The Game of Life is Just That
We all have the opportunity to wake up before we get enmeshed
One of the first ‘spiritual’ books I read was M Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled just over 30 years ago. The title, which refers to a Robert Frost poem, always made sense to me.
So many people take the broad highway which usually follows the well-trodden path of personal comfort and security, success and self-image. We do it unquestioningly as no-one tells us it is just a game for they don’t know themselves they are on a wheel which goes around ad infinitum.
We have to find that out for ourselves. Few people do. Those who don’t enmesh themselves further into the game and often become either very bad or very good. Because the game only functions within this duality.
Many people who are deeply sucked into the game become what we might term ‘evil’: politicians and power-mongers everywhere are so enamoured of the game they are prepared sometimes to kill to keep their place within it.
This road of becoming always struck me as rather narrow than broad and certainly lacking in imagination. In truth, we live in a mirage — believing it is our first mistake; the second is trying to be a better self within the mirage. Nothing wrong with that so long as we know we are living a dream life and then, as has been said, we can wear the world like a loose garment.
But we are still in a place of becoming.
Yet on the road less travelled (in fact there is no road at all) we wake up from the dream and Self or God-realise. It’s the same thing. As Krishnamurti said, ‘Truth is a pathless land’. There really is nowhere to go.
All success ends in death and many wake up in their final hours shocked by a reality they had long avoided. So often we waste our time worrying about what others think of us when really it is utterly irrelevant. We also spend our time in selfish pursuits at the expense of our fellows, stoking the fires of enmity, and then wonder why the world isn’t working.
The spiritual game is now a huge portion of the larger game with teachers and students and people imagining they can journey from A to B and often paying a lot of money for it.
Yet it’s just another game and keeps us on the path of becoming which leads, none the wiser, all the way to the gates of death. The teachers I like don’t play that game and are often not very successful in worldly terms. So many are so desperate to get from A to B they discount anything else.
But when we step beyond the mirage and gaze back at it we begin to see it for what it is. As Rumi said, ‘Wake up! Wake up and don’t go back to sleep…Safety is final danger.’
We all have a chance to wake up. Reality is before us every day but we have to choose it and step out of the game.
Then we can discover we were what we sought all along.
© Simon Heathcote
