My thoughts have been on overdrive lately because I’ve been off sick the previous week and doing nothing but lying around and thinking. Not a particularly nice start to the year from a physical standpoint but from a mental one, my mind has produced an explosion of ideas and patterns that feel right somehow.
However, I can’t fully comprehend the connectivity of them as yet, since at times they seem radical and at other times they seem ridiculous. That said, I need to get them out of me, no matter how chaotic they might seem. And even if they turn out to be insubstantial as a whole, there is a seed of something within them that seems important in some way.
Know Thyself
I keep seeing myself standing on this exquisitely designed masted ship sailing upon an unknown ocean and yet off in the distance of the early evening sky, a star shines brightly to lead my way. What this metaphor means to me is the power of fully understanding and knowing yourself. That’s because I believe that reality is perception. And the more multiple perspectives one can give to something, the more real and stable it will seem to them.
And the more multiple perspectives one can give to something, the more real and stable it will seem to them.
The problem for many people right now though is that they have no idea who they really are (symbolized by the ship) or where they are going (symbolized by the star). Thus at times they feel fearful, frustrated, and powerlessly adrift on an ocean with no sure footing beneath their feet nor any sense of where they are going.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Confucius
However, when one cares enough to start spending the time to fully know oneself, suddenly everything changes. You could be in the most chaotic of surroundings, yet if you know yourself and your direction, you feel powerfully calm amidst the storm. The reason for this is that by understanding yourself, you’ve given yourself your own gyrocompass to stabilize yourself. Rather than getting your bearings by your external surroundings (i.e. your work environment) or by what others perceive you should be, you instead get your bearings internally via your own powerfully authentic compass.
Life Is A Game
Now here’s where my vision deviates to an almost ridiculous level, yet somehow it feels right because of the patterns and similarities I’m seeing. Basically I know that if I want to share this information and help people understand themselves, I need to do it in such a way that it can connect to people on a level that they can understand. At the same time, it needs to be done from a perspective that I feel I’ve mastered and understood in a variety of ways. The most obvious pattern that kept coming up time and time again for me was games.
My entire life has evolved around social role playing games, both online and off (i.e. D&D, WoW, etc). If anything, I could almost say that most of what I learnt from life, I learnt from the playful and creative experiences within games. In fact, I believe that we as a species have a natural cyclic process of living to play, playing to learn, learning to work, and working to live. So simply put, without play, our ability to learn, evolve, and innovate is severely curtailed which in turn curtails our ability to survive.
There have been others who have seen this power of play in our lives, such as Jane McGonigal and even more recently Wil Wright. But the problem from my perspective is that they aren’t pushing the envelope or vision far enough. It’s not about making life like a game or putting games in our real lives. It’s about perceiving life itself as the greatest game of all and giving yourself permission to play within this game of life.
As I already observed before, when you play a game, your entire perspective itself changes. You suddenly shift from a lack of belief in yourself to an almost overwhelming sense of self belief. While many would argue that this is because the conscious mind perceives the lack of limitations and consequences within the fantasical world, I disagree. Many MMO theme park games today have a huge variety of limitations to them so as to keep you on their “rails” and many of their challenges require almost NASA-like coordination and expertise to achieve them.
Know your purpose. Know your role. Change your world.
No, the primary difference to me is your state of awareness within the realm of play. One goes from being someone with no strong sense of self-identity and purpose in real life to someone with an almost razor sharp sense of self-identity and purpose within the game world. In effect, you get the opportunity to peak into the game world within an all seeing eye, knowing the epic struggle that is about to take place and fully knowing your role and class capabilities even before you begin the game. We just need to give people the same sense of self awareness within life itself. Because once you start looking at life as a game itself, you’ll immediately shift your perception and start gathering the information you need to understand it and play it properly, just like any other game.
Know your purpose. Know your role. Change your world. So what great need or purpose have you been called for that makes the game challenging and engaging? What abilities does your class have and do you understand them fully? Again this is the problem that we have in our current lives. We are so detached and distracted that we lack an awareness of not only the bigger picture but also of our own inner selves. Thus for us to be able to play within the game, we need to understand ourselves and our capabilities first. It’s no different than fully understanding your class within an MMO game.
Where your talents
Aristotle
and the needs of the world cross,
there lies your vocation.
Mapping The Playing Field
Maps are the final missing element that we need to understand fully to be able to play effectively. This is no different than mastering the maps of a dungeon in the World of Warcraft or the battlefields in Counter Strike. Yet these maps in life aren’t regular geophysical maps or even linear time maps (i.e. Facebook timeline). These are a newer form of map which give us a newer understanding of ourselves in context with others. It is not ourselves that matter. It is our connectivity and what we do as a collective. Don’t get me wrong, the individual is not worthless. Rather it is what the individual does in context of the whole that matters the most.
We need awareness of the ways
Dalai Lama
we are connected with others,
reflecting on the characteristics
we share with others.
The point when one no longer focuses on himself or herself but instead fully focuses on his or her passion is the tipping point or passing of the event horizon in them becoming truly their passion. Or perceived another way, by selfishly focusing on their passions, they become self-less, thus achieving their most natural self.
You must be the change
Gandhi
you wish to see in the world.
Rather it is what the individual does in context of the whole that matters the most.