Member-only story
None of This is Real: A Guide
There are two types of game: finite and infinite. What matters is why we play, the rules we employ and how we treat one another. Only one of these can produce losers. We should stop playing those.
Yesterday, during a multi-hour meditation, I reached a vividly altered state (or two, or six) and upon waking, spent a half-hour processing my thoughts, dictating and thumb-typing them while they were still fresh in my mind.
The first thing I jotted down was the following:
Reality
Definition A: A game by whose rules the players agree to abide. If a perception — or a perception-fueled act — falls outside of the adopted rules, it is thereby considered unreal, and therefore unsanctioned, and earmarked for corrective action, and erasure.
Flaunting the rules publicly is often punishable by incarceration, immobilization, and/or application of a drug protocol regimen that aims to forcibly change the dissenter or renegade’s mindset, in order to achieve complicity with the accepted rules.
Only then is he or she allowed to return to play.
<sigh>
This morning, as I sat to write, I thought of William Shakespeare’s famous line from As You Like It in a new light:
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
Jacques, the statement’s author, then describes The Seven Ages of Man, from birth to death, clearly articulating each in caricature-like fashion, following a well-worn and familiar human script.
Shakespeare in turn reminded me of another saying — this one by Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, who quipped the following:
“When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called a Religion.”
His comment has less to do with religion, per se, and more to do with how readily — almost…
