The Following Game
KidZen articles are meant especially for young adults, but anyone can gain insight from reading them.
There’s a very fun game you can play that helps us to get a little more in touch with the way the world ‘really is’. I call it ‘The Following Game’.
The thing we’re actually following in this game is our pathway of thought – the way in which we ‘create’ things in our world. This is one of the building-blocks of Maya, and by playing it, we essentially get better at knowing how our mind picks the world apart.
How To Play
Playing is simple. You just take any object in the world – let’s start with a street-sign – and ask yourself this question: “How is it that this street sign exists?”
Usually we might think that the sign exists because the state highway workers put it there. But this is a very superficial way of looking at things. Let’s really take a look. How is it that this street sign exists?
Let’s Begin
We might start by saying that it was made by prison workers at the nearby prison. So we see that for the sign to be a sign, it had to be painted. And what was painted? Well, it’s made of metal, so the metal was painted.
Keep following!
The metal had to be refined in a big factory, and before that it was mined out of the earth.
Keep following!
Well, the metal had to be made in the earth, and it was shaped by geologic forces. Those forces have to do with the planet’s entire history. And our planet’s history was dictated by the earth’s position in relation to the sun, and to the other circumstances of our solar system. Our solar system is a direct product of the overall structure and physical laws of the universe, which began (according to one theory) when there was this great big something called ‘The Big Bang’. For now, let’s call it the ‘Big Mystery’ instead.
Another Tangent
We could follow along another line, if we wished. We could see that the sign was put there by the state highway workers. And it was put there because they wanted people to drive at a certain speed limit. And why do we have a speed limit? Because we believe that people need laws to govern their behavior. That need creates our entire system of laws. And our laws create a situation where some people will break them, and have to go to jail to make street signs.
All of these things go into making the sign what it is. You can keep following this tangent, and pretty soon it will lead you straight to the Big Mystery, just like the first one did.
Why Play?
This game not only helps children to see the world more holistically, but it also can help adults to start seeing that the world isn’t quite as simple as we usually think. We like to imagine that the world is made of independent parts that we can just deal with one at a time, but if we play this game, we start to notice that everything is pretty interconnected. If we play it enough, it starts to shift our consciousness away from our usual sliced-to-pieces view of the world (it’s still not non-dualism, but at least it’s a bit more holistic).
The key is that you have to actually play the game. Many folks like to think that ‘the world is One’, but they’ve never really thought about it, and their minds are busy breaking the world up into pieces all the time. If we actually play the game (it’s most fun with two people, each one taking it one more step – try to get creative and follow it along in strange directions, instead of just jumping right to the Big Mystery), we enact a profound change in our way of interpreting the world. Things simply become more interconnected. It’s a good way to begin ‘unlearning’ our habits of chopping-up, and a good way to see that every action, every thought, and every ‘thing’ is tied up with all the rest of the world.
Explore posts in the same categories: Mind Exercises, Zen for Young Adults