Now, it sounds very odd in our civilization to say, therefore, “I am God”—or for that matter, “You are God.” But you will remember, of course, that this exactly is what Jesus Christ felt. And he was crucified for it because—in his culture—God was conceived as the royal monarch of the universe, and therefore anybody who gets up and says “Well, I am God” is blasphemous. He’s subversive. He’s claiming to be, if not the boss himself, at least the boss’s son, and that’s a put-down for everybody else. But Jesus had to say it that way because—in his culture—they did not have, as the Hindus have, the idea that everybody—not only human beings but animals and plants; all sentient beings whatsoever—are God in disguise.

Now let me try to explain this a little more clearly, because I cannot help thinking of myself as identical with, continuous with, one with the whole energy that expresses itself as this universe. If the universe is made of stars—a star is a center from which energy flows; in other words, there’s the middle, and all the rays come out from it. And so I feel that—as the image of the whole thing—that all energy is a center from which rays come out. And therefore each one of us is an expression of what is—basically—the whole thing.

Now, therefore, whereas in the West—in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions—we have thought of God not only as a monarch but as the maker of the world. And as a result of that, we look upon the world as an artifact—a sort of machine—created by a great engineer. There’s a different conception in India where the world is not seen as an artifact but as a drama, and therefore God is not the maker and architect of the universe but the actor of it and therefore is playing all the parts at once. And this connects up with the idea of each one of us as persons, because a person is a mask—from the Latin word persona, the mask worn by the actors in Greco-Roman drama. So this is an entirely different conception of the world and—as I think I shall be able to show you—it makes an amazing amount of sense.

So we start from the premise that you—and you don’t know who you are, you can’t see yourself and, as I’ve pointed out, you don’t know how you grow your body, how you make your nervous system work, how you manage to emerge in this environment of nature. And so this unknown you—the you that is not you, the you that is not the ego—this is God. That is to say, not the cosmic boss but the fundamental Ground of Being—the reality that always was, is, and will be—that lies at the basis of reality. That’s you.

Now, let’s go into a more mythological kind of imagery. Suppose you are God. Suppose you have all time, all eternity, and all power at your disposal. What would you do? I believe you’d say to yourself after a while, “Man, get lost!” It’s like asking another question, which is: supposing you were given the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream every night. Naturally, you could dream any span of time—you could dream 75 years of time in one night, a hundred years of time in one night, a thousand years of time in one night—and it could be anything you wanted. You’d make up your mind before you went to sleep. “Tonight I’m going to dream of so and so.” Well, naturally, you would start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You would have all the pleasures you could imagine, the most marvelous meals, the most entrancing love affairs, the most romantic journeys. You could listen to music such as no mortal has heard and see landscapes beyond our wildest dreams. And for several nights—oh, maybe for a whole month of nights—you would go on that way, having a wonderful time. But then, after a while, you’d begin to think, “Well, I’ve seen quite a bit. Let’s spice it up Let’s have a little adventure.” And therefore, you would dream of yourself being threatened by all sorts of dangers. You would rescue princesses from dragons, you would perhaps engage in notable battles, you would be a hero. And then, as time went on, you would dare yourself to do more and more outrageous things, and at some point in the game, you would say, “Tonight I am going to dream in such a way that I don’t know that I’m dreaming.” So that you would take the experience of the dream for complete reality. And what a shock when you woke up! And you really scare yourself. And then, on successive nights, you might dare yourself to experience the most extraordinary things, just for the contrast when you woke up. You could, for example, dream yourself in situations of extreme poverty, disease, agony. You could, as it were, work on the vibration of suffering to its most intense point, and then suddenly—WOOP—wake up and find it was, after all, nothing but a dream and everything’s perfectly okay. And you would say, “Wow, man! That was a gas!”

Well, how do you know that that’s not what you’re doing already? You, sitting there with all your problems, with all your whole complicated life situation, listening to me. It may just be the very dream you decided to get into. If you like it, crazy. If you don’t like it, what fun it’ll be when you wake up.

Do you see? This is the essence of drama. In drama, all the people who come there know it’s only a play. The proscenium arch—the cinema screen—tells us this is an illusion; it is not for real. But the actors are trying to give us the sensation that it is for real. In other words, they are going to act their part so convincingly that they’re going to have us sitting on the edge of our seats in anxiety, they’re going to make us laugh, they’re going to make us cry, they’re going to make us feel horror—even though we know in the back of our minds, even though we have what in German is called a Hintergedanke, which is a thought way, way, way in the back of your mind which you’re hardly aware of but you really know all the time. In the theater, we have a Hintergedanke that it’s only a play, but the mastery of the actor is that he is going to try (almost) to convince us that it’s real.

And so, therefore, imagine a situation where you have the best of all possible actors—namely God—and the best of all possible audiences ready to be taken in and convinced that it’s real—namely God—and that you are all many, many masks which the basic consciousness, the basic mind of the universe, is assuming. To use a verse from G. K. Chesterton:

And now a great thing in the street,

Seems any human nod,

Where move in strange democracy

The million masks of God.

And, of course, here it is. This is the mask of Viṣṇu, the preserver of the universe. And you see it is a multiple mask to illustrate the fact that the one who looks out of my eyes and out of all your eyes is the same center.

So, if I look at another human being and I look straight into their eyes—isn’t that curious? We don’t like doing that. There’s something embarrassing about looking into our eyes too closely. As if… “Don’t look at me that closely because I might give myself away. You might find out who I really am.” And what do you suppose that would be? Do you suppose that another person who looks deeply into your eyes will read all the things you’re ashamed of, all your faults, all the things you’re guilty about? Or is there some deeper secret than that? The eyes are our most sensitive organ, and when you look, and look, and look into another person’s eyes you’re—first of all—looking at the most beautiful jewels in the universe. And if you look down beyond that you see—of course—it’s the most beautiful jewel in the universe because that’s the universe looking at you! We are the eyes of the cosmos so that, in a way, when you look deeply into somebody’s eyes you’re looking deep into yourself and the other person is looking deeply into the same Self which—many-eyed as this mask is many-faced—is looking out everywhere. One energy playing myriads of different parts. Why?

Obviously—it’s perfectly obvious—because if you were God and you knew everything and were in control of everything, you would be bored to death. As I said: it would be like making love to a plastic woman. Everything would be completely predictable, completely known, completely clear, no mystery, no surprise whatever.

Look at it in still another way: the object of our technology is to control the world, to have—as it were—a super-electronic pushbutton universe where we can get anything we want, fulfill any desire simply by pushing a button. You know, you’re Aladdin with the lamp, you rub it, the jinn comes and says, “Salāmu ʿalaykum, I’m your humble servant. What do you wish?” Anything you want. And after a while that—just as you would in those dreams I described—decide one day to forget that you were dreaming, you would say to the genie of the lamp, “I would like a surprise.” Or God, in the court of heaven, might turn to his vizier and say, “Oh, commander of the faithful, we are bored.” And the vizier of the court would reply, “O king, live forever! But surely, out of the infinitude of your wisdom, you can discover some way of not being bored!” And the king would reply, “Oh vizier, give us a surprise.”

You know, that’s the whole basis of the story of the Arabian Nights. Here was a very powerful sultan who was bored, and therefore he challenged Scheherazade to tell him a new story every night. So that the telling of tales—getting involved in adventures—would never, never end. And that’s—isn’t it; isn’t that the reason why we go to the theater, why we go to the movies? Because we want to get out of ourselves. We want a surprise, and a surprise means that you have to other yourself. That is to say, there has to enter into your experience some element that is not under your control. So if our technology were to succeed completely and everything were to be under our control, we should eventually say, “We need a new button.” In all these control buttons we always have to have a button labeled surprise. And just so that it doesn’t become too dangerous we’ll put a time limit on it. Surprise for 15 minutes, for an hour, for a day, for a month, a year… a lifetime. And then—in the end, when the surprise circuit is finished—we’ll be back in control and we’ll all know where we are, and we’ll heave a sigh of relief. But after a while, we’ll press the button labeled surprise once more.

So, then, there’s a curious rhythm to this—if you’ll notice what I’ve been explaining—and this rhythm corresponds to the Hindu idea of the course of time and the way evolution works, and their idea is backwards from ours. First of all, Hindus think of time as circular, as going ’round. Look at your watch: after all, it goes ’round. But Westerners tend to think of time in a straight line, one-way street. And we got that idea from the Hebrew religion and from—in particular—St. Augustine. The idea that there is a time of creation, then a course of history which leads up to a final eschatological catastrophe—the end of the world—and after that the judgment in which all things will be put to right, all questions answered, and justice dealt out to everyone according to his merit. And that’ll be that. Thereafter, the universe will be—in a way—static; there will be the eternally saved and the eternally damned.

Now, many of us may not believe that today, but that has been a dominating belief throughout the course of Western history and it has had a tremendously powerful influence on our culture. But the Hindus think of the world as going ’round, and ’round, and ’round for always and always in a rhythm. And they calculate the rounds in periods that, in Sanskrit, are called kalpas, and each kalpa lasts for 4,320,000 years. [Curator’s note: Buddhist scholars have since determined that a kalpa’s duration is supposed to be magnitudes longer. As is the case with mythology, they are intended to be illustrative, not literal.] And so a kalpa is the period, or manvantara, during which the world as we know it is manifested. And it is followed by a period also a kalpa long—4,320,000 years—which is called pralaya, and this means “when the world is not manifested anymore.” And these are the days and nights of Brahmā, the Godhead. During the manvantara—when the world is manifested—Brahmā is asleep, dreaming that he is all us and everything that’s going on. And during the pralaya—which is his day—he’s awake and knows himself (or itself, because it’s beyond sex or anything like that) for who and what he/she/it is. And then, once again, pressed button surprise.

And as—in the course of our dreaming—we would very naturally dream the most pleasant and rapturous dreams first, then get more adventurous and experience and explore the hot dimensions of experience, so in the same way, the Hindus think of a kalpa—of the manifested universe, of the manvantara—as divided into four periods. And these four periods are of different length. The first is the longest and the last the shortest, and they are named in accordance with the throws in the Hindu game of dice. There are four throws: the throw of four, the throw of three, the throw of two, the throw of one. The throw of four is always the best throw, like the six in our game, and the throw of one the worst throw.

Now, therefore, the first throw is called kṛta, and the epoch—the long, long period—for which this throw lasts is called a yuga. So we’ll translate yuga an “epoch,” and we’ll translate kalpa an “eon.” Now, the word kṛta means “done,” as when we say, “well done!” And that is a period of the world’s existence that we call the golden age, when everything is perfect, done to perfection.

When it comes to an end we get treta yuga, that means the throw of three. And in this period of manifestation, something is a little off. In other words, there’s an element of the uncertain, an element of insecurity, an element of adventure in things. It’s like, you know, a three-legged stool is not as secure as a four-legged one. You’re a little bit more liable to be thrown off balance.

That lasts for a very long time, too, but then we get next what is called dvapara yuga. Dva, that means “two.” And in this period the good and the bad, the pleasurable and the painful are equally balanced.

But then—finally, in the end—there comes kali yuga—and this means: kali, the worst throw, the throw one—and this lasts for the shortest time. And this is the period of manifestation in which the unpleasurable, painful, diabolical principle finally takes over. But notice that it has the shortest innings. In other words, if you add up the periods of years which they assign to all the different yugas you will see that the bad principle only has the stage for about one-third of the time. And at the end of the kali yuga the myth goes on to say that the great destroyer of the worlds—god manifested as the destructive principle—Shiva does a dance called the Tāṇḍava, and he appears blue-bodied, with ten arms, with lightning and fire appearing from every pore in his skin, and does a dance in which the universe is finally destroyed. There is that moment of cosmic death which is, nevertheless, the waking up of Brahmā, the creator. For as Shiva turns ’round and walks off the stage—seen from behind, he is Brahmā, the creator, the beginning of it all again. And Viṣṇu—whose mask I have been showing you—is the preserver, that is to say, the going on of it all, the whole state of the Godhead being manifested as many, many faces.

So do you see that this is a philosophy of the role of evil in life which is, in a way, rational and merciful? You see, if we thought God is playing with the world—he’s created it for his pleasure—and he has created all these other beings than himself and they go through the most horrible torment… you know, terminal cancer, children being burned with napalm, concentration camps, the Inquisition, the horrors that human beings go through, how is that possibly justifiable under any system where we say, well, some god created it, and if a god didn’t create it and there’s nobody in charge and there’s no rationality to the whole thing, that it’s just a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, then you’re liable to say the only out is suicide. It’s a ridiculous system.

But suppose it isn’t that. Suppose it’s the kind of thing I’ve described to you. Supposing that it isn’t that God has all these victims and is pleasing himself, showing off his justice by either rewarding them or punishing them. Supposing it’s quite different from that. Supposing that God is the one playing all the parts, that God is the child being burned to death with napalm. There is no victim except the victor. All the different roles which are being experienced, all the different feelings which are being felt are being felt by the one who originally desires, decides, wills to go into that very situation.

Curiously enough, there’s something parallel to this in Christianity. Very few people know about it. There’s a passage in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians in which he says a very curious thing:

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus
Who, being in the form of God,
Did not think identity with God a thing to be clung to
But humbled himself and made himself of no reputation
And was found in fashion as a man, and became obedient to death, even to the death of the cross.

You see, here you have exactly the same process: the idea of God becoming human, suffering all that human beings suffer, even death. And St. Paul is saying let this mind be in you, that is to say, let the same kind of consciousness be in you that was in Jesus Christ—okay, Jesus Christ knew he was God! Wake up and find out, eventually, who you really are! In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy or you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in the nut-house, which is the same thing. But if you wake up in India and you tell your friends and relations “My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God!” they’ll laugh and say, “Oh! Congratulations! At last, you found out!”