The Inevitable Ecstasy, Part 12: Seeing Beyond the Game

I was making a basic comparison between the state of consciousness of a baby and that of a so-called mature adult. Respectively, what we would call undifferentiated and differentiated. The adult consciousness being highly selective, and the baby consciousness being very open and hardly selective at all, and therefore unable to distinguish what adults consider to be the important things, which have to do with the conventions and rules that the positive aspects—whether they be called good, or pleasant, or life-giving, and so on—must prevail over the negative aspects. And I went on to show that this contrast between the two views of the world has another marked characteristic: that, in the case of the baby who hasn’t been trained or told about the difference between himself and all that is defined as ‘other’ than himself, doesn’t distinguish between voluntary behavior and involuntary occurrence.

And, of course, we think this is a very fundamental defect. But if we go back, you see, to a principle that underlies the whole universe with a kind of mathematical exactitude, we see that if we reduce things to a situation of primal simplicity, and we have a primordial ‘self’ and ‘other’ situation—that is to say, two balls in space—there is absolutely no way of telling, when they move, which one of them is moving or which one is still. They must necessarily appear to move mutually. There’s no point of reference—except each other—to determine which is moving and which is still.

Now, everything that goes on in the universe is simply a complication of that principle. Because the same thing holds true if you multiply the number of balls. You’ll see that that primordial principle—that all movement is mutual—still applies. And therefore, the baby’s failure to distinguish between the voluntary and the involuntary—the ‘I’ and the ‘other’—is, in a way, correct. Psychologists—psychoanalysts in particular—make a great deal of this contrast and consider that the baby’s view is inferior to the adult’s. And if an adult should acquire that view, in psychoanalysis this would be called ‘regression.’

The point that is missed is that the two ways of looking at things need each other to balance out. And that one needs the baby’s view as a basis for the adult view, because if you don’t have it you take the adult view too seriously; get completely carried away by it. And that would be analogous to a person who, in playing poker, loses his nerve because he doesn’t realize it’s only a game. So he becomes a very bad player.

n exactly the same way, we, in life, are only playing a game. But because we didn’t keep the baby view, we can’t see it. So what we would call a ‘Buddha-view’ is one that knows both, and therefore is not taken in by the adult games—although perfectly capable of playing them—but in so far as they are not regarded as finally and absolutely serious. He’s not captivated by them.