The game of life

< 10. THE USES OF DECEPTION

by Thomas Firth

Contents

11. THE GAME OF LIFE

Aphorisms

In order for predator and prey, magician and audience, player and opponent, to coexist, they need to be both not-too-good and not-too-bad at what they do. Good enough to live, raise offspring, score a few points, but not so good as to wreck the balance, the challenge, of life. This is the reason that life is always sorrowful – all life, not just life under capitalism or life under a totalitarian government or life without more money in my pocket. Sorrow is intrinsic to life because if life were blissful, comfortable and safe it would be either short-lived or one-sided and unadventurous. So rather than solving life’s intrinsic problems – to solve the problems that support life is to invite disaster – we have to find a way to live happily with endless friction of one kind or another. We can do this by treating life as a game.

When life is experienced ‘as if’ it were a game, we revel in both our challenges and our successes. Your opponent plays upon your imperfections and with skill (and more than a few deceptions) you play upon his.

The framework of a game is of course the rules. Life itself has rules. We absolutely cannot cross certain boundaries if we are to continue to exist, if life is to go on. These are not only the ‘rules’ of physics but also natural limits to the balance of predator and prey, player and opponent, buyer and seller. The eagle who hunts all the snakes finally wipes himself out. If everyone were thieves, the economy would collapse and society along with it. Laws are the game-rules of society.

Read psychologically, the rules of a game are like imperfections of existence. Whenever we have a strong desire to do something – to buy more, to eat more, to fly through the air – we find that one law or another may leap up in our path, barring the way. Just try to get planning permission from your local council and you’ll see what I mean here. So the rules of a game subliminally remind us of the laws, boundaries, and imperfections of life.

During a game of tennis, the player experiences the rules regarding fault lines and serves and ball bounces as if they were essential life problems. The rules of the game become the natural laws of the tennis ‘mythical world’. Here, your racquet is like a part of your body evolved to cope with the tennis balls that fly about here. Your opponent is like a rival of the same species or a predator of another. Play starts and life is in a mythic sense acted out before us. We subconsciously recognise the struggles of our own imperfect lives in the game. And one day the eagle will win and carry off the snake, while another day the snake will slink into safety and the eagle go hungry. In other words, victory is tenuous, as it is and needs to be to retain the balance of life.

So how do you win the game? How do I gain an advantage over my opponent?

How do we get rid of that nasty net that keeps getting in the way? The answer is of course that we can’t get rid of it. The net is a rule – an intrinsic problem that you need to put up with or not play tennis. (Nor can you ask exactly why it is there. To create an exciting challenge maybe? Perhaps all challenges in life exist for the same reason.) You can’t gain an advantage by breaking the rules any more than you can win a sprint race by transforming yourself into a leopard. It can’t be done. Breaking the rules of the game leads to a hollow victory – metaphorically, you haven’t learnt to accept the sorrowful cycle of life living on life; you have simply lied to yourself.

There is only one weapon you can use against both your opponent and the situation itself (the rules of the game) – your subconscious reflexes. Distracted away from the opposites of time, the player slays his devious conscious strategies and is reborn with a calm, centred viewpoint. He is alive with the power of instinct, well-versed in The Way The World Is. Victory is achieved despite the odds, despite your opponent/rival/predator and the rules/laws of the world.

Then the experience of victory is an experience of happiness in life. Here the tennis match allows us to practice acting in partnership with instinct, compassion and awareness, becoming truly whole. Victory suggests you can succeed without cheating, that in fact, happiness doesn’t come from solving difficulties any more than it comes from breaking rules. There are no problems you can’t face when your conscious self is balanced by your unconscious parts. The game amounts to an affirmation of sorrow. Without a challenge, there is no victory. Without imperfection, there is no life. Without rules and opponents, there is no game. Without a centred view of life, there is no happiness.

The magician plays a different game with different rules. His challenge is stabbing his assistant (through a box) without killing her. What makes this a game, not an execution, is the inclusion of the box into the rules. The magician uses his performance skills to get the audience to accept the box as a ‘natural law’ in this magical world. And in our example from Much Ado About Nothing, the ‘death’ of Hero was the rule that Leonato introduced to allow the lovers to play the game of forgiveness. Furthermore, this shows us that a solution might be found by introducing more imperfections, more rules, rather than vainly trying to solve impossible problems.

We can learn and develop the game that is life because it has rules, that is, it has imperfections and limitations that challenge us. And winning the game is only fun with challenges. (Indeed, we are even infuriated when some incompetent umpire has made things too easy; we feel that upsetting the balance is disastrous.) In this way, adversity is celebrated; life is worth living through playing the game.

12. INTOLERANCE >