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Chapter Five

The Dance of Life, Lila

You sit beside a stranger, a person you have not met before nor will ever meet again. You are bored and feel isolated and have a deep yearning to find some relationship or union with someone. You become interested in the stranger next to you and wonder what she is thinking or feeling and find a desire to feel some interaction with her. You offer some simple statement and then... two hours later you part with a sense of deep union and sharing of extreme intimate feelings approaching ecstasy. There were no conflicts, only deep yearning and the sense of having been overpowered.

Why can you not have this closeness with your friends and family? The difference in the two states of interaction with the stranger and with your friends can be described as the difference between trusting what is happening or what is going to happen versus attempting to control the outcome by thinking and trying. This is the difference between freedom and bondage or "playing" and "trying". This difference will be elaborated upon in the next chapter.

Playing is first experienced as a child. Initially, a child may watch older children playing some imaginative interactive game. Then she is gradually allowed to enter into the game, starting as an inert non-reactive element, like a crew member in a space game or a student in a school game. At this level the child is told what and when to speak and is fully controlled by the older children in the game. The child gradually senses the intensity the older children bring to the game and how they fully interact with each other, somehow not worrying or hesitating about what they do or say. The child senses magic in the game that overtakes and controls the players. In the game the children are able to let the game and their different roles dictate their actions, what they think, say, and do. Newcomers are gradually led into the method of game playing until finally the game controls their actions as well. When the game and not the older children control, then the child becomes a full-fledged player.

Educators and other people working with children are aware of the power of games. If a teaching or lesson can be inserted into a game, then it is more rapidly absorbed by the children than if they "try" to learn the content.

What is of importance in these games is the ability of the children to accept various roles and to make them real in their own minds and perhaps even more importantly, to make them real in the minds of the other players. Once they assume and enliven their respective roles, they no longer have to think or plan "how" to play their roles in the game. They must, of course, continue to put their effort into maintaining the roles. The roles fit the game and the game seems to fit all of the roles. The game moves along with the children becoming more and more enmeshed within and taken over so that observing adults can become concerned about their children's fantasies becoming real, which of course they are. To play these imaginary games requires that the children have an initial dedication to the game or a deep yearning to become someone different, a willingness to renounce who they were before the game, and a trust in the game to guide them. The children must likewise be willing to let the game overpower them and control their thoughts, actions, and statements. This process is called samarpana.

Game playing is nearly opposite to the conditioned interaction with others that children eventually learn. In game playing, the role is of greatest concern. Effort must be placed into portraying the role just right. Even slight deviations of the role can ruin the game as for instance, smiling if you are playing a suffering dying martyr. The other point of interest is that in game playing there cannot be any effort put into what you are going to say or do. Instead, you must be completely open to the game and let the game lead you. In the adult civilized world the concerns are reversed. You must worry about what you are going to say and do. At this time, you do not put effort into the role since that is assumed to be fixed and is the real "me".

Children are being civilized or conditioned to have fixed and controlled responses to the outside world, or to say and do prescribed things. Their role, ego, conditioned self, or character then becomes the result of doing the prescribed things in a prescribed way. This is of course the opposite to game playing.

The first game that a child learns to play is reacting to a parent. A child, for instance, will increase the intensity of a scream if it seems to yield more response from a parent. When children scrape their knees they may look to a parent's response to gauge how much effort they should put into playing the role of an injured person. The parent becomes the leader or power behind each moment in the game. Later, this variable reaction to the parent becomes fixed, based upon success in the past. The response becomes a part of the conditioned self or ego.

Children are gradually taught by the adult society to be only one person or to have only one role (with fixed and repeatable responses to the outer world.) This is evidenced by some of the definitions you have about someone, such as, they take everything seriously and frown, or they laugh at problems, or they are honest. While a child is being conditioned to maintain a fixed response to the world, they are also warned about people who are "playing" a role which might be misleading and harmful, such as a child molester who smiles and offers candy. This conditioning carries on into adulthood with adults being very suspicious of people "who are not themselves" including yourself. Just what the term "being your self" means is not questioned. The actor Peter Sellers was quoted as saying that he had played so many different roles that he no longer knew who he was.

The conditioned and rigid social reaction of adults requires many years of coaching, copying, and watching. When adults become parents they find themselves rearing their children as they were reared. One of the humorous sides of parenting is the recognition that you are doing to your own children what you rebelled against in your parents. The professional games played out in the market place require studying, practice sessions, and much coaching. College students learn more than course work as they observe the mannerisms of their professors and later adopt many of them as their own. A person entering the blue-collar work place also finds coaching and training from other workers in how to please the bosses, how to get along with fellow workers, and how to minimize the effort or pain in the work. The advent of unions and professional standards has complicated the drama and roles in the work place and the games are played with increasing sophistication.

When you consciously choose a game and play it with the understanding that a mystical unseen power in that chosen game controls the actions of the players, the game becomes "the dance of life". This dance of life requires dedication, renunciation, energy, and trust. You must fully intend to interact with the dance and do, say, or feel what ever the dance requires. The role that you intentionally put on to play is called your Mudra. If you do not consciously chose a role or a game to play then you remain a conditioned robot with conditioned responses that are associated with "you".

The dance of life that includes others must therefore start with a clear agreement of the roles each active person involved in the game will play. If one person is playing the role of a policeman, then there must be the recognition of the power that goes with that role. The policeman role must have the power to control and to overpower you if necessary. A teacher role must be a perfect source of wisdom without flaw that can overpower you with new insights. A lover must have complete control over your feelings and able to lead you into ever deeper intimacies. A physician must have mystical powers of healing which can overpower your illnesses or complaints. One of the very interesting aspects of the game of life is that when you empower the other players, they play their roles with greater intensities. As an example, if you do not empower your policemen, and instead consider them as part of your problems then they become ineffective in controlling. Similarly, when you limit the power of your lover, love and intimacy disappear only to be replaced with conditioned responses.

Your own role requires the acceptance of purpose and power and the renunciation of any old role that may have been played, including "being your Self". You must have a clear concept of the goal associated with the role and its relationship to the chosen game, and then you must take on the attributes or characteristics that make that role and game become more and more intense.

If you are playing "being your Self" for instance, then the goal is carried in your conditioning and may appear as "being good". The characteristics of the Self then take on the nature of being affable, agreeable, trustworthy, and traits learned from our childhood as being socially acceptable. If however, you take on the role of being a fireman, for instance, then many of the old learned traits must be shed. Concern for Self must be replaced with concern for others. Fear of fire, height, or danger must be overcome with absolute trust in equipment, procedures, leadership, and fellow firemen.

Primitives living close to nature do not outgrow this trusting game and instead perceive the world as a unity and their immediate God as a Spirit contained or moving in everything (each element having its own nature, game or god.) Nothing in nature acts upon its own, but rather as an interaction with everything else. If one attempts to live in nature without playing this game, one remains always an outsider and at harm. One may also argue a similar game in a city with its inhabitants becoming "street-wise" or acquiring other civilized games such as sales or construction.

One major source of misery to adults is the loss of the concept of playing a game. Instead, you start to identify with your role and see yourself as being that role, not a player acting that role. It is this identification with the role that immediately limits your ability to change or to evolve beyond the role. In contrast, you can accept the concept that what you think you are is only a role that you have been playing most of your life. This role was not of your choosing, but rather was forced upon you during the process of becoming civilized. Public performers and artists report how some of them become identified with their role on stage and have difficulty in shedding it off-stage. "Groupies" or their followers increase the difficulty since they force the performer to continue their stage role off-stage. This is not unlike what happens when you, as an adult, are in the company of your parents and are forced into old roles.

The comparison between conditioned roles and the desired new roles is like the difference between reliance on past conditioning and shaping a new role that lies in the future. That desired role is ahead of the present moment in time, always in the future. As an example, when you are your old self, you "think" about what you should do, whereas in a desired role, you find yourself doing without thought. "Thinking" is the link with the past conditioning whereas "finding yourself," is reacting to that which is ahead in the un-folding or on-coming moment.

One interesting aspect of the game of life is that it cannot have a beginning or an ending. We must step fully into a role immediately upon entering it. You cannot gradually become a boss with an employee or gradually become a parent with a child. It is similar to dreaming. You enter a dream without any preamble and never have to ask, "What's going on?" or "Where am I?". You are instantly in a role that has a history as well as a present and future all controlled by the game.

The dance or game of life has no ending. If you encounter an old school friend after many years of absence, there is an immediate re-connection to the old game that you played together. Class reunions are interesting in that even after decades, the old school roles and interactions predominate despite what each individual may have done in the intervening years. There is a definite sense of continuing worlds with no time in between the scenes. You do not experience a time lapse between meetings with people who have been joined in play. By extrapolation of this experience you see the impermanence of death or the ability of some inner spiritual nature to exist beyond physical separation.

The game of life cannot be coupled with the normal controlled world. You cannot enter into the game while attempting to restrain or control your actions or thoughts. It is an all or nothing type of interaction. Children, for instance, cannot play "mud slide" if they are concerned about keeping their clothes clean. Nor can you experience the joy of the game with a fellow traveler in conversation if you are concerned about saying something wrong. There must be a complete renunciation of other roles in order to play a new role even though the new role may have some characteristics that are similar to the old role.

In the market place, if you can renounce the desire to judge and control, you can learn to experience the game of life with people you would not normally choose as playmates. This stepping into the game of life can be accomplished even though those around your do not see the game. You may have opponents in the business world for instance, whom you have disliked very much, but this dislike may be changed to a respect for their abilities in playing their roles (even though they might deny that they are "playing".) If you can see your enemies as supporting players in the game of life, then they can be accepted as wonderful additions to the plot who increase the intensity of the game by their excellent portrayals of an opposing force. You learn to react to an individual's role with intensity while seeing the interaction as part of the whole play and loving the person playing the hateful role. This can be compared to a children's game where one child plays the role of some horrible fiend, hated by all but at the same time completely enjoyed by the other players. It is again when one identifies either the conditioned self or other individuals with the roles that misery results.

The game of life has the characteristic of "pulling" you into it. As you step into the game, the desire to act or react grows. The game intensifies and the game tends to find a rising crescendo as the players warm to it and develop skills that increase their ability to project their roles. The villain becomes more villainous while the heroes become more heroic. The game is fired by the desire to experience more and more in the game. This intensification of the action will be called the crescendo of the game or vimarsha. This crescendo, vimarsha, is well known to playwrights and musicians and reflects the intention of playing the game or listening to some music whereby you wish to be stimulated and carried beyond your present feelings.

For example, in the conversation described at the beginning of this chapter when you are bored with your trip and looking for a lively discussion with a fellow traveler, you allow a discussion to intensify and become more and more personal or intimate to increase the crescendo or interest in the conversation. If you are successful, the time passes almost instantly and you arrive at your destination actually refreshed and more alive then when you started the trip. Unfortunately, as the excitement and crescendo increase, most would-be players may back away from the game and begin to judge their actions or feelings. They may then become horrified at their lack of self-control, the exposure of their inner feelings, or the animation in their expression. It is typical to start to feel that you are being overpowered by the other person or the game or both. Such an interruption destroys the game by removing the intimacy and the crescendo of the game. The game is reduced to a controlled social interaction. To continue in the game you must allow the vimarsha of the game to become overpowering and trust in the outcome. Along with the trust, there likewise is a requirement for a greater and greater input of energy (in a form that will be discussed later.) As the game intensifies, you find that you are exerting yourself more and more with increased awareness and openness as well as with the intensity of your expressions. Without this increased investment, the game dies. Another requirement is that you must not attempt to bring another world or game within the present game. For instance, one of the reasons that you can find a game with a stranger on a bus is that you can renounce your old games that include self-importance, prestige, social powers, etc. If you attempt to bring one of your old roles into this new game, the game will probably die unless the other person can build upon your old game.

In general, our conditioning labels activities with a vimarsha as "fun" or as "games" while the activities without a crescendo are the drudgeries of life. The method for increasing the joy in living is therefore to bring vimarsha into your ordinary activities or to make a game of each element of life.

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