The World as Self, Part 4: Self as Play Alan Watts

So when the Hindu and Buddhist philosophers speak of detachment from all this apparent world of separate beings—detachment means ‘going with’ this whole thing and not resisting its change. And you can afford to go with it, you can afford to get mixed up in life, and to fall in love, and to get involved with all sorts of things. You can afford it if you know that it’s an illusion. But this is not illusion in a bad sense of the word.

Here’s this Hindu word—crucial—the world is called māyā. This word, māyā—yes, it means ‘illusion,’ it means ‘magic,’ it means ‘art,’ it means ‘delineation,’ or ‘measurement’—and so from matr we get ‘meter,’ and we also get ‘matter,’ ‘material.’ Isn’t it funny that the way we say ‘material’—today, we mean something very real, but the root of the word is ‘illusion.’ So, you see—I mean, measurement is kind of an illusion. You don’t find inches lying around; you can’t pick up an inch. So, in the same way that hours and inches and pounds and dollars and so on are actually imaginary—they’re elaborate systems of cosmic bookkeeping with their little scratches on paper, little hairlines on dials—so in exactly that way the distinction between things is māyā, is imaginary. But what an imagination! In a way, to say that the world is māyā is at the same time to say that what lies behind māyā is immaterial. Look at the reversal of the word. Oh, it’s immaterial, it doesn’t matter. What matters is all this.

But that gets us to a deeper point yet. The Self—the real Self—doesn’t matter, which is another way of saying it doesn’t exist for any purpose. It doesn’t need to exist for any purpose. What purpose would it exist for, when it’s what there is! It won’t find anything in the future, has nothing in the past that it has to go back and remember. It’s now. An eternal now. And so, in that way it doesn’t matter. But therefore, the most important thing in the universe is the one thing that doesn’t matter. The one thing that’s totally and completely useless, and that nobody can find anything for.

Once, a Zen master was asked, What is the most valuable thing in the world?

And he answered, The head of a dead cat.

Why?

Because no one can put a price on it.

So this Self, the Brahman, is like the head of a dead cat. But you see, if, then, you say, Mmm, I really ought to get that dead cat’s head because... something spiritual about it and it’d be very good for me. After all, if I knew the Self I might be a better person. People might like me more. I’d be more constructive in society. I would do this, that, and the other. You see, that’s putting the cart before the horse. That’s trying to make the tail wag the dog.

The knowledge of Brahman, the Self, never does anybody any good if they’re trying to make it do them some good. Only when they are not concerned with whether it does them any good or not does it do them any good. It’s like when you relax and you go out and play. Americans, in particular, don’t know how to do this because they always justify it. They always say, It’s good for me. It’s exercise. It’s just a change from work, and that’ll be able to make me work better. See? Everything they do is done for some serious reasons. It’s the Protestant conscience. And so we never play, except very exceptionally. Because play is that which is done just for itself—for fun.

So the Self—the Ātman, the Brahman—exists for fun. See, there is no reason to exist; it’s completely useless. And it is—therefore, māyā is linked with the word līlā, and that means ‘play.’ Also, of course, the word ‘illusion,’ in English, is derived from the Latin ludere, ‘to play.’

So the nature, you might say, of the Self is that it does no work, it only plays. Work is something serious, you now, that you do for a purpose because you believe that you’ve got to go on living; you work to survive, because you think you have to survive. That was one of the things they told you as a little child. You’ve got to go on, man!

You don’t have to. This thing doesn’t have to go on—that’s why it does. I know that sounds paradoxical, but there’s so many things in life that are like that. If I’m trying to impress people I usually don’t. If you try too hard with anything you usually make a mess of it. And so this basic thing, then, is that the Self—the Brahman behind the world—is engaged in play. It is in this sense that the Hindu philosophers say, Brahman does not actually become the world. The meaning of that is: he’s playing at being it—or it’s playing at being it—as distinct from working at it.

And so, in certain Oriental countries, when one refers to noble people of high birth it is often said, Lord So-and-so has died. The Japanese would say he’s played at dying. Or will he play at taking a journey to Tokyo? Also, remember this: although I have constantly used in this talk the word ‘one’ to apply to the Self—and ‘central’—the Hindus don’t use this word except speaking poetically and loosely. The Self is not one. The Self is called ‘non-dual’—because, you see, the idea of one has an opposite. The opposite of one is many—or none. But the which then which there is no whicher has no opposite; there’s nothing outside it, so you can’t call it ‘one.’ Because ‘one’ is an exclusive idea, it excludes ‘two.’ So they call it, instead of ‘one,’ they call it ‘non-dual,’ which is advaita. This is from the word, you see—dva is the root meaning ‘two;’ the ‘v’ becomes ‘u,’ so we get ‘dual;’ and ‘a’ is the meaning—in Sanskrit, often—‘non.’ Non-dual, advaita.