Out of Your Mind: Tricksters, Interdependence, and the Cosmic Game of Hide-and-Seek (Alan Watts, 2017)
“So we can speak metaphorically of the everlasting game of hide-and-seek in which the self plays with itself.
It forgets who it is, then creeps up behind itself and says, “Boo!” And that’s a great thrill.
The self pretends that things are getting serious, just like a great actor on the stage.
Even though the audience knows that what they see on stage is only a play, the actor’s skill takes them in— they weep and laugh and sit on the edge of their seats with anticipation.
They’re utterly involved in what they really know is just a play. So that’s what’s going on here.
Brahman is a tremendous actor with absolutely superb technique, so much so that Brahman takes itself in and feels that the play is real. (…)
You’re sitting there, really thinking you’re there. You’ve persuaded yourself so well. You’ve acted so well that you just know that this is the real world.
But you’re merely playing. Because the audience and the actor are one.
You know that the word person means “mask”? The persona was the mask worn by actors in Greek and Roman drama. (…)
So, in the dramatic myth, life as we experience it is a big act, and behind the big act is the player.
And the player is the self, the atman in Hindu philosophy. That’s you.
Only you are playing hide-and-seek, but you won’t admit it, because you have deliberately forgotten who you really are, which is the foundation of the universe, or the “ground of being” as twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich calls it.
Well, you might remember who you really are somewhere back there or somewhere deep, deep down, but you still can’t admit it.
So, to bring this knowledge to the front, you have to be kidded out of your game. (…)
In this way, everybody is the fundamental reality—not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self.
Deep down, you’re all this basic reality, but you’re pretending that you’re not.
And it’s perfectly okay to play this game, to pretend that you’re not God, because that’s the whole notion of drama.”
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