Mythology of Hinduism

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this take comes from m a but rio three probably go california nine forty nine sixty five know alan watch
now
as announced the subject with this seminar
is hinduism and christianity
and i'm going to make a comparison between these two it is treating them primarily as mythologies
and i want to start out by explaining quite carefully what i mean by mythology
the word is very largely used today to me in fantasy or something that is definitely not fact
and it's used therefore in a pejorative or put down fence so that when you call something a mythology or a myth it means you don't think much of it
but the word is used by philosophers and scholars and quite another fence
where to speak in the language of myth is to speak and images
rather than to speak in
what you might call plain language or the language of fact descriptive language
say more things with images than you can say with concepts
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
we say a certain thing as a say we we we think of the life of human beings might be compared to the seasons of the year
are there are many important differences between a human life and the cycle of the seasons but nevertheless
one talks about the winter of life for the spring of life and so the image becomes something that is powerful and our thinking
furthermore
when we try to think infant and 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 surrounded with winged angels
and we send our no sensible person could possibly believe that god is just like that therefore if you'll get more sophisticated you believe that god
essay say if you follow some thomas aquinas you think of god as necessary being
or if you think with the
buddhists you think of of god as the undifferentiated void
or as a the infinite essence but actually
however rarefied 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 a white beard or the lord in green pastures wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar
because or 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
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 that he is very simple terms derived from the imagery of the bible
oil and of the medieval church
but i shall discuss hinduism in the same way
and i'm going to begin with hinduism to give you a sort of fundamental account of what it's all about
i imagine some of the were present at the lecture i gave in know the university on no religion and art
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 braemar
and this word

comes from the sanskrit root for
which means to swell or expand
and the hindu idea of braemar the supreme being
is
linked with the idea of the self
he knew deep down you feel that there is want to call i
and this word when you say i am that in sanskrit is ahem age i am
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 of fundamentally is that there is only oneself
and each one of us is that self only it radiates like a son or a star and just as the sun has innumerable raise or just as you can focus the whole son through a magnifying glass and concentrated on one point
or as a rookie an octopus has many tentacles or as a sow has many tits
so in this way drama
is wearing all faces that exist and they are all the mosques of from off
not only human faces but animal faces insect faces vegetable faces and mineral phases 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 are 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 out the book and you
hide your face behind it and then you pick out at the baby and then you pick up this way the baby begins to giggle because a baby being near to the origins of things knows intuitively that hide and seek as the basis of it all and children like to get on the sit in a high chair and they have something on the tray and make it gone and then somebody picks it up
the puts it back they make it gone again busy now then that's very sensible arrangement
it is called a in sanskrit called leila
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
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 should be after a while she'll cease to notice it but if i gently pat her on the knee because nine there are now i'm not it will be more noticeable
so all reality is a matter of coming and going it is vibration it is a wave that positive and negative electricity it's up and down and things like would appear to be solid because in this in much the same way but 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 as a terrific agitation which will not allow the agitation called my 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 slowed us sound down in the same way you see you can slow soft down and 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'll find it's full of silences sound is sound hyphens silence there is no such thing as pure sound just as there is nothing is as no such thing as pure something something always
he goes together with nothing solids are always found in spaces and no spaces are sound found except whether our solids
you might imagine there being a space without any solid in it but you will never never encounter one because you will be there in the form of a solid
to find out about it because they they go together these things the solid of the space the positive and negative the here we are on here we armed go together in the same way as the back in front of a kind and you can't have a coin that has a back and know front the only thing that gets anywhere near that is a mobius strip which is a mathematical conceit which
in which the back of the front of the same but that only shows a more vivid way how backs and fronts go together
now
so that the whole thing is based on that you see now once we've got this game that there are two different things but they're rarely the same see the brahma is what is basic but the brahma manifests itself in what are called the for
that means the pairs of opposites
duality var you see is the robot with the sanskrit word for to which becomes duo in latin and dual in english
to is the basis you can't go behind to because one has an opposite the opposite of one as much as none
now what is in common between one and none no one can say you can't mention it it's called braemar that sometimes called own oh m
and but you can't really think of what is in common between black and white there is obviously a conspiracy between black and white because they're always found together
tweedle dum and tweedle dee
agreed to have a battle to there's always an agreement underlying this difference but that is what we call implicit the difference is explicit
so the first step in what you might call the hide phase of the game of hide and seek is too
get is to lose sight of the implicit unity between black and white between yes and no between existence and non-existence
and that losing sight of the fundamental unity is called maya
maya a word that means many things but primarily it means creative power or magic
and also illusion
the illusion that the opposites are really a separate from each other
and once you could think that they are really separated from each other you can have a very thrilling game
the game is oh dear black might win
ah we must be quite sure that white wins
now which went on to win
sometimes when you look at best he would say abyss the reality here is the writing that is what is significant and yet there are many patterns that one can have when you are undecided in your mind as to what is the figure and what is the background
it could be a black design on a white sheet or it could be a white design on a black sheet and the universe is very much like that
space or the background of things isn't nothing
but people tend to be deceived about this if i draw that
most people when asked what i have drawn will say that i have drawn a circle or a disc or a ball very few people will ever suggest that i've drawn a hole in a wall
because people think inside first rather than thinking out here but actually the two sides go together you can't have what's in here unless you have what's out there
so all artists all architects or people concerned with the organization of space think quite as much about the background behind things and containing things as they do about the things so contained it's all significant and it's all important
that the game is let's pretend that this doesn't exist so that's the pretending oh black might win or a white might win
and so you see that is the foundation of all the great games that human beings play of checkers of chess and of the simple children's games of hide and seek
and the it's a farce you see the tradition of chest that white gets the first move because black as the side of the devil
so all complications and all possibilities of life lie in this game of black and white
of ah
you can put it in another way
in the beginning
of the game when the the two pals are divided that is to dismember to cut two separate
in the end of the game when they the the everything comes together they are remembered
to dismember his to hide or lose
to dismember is to seek and to find through to remember is to seek and defined
and so that the hindu mythology is this
that
the brahma plays this game through periods of time called a kalpa and every kalpa is four million three hundred and twenty thousand years long
and for a kalpa he forgets who he is
and manifests himself of pretends he act the part of as the great actor of all of us
and then for an another kalpa he wakes up remembers who he is and is a peace
so the period in which he
manifests the world's is called a man ventura
and the period in which he withdraws the game is called the pro-life
and these go on and on and on for ever and ever and ever and the whole thing is that it never becomes boring
because the the forgetting period
makes you forget everything that's happened before
so that each time for example a baby comes to birth a baby is although inheriting genes from the most distant past the baby always confronts the world and new and is astonished and surprised at everything
but as you get old you'll get heavy with memories
you get like a book that people have written on and written on and written on as if i was to go on writing on this and eventually the whole thing would become black not have to take out a white chalk and start doing it that way well that would be like the change you see between life and death
now in popular hinduism he and is believed that each one of us is contains not only the supreme self
ah the the one ultimate reality the braemar who looks out from all eyes and his through all his but there's also an individualized self and this self reincarnate from life to live in a sort of progressive way or a regressive way according to your karma the sanskrit word
which means you're doing
karma from the route creek
to do
and so ah
there is a time then you see in which we become involved
and get more and more tied up in the tiles of the world
more and more subject to desire to passions and to getting ourselves hopelessly out on the limb
then there follows a later time when the individual is supposed to withdraw and gradually evolve until he becomes a completely enlightened man
what is called a a multi
a multi is a liberated person who has attained the state called moksha
liberation when he has found himself he knows who he is he knows that he deep down in himself and the do deep down and yourselves are all the one central self and that this whole apparent differentiation of the one from the other is an immense and glorious illusion

now you see i said at the beginning that this is a dramatic idea
in drama
we have a convention of the proscenium arch and the stage
and we have a convention of unseen and off seen there is the curtain and also or backdrop in front of which the actors appear and behind that there's a dressing room called the green room
and in the green room they put on on and take off their masks and in in a
latin
the the the word for the masks worn by the players in classical drama was persona
that
latin word power means through sewn unsound that through which the sound comes because the the mask was had a megaphone shaped mouth which would throw the sound in an open air theatre
so dramatis personae the lists of the players in front of a play means the list of masks that are going to be worn
and in so far as we now talk about the real self in any human being as the person are you a real person you we have inverted the meaning of the word and we have made the mask word mean the real player underneath that shows how deeply involved we are in the illusion
point overplay the skill of the actor is to persuade the audience despite the fact that the audience knows it's at the play is to have them sitting on the edge of their chairs or weeping or in terror because they think it's real
and so of course the hindu idea is that the greatest of all players the master player behind the whole shebang whose putting on the big act called existence had is so good at an actor that he takes himself
he is at once the actor and the audience and he is enchanted by his playing so the word maya illusion also means to be enchanted you know what what to be enchanted is is to be listening to a chant had to be completely involved in it or he is a
eased what is to be amazed it is to be caught in a maze or spellbound how do you get spellbound what do you spell spell words
and so by the ideas we have about the world
and through our belief in know the reality of different things and events we get completely carried away
an topic altogether forget who we are
there is a story about a what a great sage
nevada who came to vishnu vishnu is one of the aspects of of the godhead from our rama is usually the word open to the creator aspect vishnu to the preserving aspect and shiva to the destructive aspect
but when the narada came to vishnu and said what is the secret of your maya vishnu took him and threw him into a pool
and the moment he fell under the pool he was born as a princess in a very great family and went through all the experiences of childhood and being a little girl finally married to a prince from another kingdom and she went to live with him and his kingdom and they were tremendous prosperity and palaces
and peacocks and all like kind of thing and suddenly there was a war and the kingdom was attacked and utterly destroyed and prince himself was killed in battle and so he was cremated and she is a dutiful wife was about to throw herself weeping on the funeral pyre and burn herself in an act of saudi
self sacrifice when suddenly narada woke to find himself being pulled out of the pool by his hair vishnu said for whom were you weeping
so
that idea of the whole world being a magical illusion
but done so skillfully by whom by you
basically not you the empirical ego
not you who is just a kind of focus of conscious attention with memories that are strung together into what you call my everyday self but the you that is responsible for growing your hair for coloring your eyes for arranging the shape of your bones
the deeply responsible you is what is responsible for all this
and so then there are the the people who are well we'll call filed
they are far out into the illusion and they are really lost
and they are the kind of people we will call squares
they are deeply committed to the
human situation
then on opposite them that the foreign people
who are in touch with the center
now the very fine art people who see our to be commended because they are doing the most adventurous thing they are as lost their the explorers their way out in the jungles is he
but they in a way in all societies in some way or other the far out people keep in touch with the foreign people
fine people are there are they may be monks they may be yogis they may be priests they may be of philosophers but they remind the far out people
after all you're not really lost
but it's a great thrill and very brave of you to think that you are
and so
but then the function is you see that is a other for a foreign people some of the foreign people act as what is called a guru
and the function of a guru is to help you wake up from the dream when your time comes
now in the ordinary life of the primitive hindu community
as you know there are forecasts
cast of priests
cast the warriors the cost of merchants and the cost of labourers
and every man who belongs to the hindu community belongs to one of the forecasts into which he is born
that seems to us rather restrictive because if you were born the son of a university professor you might much prefer to be a water skiing instructor and that would mean this shift and cast from what's called a brahmana because the professor would wouldn't hindu live come under the priestly caste
but you see in a time when the those schools and everybody received his education from his father
and the father considered it a duty to educate the boys and mother considered it her duty to educate the girls
the there was no choice of your being something else than your father you were apprenticed to him very young and the child as you know naturally takes an interest in what the parents were doing and tends to want to do it too
so it was based on that primitive to our ideas but still that's the way it was but when a man attain the the the age of maturity and he came to the middle of his life and he had raised a son now old enough to take over the family business then he abandoned cast
he became an upper outcast but is called a sun yat-sen
and he goes outside the village
back to the forest
so though these two stages of life one is called a the stage of grey hostile
which means householder
and van prostitute
which means forest dweller
back to the forest see we came out of the forest and we formed civilized villages the hunters settled down and started agriculture
but that then they formed into casts and every man as it were had a function tinker tailor soldier sailor rich man poor man beggar man thief
but those are all parts there's a big acts who are you really
behind your mouth so the middle of life it said considered it's up to you now to find out who you are you going to die in a few years but for you die wake up from the illusion so that you won't be afraid of death
so you when you become a roster
you go to a guru
and the guru
teaches you yoga
oh which is the art of waking up z yoga
if is some from the route yoked
and that means to join from which we get in latin young girl
join and we get union it's all the same word
and yolk
in english it's all the same
to join
in other words to remember as distinct from dismember
to find out again that our separateness is my yard is in seeming only it is not the fundamental reality we're all one
now how does the guru picchu you that
he does it mostly by kidding you
he has a funny look in his eye
as if to say
brahma oh boy
he can't for me and the other person that the the basic question that all gurus asked their students as who are you
if you ask him a question like of the great guru of modern times sri ramana maharshi you know wealthy philosophical ladies in the united states used to go to him and say i'm
oh who was i in my former incarnation they wanted to find out they will cleopatra or something like that and that he would say who asked the question
who is it that wants to know find out who you are well you know if you want to find out who you are
you get an a very funny mix up
who is it that wants to know who i am i doing there to see
thirty i could catch that thing groups and he gave a guru really as by now let's get go on with that concentrate jersey and get that thing so he has all these people meditating on their own essence and all the time he's looking at them with a funny look in his eye
and they think oh dear that girl he knows me through and through he reads all my secret and impure thoughts he realizes my desires and how badly i concentrate and ah but rarely the guru is laughing himself city inside because he sees that this is the brahma
being quite unwilling to wake up
i'm not really ready yet and sell suddenly there comes a shock it's like at the moment when you realize you see that that family were catching oh dear
it's after all the same hand z and there's a shock of recognition suddenly wake up and see
of com
now that moment and see as moksha liberation
and we call it we have many names for it but no very clear names in the west
we call it mystical experience or cosmic consciousness or something about kind and we find it very difficult to express in our religious language because we would have to say at that moment i have a last discovered that i am the lord god
and we put people in asylums who discover that are least if that's the way they express it
because that really is for us the one sure sign of being completely out of your head whereas in india when somebody says i am the lord god they say will naturally congratulations at last you found out
well now that is because
ah idea of the lord god as we shall see is different from the hindu idea you notice that hindu images of the divinities usually give them many arms
and that is because they are conceived as sort of cosmic centipedes
because you see the centipede doesn't think how to use each leg
just as you don't think
how to use every nerve cell and your nervous system they just seem to use themselves they work automatically
well that everything many things working automatically together is the hindu idea of omnipotence
whereas our idea is more technical the the person in supreme control would have to know how he does every single thing so that if you ask god
ah god how how do you create rabbits
i mean as if he doesn't just pull them out our hats like a stage magician but actually knows in every detail down to the last a molecule of a or our subdivision thereof
how it's done and could explain
whereas the hindus would say if you ask god how do you make a rabbit if you say that it's no problem at all i just become it
but how do you become it on you just do it like you open your hand or close it you just do it you don't have to know how in words
because what we mean by understanding things and explaining things is being able to put them into words and we do that first by analyzing them into many bits in the same way you see when you want to measure the properties of a curve which is complicated to say
thing like that
in order to say how that curve is shaped
you've got to reduce it to tiny points
and measure them so you put say a grid graph paper or something across this and so by telling the positions on the graph of where the curve is at everything you'll get a not an accurate description of what that curve is or how it is in what we would call
all scientific terms
that's what we mean when we talk about understanding things but obviously there is another sense of to understand you understand how to walk even if you can't explain it because you can do it
can you drive a car yes how do you drive a car if you could put it into words it might be easier to teach people how to do it in the first place but one it's understands and learns many things about driving a car that i never explained in words you just watch somebody else do it and you do the same thing
so in this way them the hindu idea of god and the western idea are somewhat different and so when they were the hindu realizes that he is god
and you are too when he sees the activity in the dance of god and everybody all around him in every direction
he does not assume certain things that a western person might assume i had the same experience
for example
you know the difference between what you do voluntarily and what happens to you involuntarily
when i see someone else on the far end of the room move
that comes to me with a signal attached to it that experience in voluntary
when i move on i'm scratching my face it comes to me with the signal voluntary tagged on it
nevertheless both experiences are states and changes in my nervous system
but we don't ordinarily realize that when we see somebody else doing something we think that's outside my nervous system it isn't at all that's right inside
it's happening you you know it in the as a happening in your own brain
now if you should discover that that is a happening inside you it might very well come to you with the voluntary signal attached to it
and so you would say you say i've got the feeling that i'm doing everything that everybody else is doing everything that i see everything i am aware of is my action
i feel misunderstood that you might think that you were able to control everything that everybody else does
and that you really were god
in that kind of technical sense of god
so you have to be careful what sort of interpretations you put on these experiences
you see it's one thing to have an authentic experience of the stars
it's quite another thing to be able to describe accurately their relative positions
it's one thing to have an experience of cosmic consciousness on liberation but quite another thing to give a philosophically accurate account of it
or a scientifically accurate account
but at any rate
this experience
is the basis of the whole hindu philosophy
what you might say is if i could sum it up the nature of this experience it it is as if
one comes into the world in the beginning having what freud called the oceanic consciousness of a baby
and a baby does not distinguish apparently i don't know how we notice but lots of psychologists say so
baby doesn't distinguish between what experiences our experiences of itself and what experiences our experiences on the external world therefore it's all one
furthermore a baby has for a long time been part of its mother and it's floated in the ocean of the womb and so on and so has the sense from the beginning
of what is really to an enlightened person totally obvious
that the universe
is one single organism
now
ah social way of bringing up children is to make them concentrate
on the bits and to ignore the totality
we pointed things and we give them names and we say look at that but children very often ask you what are things but you realize you don't have names for them
they point out backgrounds and these the shape of spaces between things and say what's that
and you brush it aside well that's not important that doesn't have a name and see so you keep pointing out the significant things to them and above all what everybody around the child does is to tell the child who he is
and what sort of part is expect expected to play what sort of mask he must wear
so that i remember very well as a child
identities and i'd probably have to settle to for one of them that the the adult world was pushing that on me i was one person with my parents at home i was another person altogether at my uncle's home i was still quite another person with my own peer group
and so it went
but that the what society was trying to do with now make up your mind who you are really
you don't care so i imitate some other child who i admired and i'd come home my mother said allen that's not true that's peter
and you're you're you're putting on his game you'll be yourself now see that's otherwise you're somehow phony
and the point is not to be phoning to be real whereas this whole thing is for me you see it's a big act ah but ah
marvelous accuracy and what a a genuine person is is rarely is one who knows he's a big act and does it with complete
zip up here's what we would say committed and yet he's free by becoming completely committed and knowing that is that the world is act it doesn't anybody doing it like we think things stand behind processes and things do the processes that says a convention of grammar that's because you have
a ever you have verbs and nouns
whereas every noun obviously can be described by a verb that the the mat we can also say that matting so likewise you can say catching for cat
only when we will have to say the counting is sitting we say the cat sits a using a noun and verb whereas it's all verb it's all a big act
ah so
then this in some men is this hindu dramatic idea of the cosmos as an endless hide and seek game now you will see it now you don't
and so it saying to everybody really of cacio you worry and you could fade of disease and death paid and all that sort of thing of course
but it's on lou illusion there's nothing to be afraid of
and you think well out but my goodness supposing when i die they just won't be anything
be like going to sleep and never waking up that awful i mean that's just terrible nothing forever
that doesn't matter
you eat when you when you go into that period called death or forgetting that's just so that you won't remember
because if you did always remember to be a ball
but you are wiser than you know because you arrange to forget you arrange to die and keep going in and out of the a lot of the light
but underneath
at the basis of all this between black and white between life and death is something unmentionable that's the really you that's the secret
i don't give the show away see all of you and are privy to a secret your initiates to see you know sleep it'll thing but you may not have experienced it would you know about it
but you mustn't give the show away the run out the street suddenly and say to everybody i'm god see because they won't understand you

you've been listening to a lecture by the late alan watts entitled the mythology of hinduism