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Unless you can play and do play you can’t grow.
What’s the difference between your regular life and play?
And is the wild competition of let’s say football… is that play?
Surprisingly what adults call play isn’t… It is just extending their serious competitiveness, their inclination to get status and deferred value by winning over another.
Real play is not about winning.
Then why play?
If you asked that question, you may be too far gone on the side of competitiveness, and nothing I can offer can save you.
Save you? Yeah.
You see the world is all about the temporary… what can fall down in a moment. This is one of the reasons we call it the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Death of everything is imminent, no certainty, no continuity, always fear.
Horrible. The higher you intend to go, the deeper the fall will be.
It is not the right mindset, the right attitude where you can grow.
You can grow only in play. Where failing is temporary and you can laugh at it. And success is temporary and you can laugh at it.
If you played a lot as a child then you may have unfair advantage over children who didn’t play, for whatever reason.
Playing, experiencing failure, falling, stumbling, losing, is not the end of the world for a child.
The more you can experience all those things to happen, the more you can really see that they are par for the course, and mean nothing.
Playing, playing a lot is rehearsal for a life that can be productive, fun, and enjoyable.
I was lucky, both my parents worked, and I just played with children who were also allowed to play. Climbed fences, climbed trees, competed who can pee further, wrestled, ran, whatever. And laughed.
I was little. Smaller than my peers. But played and laughed louder than any of them.
And brought that attitude to all of life… I stumbled? so what? I lost? so what? No big deal, not even a small deal. No issue. No matter. Nothing to concern myself with.
I am me, and I am not my results. Not what others think about me. I am none of that. I am the same, winning or losing, succeeding or be left behind.
Because I am, the me, the Self, is permanent… not temporary.
And that is because I played and play now.
I compete with myself. I compete with life. And laugh. Laugh a lot.
Now, on the surface one could say: just play more… Right?
But when I look deeper, until you can SEE that there is nothing ever wrong in anything, with anything, including you, you’ll play to win… Because winning is good and losing is bad… Am I right about that?
Thinking, saying that there is nothing wrong isn’t going to change anything.
You have to SEE that whatever is is, and it is always what it is… winning, losing is what it is. The label ‘wrong’ is placed on it by you, it is like dressing something up in prison garb. You know that horrid orange in most prisons.
Everyone looks horrid.
But that is just the clothing. They are individuals. Some killed… some stole… people.
And they got caught. That is the only commonality; that they got caught.
They violated some man-made rule and they got caught.
Did they do wrong? No, they did what they did… Wrong is added by man.
Reality has no adjectives and no adverbs. Look it up if you are like my students, don’t know what the heck they are.
Reality has verbs and nouns. No labels. All labels are added by some self-centered human… the labels don’t belong to reality.
And you, thousands of years later, would do better, much better, if you could see the orange garb reality has been dressed by earlier humans. Where you can see the garb but not reality.
Yesterday I had this conversation with a student in the Prison Break. That’s a course that’s ending next week.
I mentioned that she was stingy. And kind of dull, like a dull knife, because her cell hydration was just 1%.
So I remote energized a glass of water for her, to bring up her cell hydration to 10% where she can be a tad sharper.
But although she got sharper, she was not seeing that being stingy isn’t wrong. It is a possible way to be… and not who she is.
And as long as she sees ANYTHING as wrong, she will do whatever she needs to do to avoid being seen, being thought of like that… She will try to fix that darn stinginess.
But if it is not wrong, what happens, what MUST happen when she attempts to fix it? She will create the next and BIGGER issue.
You cannot fix what isn’t wrong.
And because there is no wrong in the universe, in reality, fixing is what creates problems, not what you labeled as wrong.
If you look at the state of things in the United States, people, humanity, is more and more OWNED by the labels, the orange prison garb, and forgets that those are people.
They label each other and are stuck on the label. He, she, they, heshe… that is the label. Maybe evolution is trying to avoid bringing more innocent people into this hellish life humans created… So takes people out of the procreation game…
When was it last time that you looked at a person and saw a person? Probably never.
But when you learn to look beyond the labels, whether you place them on yourself or others, you can find yourself in a bubble of joyous place… reality. Where nothing is wrong. Not because I say so. Not because YOU say so. But because there is not a thing that is wrong in reality.
When you can see it, you just got to the place we can call Heaven on Earth.
Stop thinking in labels, and start LOOKING. Look and SEE. Not the words… what is there.
Prefer to live in the Valley of the Shadow of Death? Be my guest. I honor your decision. You earned to your misery.
If you didn’t catch what are the conditions for growth, growth that gives you peace of mind, grace and ease, here they are:
- Play. In play you play for the sake of play, for the pleasure it gives you. Without playing that way you can’t and won’t grow
- Ignore and allow the labels to drop. Awareness that it is a human added label, not the truth will allow them to drop.
- And lastly: Start looking with awareness. Not look for something, not look at something, just look. Expecting reality break through the maya and show itself to you. Allow your insides catch up with what you see… Reality islike a breath of fresh air… beautiful.
In tomorrow’s workshop, The Self, I’ll make sure I talk about play…
When I look, that has been the most crucial component of my growth.
I play a lot. I play by myself… play with my voice, laugh out loud, and am having fun. Often I play with words, I experiment. Hell, I don’t take myself or anything seriously, because what the world calls serious is heavy and significant.
Like the labels. Or what people think about you… Ugh.
Come to tomorrow’s workshop. If you don’t want to talk, you can say so at the beginning and I’ll honor it.
The Self workshopPS: Why is play so important, so crucial for your growth?
Because when you play there are NO STAKES. You can try out this and that, this strategy and that strategy, and tactics, and learn from what you experience. And no one, especially you, won’t expect yourself to win, because play is not about winning.
The United States is very competitive, and therefore it is the most miserable country in the world. And soon it is also becoming the home to the dumbest… All because of this need to win.
Winning is temporary. It feels good for a moment, but it is not consequential. But losing is learning. And learning is building. learning is growing. And Life says: it is all about growing. Growing yourself…
