“There
was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round
like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look
at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats
itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up
to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and
sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can’t have any one of
these without the other, because you wouldn’t be able to know what black
is without white, or white unless side-by-side with black.
“In
the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn’t,
for if the world went on and on without rest for ever and ever, it would
get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now
you don’t. So because it doesn’t get tired of itself, it always comes back
again after it disappears. It’s like your breath: it goes in and out, in
and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It’s
also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it’s always fun to find new
ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn’t always hide in the
same place.
“God
also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside
of God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty
by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself.
He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the
animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way
he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and
frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they
will disappear.
“Now
when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well
that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself.
But that’s the whole fun of it -- just what he wanted to do. He doesn’t
want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is
why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise,
pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough,
all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one
single Self -- the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever
and ever.
“Of
course you must remember that God isn’t shaped like a person. People have
skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren’t,
we wouldn’t know the difference between what is inside and outside our
bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn’t any outside
to him. The inside and outside of God are the same. And though I have been
talking about God as ‘he’ and not ‘she,’ God isn’t a man or a woman. I
didn’t say ‘it’ because we usually say ‘it’ for things that aren’t alive.
“God
is the Self of the world, but you can’t see God for the same reason that,
without a mirror, you can’t see your own eyes, and you certainly can’t
bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly
hidden because it is God hiding.
“You
may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends
to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he
isn’t really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost
all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people,
for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get
the better of the bad. It’s the same as when we play cards. At the beginning
of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things
in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order,
and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once
more and play again, and so it goes with the world.”