We Are All God Playing Hide And Seek

“So here’s the drama. My metaphysics, let me be honest with you, is that there is the central Self, you can call it God, you can call it whatever you want, and it is All of Us. It plays all parts of All Creatures, anywhere, anytime.

And it plays hide and seek with itself. It gets lost, it gets involved in the most distant adventures, but in the end it always wakes up and comes back to itself. And when you’re ready to wake up, you wake up, and when you’re not ready, you keep pretending that you’re just ‘poor little me’.

And since you’re all here doing this kind of research and listening to this kind of lecture, I assume you’re all in the process of waking up. Or else you’ll be teasing yourself with some form of wake-up flirting that you’re not serious about. But I guess you may not be serious, but sincere, that you are ready to wake up.

So when you are about to wake up and find out who you are, you meet a character called a guru, as the Hindus say ‘the teacher’, ‘the awakener’. And what is the function of a guru? He’s the guy who looks you in the eye and says, ‘Oh, bring it on. I know who you are.’

You come to the guru and say, ‘Sir, I have a problem. I’m unhappy, and I want to get one in the universe. I want to be enlightened. I want spiritual wisdom.” The guru looks at you and says, ‘Who are you?’

Do you know Sri-Ramana-Maharshi, that great Hindu sage of modern times? People came to him and said, ‘Master, who was I in my last incarnation?’ As if that mattered. And he said, ‘Who’s asking the question?’

And he looked at you and said, get to it right away: ‘You’re looking at me, you’re looking out, and you’re not aware of what’s behind your eyes. Go back inside and discover who you are, where the question comes from, why you are asking it. ‘

And if you’ve looked at a photo of that man, I have a beautiful photo of him; Every time I go out the front door I look past it. And I look at those eyes, and the humor in them; the lilting laugh that says, “Oh, bring it on.” Shiva, I recognize you. If you come to my door and say, “I’m so-and-so,” I’ll say, “Ha-ha, what a funny way God stopped by today.”

So in the end, of course, there are all kinds of tricks that gurus pull off. They say, ‘Well, we’re going to put you through the mill.’ And the reason they do that is simply because you don’t wake up until you feel like you’ve paid a price for it.

In other words: the sense of guilt one feels. Or the feeling of fear. It’s just the way you experience how to keep the disguise game going. Do you see that? Suppose you say, “I feel guilty.” Christianity makes you feel guilty for existing. That the fact that you exist is somehow an insult. You are a fallen man.

I remember going to church service on Good Friday as a child. They each gave us a colored postcard with Jesus crucified on it, and underneath it said: ‘This is what I did for you. What are you doing for me?’ You felt terrible. YOU nailed that man to the cross.

Because you eat steak, you have crucified Christ. Mythra. It’s the same mystery. And what are you going to do about it? “I did this for you, what are you doing for me?” You feel terrible that you even exist.

But that guilt is the veil over the sanctuary. “Don’t you dare come in!” In all the mysteries, when you are initiated, there is someone who says, ‘Ah-ah-ah, don’t enter. You must meet this requirement and that requirement, THEN we will let you in.”

And so you go through the mill. Why? Because you say to yourself, ‘I won’t wake up until I deserve it. I don’t wake up until I’ve made it difficult for me to wake up.

So I devise an elaborate system for myself to delay my awakening. I put myself through this test and that test, and when I convince myself that it is tough enough, THEN I finally admit to myself who I really am, and I pull back the veil and realize that in the end, when all is said and done is done, am that I am, which is the name of God.”