, has
 a deep sense. When we say music, even the music of Bach, as a great master of what we
 call serious music, is still playing. And so in the deeper sense of play, the Hindu
 sees this world as play, and therefore that the intense situations, personally, socially,
 and so on, that we are all involved in, are seen not as bad illusions, but as magnificent
 illusions, so well acted that they've just about got most of the actors fooled, so that
 they've forgotten who they are. And man thinks of himself, when he's been fooled, as a little
 creature that comes into this world, which is all strange and foreign, and he's just
 a little puppet of fate, and he's forgotten that the whole thing has at its root the self,
 which is also yourself.
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