It often strikes me that one of the most fascinating conventions in the world is the proscenium arch: the arch over the stage which divides so-called reality from play. And extraordinary effects can be produced upon any audience when the players put them in doubt as to where this arch actually stands—as, for example, when there’s a murder on the stage which all seems to be part of the play, and then suddenly one of the actors calls, “Is there a doctor in the house?” And then, of course, a prepared actor in the audience steps up on the stage and the audience begins to worry. Has there actually been a murder on the stage, or is this part of the play? And it’s very fascinating to notice in how many dramas recently the convention of the proscenium arch has been played with in this way.

But behind that lies really what is the whole test and canon of sanity in almost any society. A person is sane, I think, if he gets the cues as to whether words or action or gesture are intended seriously or intended playfully. And it’s often struck me that nobody really ever tells us how to interpret those cues. Of course, very often the father or an older brother or an older friend takes a child aside and says, “Now listen, you mustn’t take that seriously. He was only teasing you.” Or, “You mustn’t say that sort of thing. People will take you seriously.” But taking that advice depends (on the child’s part) in believing the person who tells him; believing that it’s not a lie, believing that what is said to him in this confidential way is said in seriousness and not in play. And a kind of panic can overtake us when we begin to be in doubt as to whether people really mean what they do, and sometimes we can even come to the point of thinking that the whole of life is a play, and get a very, very curious sense of unreality—a sense which is, as I said, sometimes to some people deeply unhinging.

The more perceptive we become, the more we become aware of what psychologists call our own ambivalence, and the more, too, we become doubtful of the seriousness of the great many things that we feel and do. The ability of the human being to be divided—to say one thing and mean another, or to stand aside from himself, as it were, and inspect himself—the fact that we possess this kind of feedback is at the genesis of this whole problem of wondering whether we are serious or whether we are playing. A lot of people think that animals have no sense of humor; that they are always serious. That is because they’re unable perhaps to stand aside from themselves and be self-conscious. When an animal plays, it only plays, perhaps, in the sense of taking exercise, or of enjoying a meaningless activity. But the division, the split of the human mind, to be able to reflect on our own actions makes it possible for us to question almost everything that we do as to whether we really mean it, or whether we are only pretending.

And this is, of course, aggravated by the fact that civilization calls on us in so many ways to pretend—to say, “Pleased to meet you” when you’re not; to say, “Well, have a good trip” when you hope the person goes and drowns, or something of that kind. But as we become deeper in our self-knowledge, we can very easily come to the point when we wonder who we really are. A lot of people talk, saying, “I haven’t found myself yet. I’m trying to discover what I’m really supposed to do in life.” As if somewhere deep down in the center of us there is a real me—that is to say, an aggregation of ideas that are really meant, feelings that are really felt, where one has a completely honest core, however many masks there may be overlined.

And as, in the process of self-knowledge, we start peeling off these masks, there comes sometimes a frightful moment when we may wonder whether there is going to be anything inside at all, whether there won’t be masks behind masks, until we’ve peeled them all off and disappear like a peeled onion into just a set of fragments. For very many people, the sensation of being in doubt as to whether there is any reality underneath begins to provoke an extraordinarily strong sensation of guilt. After all, there is supposed to be, you see, something that we really do intend, and something that we do stand for with all our heart; the possibility that there is something to which we can commit ourselves.

Although perhaps something a little more than that is involved in the test of true sincerity, because there are a lot of people who will commit themselves to things in which they don’t believe profoundly. There is the person who will feel, for example, that he’s not anything special in the way of a patriot. He doesn’t really believe in the righteousness of his country’s cause, but he may nevertheless quite willingly go to war, and in this sense commit himself in a very, very profound way to something in which he doesn’t absolutely believe. Life often requires that we commit ourselves. Every time one walks out of doors, in a way, you take a risk; every time you ride an automobile or go on a plane, you commit yourself. But obviously this isn’t always an act of total sincerity. It isn’t an expression of something in which you believe with your whole being.

And therefore, when the perceptive person begins to analyze himself, and find, you know, that behind all his ostensibly loving and kindly activities there’s a very deep self-interest, then he starts questioning that self-interest: does he really love himself? And he finds that just because he’s discovered that he always acts in self-interest, it makes it very difficult for him to love himself. He may indeed despise himself. And then what has he got left? What is the core in which he believes? And so he begins to be guilty and to be oppressed.

This is, of course, basically the same oppression that afflicted those great Christians like St. Paul, St. Augustine, and Martin Luther. When commanded to love God with all the heart and with all the soul and with all the mind—that is to say, to love with an act of total sincerity—they found themselves simply unable to do so. Or when urged to repent sincerely of their sins, to have what theologians call true contrition, they found that beneath their most contrite feelings lay fear of consequences, or shame, damaged pride, something of that kind, and not true contrition based on the love of God at all.

And then, for such a person, he wonders: how can he possibly be saved? What is there in him that isn’t false? Is there really any solid core to one’s being at all? But of course it’s in pursuing that line that there arises the kind of person whom we might call a saint. Because it is just—if he can go that far—it is just at the moment when he discovers that he’s not really sincere about anything at all, it’s at this point that he’s suddenly able to become sincere about everything. And the reason is that, when the point arises when he discovers the sort of total hollowness of his sincerity, he’s also discovered at the same time the hollowness or the unreality of our apparent ability to divide ourselves from ourselves.

In the last broadcast I made I was discussing this problem in some detail; trying to distinguish between an actual division of the psyche into the knower and the known, the thinker and the thoughts, the feeler and the feelings; between that on the one hand, and a very marvelous feedback system on the other, which is simply the capacity of a perfectly unified pattern of psychic activity to contain within itself patterns which represent its own former states. And these memory patterns, as we call them, are of course inseparable from part and parcel of the total pattern of psychic activity at any moment, and therefore we are not really divided within ourselves into two entities at all. But when we seem to be so, and therefore we are unable to doubt ourselves, then the capacity not only for calling in question our sincerity, but for actually being insincere, arises. For a mind which is integrated, which is not divided against itself, there is really no possibility of insincerity.

And it is for this reason, you see, when one begins to find oneself, as it were, wholly insincere, that what has actually been discovered is the unreality of this division in the psyche. And so at the moment when the saint finds that he is, shall we say, as bad as can be; thoroughly corrupt through and through—as the prayer in the Anglican prayer book says, “There is no health in us. No, that is wholeness”—then, at that moment, a kind of psychic flip occurs and the person finds himself whole, all of a peace. Because he has, as it were, exploded the reality of his ego by finding that his observing self, the self that observes himself, has after all nothing in it. It’s only a pretense and as-if self. It’s as if I could look at myself, as if I could separate myself from myself, and observe my own motives, and judge and weigh them.

But I can only really observe and judge and weigh as-if motives, never real ones. As it were, as soon as any psychic content—any feeling, any thought—appears to be an object of knowledge, and we begin to look into it, the very act of looking into it, as it were, bores a hole in it and it becomes hollow by the very act of doing that. This is why one can introspect almost indefinitely and dissolve oneself away and away and away. And if there arises a fear at this point, then comes an unconscious block. If we’re afraid of this discovery that we’re totally hollow, we think sometimes: “At last I’ve come upon something that I really am.” And this may, you see, just be an unconscious block to investigating any further. Whenever we encounter the solid—whether we encounter it in the form of what we think is physical substance or psychological substance, mind substance—this really means that we’ve encountered something which we haven’t or are not going to investigate. Because whenever we investigate the solid, we find structure and form and space inside it, however closely in it.

And so, in the same way, the person who finds that he has to go through that block, that he is not content with the solid inner self that he discovers, and says, “Now that, at last, is me. I have really found myself. I am someone,” if he doesn’t stop at that point and goes on, he’ll come to the kind of valley of the shadow, the dread passage, where he seems to have disintegrated to nothing, to be a mockery all the way through, to be nothing but masks. And then it’s just in that moment, as I said, that there is a switch, a transformation, and he becomes altogether real.

To put it in another way: the distinction between play and seriousness disappears when we find, say, that everything about us is play. At this moment it becomes the same thing as saying, “everything about us is sincerity.” I prefer, perhaps, sincerity to seriousness. I think seriousness disappears altogether from a really integrated person. I always loved the remark which G. K. Chesterton made in his book, Orthodoxy, that the angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. Seriousness is heaviness. It arises whenever we think we have hit, as it were, the solid substance of our psyche, of our inner life. But when we’ve discovered that there is no substance, there is only form—and form, in a way, is analogous to or parallel to play; a substance to seriousness. And when that substance disappears and we find only form, isn’t it interesting how we use the word “form” as the outward shape, the pretended thing, the “substance” as the inner reality? And so when we find there’s only the shape—shapes of nothing, shapes around nothing, hollows inside everywhere, however small, however minute; ultimately, just hollows—then the form itself, shall I say, becomes the substance, and action acquires a totally genuine quality. Play, in other words, and genuineness become the same.

And this is, of course, probably the inner meaning of the dramatic character of Hindu mythology, where the whole world is looked upon as the self-masking of God: the one God playing the parts, being the one actor in every life, whether human or animal or vegetable or mineral or whatever it may be. The whole world seen as the līlā (or “playing”) of the Godhead. And of course, when many Westerners hear that, they think—to use Einstein’s phrase: he doubted that “God plays dice with the universe.”

Because, you see, there’s something in the attitude of play that, taken so far, repels us a little. Does this then mean that the Godhead, Brahma, doesn’t really mean it? Is he just playing with us? Is all this life a mockery? But, you see, play (in this sense) seems to have the atmosphere of mockery, of something deceitful, when it isn’t one hundred percent play. It seems this way to a divided being, who thinks that he can sometimes play and sometimes be serious. He doesn’t realize that there is a kind of play which is identical with total sincerity—where, as it were, the proscenium arch of the psyche has altogether dissolved. We find this division in, really, two kinds of people: the crazy man and the profoundly innocent or wise man.

There’s a story about the old Zen Buddhist monk and poet Ryōkan, who really was the most astonishing innocent. He was playing hide and seek with some children one day, and he had to go and hide, and he was waiting for the children to call him. The children forgot all about him. They ran after their homes and for dinner. And Ryōkan, because he really believed they would call him, he stayed all night hiding behind a bush until someone discovered him in the morning. Of course, we can be wise and worldly and say, “Well, that’s not very practical.” Indeed, no. But this is a wonderfully revealing story about an innocent man who was playing, you see: playing a game with children, and yet at the same time totally sincere—his playing and his sincerity being one and the same.