Oh, Just the Answers to Everything

Myths are stories or images we use to explain what something is like, not what it is. Watts distinguishes between the popular conceptions of the myths of the world's major religions and the ways the sophisticated thinkers of those religions conceive of the myths.

In Hebraic religions, the Lord makes man to be like Him. Man is "something like god, but not God." Thus, the universe is thought to be "a marvelous technical accomplishment." In which case, there must be a way to explain how it was made, and we in The West have been trying to figure out "the blueprint that underlies this creation" and continue to persist in this line of inquiry even when most of our scientists are agnostic or atheistic.

Christians and Jews believe God created the world, but in The West, if you're agnostic or atheistic, you "believe that the world is an automatic machine without a creator, something which made itself." Watts calls this "The Ceramic Model," as The Bible often refers to God as The Potter. Now scientists/philosophers/etc. have adopted "The Fully Automatic Model," but we're still trying to figure out how it's "put together," which we try to do by taking everything apart to look at the smallest pieces. And then we take those pieces apart too.

But this means that man is "fully automatic" too. "Am I real, or am I just an automaton?" this leads us to asking. Or most of us think that somehow, inside a fully automatic universe, by some fluke, consciousness, reason, love, etc. arose. So that we're special and somehow apart from "nature," in which case, humans who want "to maintain reason and love in the universe" have to "fight nature and beat the stupid, external world into submission to the human will. And so the war against nature is the great projects, thus far, of Western technology."

So Westerners feel like a mind inside a body in a stupid world, a tiny, lonely ego or mind in an enormous, stupid universe. And this might lead some of us to want to believe "that it was more than that... 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 extraordinary thing to believe."

Watts contrasts this with the Hindu image that God didn't make the world, the way a potter makes a pot. Instead, God acts it. Every tree and human and animal and rock is another role God is playing. The Hindu God, if you asked him, "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... it would take all eternity for me to tell you. And 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."

"...The Hindu doesn't see any fundamental division between God and the world. The world is God at play. The world is God acting.

"...When he tries to think why there is a world at all, because if you think about it it is extraordinarily off that there is anything - it would've been much simpler and required a great deal less energy for there to have been 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 that you wanted to dream: what would you do? Well, first of all, I’m quite sure that most of us would dream all the marvelous things we wanted to happen, we would fulfill all our wishes. And we might go on that way for months. Besides, you could make it extraordinarily rich by wishing to dream seventy-five 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. Ew. But you know you'll wake up. And 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."

"...Why would one do that? The reason for that, 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 du-du-du-du-du at various speeds... 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 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 when, you know, the disappearance gets very far out then the contrary rhythm begins and the dreamer wakes up, and finds out, ‘Whew! 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."

"...Under the surface you are all the actor."

"...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... 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'd give the show away!"

"...You've been taken in by your own role...bewitched, spellbound, enchanted."

"In the drama, there has to be a villain... 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 the introduces chaos. And the game is to play order versus chaos. So in the drama, somebody has to play 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 when and you call it a tragedy. If you go for a thrill, you let the hero win... 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 to the Hindus we're all really good method actors who have forgotten entirely that we're not really the characters we're playing.

So Westerners think they're really themselves, and Hindus think they're really God.

And then there's the question of why there's evil and tragedy. "In the Christian tradition, you have to attribute evil to something else besides God. Their God is defined as good." But after the fall of man, evil was introduced, against God's wishes. On the other hand, Hindus think God is the actor behind both good and evil, or else there wouldn't be much of a story. "And in any case, it isn't as if the creator had made evil and made someone else it's 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... What sort of a game do you want, anyway? ... All good games, games that are worth playing, that arouse are interest, are constructed like this: If you have the good and the evil equally balanced, the game is boring. Nothing happens - it's stalemate... On the other hand, if it's all good, and there's hardly any evil... it also gets boring. Just in the same way, say for example, supposing you knew the future and could control it perfectly, would what you do? You would say, '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 sixteen moves, and nothing can be done about it, they abandon the game and begin another.

"...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, in really serious danger of losing, but manages always to sneak out."

"...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 outgroup of nasty people. Otherwise they wouldn't know who they were. And you must recognize then that this outgroup is your necessary enemy whom you need. He keeps you on your toes, but you mustn't obliterate him... So you have to love your enemies in this sense: Regard them as highly necessary and to be respected chivalrously."

"...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 is... that you are God, and so that excludes Hinduism, apparently. But let's god back to Judaism for a minute. And ask this question: If Judaism is the true religion, can Christianity too? No. Because there's 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 Good 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 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 and 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 is 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 are 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 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... 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... That's a beautiful game, but the Christian doesn't know it's a game."

"If your enemy in the battle of life is to be regarded as an absolute enemy who is pure evil, black as black could be, you can't be a good sport. You can accord him no chivalry, no honors of battle. You've got to annihilate him by any means possible, fair or fail. 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... in the back of your mind... you know it is not ultimately 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.' or 'You mean life is nothing but a game?' The Hindus indeed call the creation of the universe the "Lila" 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're 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... 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're 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."