Wise Words from a Good Friend

For your reading pleasure via Brad in SF, a brother in blogging and sobriety...

There is a curious, extremely interesting term in Japanese that refers to a very special manner of polite, aristocratic speech known as 'play language', asobase kotoba, whereby, instead of saying to a person, for example, 'I see that you have come to Tokyo', one would express the observation by saying, 'I see that you are playing at being in Tokyo' – the idea being that the person addressed is in such control of his life and his powers that for him everything is a play, a game. He is able to enter into life as one would enter into a game, freely and with ease. And this idea is carried even so far that instead of saying to a person, 'I hear that your father has died', you would say, rather, 'I hear that your father has played at dying'.

And now, i submit that this is truly a noble, glorious way to approach life. What has to be done is attacked with such a will that in the performance one is literally 'in play.' That is the attitude designated by Neitzsche as amor fati, love of one's fate. It is what the old Roman Seneca referred to in his often quoted saying: 'The Fates lead him who will; him who won't, they drag.'

Are you up to your given destiny? That is the challenge of Hamlet's troubled question. The ultimate nature of the experience of life is that toil and pleasure, sorrow and joy, are inseparably mixed in it.

And, of course, as everybody knows who has ever played at games, the ones that are the most fun - to lose as well as to win - are the ones that are the hardest, with the most complicated, even dangerous tasks to accomplish...but winning, finally, is not the aim; for as we have already learned in mounting the way 'rich in pleasure' of the Kundalini, winning and losing in the usual sense are experiences of the lower chakras. The aim of the ascending serpent is to clarify and increase the light of consciousness within, and the first step to the gaining of this boon - as told in the Bhagavad Gita, as in many another wisdom text - is to abandon absolutely all concern for the fruits of action, whether in this world or the next.

Life as an art and art as a game - as action for its own sake, without thought of gain or loss, praise or blame - is the key, then, to the turning of life itself into a yoga, and art into the means to such a life.

~ The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell