"There was never a time when the world began, because it goes
round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it
begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the
world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the
watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night,
waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't
have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to
know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or
white unless side-by-side with black.
"In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when
it isn't, for if the world went on and on without rest for ever and ever, it
would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it;
now you don't. So because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes
back again after it disappears. It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in
and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also
like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new
ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the
same place.
"God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing
outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over
this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of
hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people
in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the
stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of
which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams,
for when he wakes up they will disappear.
"Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does
it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he
hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do.
He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the
game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we
are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game
has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and
remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there
is and who lives for ever and ever.
"Of course, you must remember that God isn't shaped like a person.
People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If
there weren't, we wouldn't know the difference between what is inside
and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there
isn't any outside to him. [With a sufficiently intelligent child, I illustrate
this with a Möbius strip—a ring of paper tape twisted once in such a
way that it has only one side and one edge.] The inside and the outside
of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as 'he'
and not 'she,' God isn't a man or a woman. I didn't say 'it' because we
usually say 'it' for things that aren't alive.
"God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same
reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you
certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is
that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding.
"You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible
people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain.
Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself.
Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be
bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out
how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when
we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a
mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the
game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is
the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so
it goes with the world."
"The Ultimate Ground of Being" is Paul Tillich's decontaminated
term for "God" and would also do for "the Self of the world" as I put it
in my story for children. But the secret which my story slips over to the
child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the
everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or "pretending" to be, but
that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it's always the
inspector. This, then, is the taboo of taboos: you're IT!
Yet in our culture this is the touchstone of insanity, the blackest of
blasphemies, and the wildest of delusions. This, we believe, is the
ultimate in megalomania—an inflation of the ego to complete absurdity.
For though we cultivate the ego with one hand, we knock it down with
the other. From generation to generation we kick the stuffing out of our
children to teach them to "know their place" and to behave, think, and
feel with proper modesty as befits one little ego among many. As my
mother used to say, "You're not the only pebble on the beach!"
Anyone in his right mind who believes that he is God should be
crucified or burned at the stake, though now we take the more charitable
view that no one in his right mind could believe such nonsense. Only a
poor idiot could conceive himself as the omnipotent ruler of the world,
and expect everyone else to fall down and worship.
But this is because we think of God as the King of the Universe, the
Absolute Technocrat who personally and consciously controls every
details of his cosmos—and that is not the kind of God in my story. In
fact, it isn't my story at all, for any student of the history of religions will
know that it comes from ancient India, and is the mythical way of
explaining the Vedanta philosophy. Vedanta is the teaching of the
Upanishads, a collection of dialogues, stories, and poems, some of
which go back to at least 800 B.C. Sophisticated Hindus do not think of
God as a special and separate superperson who rules the world from
above, like a monarch. Their God is "underneath" rather than "above"
everything, and he (or it) plays the world from inside. One might say
that if religion is the opium of the people, the Hindus have the inside
dope. What is more, no Hindu can realize that he is God in disguise
without seeing at the same time that this is true of everyone and
everything else. In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except God.
There seem to be other things than God, but only because he is
dreaming them up and making them his disguises to play hide-and-seek
with himself. The universe of seemingly separate things is therefore real
only for a while, not eternally real, for it comes and goes as the Self
hides and seeks itself.
But Vedanta is much more than the idea or the belief that this is so. It
is centrally and above all the experience, the immediate knowledge of
its being so, and for this reason such a complete subversion of our
ordinary way of seeing things. It turns the world inside out and outside
in. Likewise, a saying attributed to Jesus runs:
When you make the two one, and
when you make the inner as the outer
and the outer as the inner and the above as the below ...
then shall you enter [the Kingdom]....
I am the Light that is above
them all, I am the All,
the All came forth from Me and the All
attained to Me. Cleave a [piece of] wood, I
am there; lift up the stone and you will
find Me there.
Today the Vedanta discipline comes down to us after centuries of
involvement with all the forms, attitudes, and symbols of Hindu culture
in its flowering and slow demise over nearly 2,800 years, sorely
wounded by Islamic fanaticism and corrupted by British puritanism. As
often set forth, Vedanta rings no bell in the West, and attracts mostly the
fastidiously spiritual and diaphanous kind of people for whom
incarnation in a physical body is just too disgusting to be borne.(4) But
it is possible to state its essentials in a present-day idiom, and when this
is done without exotic trappings, Sanskrit terminology, and excessive
postures of spirituality, the message is not only clear to people with no
special interest in "Oriental religions"; it is also the very jolt that we
need to kick ourselves out of our isolated sensation of self.
But this must not be confused with our usual ideas of the practice of
"unselfishness," which is the effort to identify with others and their
needs while still under the strong illusion of being no more than a skin contained
ego. Such "unselfishness" is apt to be a highly refined egotism, comparable
to the in-group which plays the game of "we're more-tolerant-than-you."
The Vedanta was not originally moralistic; it did not urge people to ape
the saints without sharing their real motivations, or to ape motivations
without sharing the knowledge which sparks them.
For this reason The Book I would pass to my children would contain
no sermons, no shoulds and oughts. Genuine love comes from
knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt. How would you like to be
an invalid mother with a daughter who can't marry because she feels she
ought to look after you, and therefore hates you? My wish would be to
tell, not how things ought to be, but how they are, and how and why we
ignore them as they are. You cannot teach an ego to be anything but
egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be
reformed. The basic thing is therefore to dispel, by experiment and
experience, the illusion of oneself as a separate ego. The consequences
may not be behavior along the lines of conventional morality. It may
well be as the squares said of Jesus, "Look at him! A glutton and a
drinker, a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners!
Furthermore, on seeing through the illusion of the ego, it is
impossible to think of oneself as better than, or superior to, others for
having done so. In every direction there is just the one Self playing its
myriad games of hide-and-seek. Birds are not better than the eggs from
which they have broken. Indeed, it could be said that a bird is one egg's
way of becoming other eggs. Egg is ego, and bird is the liberated Self.
There is a Hindu myth of the Self as a divine swan which laid the egg
from which the world was hatched. Thus I am not even saying that you
ought to break out of your shell. Sometime, somehow, you (the real you,
the Self) will do it anyhow, but it is not impossible that the play of the
Self will be to remain unawakened in most of its human disguises, and
so bring the drama of life on earth to its close in a vast explosion.
Another Hindu myth says that as time goes on, life in the world gets
worse and worse, until at last the destructive aspect of the Self, the god
Shiva, dances a terrible dance which consumes everything in fire. There
follow, says the myth, 4,320,000 years of total peace during which the
Self is just itself and does not play hide. And then the game begins
again, starting off as a universe of perfect splendor which begins to
deteriorate only after 1,728,000 years, and every round of the game is so
designed that the forces of darkness present themselves for only one
third of the time, enjoying at the end a brief but quite illusory triumph.
Today we calculate the life of this planet alone in much vaster
periods, but of all ancient civilizations the Hindus had the most
imaginative vision of cosmic time. Yet remember, this story of the
cycles of the world's appearance and disappearance is myth, not science,
parable rather than prophecy. It is a way of illustrating the idea that the
universe is like the game of hide-and-seek.
If, then, I am not saying that you ought to awaken from the ego illusion
and help save the world from disaster, why The Book? Why not
sit back and let things take their course? Simply that it is part of "things
taking their course" that I write. As a human being it is just my nature to
enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds
are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses. I realize,
too, that the less I preach, the more likely I am to be heard.”