Hide and Seek

DURING THE 1960s, ALAN WATTS TOLD AND RETOLD A REMARKABLE STORY about God playing hide-and-seek. The popular philosopher appealed to his mostly American audience with a playfully modern and mythical presentation of metaphysical ideas from an ancient Hindu philosophy (Advaita Vedanta). As far as I can tell, the story first appeared in print in The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966). It goes something like this …

The world didn’t begin, because it goes round and round like a circle, and a circle has no beginning. Sometimes the world is, sometimes it isn’t. Now you see it, now you don’t. Because the world comes and goes, it never gets tired of itself and always comes back after it goes away. It’s like your breath, coming in, going out. It’s also like the game of hide-and-seek.

God likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there’s nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. So, he pretends he’s not himself. He hides himself in you and in me, and in all the world. This allows him to experience a multitude of strange and wonderful adventures.

When God hides, it takes him a long time to find himself. That’s what makes the game fun. That’s also why it’s so hard for you and me to discover we’re actually God in disguise. When the game has gone on long enough, however, we all wake up and remember that we are all one single Self – the God who is all there is, who lives for ever and ever.

By the way – in spite of only calling God “him,” God isn’t just a man. God is also a woman. And God is the Self of the world. In the Upanishads, the ancient Hindus called the ultimate “That,” but let’s call it “IT.”

You’re IT!

(Adapted from A. Watts, The Book, 1966, pp. 13-14)

Do you see how playfully this story takes on the “big” questions of life? It addresses the question, Who am I?  by answering the question, Who are You? In the story, God is eternal and omnipotent and omnipresent – and bored. So, God plays hide-and-seek, hiding in each one of us, and everywhere in the world. In other words, as the story says, each of us is “God in disguise.”

If you’re old enough to remember the New Age movement that flowered in the 1980s, you probably remember some New Agers proclaiming, “I am God.”  While I could see they were “mystically correct” in what they said, I always felt they somehow missed the mark. Watts’ hide-and-seek myth shows us how they were diverted: I am not God; I am a mask God wears while playing hide-and-seek, while performing a cosmic drama. (Let’s give a nod here to Joseph Campbell, and remember what Shakespeare says: “All the world is a stage …”)

Before you dismiss this idea out of hand, read (or re-read) the Gospel of John, in which Jesus reveals a doctrine of mutual abiding, in which Jesus abides in God and the disciples abide in Jesus, which suggests the disciples also abide in God, and we do too (see Jn. 15:1-11). Followers of the Orthodox tradition look to the transformative process of “deification” (theosis) to reach a state of mystical union with God. Various Catholic mystics, too, have charted similar inward paths to this same transcendent state.

The ancient Hindu realization shared by Watts in his story isn’t heresy for Christians. Nor is it for Jews. In fact, it’s the fundamental wisdom found in the mystical traditions of all the world’s religions. It’s an expression of what Aldous Huxley called the “Highest Common Factor” at the heart of virtually every religious or philosophical or wisdom tradition ever developed by human beings (see Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945).

The game is on. You’re IT!