Play as a Spiritual Practice

Here's a link to my free weekly email newsletter, featuring the Free Will Astrology horoscopes, plus a bunch of other stuff, including good news, lucky advice, and tender rants. It arrives every Tuesday morning.

Read past issues of the newsletter.

Sign up here for your free subscription.





PLAY AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

Once, as an adult, psychologist Carl Jung took a break from work to stroll on a beach. As he meandered, he was overcome with a spontaneous impulse to build things as he did when he was a kid. He gathered stones and sticks and used them to construct a miniature scene, including a church.

As he finished, he was visited by a flood of novel insights about his life. He concluded that his childlike play had called forth these revelations from his unconscious mind.

That might sometimes be a worthwhile strategy for you. To access important information that your deep mind has sequestered, go play a while.





PLAYING EASILY IN THE DEEP

Approfondissement
is a French word
that means
“playing easily
in the deep."

—Tom Robbins





LEARNING COMES FROM PLAYING

"The ancient Greeks knew that learning comes from playing," writes Roger von Oech in his book "A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative." Their word for education, paideia, he says, was close to their word for play, "paidia."




I ACCEPT HELP!

If you would like to contribute to me and my ongoing work, please visit my Virtual Tip Jar at Paypal.


You can also contribute to my well-being by buying the Expanded Audio Horoscopes I create. These forecasts are different in tone and content from the written horoscopes I provide here. They're four- to five-minute-long ruminations about the current chapter of your life story.





MEDITATION AS PLAY

"As a free deed, meditation is naturally individual, uniquely our own. It is where we most fully become ourselves. Its practice is also always individual.

"There are no rules. Just as every potter will elaborate his or her own way of making pots, so every person who meditates will shape his or her own meditation. No two people will do a given meditation in exactly the same way. The same meditation practiced daily will be different every time.

"Every meditation is experimental. One never knows what is going to happen. Improvisation is essential . . . Meditation is something to play with . . . There is no 'wrong' way of doing the meditation, except not doing it!"

- Christopher Bamford, Start Now!: A Book of Soul and Spiritual Exercises





WE ARE FULLY HUMAN WHILE PLAYING

"We are fully human only while playing, and we play only when we are human in the truest sense of the word."

-Rudolf Steiner





HOW MUCH COURAGE IS NEEDED TO PLAY

The research of the Beauty and Truth Lab is made possible in part by the largesse of Boris Pasternak's poem "Bacchanalia," which includes these words:

"How much courage is needed
to play forever,
as the ravines play,
as the river plays."





YOU ARE A MUTANT DEITY

You are a mutant deity in disguise—not a Buddha or a Christ exactly, but of the same lineage and conjured from the same fire. You have been around since the beginning of time and will be here after the end. Every day and in every way, you're getting better at playing the preposterously amusing master game we all dreamed up together before the Big Bang bloomed.





DISRUPTIVE PLAY

Disruptive Play: The Trickster in Politics and Culture by Shepherd Siegel

Description of the book:

"In a world ruled by conflict and competition, non-competitive play is insurrection.

"Mischief-makers and culture jammers have transformed society again and again, from ancient folkloric appearances of the Trickster as Raven and Èṣù-Elegba, to the twentieth century's dada and hippies, to contemporary social actors like the graffiti artist Banksy.

"Original Play is the frolic and noncompetitive play that animals and human babies do in order to have fun and to keep on playing -- not to win or to lose. It is a substance of the universe that occurs in all life. It is the behavior by which love and belonging are expressed, given, and received.

"When play moves into contest or other roles and rules, with winners and losers, it becomes Cultural Play. Issues of ego and narcissism are issues for Cultural Play, not for Original Play.

"Disruptive Play occurs in the rare times when the rhythms of Original Play suddenly appear in a political or cultural setting, settings conventionally fraught with Cultural Play. Like driving a clown car across the field during an official NFL game. Or Raven tricking Chief into releasing the sun, the moon, and the stars into the sky. Or a surreptitious Banksy graffiti that invades a museum or the public commons. Tricking power into performing an act of love.

"Disruptive Play: The Trickster In Politics and Culture connects knowledge from mythology, folklore, popular culture, art, politics, and play theory to make its case that to be playful means not taking power seriously. At critical mass, power collapses and leaves us swimming about in the waters of the amoral Trickster. New values emerge and could lead to some version of the dystopia that currently drenches popular culture.

"Or, if people can discern between the authentic contact and exhilaration of play, and branded, mediated, alienated pleasure, then we just might stumble and frolic our way to the Play Society.

"Disruptive Play is ideal for enthusiasts of the human condition and those who hold out for the vision, however slim, of the Play Society."





Lila: The cosmos is a manifestation of the creative play of God and Goddess.


+

Western science and religion have differing views on how the universe was created, but they agree that it happened a long time ago.

The mystery schools of the West, on the other hand, assert that the universe is re-created anew in every moment through the divine erotic play of God and Goddess. They say that if we humans treat lovemaking as an experimental sacrament, we can attune ourselves to the union of the two primal deities and, in a sense, participate in the ongoing creation of the world.





THE IMPORTANCE OF PLAY


The Importance Of Play





A STUDY OF THE PLAY ELEMENT IN CULTURE


Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture






PRAYER

I pray that all those who, like me, have been lucky enough to receive a multitude of life's blessings

might express humble gratitude for their good fortune

by summoning maximum levels of empathetic passion and compassionate zeal

and campaigning for justice and sanctuary and beauty and love and financial security and health care

for those who are less privileged than we are





HALLOWED BE THY NAMES

Our mother who art underfoot,
hallowed be thy names.
Thy seasons come, thy will be done,
within us as around us.

Thank you for our daily bread, our water, our air
and our lives and so much beauty;

lead us not into selfish craving and the destructions
that are the hungers of the glutted,
but deliver us from wanton consumption
of thy vast but finite bounty.

For thine is the only sphere of life we know,
and the power and the glory, forever and ever.
Amen

Mother's Prayer, adapted by Rebecca Solnit





PRACTICAL MAGICK

Adapted from Aleister Crowley and Jonathan Zap:

1. Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.

2. Every intentional act is a Magickal Act.

3. A person who is doing her True Will has the rhythm of the Universe to assist her.

4. Every force in the Universe is capable of being transformed into any other kind of force by using suitable Magick. There is thus an inexhaustible supply of any particular kind of force that we may need.

5. A person may attract to herself any force of the Universe by making herself a fit receptacle for it, establishing a connection with it, and arranging conditions so that its nature compels it to flow toward her.

6. A person's sense of herself as separate from, and opposed to, the Universe is a bar to her conducting its currents. It insulates her.

7. The most important preliminary to any Magickal operation is to make sure that its object is not only harmonious with, but necessary to, your Great Work.


Experiment: Say this to demons and trolls: "I am a monster of love and goodness who will defeat all threats to my integrity."





YOUR ILLUSIONS

Some of your illusions seeped into you before you learned to talk. Others sneaked into you later, while you were busy figuring out how to become yourself. Eventually, you even made conscious choices to adopt certain illusions because they provided you with comfort and consolation.

There's no need to be ashamed of this. It's a natural part of being a human being.

Now here's the good news: You have the power to shed at least some of your illusions in ways that don't shatter your foundations.

To begin the process, declare this intention at noon every Sunday for the next six months: "I am calling on all the power I have at my disposal, both conscious and unconscious, to dissolve my illusions."





LOVING THE CHANGES?

Whether you're a fan of a monotheistic God or a pluralistic
Goddess, you've undoubtedly noticed a deeply rooted quirk about
the Divine Temperament: an extreme fondness for change. The
Creator really likes to keep things moving right along.

Earlier in my life, I bore a grudge against this incorrigible
inclination. But after repeatedly having my karma crumpled for
resisting it, I realized I'd better get used to it. In recent years,
I've come a long way in retraining myself to be cheerfully
cooperative with the primal flux.

As a reward, the Cackling Goddess (my current favorite name for
the Sublime Mystery) has blessed me with a relentless series of opportunities to prove how well I've learned my lesson. She just keeps throwing changes my way, daring me to adjust with as much skill and grace as I can muster.

And you?





CONGRATULATIONS!

Congratulations. Every cell in your perfect animal body is beginning to purr with luminous gratitude for the enormity of the riches you endlessly receive.

You are becoming aware that each of your heart's beats originates as a gift of love directly from the Goddess herself.

Any residues of hatred that had been tainting your libido are leaving you for good.

You are becoming telepathically linked to the world's entire host of secret teachers, pacifist warriors, philosopher clowns, and bodhisattvas disguised as convenience store clerks.

In other words, you're on the verge of détente with your evil twin. And you're ready to submit to a multiple-choice test, which goes like this:

How does it make you feel when I urge you to confess profound secrets to people who are not particularly interested? Does it make you want to:

a. cultivate a healthy erotic desire for a person you'd normally never be attracted to in a million years;

b. stop helping your friends glamorize their pain;

c. imitate a hurricane in the act of extinguishing a forest fire;

d. visualize Buddha or Mother Teresa at the moment of orgasm;

e. steal something that's already yours.

The right answer, of course, is any answer you thought was correct. Congratulations. You're even smarter than you knew.





GRATITUDE FESTIVAL

Would you like to make yourself smarter and more beautiful? Are you interested in increasing your capacity for ecstasy and improving your health?

Consider the possibility of celebrating regular Gratitude Festivals. During these orgies of appreciation, you could confer praise and respect on the creatures, both human and otherwise, that have played seminal roles in inspiring you to become yourself. You would devote yourself to invoking and expressing thanks.

Who teaches and helps you? Who sees you for who you really are? Who nudges you in the direction of your fuller destiny and awakens you to your signature truths? Who loves you brilliantly?





GRATITUDE FOR GRAVITY

Have you said a prayer of gratitude any time recently for the fact that your feet remain steadily on the earth? Gravity is giving you the same gift it always does, pulling on you with neither too much nor too little force. You should be glad for its versatility, too. It's working for the heavenly bodies with the same tender attentiveness it bestows upon you. 

As all the other planets do, the Earth relies on gravity's genius to keep orbiting the sun in its ancient hallowed groove, thereby providing you with all of the favorable environmental conditions you need to live.

Magicians of the Western Hermetic tradition say that gravity is actually a form of love -- the irresistible attraction that all things have for each other over even the vastest distances.

Meanwhile, a trillion other facets of nature's ingenious design are expressing themselves as a skilled artist might. At the heart of the masterpiece are the plants. With relentless grace, they perform the everyday miracle of photosynthesis, using sunlight as a trigger to convert water and carbon dioxide into the fuel they need.

If you're like me, you feel regular surges of adoration for this complex alchemy, which pours oxygen into the air for us to breathe and ultimately provides us with all of our food.





GRATITUDE FOR NEGATIVE THOUGHTS

Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield espouses an interesting method for dealing with negative and unwanted thoughts. Don't let them possess you, he says, and don't assume you have to act them out.

On the other hand, don't struggle mightily to suppress them, either. Instead, try this: Bow to the offending idea. Acknowledge and admire its power. Express your gratitude and respect to it for galvanizing so much of your psychic energy.





WANT TO GET YOUR ASTROLOGICAL CHART READ?

If you want your personal chart done, I recommend a colleague whose approach to reading astrology charts closely matches my own. She's my wife, RO LOUGHRAN. Her website is here.

Ro utilizes a blend of well-trained intuition, emotional warmth, and technical proficiency in horoscope interpretation. She is skilled at exploring the mysteries of your life's purpose and nurturing your connection with your own inner wisdom.

In addition to over 30 years of astrological experience, Ro has been a licensed psychotherapist for 17 years. She integrates psychological insight with astrology's cosmological perspective.

Ro is based in California, but can do phone consultations and otherwise work with you regardless of geographic boundaries.

Check out Ro's website.





GRATITUDE FOR YOUR INTERESTING PROBLEMS

What ignorance do you deserve to be forgiven for? How might you express gratitude for your most interesting problem? What could you do to love your body better?





UNLEASH THE UNSPOKEN PRAISE AND GRATITUDE

"I've been practicing radical authenticity lately," my friend Brandon told me. "I'm revealing the blunt truth about unmentionable subjects to everyone I know. It's been pretty hellish -- no one likes having the social masks stripped away—but it's been ultimately rewarding."

"I admire your boldness in naming the currents flowing beneath the surface," I replied, "but I'm curious as to why you imply they're all negative. To practice radical authenticity, shouldn't you also express the raw truth about what's right, good, and beautiful? Shouldn't you unleash the praise and gratitude that normally go unspoken?"

Brandon sneered. He thought my version of radical authenticity was wimpy. I hope you don't. As a budding pronoiac, you have a mandate to be honest in both ways.





THE EMOTION CALLED "ECSTATIC GRATITUDE" is when you feel genuine thankfulness with such resplendent intensity that you generate a surge of endorphins in your body and slip into a full-scale outbreak of euphoria.





GRATITUDE IS THE ESSENCE OF BEAUTIFUL ART

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude." -Friedrich Nietzsche





THE NUANCES OF GRATITUDE

Pronoia is fueled by a drive to cultivate happiness and a determination to practice an aggressive form of gratitude that systematically identifies the things that are working well.

But it is not a soothing diversion meant for timid Pollyannas strung out on optimistic delusions.

It's not a feel-good New Age fantasy used to deny the harsh facts about existence. Those of us who perceive the world pronoiacally refuse to be polite shills for sentimental hopefulness.

On the contrary, we build our optimism not through a repression of
difficulty, but rather a vigorous engagement with it. We understand that the best way to attract blessings is to grapple with the knottiest enigmas.

Each fresh puzzle is a potential source of future bliss—an exciting
teaching that may usher us to our next breakthrough.

Do you want to be a pronoiac player? Blend optimistic rebelliousness with open-hearted exuberance. Root your insurrectionary fervor in expansive joy instead of withering hatred. Enjoy saying "no!" but don't make it the wellspring of your vitality. Be fueled by blood-red yeses that rip against the grain of comfortable ugliness.





UNEXPECTED GRATITUDE

Imagine you're with a team of explorers in Antarctica. You're climbing the 2,000-foot granite spire called Rakekniven that thrusts up out of the ice in Queen Maud Land. The temperature is 10 degrees below zero.

There's not a plant or animal in sight. The blinding white emptiness of the wasteland beneath you fills you with desolate reverence, alienated awe, and soaring gratitude. You are far from everything that normally gives you comfort.

Why do you feel so good?





NEW ROSES AS AN ANTIDOTE TO NEUROSIS

The phrase "new roses" can serve as an antidote to neurosis -- as a kind of magical spell. You might invoke it when you're in danger of getting undermined by either your own neurosis or someone else's.

If you notice, for instance, that your subconscious mind is spiraling down into a sour fantasy stirred up by one of your habitual fears, you could mutter a cheerful round of "new roses, new roses, new roses."

If your allies slip into the same compulsive behavior that they tend to get stuck in whenever stress overflows, you could chant "new roses, new roses, new roses" in a tuneful, affectionate tone.





IF THE ANGEL DECIDES TO COME . . .

"If the Angel decides to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears, but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner."

- Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell





BE SCARIER THAN YOUR FEARS

EXPERIMENT: Be scarier than your fears. If an anxious thought pops into your mind, bare your teeth and growl, "Get out of here or I will rip you to shreds!" If a demon visits you in a nightly dream, chase after it with a torch and sword, screaming "Begone, foul spirit, or I will burn your mangy ass!"

Don't tolerate bullying in any form, whether it comes from a critical little voice in your head or from supposedly nice people who are trying to guilt-trip you. "I am a brave conqueror who cannot be intimidated!" is what you could say, or "I am a monster of love and goodness who will defeat all threats to my integrity!"





DEVOTIONAL PRONOIA THERAPY

Devotional Pronoia Therapy. Experiments and exercises in becoming a gracefully probing, erotically funny, shockingly friendly Master of Orgasmic Empathy

1. What causes happiness? Brainstorm about it. Map out the foundations of your personal science of joy. Get serious about defining what makes you feel good.

To get you started, I'll name some experiences that might rouse your gratification: engaging in sensual pleasure; seeking the truth; being kind and moral; contemplating the meaning of life; escaping your routine; purging pent-up emotions. Do any of these work for you? Name at least ten more.

+

2. Are other people luckier than you? If so, psychologist Richard Wiseman says you can do something about it. His book *The Luck Factor* presents research that proves you can learn to be lucky. It's not a mystical force you're born with, he says, but a habit you can develop.

How? For starters, be open to new experiences, trust your gut wisdom, expect good fortune, see the bright side of challenging events, and master the art of maximizing serendipitous opportunities.

Name three specific actions you'll try in order to improve your luck.

+

3. Dumb suffering is the kind of suffering you're compulsively drawn back to over and over again out of habit. It's familiar, and thus perversely comfortable. Smart suffering is the kind of pain that surprises you with valuable teachings and inspires you to see the world with new eyes.

While stupid suffering is often born of fear, wise suffering is typically stirred up by love. The dumb, unproductive stuff comes from allowing yourself to be controlled by your early conditioning and from doing things that are out of harmony with your essence. The smart, useful variety arises out of an intention to approach life as an interesting work of art and uncanny game that's worthy of your curiosity.

Come up with two more definitions about the difference between dumb suffering and smart suffering.

+

4. Write the following on a piece of red paper and keep it under your pillow. "I, [put your name here], do solemnly swear on this day, [put date here], that I will devote myself for a period of seven days to learning my most important desire. No other thought will be more uppermost in my mind. No other concern will divert me from tracking down every clue that might assist me in my drive to ascertain the one experience in this world that deserves my brilliant passion above all others."

+

5. The primary meaning of the word "healing" is "to cure what's diseased or broken." Medical practitioners focus on sick people. Philanthropists donate their money and social workers contribute their time to helping the underprivileged. Psychotherapists wrestle with their clients' traumas and neuroses. I'm in awe of them all. The level of one's spiritual wisdom, I believe, is more accurately measured by helping people in need than by meditation skills, shamanic shapeshifting, supernatural powers, or esoteric knowledge.

But I also believe in a second kind of healing that is largely unrecognized: to supercharge what is already healthy; to lift up what's merely sufficient to a sublime state. Using this definition, describe two acts of healing: one you would enjoy performing on yourself and another you'd like to provide for someone you love.

+

6. Is the world a dangerous, chaotic place with no inherent purpose, running on automatic like a malfunctioning machine and fundamentally inimical to your drive to find meaning? Or are you surrounded by helpers in a friendly, enchanted universe that gives you challenges in order to make you smarter and wilder and kinder and trickier?

Trick questions! The answers may depend, at least to some degree, on what you believe is true.

Formulate a series of experiments that will allow you to objectively test the hypothesis that the universe is conspiring to help dissolve your ignorance and liberate you from your suffering.

+

7. Those who explore pronoia often find they have a growing capacity to help people laugh at themselves. While few arbiters of morality recognize this skill as a mark of high character, I put it near the top of my list. In my view, inducing people to take themselves less seriously is a supreme virtue.

Do you have any interest in cultivating it? How might you go about it?

+

8. Computer programmer Garry Hamilton articulated the following "Game Rules." Give examples of how they have worked in your life.

1. If the game is rigged so you can't win, find another game or invent your own. 2. If you're not winning because you don't know the rules, learn the rules. 3. If you know the rules but aren't willing to follow them, there's either something wrong with the game or you need to change something in yourself. 4. Don't play the game in a half-baked way. Either get all the way in or all the way out. 5. It shouldn't be necessary for others to lose in order for you to win. If others have to lose, re-evaluate the game's goals.

+

9. "There are two ways for a person to look for adventure," said the Lone Ranger, an old TV character. "By tearing everything down, or building everything up." Give an example of each from your own life.





DEEPEST SPIRITUAL ASPIRATIONS

Here are three of our deepest spiritual aspirations, which we invite you to steal for your own use:

1. to develop the capacity to thrive in the midst of raging contradictions;

2. to be discerning as we protect ourselves from people's flaws while at the same time being generous as we celebrate their beauty;

3. to refrain from dividing the world into two groups, those who help and agree with us and those who don't





"Nothing's going right in my life. I feel anxious and paranoid all the time. My relationships are a mess. Plus the whole world's going to hell!"

In my line of work, people make confessions like that to me.

My first response is usually something like this: "Do you habitually gobble junk food near bedtime, steal a paltry five hours of sleep per night, gulp two cups of coffee and no breakfast in the morning, then bolt to a workplace where you get no sunlight or exercise and sit in an uncomfortable chair?"

They often reply, "You must be psychic! How did you know?!"

My point is that many psychological troubles stem from our chronic failure to take good care of our physical needs.

Can you think of three things you can do to promote pronoia in yourself by taking better care of your body?





In her book Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes suggests that we all need to periodically go cheerfully and enthusiastically out of our minds. Make sure, she says, that at least one part of you always remains untamed, uncategorizable, and unsubjugated by routine. Be adamant in your determination to stay intimately connected to all that's inexplicable and mysterious about your life.

At the same time, though, Estes believes you need to keep your unusual urges clear and ordered. Discipline your wildness, in other words, and don't let it degenerate into careless disorder.