It’s time for a new game
Hindus say the world is Lila, divine play.
Sociologists say our lives are role play.
Anthropologists study the unwritten rules of the game.
Those rules are breaking down.
It’s time to design new games.
What kind of game shall we play?
***
To design the game, you need to know the pieces and the players and how to set them up.
What are the pieces of the world?
What are the players?
What are they made of?
How do you make them?
***
Treat things as objects: objectify them
Treat them as persons: personify them
As vital energies: vitalize them
As mental visions: visualize them
As spirits: spiritualize them
How you treat them is how they will become to you
What kind of world are you creating?
***
Think with your whole body
Think with the landscape
Breathe.
In and out.
***
Watch your thoughts come and go.
Find the thoughts that give life and love.
Place them in the centre of your mindscape.
Water them every day.
Don’t feed the morbid ones.
Let them dry off, fall and blow away.
Turn to the light that illumines the mind.
***
In and out, breath gives us life.
Where is the line between me and not-me?
Thoughts are things, blowing in the wind.
Where is the line between thinking and the world?
Underneath it all, we are all One.
***
How can we translate this oneness into social reality?
The games we play are tearing us apart,
drawing us farther from the oneness.
Can we learn to play a game that grows the oneness among us?
===
As an anthropologist of Asian religion, I’ve been thinking for a long time about how, in Asian religions and cosmologies, we can find new ways of thinking and doing.
I shared some of the above thoughts at a talk at Salesian College in Northeast India, in Nov. 2020. The full talk is embedded below.
I’ll be expanding these ideas through more writing here and elsewhere (For little thoughts, on Twitter @new_mindscape).
Do let me know some of your own thoughts!
