Playfulness comes out of ‘a place of plenitude’, it comes out of a place where there is ‘already everything’, so to speak. When we are acting out of fullness (as opposed to acting out of deficiency) then this may be said to be the equivalent to Abraham Maslow’s Being Motivation, therefore. What we could call ‘seriousness’ – on the other hand – doesn’t come from a place of plenitude – it comes from a place of impoverishment (a place of ‘deficit’) and this is why we are so serious – because that sense of impoverishment is putting the hurt on us and we have to do something about it. We’re being jabbed viciously from behind with a sharp stick and so we’re trying to ‘make good the deficit’. This is inherent in Goal-Orientated Mode – when we’re in GO Mode then we’re deadly serious, we’re deadly serious because we‘re deficient in something that we absolutely need.
GO Mode is a compulsive mode, we could say. It’s driven by pure need. I don’t press for a conclusion in my goal orientated activity because I want to but because I have to. ‘Failure is not an option’, we say, full of absurd bravado, but what this really means is that we have no freedom in the situation. Doing something because we ‘have to’, no matter what spin we try to put on it, is never a good thing – no matter how you might try to dress it up, the life of a slave is the life of a slave. To be serious is to live in fear of the adverse consequences of failing to achieve. We might experience this as intense desire – which we would then see as our own volition – but the truth is that it’s just ‘fear in disguise’. When we are yearning to secure a particular outcome then the intensity of this yearning is a measure of how much we fear not securing the outcome.
When we’re being serious then we’re being very narrow – only one very specific outcome will satisfy us. Anything else will be useless to us, any other outcome, will be of no interest whatsoever to us. We are acting under the influence of a bias – we are rigidly fixated upon obtaining this one defined result and only that one will do. The lack of interest in anything other than the outcome we ourselves have specified translates as a profound humourlessness; acting on the basis of a collection of biases means that we’re operating in Mechanical Mode, in other words. We are acting like machines, not like human beings; inasmuch as the society we are part of values goals above over all else, and is essentially driven in its nature, then we are living in milieu that is encouraging us to act as machines. Actual human beings aren’t going to do well here; being an actual human being isn’t encouraged – it is in fact actively penalized. We are obliged to take seriously whatever dogma it is that’s being propagated; we are obliged to take seriously whatever it is we’re being told to take seriously (even though – deep down – we can see that the whole business is a ludicrous farce).
Life itself isn’t something that we ought to be ‘taking seriously’ – to even talk of ‘taking life seriously’ is absurd; it’s absurd because we don’t have a clue as to what life actually is. How do we take something that we can’t understand ‘seriously’? If we say – as we do say – that life can be best served by pursuing this goal or that goal then we have turned life into a game. This is the difference between life and a game – a game has a point, whereas life doesn’t. Saying this sounds wrong however – how could we say that life doesn’t have a point? Surely – we might object – this is what a depressed person would say. A mentally healthy person knows that life does have a point, a mentally healthy person has many goals that they are motivated to achieve, many important values that they try to live up to.
We see things like this because we are a mechanical society, however. We’re actually seeing everything backwards – we’re living life on the basis of what we think about it, rather than living life as it itself presents itself to us. We are always distorting reality in order to get it to conform to the ideas or beliefs we have about it, and this is precisely what it means to say that ‘we have turned life into a game’. When we live like this then we are always aiming at something outside of us – life itself is seen as something outside of us. Life is seen as something that must be obtained by strenuous effort, something there has to be won (or deserved). The way in which we are to obtain the prize (the way in which life is to be won) is the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the game, therefore – this is where the rules come in. If we want to be successful in life then we have to know how to correctly follow the rules and this is what we’re referring to as ‘a game’.
When we treat life as a game then this automatically means that we’re seeing it as something that exists outside of us. The business of ‘following the rules so to obtain the desired result’ obviously isn’t something that’s carried out ‘for its own sake’ – it’s something that we do in order to obtain the prize. The prize for playing the game successfully is life therefore, therefore. What this means is that doing all the stuff that we’re supposed to be doing isn’t life, but rather life is what we get when we correctly follow all the rules. If we jump through all the hoops then life is our reward; ‘jumping through all the hoops’ isn’t life however – that’s just the preliminary, that’s just what we have to do in order to be worthy of living.
This business of being goal-orientated turns everything on its head – life thus gets turned into ‘the means to life’, as James Carse says. ‘Where we are right now’ gets devalued by contrasting it with ‘where we ought to be’, ‘where we want to be’. The only value in ‘where we are right’ now lies in the fact that it might serve as a stepping stone to ‘where we want to be’. This is what being in GO Mode always comes down to, whether we want to admit it or not; GO Mode might also be called Exploitation Mode – we’re exploiting everything in sight in the hope (or belief) that this will help us attain the ultimate goal. This is the same as saying that ‘the end justifies the means’ of course but the thing about this is that what we are treating as ‘the means’ is life itself, whilst ‘the end that we are so desperately fixated upon’ is nothing more than an unreal projection! The ‘end’ that we’re using to justify everything we do is merely an idea that we have in our heads and – as such – it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything real. It has nothing to do with life because life is not made up of our ideas, because life does not faithfully reflect our biases or prejudices.
This brings us back to what we started off by saying, which is that life doesn’t have a point, that there is no purpose to it. This – as we have said – sounds very negative to us but all we really saying here is that life isn’t something that we engage in for the sake of ‘winning’ something, or ‘gaining’ something. There’s nothing outside of life to win, nothing outside of life to gain – that is a pathological illusion that we are afflicted with when we slip into ‘Mechanical Mode’. That’s actually a glitch that works by putting life forever out of our reach. When we talk – as we do talk – about ‘valuing’ life, ‘celebrating’ life, ‘exploring’ life and so on we’re inverting the true state of affairs, we’re employing Orwellian doublespeak, we’re claiming to love life whilst the truth is that we have demonised it, just as Joseph Campbell points out. We’re not celebrating life at all, we’re celebrating our idea of it and to celebrate our idea of something is to deny the actual reality (whilst at the same time getting to believe that we aren’t denying anything). We are in this way being facilitated in ‘avoiding life’s challenge whilst perceiving it to be the case that we’re facing it head on’. It can hardly be considered I wonder that this option is so popular.
We might argue that the point of life is to live it, which would therefore mean that it isn’t pointless after all. This is still making life mechanical, however – it’s making life mechanical because we’ve introduced a rule where there isn’t one. There’s no point to life at all and if we say that ‘the point of life is to live it’ we’re making something mechanical that isn’t mechanical, we’re making something serious that is actually entirely playful. Playful doesn’t mean that we’re being ‘flippant about things’, or that we’re being ‘superficial in our attitude’. It doesn’t mean that we’re avoiding the issue, that we’re just being immature (which is what we will probably be told). When we’re living life ‘as it actually is’ (rather than ‘as we think it is’) then we’re being playful, we’re being spontaneous. We can hardly be otherwise, seeing that reality is symmetrical, seeing that ‘no part of life is any more important than any other part’. There are no biases built into reality, in other words, and so if there is some sort of bias there then we must have made it up ourselves. Reality itself is quintessentially unbiased. It is a ‘symmetrical situation’.
To be truly playful isn’t in evasion at all therefore – it’s ‘being serious’ that is the evasion, it’s ‘following the established rules’ that is the avoidance. The reason we’re so serious (so driven) when we’re playing a game isn’t because of any wholesome reason (it isn’t because we’re such responsible adults, which is what we like to claim), it’s because we’re afraid of ‘not achieving what the rule says we have to achieve’. ‘Failure is not an option’. The irony in this is that by baulking at the radical risk of ‘seeing what happens when we’re no longer in control’ (because of our fear of possibly losing everything as a result) we get stuck in the state in which we have already lost everything (since that is what the Deficit State is) but where we are unable to see the fact. Our ‘seriousness’ is supposed to save us, whilst what it really does is that it guarantees our continued imprisonment in poverty.
Our on-going attempt to change our situation is what keeps us locked in a static position – we’re trapped in a static position by playing the game which we very strongly believe to be our salvation. We might be in a ‘Deficit-Type situation’ (this is implicit in everything we do) but by obeying the rules of the game (and more importantly, by excelling at it) we believe that we stand a chance of changing everything. The irony is – then – that when we play our serious games (‘serious’ because we’re not playing around here) we absolutely ensure that we stay locked in that particular position. Or as we could also put it, when we engage in purposeful behaviour then – paradoxically – nothing changes. We’re ensuring when we strive to improve ourselves from the standpoint of being who we think we are from the standpoint of being this game player then we have to continue being this game player, come what may. We’re locked into it. The irony is therefore that when we strive to improve ourselves we get hopelessly stuck in ‘being who we think we are’ (or ‘who the game says we are’), which is of course exactly what we don’t want to happen. We fully believe that playing the game successfully will allow us to move on from our ‘Deficit-Type situation’ to an incomparably improved one and the thing about this is that our unshakeable belief is the perfect inversion of what is actually true.
Instead of saying that we are trapped in a Deficit-Type situation by our D-Type motivation (i.e., by our ‘seriousness’) we could alternatively say that our striving and straining is what keeps us so very effectively trapped in ‘an unreal situation’. The deficiency that we’re talking about here is ‘the deficiency in reality’, and – we ought to add – a deficiency in reality isn’t itself a real thing. But even though the state of ‘being unreal’ is itself not real, when we strive to change (or improve) ourselves on this basis then this ensures that we can’t ever change. We’re busy ‘digging in’ (i.e., we’re busy playing finite games) because we want to prevent anything radically new (or radically unexpected) from happening – which is to say, we’re ‘safeguarding ourselves’, which is what the self always and inevitably does. It just so happens that taking precisely this risk is the only doorway into reality (so to speak); being genuinely playful (which is to say, risking everything) is ‘the only way into reality’. Being spontaneous is the only way into reality. Instead of allowing ourselves to be playful or spontaneous however we ‘obsess grimly over our goals’ and the ‘goals that we are obsessing over’ are the ever-proliferating projections of our own unreality.
From where we’re coming from it’s as if we’re ‘risking everything’ (and that – therefore – the cautious, calculating, risk-averse approach would be the only possible option to go for) but what we discover afterwards – if we do ‘risk everything’, that is – is that we never actually ‘had’ anything to lose in the first place. We only thought we did…
Image credit – londoncallingblog.net
