Hide And Seek – Alan Watts

you can sometimes say more things with images than you can say with concepts [Music] as a matter of fact images are really at the root of thinking one of the basic ways in which we think is by analogy say we we think of the life of human beings might be compared to the seasons of the year now there are many important differences between a human life and the cycle of the seasons but nevertheless one talks about the winter of life or the spring of life and so the image becomes something that is powerful in our thinking furthermore when we try to think philosophically and think in abstract concepts about the nature of the universe we often do some very weird things you see it's considered nowadays naive to think of god as an old gentleman with a long white beard who sits on a golden throne and is surrounded with winged angels and we say now no sensible person could possibly believe that god is just like that therefore if you get more sophisticated you believe that god is say if you follow some thomas aquinas you think of god as necessary being or if you think with uh buddhists you think of of god as the undifferentiated void or as uh the infinite essence but actually however rarified those concepts sound they are just as anthropomorphic that is to say just as human and in the form of the human mind as the picture of god as the old gentleman with the white beard or dilord in green pastures wearing a top hat and smoking cigar because all ideas about the world whether they be religious philosophical or scientific are translations of the physical world and of worlds beyond the physical into the terms and shapes of the human mind so there is no such thing as a non-anthropomorphic idea the advantage of the lord in talking about these things is that nobody takes it quite seriously whereas the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum could be taken seriously and that would be a great mistake uh because you would think you understood what the ultimate reality is so i'm going to use very largely naive mythological terms to discuss these matters and if you are a devout christian you mustn't be offended by this because you will naturally think that you have risen now to a more superior idea of these things than these very simple terms derived from the imagery of the bible and of the medieval church and i discussed the view of the world as drama now i want to go more thoroughly into this because the hindu view of the universe is fundamentally based on the idea of drama that is to say of an actor playing parts the basic actor in this drama is called brahma and the hindu idea of brahma the supreme being is linked with the idea of the self in you deep down you feel that there is what you call i and this word when you say i am that in sanskrit is aham a-h-a-m and everybody when asked what his name is replies i am i i am i myself and so there is the thought that in all life the self is the fundamental thing it means the center and so the brahma is looked upon as the self and center of the whole universe and the idea fundamentally is that there is only one self and each one of us is that self only it radiates like a sun or a star and just as the sun has innumerable rays or just as you can focus the whole sun through a magnifying glass and concentrate it on one point or as a an octopus has many tentacles or as a sow has many tits so in this way brahma is wearing all faces that exist and they are all the masks of brahman not only human faces but animal faces insect faces vegetable faces and mineral faces everything that there is is the supreme self playing at being that because the fundamental process of reality is according to the hindu myth hide and seek that or lost and found that is the basis of all games and it's true isn't it that when you start to play with a baby and you take up a book and you hide your face behind it and then you peek out at the baby and then you peek out this way the baby begins to giggle because a baby being near to the origins of things knows intuitively that hide and seek is the basis of it all and children like to get on their sit in a high chair where they have something on the tray and make it gone and then somebody picks it up and puts it back they make it gone again see now then that's a very sensible arrangement it is called uh in in sanskrit this is called lila and that means sport or play but the play is hide and seek now let's go a little bit into the nature of hide and seek because don't let me insult your intelligence by telling you some of the most elementary things that exist um really everything is a question of appearing and disappearing for example if i sit next to a beautiful girl and i put my hand on her knee and leave it there after a while she'll cease to notice it but if i gently pat her on the knee because now i'm there and now i'm not it will be more noticeable so all reality is a matter of coming and going it is vibration it is the waves of positive and negative electricity it's up and down and things like wood appear to be solid because in this in much the same way that the blade of a fast-moving electric fan appears to be solid so the vast agitation that is going on in the electrical structure of solid things is a terrific agitation which will not allow the agitation caused by hand to go through it other kinds of agitation like x-rays are so constructed that they can get through so everything is basically coming and going for example sound if you listen to sound and slow this sound down in the same way you see you can slow sound down in the same way as you can use a magnifying glass to look at the structure of something visible and as when you look at the magnifying glass you find that solid things are full of holes so when you magnify sound you find it's full of silences sound is sound hyphen silence there is no such thing as pure sound just as there is nothing uh no such thing as pure something something always goes together with nothing solids are always found in spaces and no spaces are found except where there are solids you