Once You Understand This.. Everything Changes - Alan Watts

the basic form of the cosmic game according to the Hindu view is the game of hideand-seek or you might call it the game of Lost and Found or again now you see it now you [Music] don't in examining the nature of vibration we find a very peculiar thing if you represent vibration as a wave motion you will notice that there is no such manifestation as halfth a wave we do not find in nature crests without troughs or troughs without CRS no sound is produced unless there is both both the the the beat as it were

and the interval between now this wave phenomenon is happening on ever so many scales there is the very very fast wave of light the slower wave of sound then the there are all sorts of other wave uh processes the beat of the heart the rhythm of the breath waking and sleeping the peak of human life from birth to maturity and down again to death and the slower the wave goes the more difficult it is to see that the crest and the trough are inseparable so that we become persuaded in the game of hide and seek

that it is possible for the trough to go down and down and down forever and never rise again into a Crest forgetting that trough implies Crest just as Crest implies trough there is no such thing you see as pure sound sound is sound silence light is light Darkness light is pulsation and between every light pulse there's the Dark [Music] Pulse and so the Hindu image is that the self eternally plays a game of hideand-seek with itself Hindus calculate time in kalpa [Music] units and the kalpa is 4, 320,000 years and so they say that for

a period of a kalpa the worlds are manifested or any particular Universe not all universes but let's say any particular Galaxy or what or whatever it may be World Order of some kind don't take this too literally don't take these figures as being some sort of divine revelation as to making predictions and prophecies they're symbolic figures so for one kalpa the world is manifested and that period is called in Sanskrit a manant and during that time the Brahman plays hide and he hides it hides in all of us pretending that it's us and then at

the end of the kalpa there comes the period called praa and that also is a kalp along and in that period the Brahman as it were comes out of the act and returns to itself in peace and Bliss this is a very logical idea what would you do if you were God isn't the whole fun of things as every child knows to go on adventures to make believe to create illusions that is to say patterns and so uh for some ways of talking in Hindu thought this world is the dream of the godhead the godhead

is of course represented as in a way two-faced with one face he dreams and is absorbed in the dream world with the other face he is liberated in other words what you have to understand correctly is that from the standpoint of the self the Supreme self the praya and the manvantara are simultaneous but put into mythological form for human consumption they are represented as being in sequence following each other but they really happen at the same time so that one doesn't realize Union with the self after death later than a certain time all references to

the Hereafter should correctly be understood as the herein as a domain pain deeper than egocentric Consciousness that is to say when you get down to the bottom of the egocentric Consciousness you get to its limit which is figuratively its death then you go on inwards the self deeper than the conscious attention and in that way you go inwards to eternal you don't go onwards to Eternity to go onwards is to find Only Time and Time and Time and more time and more time in which things go round and round and round forever but to go

in is to go to Eternity but in the ordinary way when we're talking about this graphically and vividly in imagistic terms we can talk about the Everlasting game of Hide and Seek which the self plays with itself it forgets who it is and then creeps up behind itself and says moo and that's a great thrill it pretends that things are getting serious just as a great actor on the stage although the audience know that what they're seeing is only a play the skill of the actor is to take the audience in and have them all

sitting in anxiety on the edges of their seats or to be weeping or laughing or utterly involved in what they really know is only a play so you would imagine that if there were a very great actor with absolutely superb technique he would take himself in and he you see would feel that the cl was real well that's their idea of what we're doing here and now we are all the Brahman acting our own parts Being Human playing the human game so beautifully that he is Enchanted you see what Enchanted means under the influence of

a chant hypnotized Spellbound fascinated and that Fascination is Maya