The World as Self, Part 18: Gamesmanship in Spiritual Practice

So now, the most amazing gamesmanship goes on in the whole domain of yoga and spiritual practice; you would be astounded. One of the games in all this is to find a little flaw in you, see? Everybody has a place where they can be jiggled a bit; something they’re a bit ashamed of, and so they think, Does this person really know my secret? He’s not saying anything because he’s polite, but does he really see through me and know that somewhere are the awful awfuls, and that I’m a little bit upsettable.

This is all part of religious competition. If you go to the Roman Catholics, and you’ve been psychoanalyzed—you see?— they’ll say, Well that’s fine, but, of course, it’s not nearly enough. I mean, that’s all very well so far as it goes, but... Or, if you’re a Roman Catholic and you go to a Buddhist outfit on a missionary basis, they’ll say, Yes, of course, through your Catholicism you’ve learned some of the basic virtues, but, of course, Catholicism doesn’t go anywhere near the heart of things because Catholicism doesn’t have an elaborate system of meditation like we have. Then you go over to a Hindu school and they say, Yes, the Buddhists go to a certain point; they do obtain a very, very high stage of realization, but there is nevertheless something higher than that, which they don’t quite get.

And you’ll find this all round the world. Everybody claiming to have that little, special, extra essence which the others don’t have. Now, why are they doing that? Are they all frauds? Are they all out to get you into their society? Sometimes, yes. But sometimes they are trying to see whether you fall for this; testing you out. This is upaya, the ‘skillful method.’ And if you become falling for that little extra special thing that’s just supposed to be around the corner, then they’ve got you. Or rather, you’ve got yourself in a mix. And you have to work at that, and work at that, and work at that, until you find out that you were being made a monkey of. But you were being made a monkey of because you could be made a monkey of. You hadn’t really arrived where you are. You didn’t have the nerve to be you. That is to say, to be the Self.

And so you had, always, to feel that there was something beyond that; there’s a stage higher, see? So that’s why, for example, masonry is such a success; it has 33 degrees. And, you know, you can go up that ladder and get higher and higher status. The more degrees the merrier. There have been things that invented hundreds of degrees, and they are an immense success. Because you can postpone it longer and longer, like Achilles overtaking the tortoise. He doesn’t overtake it in the problem because we keep dividing and dividing the space between Achilles and the tortoise as he approaches the tortoise. What delays Achilles overtaking the tortoise is not Achilles, but our calculations about how he approaches it. We make the calculations more and more complicated as he gets nearer and nearer to the tortoise. It’s only the calculations that put it off. Achilles, in fact, runs right by. So in the same way, you can calculate yourself out of liberation. You can put it off indefinitely by inventing new degrees and new stages. But actually, when you get it, you don’t get it. You suddenly see it; it happens instantly. It happens instantly whether you put in thirty years’ practice, or whether you put in three minutes. It’s the same. Suddenly it dawns on you that that’s the way things are. Tat tvam asi.