The Games Called Intention-Manifestation, Awakening, and Dualism
Which one are you playing? You might be able to decide if you ask yourself a strange sort of question. Here it is –
Are oranges and apples different things?
This is a most important question. Your answer will tell you a lot about your basic attitudes regarding life, and will also be indicative of how life ‘treats’ you.
For most of us, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. Could anything be more obvious? But in ways that I’ll point out, a ‘yes’ answer creates a basic idea that life ‘happens to you’, or that ‘you happen to life’. A ‘no’ answer creates a very different outlook on life.
Life Happens To You
This is the assumption that most people hold about life. In this mode of thought, the best we can do is try to make good decisions and steer life’s course so that we get more good things happening to us than bad. People of this attitude claim that life is an unpredictable set of events, a sort of mine-field, and they spend their life energies trying to avoid as many disasters as possible. Of course, they know the whole time that disasters are right around the corner. The car will break down eventually, the furnace will fail, and we’ll get sick or lose our jobs. At least we have weekends and vacations to look forward to!
You Happen To Life
One can imagine those who adhere to the Intention-Manifestation model just shaking their heads at these folks, because the I-M people claim that ‘we happen to life’. Our thoughts and emotions are creative forces, and it’s all too plain that the mine-field folks are creating are their own mines. With I-M, life is a bowl of cherries, and all our energies are devoted to coaxing lots and lots of cherries out of that bowl and into our mouths.
So What’s Up?
Those of us seeking Awakening might have a sneaking suspicion that both of these methods hold some truth, and both are a little ‘off the mark’.
What is the situation, really?
If we look at both of these models, they make a basic assumption about the world – and that assumption is that there is a ‘me’ over here (who can step on mines or eat cherries), and a world out there (which can throw mines in my direction or give me cherries). By this reasoning, the world is composed of different ‘things’, and those ‘things’ set us into a certain relationship with the world. I start to believe that oranges and apples are actually different things, and that leads me to believe that the world is made up of lots of these different things. From there, I have to negotiate my relationship with those things, and if I’m smart, I’ll choose a negotiation like Intention-Manifestation, so I can eat lots of cherries.
But is negotiation even necessary?
Oranges and Apples
Is there actually a difference between oranges and apples? Like most questions, we can get tied up if we try to answer the question before first examining what it is we’re really asking. The real question is this – What do we mean by ‘difference’?
Probably, our thoughts go something like this – “Is there a real, natural boundary or line we can draw between oranges and apples?” In other words, is there some natural or ‘reality-based’ difference we can find?
Of course there is! But we can also find differences between types of snow (crystal structure, density, etc.), and yet, most of us just call snow ‘snow’. We can find differences between types of light, and yet most of us (except perhaps artists and photographers) just have ‘light’ and ‘dark’. Or, as someone pointed out to me the other day, there are many different types of the feeling ‘sticky’, but we just have one word for all of them.
In other words, we decide where to draw lines in the world, and although our lines might have ‘real world’ reasons behind them, we decide somewhat arbitrarily where we’re going to put our definitions.
If we decided that ‘roundish fruit’ was the line, (like we’ve decided ‘snow’ is the line), then we wouldn’t differentiate between oranges, apples, or tomatoes (like we don’t differentiate between fluffy snow, crispy snow, or sticky snow).
Similarly, we could get more detailed in our lines– an apple expert will be able to tell you the different kinds of apples, even when the taste, texture and appearance is somewhat similar between varieties.
The further distant two things are in our category-system (for instance, if I compare a raisin and a puppy dog), the more difficult it is for us to see that we’re doing the line-drawing. But if you take the time to really think about it, you’ll see that we could have drawn our lines in many different ways.
Because we’ve drawn the lines in the way we have, we have come to believe that the world is actually divided by those lines. In effect, we’ve fooled ourselves into believing in our own make-believe!
But Apples and Oranges are Genetically Distinct!
That’s right. We can show, scientifically, the difference between an apple and an orange. We can also show, scientifically, the density difference between fluffy snow and sticky snow, but in this case we don’t make a distinction. If we break down snow or apples or oranges far enough, we’ll get to the same basic building materials (strings or elementary particles or whatever it will be next week). But as we begin moving up the macroscopic scale, we decide, at some point, what attributes are important enough to signify something as ‘different’.
Cool. But Who Cares?
If we were aware of this process, it wouldn’t give us trouble. But because we aren’t aware of it, and merely assume that the differences are ‘real’, we start making interesting distinctions. For instance, some people will see humans as humans, but other people will see some humans as one race, and other humans as another race, and they will usually decide that one race is better than the other. That’s racism.
On a more subtle level, being unaware of our division-creation creates a host of other problems, such as how to relate to other people, or what constitutes ‘success’ in life. In fact, if we examine our daily lives, we’ll find that the only problems we have in life arise because of these divisions. More specifically, they arise because we take these divisions seriously (in other words, we assume they are real).
Realizing the true nature of divisions allows us to take control of our division-making process. While a division-deluded person can get stressed over money matters, a division-creating person can’t.
Think of it this way. Imagine sitting down to play a board game with a bunch of your friends. In essence, you’re all involved in make-believe. You all agree to certain terms and rules, and then you play the game. Some people remember it’s a game, and they can have fun with it whether they win or lose. Other people get ‘lost’ in the game, and take it very seriously. They get competitive, and have a great desire to win. Often, their self-image will depend, at least to a small extent, on performing well within the game. They might get a little angry if they lose. But whether they are taking it seriously or not, it’s all make-believe. It’s just that some people get ‘lost’ more easily than others.
Life is just like this board game. You, as well as all the people around you, have agreed to certain terms and rules. You’ve agreed to abide by the clock, by money, by our morals and expected behaviors. But none of this is ‘real’ in the sense that we could change any of these rules if most of us agreed to change them. In fact, different cultures and different belief systems play by different rules all the time!
It doesn’t take much to see that this is all make-believe, too. In this way, when we say – ‘That’s just the way life is’, we’re really saying ‘Those are just the rules of the game you’re choosing to play’.
Some rules, like the ‘fact’ that we’re all going to die, seem real regardless of our culture or belief system. But non-dualism will even call this basic fact into question!
Playing the Game
Unless we go live in the wilderness, we have to play this game, at least to some extent. But, like the example of the board game, we can either be the person who is playing for fun, or the person who gets ‘lost’ in the game and takes it very seriously. If the game is making you miserable, why not just see that the rules are make-believe, and have some fun with it?
But the Game Seems So Real!
A board game is one thing. We all sit down, read the rules, and play. Within a few hours, we’re done. But the game of life is different, in that we were taught the rules when we were very young, and since our memories aren’t that great, we’ve forgotten that the rules are make-believe. It’s often not until much later in life that someone points out to us that the rules are only fantasy, and by then it’s difficult for us to believe, because we’ve played by these rules all our lives. We often find that we can’t just ‘will’ ourselves to stop taking the game seriously. So what’s to be done?
The answer is simply to become aware. Take a good look at all the things you take seriously, and unmask these things until you can see how they are only make-believe. As you observe, you’ll soon see that it’s ‘much ado about nothing’. Everyone is getting drunk and getting stressed and getting upset about the rules that they’ve chosen to play by. Nothing else. And we’re doing the same thing – getting so worked up about the rules that we can actually get stressed out about them.
You’ve probably figured out that this is the ultimate method to gain control of your life. It’s not just a method, like I-M, to get more cherries, but a way to change all of life’s experiences into cherries.
So, once you’ve figured this out and have gained perfect control over your life, it’s time to read this article, which hopefully will undo that illusion, as well. Because it’s easy to make Awakening into a game, just like all the rest.
Explore posts in the same categories: Awakening and Reality, Understanding Dualism, Stress