Page last modified 12:57, 25 Jan 2012 by eliza
Initial Outline of Play as Being
Table of contents
No headersThe Basic Idea
The basic idea of "Play as Being" is very simple. Once every
fifteen minutes, you take a 9-second break. During that time
you relax, and you free up your attention.
You can do this for a few hours a day, or throughout the
whole day, as you like. You can use a bell, either a clock on
your computer that rings every fifteen minutes, or a watch or
alarmclock. Or you can just remind yourself to take a short
break, a few times an hour. The suggestion of 9 seconds is a
bit of a joke: 15 minutes contain 900 seconds, so 9 seconds is
exactly 1% of a quarter of an hour. Following these breaks
throughout the day corresponds to a 1% time tax on your life.
It is not necessary to stop what you are doing, during
those short breaks. The main point is to turn your attention
away from an exclusive focus on whatever it was you were doing.
If the task at hand allows it, then it may be nice to actually
stop. If you were typing on your computer, you may take your
hands off your key board, stretch your back, look around, take
a deep breath, or close your eyes, whatever feels right.
However, there are many situations in which a complete
stopping would be rather unnatural. For example, if you're
talking with someone, it would be rather odd to suddenly remain
silent for 9 seconds seconds and look elsewhere. Instead, you
could use the 9 seconds to loosen up. You could drop the usual
emphasis on your own position, your own role in the conversation.
Instead, you could take a kind of observer position, watching the
conversation as if at arm's length removed, so to speak.
Similarly, while driving a car, you certainly don't want
to stop doing that during our short breaks. But you can still
use those 9 seconds to take a deep breath, look a bit more to
the left and right, reminding yourself not to get too much
focused on the spot right in front of you, and also not to get
too much lost in daydreams. Regularly freeing up your attention
in this way quite likely will make your driving safer, more loose
and more open to react flexibly to sudden unexpected situations.
A Bit More Specific
Taking a very short break a few times an hour can be already be
very beneficial. Modern life doesn't leave us much room for
vast stretches of unstructured time, and going on mini-breaks
(nano-holidays?) may provide the kind of breathers that can
provide at least some kind of balance. However, we can do more
than just relax. We can give a bit more structure to these
breaks by dropping what we have in order to see what we are.
We play many roles in our life: we have a job that defines
us to some extent in the eyes of others and ourselves; we have a
nationality written in our passport; we have a gender that comes
with a package deal with largely unwritten expectations; we have
a body and mind with which we identify to varying degrees in the
course of a day, depending on the situation. However, when we
talk about all those roles and identifications, we typically use
the verb `to be.'
When I introduce myself I may say: "I am an astrophysicist"
or "I am Dutch." When asked to fill in a customs form I may write
"I am male." When asked for my age I may respond "I am 57." And
this pattern of identification, this switch from having to being,
goes very deep. It echoes how we tend to jump from properties to
essence, in the blink of an eye. We identify ourselves and others
with what we are doing, what we have, and once such identities are
firmly in place, it becomes harder and harder to play with them.
We have a saying "once a thief, always a thief." And when
someone is caught stealing something, we quickly label that
person "a thief" as if that is part of what the person truly
is. But we have a choice there. We can also state, more
accurately, that there is a person who at least once stole
something. And yes, it may well be that this person has stolen
before, and may be more likely to steal again later, but those
are properties and characteristics that someone may have -- it
would be unfair and inaccurate to consider someone's core essence
to be that of a thief.
Yet we tend to do that, as a kind of mental laziness: we
tend to ascribe what we have to what we are. As a result we can
classify ourselves and others that way. We then know where we
stand, and we don't have to bother to be open, moment to moment,
to changes, to new opportunities. Living thus in a world of
more of less fixed identities may seem safe and comfortable,
but in fact it is deadening, it ties us down, and it takes the
spark out of life, the creativity inherent in switching identities
and playing with them.
So this is the added suggestion, in addition to "just relax,"
during our mini-breaks: "drop what you have in order to see what
you are." Play with your identities. Wear them lightly. No need
to deny or ignore or suppress them; acknowledge them, but don't
let yourself get stuck to them. Rather than allowing yourself to
get glued to your identities, enjoy a freedom from identification.
Freedom from Identification
We all have the experience of meeting people who seem to be
totally stuck to their roles. Liberals who can't seem to see
any value in any conservative ideas, and the other way around:
conservatives who automatically reject anything labeled liberal.
Nationalists who blindly follow their country into whatever war
breaks out. Religious fanatics who don't seem to be open at all
for any other way of thinking, feeling, and experiencing than
what fits into their preconceived system of ideas.
However, when we look carefully and honestly, we all can
discover a whole lot of similarly lazy identifications that we
use to let part of our life unfold on auto-pilot. They may not
be as blatantly obvious as the examples given above, but at the
same time that can make them even more pernicious, when they are
not recognized -- in which case they can govern our lives in ways
that we may be totally unaware of.
Each identity we have is like a piece of cloth. We can
take it on or take it off; we can tightly wrap it around us or
we can wear it lightly; we even can forget that we can take it
off, and wear it day and night, as if it were our skin.
The invitation during the 9-second breaks is to become naked.
To drop any and all idenfitications, temporarily, during 1% of our
waking life, leaving them to play out to their heart's content
during the remaining 99% of the time.
And again, we can do that in two ways. We saw that taking
a break from typing could be done literally, taking your hands
off the keyboard, while taking a break from driving should be
done differently: by all means keep your hands on the steering
wheel, but allow your attention to free up beyond the narrow
focus we tend to fall into. Similarly, when I drop my
identification with being Dutch or male, I don't have to burn
my passport or undergo a surgical sex change. It is sufficient
to be more open to how it would be to have a different nationality
or gender. And that implies: allowing yourself the freedom of
acting and responding to situations in ways that would normally
not be associated with the standard identities you carry.
Seeing What Is
The 9-sec suggestion, to drop what you have in order to see what
you are, is a tall order. Chances are that you don't get very
far, at first. And that's fine! The first step is to simply
remember to take mini breaks. The second step is to use those
breaks to relax, sit back, breathe -- we often forget to `just
breathe'! After we get comfortable with the first two steps,
we can slowly move toward dropping what we have.
In the middle of an activity, it is hard to drop our
identification with the roles we play. Taking a break is
almost a prerequisite. And if we don't relax during such
a break, we won't have much of a chance to drop that
identification. But once we stop briefly, and let it all
go, look up and smile, we have a chance to notice what it
is we are glued to. What was the role I was so involved in,
just a second ago? What was it that kept my muscles tense,
my eyes focused, my whole posture, physically and mentally,
so directed toward an activity?
Asking that question, time and again, during the various
mini breaks, will quickly open a whole landscape of roles and
identities -- a huge wardrobe of roles from which we pick and
choose, often without much awareness. And the more we see, the
more we can unbutton some of these clothes, or take them off and
put them aside for a while.
After some time we get comfortable with this third step,
from stopping to relaxing to dropping. We can then ask the
question, as a fourth step: what happens when we keep dropping
our overly tight identifications? Is there no end to this? Is
it like an onion where you can keep peeling layers and layers
and layers without finding anything underneath?
This is a central question. It is the question of Being.
To the extent that we get better in dropping what we have,
can we begin to see what we are? And does it even make sense to
ask that question? Can we learn to see what is, beyond all the
many layers of properties and attributes that we have?
There is one problem here, in using words: as we have seen,
we tend to use the words "is/am" or "to be" casually, as in
"I am an astrophysicist" or "I am a European." But a quick
inspection shows that those are all identities we have. What
we are after now is to see what is left after dropping what
we have. The "is" or "being" of what is left then is very
different from the "is" that we use when we really mean "have".
For simplicity, let us use lower case "is", "am", "be" and
"being" for what we have, and capitalized "Is", "Am", "Be" and
"Being" for what is left when we drop what we have.
Being
At first, the notion of "Being" or simply of "what Is" may seem
rather abstract, a philosophical term with no clear meaning for
our day to day life. And indeed, the whole question of Being
can easily become an intellectual game, a play with words and
concepts. The best way to avoid that is to simply plunge in,
and start exploring for ourselves, without worrying about what
philosophers and other individuals in various traditions may have
said about Being. The 9-second approach is one very direct way
to plunge in, approaching Being with no strings attached.
Sooner or later, however, the question may arise as to
what has been said about Being in the near and distant past, in
different traditions. Starting with the present, natural science
so far has had nothing to say about Being. That may well change,
in due time. In fact, I see science as one very careful approach
to circumscribing Being, by systematically starting with the
phenomena of the material world, and drilling deeper and deeper
to uncover an underlying unity that is expressed in all phenomena.
As for recent European philosophy, very little has been
said in the last hundred years about Being, with Heidegger
being one exception. He clearly had an intuition of the
importance of the notion of Being, and it is a pity that his
personal life and behavior has detracted from his philosophical
insights. His early Nazi sympathies have unfortunately colored
the way he and his ideas are currently perceived, especially the
way in which he abandoned his German Jewish thesis advisor Edmund
Husserl, the founder of the philosophical school of phenomenology.
Among earlier European philosophers, Spinoza's radical
notion of God or Nature points in a similar direction as Being.
Even earlier, various Medieval philosophers such as Thomas
Aquinas wrote about Being. And when we turn our attention to
Asia, such as Persia, India, Tibet, China and Japan, we find
plenty of examples of discussions of Being by philosophers,
poets, and other central figures in various traditions.
Rather than trying to give an overview of who said what,
it may be more interesting to present a few quotes from some
of these different traditions, in order to convey a flavor of
various approaches. I have chosen five with which I am a bit
familiar: Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Taoism, and Medieval
Christian mysticism.
No doubt it would be easy to find other quotes, for
example from Chassidic mysticism or Baha'i or aspects of many
shamanic traditions -- really any historical source reporting
results of sufficiently deep experiential explorations of the
nature of reality. And of course, there is no reason to
confine these quotes to what is classified through a European
lens with the term `religion': there is nothing preventing
agnostic or humanist poets to reach similar insights.
Buddhism
Here are the Six Words of Advice, from Tilopa (988-1069), an
Indian tantric Buddhist, in a translation by Ken McLeod:
Let go of what has passed
Let go of what may come
Let go of what is happening now
Don't try to figure anything out
Don't try to make anything happen
Relax, right now, and rest
To do full justice to this pithy summary, we would need a
lengthy discussion of Tilopa's views and his significance
as the historical founder of what would become the Kagyu
school of Tibetan Buddhism. But very briefly, we can
recognize here parallels with the 9-second suggestion of
dropping what we have in order to see what we Are.
We tend to lose ourselves in reflections on the past,
often colored with a sense of regret, and in speculations
about the future, often colored by hope and fear, and Tilopa
suggests that it may be a good move to try to drop both.
Not only that, he suggests to even drop the kind of endless
weaving of thoughts that we do in reflection on what is
happening in the present. Dropping any conceptual eagerness
in dealing with the three times, we are also invited to drop
any kind of analysis and any kind of action.
All this may seem paradoxical, and an invitation to become
completely passive and fatalistic, but that would be far too
superficial an interpretation. Tilopa's "not doing" is closely
related to the Taoist notion of "wu-wei" or "wei-wu-wei" (not
doing, or doing through not-doing). Dropping all concern with
projects as such, as things to hang on to, things we have, we
can rest in what Is. And from that position, which is not
really a position, we can in fact act far more efficiently and
in a more natural way than when we try to act, as we usually
do, through subtle forms of scheming and manipulation.
Hinduism
One of the simplest descriptions of dropping what you have has
been given by Nisargadatta (1897-1981), a Hindu practitioner
without any intellectural background. Here is a simple quote
by him:
There is nothing to practice. To know yourself, be yourself.
To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that.
Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your
mind with seeking.
The parallels with Tilopa's six words are clear. And all that
we can possibly imagine ourselves to be are aspects that we
have, not what we Are. Here is another quote:
It is disinterestedness that liberates. Don't hold on, that
is all. The world is made of rings. The hooks are all yours.
Make straight your hooks and nothing can hold you. Give up
your addictions and the freedom of the universe is yours.
Be effortless.
This is my favorite quote from the first book of dialogues
by him that appeared in English, "I am That." He invites us
to see what we are, by dropping our addiction to what we have.
I just love this image of us tramping around in great confusion,
getting hooked here and there, day by day, moment by moment,
until we finally figure out the simple solution: rather than
trying to avoid all the rings in the world, we just straighten
our hooks, we just let go of what we have, in the sense of
wearing it all lightly.
Islamic Sufism
Rumi (1207-1273) was a Persian poet, also known as Mawlana
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi. He was born in Afghanistan and
lived most of his life in Anatolia, Turkey. His outlook on
life, as a Sufi, is beautifully expressed in his poem "Guest
House." In the translation by Coleman Barks:
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and attend them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture, still,
treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Welcome difficulty.
Learn the alchemy True Human Beings know:
the moment you accept what troubles
you've been given, the door opens.
Welcome difficulty as a familiar
comrade. Joke with torment
brought by the Friend.
Sorrows are the rags of old clothes
and jackets that serve to cover,
and then are taken off.
That undressing, and the beautiful
naked body
underneath,
is the sweetness
that comes
after grief.
Compared to the previous quotes, this expression from within
a monotheistic tradition at first sight seems quite different,
with allusions to "a guide from beyond" and "the Friend" but at
the same time the invitation to drop what you have in order to
see what you Are can be recognized here as well. Instead of
identifying with our emotions, we greet them as temporary guests,
like clothes we can wear lightly, without getting too much
attached to them through attraction or repulsion.
This Sufi poem is devotional in spirit. In general, any
spiritual approach that is centered around devotion can in
principle be used as an aide in moving from what we have to
what we Are. While we are all familiar with potential
drawbacks of overly devotional attitudes, in terms of blind
belief and unquestioned adherence to dogmas, in principle an
attitude of devotion can speed up the process of dropping what
we are addicted to. A modern-day example is the approach by
Alcoholics Anonymous, with their method of devotion to an
(otherwise unspecified) "higher power."
Taoism
The very first chapter of the Tao Te Ching, the oldest book of
Taoism, launches directly into the notion of dropping what you
have in order to see what you Are. Here is the translation by
Stephen Mitchell:
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.
What is translated here as `darkness' and in some other
translations as `mystery' and also `mystery/darkness' can
be seen as a pointer to Being. The more we drop our tendency
to name, label, conceptualize and reify all that appears, the
easier it is to find our way back from having to Being.
Christian Mysticism
Here is another quote from a monotheistic tradition, by the
anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing, chapter 32,
translated into modern English by C. Wolters:
Yet I can show you something of these spiritual arts: at least
I think so. Try them out, and see if you can do better. Do
everything you can to act as if you did not know that they were
so strongly pushing in between you and God. Try to look, as it
were, over their shoulders, seeking something else -- which is
God, shrouded in the cloud of unknowing. If you do so, I
believe that you will soon find your hard work much easier. I
believe that if this dodge is looked at in the right way, it
will be found to be nothing else than a longing and desire for
God, to feel and see of him what one may here below. Charity
is such a desire, and it always deserves to have its way made
easier.
There is another spiritual dodge to try if you wish. When you
feel that you are completely powerless to put these thoughts
away, cower down before them like some cringing captive
overcome in battle, and reckon that it is ridiculous to fight
against them any longer. In this way you surrender yourself to
God while you are in the hands of your enemies, and feeling
that you have been overcome for ever. Please pay special heed
to this suggestion, for I think that if you try it out it will
dissolve every opposition. I am quite sure that if this dodge,
too, can be looked at in the right way, it will be recognized
to be none other than the true knowledge and experience of the
self you are; wretched, filthy, and far worse than nothing.
Such knowledge and experience is humility. And this humility
causes God himself to come down in his might, and avenge you of
your enemies, and take you up, and fondly dry your spiritual
eyes -- just as a father would act towards his child, who had
been about to die in the jaws of a wild boar, or mad, devouring
bears!
The particular form of devotion displayed here fits in very
nicely with the other quotes we have seen above. Instead of
trying to reach, to analyze, to figure out or manipulate, the
author suggests two particular tricks, called `dodges,' which
have a strong wu-wei flavor.
The description of the self as "wretched, filthy, and far
worse than nothing" may sound rather negative, and indeed, such
descriptions have given rise to some very negative attitudes,
particularly in Calvinism but also elsewhere. Yet this same
orientation can also be seen in a more positive light, as it is
presented here: by associating all these negative aspects with
attributes that we have, we are encouraged to drop all those in
order to open up for what Is, here pointed at through the term
"God" as the object of devotion. And in some Christian mystics,
such as Meister Eckhart, the notion of subject and object is
transcended as well, as in Eckhart's famous quote:
The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which
God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one and the same —
one in seeing, one in knowing, and one in loving.
Play
So much for the notion of Being. What about the role of `play'
in "Play as Being"? In the quotes from the five traditions
mentioned above, it is interesting to note that the writers in
the two monotheistic traditions display a distinctly playful
attitude. Rumi invites us to welcome all and anything that
crosses our path, and even to "joke with torment." The author
of The Cloud talks about dodges, tricks that you can apply.
The particular quotes from the other three traditions don't
show a very clear playful nature, but all three authors display
plenty of playfulness in others places in their writings.
In contemplative traditions, initial forms of practice are
often presented in rather serious terms. The usual picture is
that of a long road that has to be traversed, in order to reach
a distant goal, be it enlightenment or salvation or realization
in one way or another. However, upon reading historical accounts
of those who seem to have reached a profound degree of insight
into the nature of reality, we are struck by the first reactions
reported by them. Often they take the form of laughter or other
expressions of amazement, indicating deep surprise at how simple
everything is when seen in terms of Being, as Being, by Being.
There are many zen stories along these lines, in which a
famous master starts off on a very intense and arduous quest,
and after several years experiences a deep form of realization.
Yet after seeing the emptiness and openness of `what Is' or the
`suchness' of reality, typically such a master continued to
practice for many more years until he felt ready to teach.
No matter how complete his initial realization may have been,
the extra practice, spanning more years than the initial search,
was aimed at integrating the most profound insights into daily
life. Only after deep insight and broad integration did such a
master feel ready to take on students.
In Play as Being, we put the cart before the horse, you
could say. We start at the end, with some tentative steps
toward integration before we even talk about any particular
form of meditation or contemplation. Every fifteen minutes we
do something, we hardly know what, but whatever we do, it gets
under our skin quickly, since we do it so often. Trading
frequency for duration, we choose continuity rather than length
of practice sessions. In fact, when we spend just a few hours
every day, stopping for 9 seconds once every quarter of an hour,
the total time involved is comparable to brushing your teeth.
Whether this kind of playful approach can be meaningfully
compared with more traditional approaches is an open question.
We started Play as Being in 2008, in a rather leisurely way,
and it will be interesting to see what will happen over the
years. What it means to "start at the end" is something that
we have to explore much further than has been done so far in
the Play as Being sessions in Second Life. For example, the
very notion of `starting' has to be reevaluated; what does it
mean to start, if you are already at the end?
Appearance
No matter how we look at the world, and no matter how we
interpret our appearing in this world, and any meaning we
associate with any aspect of self or other, we can all agree
upon some basics. Something appears. We can quibble about
what is behind the phenomena we observe, but we cannot deny
that there are phenomena. We may question the nature of time,
the nature of self, the nature of anything, but we cannot deny
the presence of appearances.
One particular phenomenon that is present for me is the
appearance of me myself. Stated in terms of Being, I can say
that my own appearing in this world is a presentation by Being.
Or more precisely, the presence of the appearance of me is a
presentation by Being. This may sound mysterious, but let us
look for a moment at what it means to "be there."
A chair can be white, can be made out of wood, can be
tall or short, but any chair first has to be there, before we
can meaningfully talk about its properties. It could have a
different color, it could be made from a different material,
it could have a different size, but without the chair being
there there would be no chair. So when we talk about a chair
saying "it is white and it is there" the two uses of `is' are
very different. In the sentence "the chair is white" we start
with the chair and list a property of the chair that could
easily be otherwise. But in the sentence "the chair is there"
in the sense of the chair exists, the existence of the chair
is not an arbitrary property. Rather the notion of existence
itself is fundamental, and the fact that there is a chair is
rather arbitrary; there could also be a table instead, or some
other object. In this sense the `being there' of the chair is
the starting point, the givenness of the chair, or in more
poetic terms: Being presents the presence of the appearance of
the chair.
All these ideas need a lot of sharpening, and a lot needs
to be added to avoid misunderstandings that can easily arise
when talking about "Being presenting something". However, let
us start with this way of speaking, for now. We will soon come
back to fill in more details, for example when we will critically
investigate notions such as existence and time, trading them in
for presence without persistent existence and a kind of timeless
time, respectively.
Play as Being
Starting with the hypothesis that it is meaningful to talk
about the notion of Being, we can include in the hypothesis
that it also makes sense to say that Being presents everything
that appears. This may sound like a tautology, and indeed,
logically speaking that is the case, and yet we can apply this
kind of hypothesis to do some real work, in our exploration of
the nature of reality. In that sense, our hypothesis becomes
what is called a `working hypothesis' in science: not something
you accept as dogma, nor something you skeptically reject, but
rather something we agree to keep open, using it as a tool of
investigation, without falling into belief or disbelief.
In a lose way you could even restate our working hypothesis
as "Being plays us" in the sense of Being presenting the presence
of the appearance of anything at all, including us. Now how can
we investigate such a hypothesis? Simple! We turn the statement
around. We return the compliment: while letting Being play as us,
we in turn play as Being.
The idea here is that we stop identifying with the limited
identities we normally take for granted: our body, our mind, our
thoughts and feelings. Instead we shift our attention from all
that, as something we have, to what we really Are, which is Being,
according to the working hypothesis. And if we can't get a clear
sense of what it means that Being playfully presents our presence,
we can instead play as if we already are Being. In other words,
instead of waiting for Being to show us how it plays us, we can
start by playing as Being, to get an initial sense of what that
might mean. By doing so, Being may show itself more clearly.
Again, this is a very short and limited sketch. We will
need to unpack many layers of meaning, in order to see what
these brief hints may be pointing to. But all of that is part
of working with our working hypothesis, part of the whole fun
adventure of Playing as Being.
Many Ways to Take a Break
The title "Play as Being" will remain puzzling, or at least
I hope it does! If you think you `get' what these words are
pointing at, most likely you will have constructed a conceptual
story that may look elegant and contain some logic acrobatics,
but that will have little if anything to do with the intention
behind the title. However, the title is just an invitation,
not more than that. What is much more important than trying
to analyze the meaning of the title is to jump in and start
playing with the 9-second breaks, once every fifteen minutes.
What counts is a real engagement.
And there are many different ways to engage with the 9-sec
exploration, all of them valid and useful, even though they may
look very different. Let me briefly list here five ways, which
I will label depending on the kind of world view lying behind it,
as no-view, therapy, humanism, transcendance, radical-openness.
These ways are by no means exclusive: we can find ourselves
combining two or more at any given time. However, they do have
different flavors and reflect different attitudes, so it may be
interesting to list them separately. And in addition, I'm sure
you can find other ways as well.
1. No View
The simplest way to play with the 9-sec breaks is to not care
at all about a view of the world, of our own place in the
world, or whatever philosophical attitude could come in. In
this case we can simply pause regularly, take a deep breath,
and look around. This way of letting off steam, or charging
the batteries (different metaphors from different eras), can
have a healthy effect and make our life more pleasant and
productive, as well as more relaxed, all at the same time.
2. Therapy
Another way to use the 9-sec periods is to reflect on the
other 891 seconds in every fifteen minutes, watching our
tendency to get all wrapped up in one or more activities,
and then to reflect and analyze our reactions. This would
be a kind of therapy attitude. And indeed, the whole 9-sec
idea could be viewed, and correctly so, as a new self-help
approach toward gaining a deeper understanding of both self
and world, and the relationship between both, through many
frequent daily observations.
3. Humanism
Expanding the sphere of attention beyond a concern mainly with
our own balance, and possibly that of those closest to us, we
can also include all of humanity. We can take the world as it
presents itself to us, relying on the knowledge that science
provides us, while establishing a system of ethics and morals
to help guide us in how to use the fruits of science and
technology in wiser ways than has been done so far. With this
attitude, the 9-sec breaks can serve as useful reminders to
keep our sense of ethics and balance in mind, avoiding us to
get lost in the details of activities requiring our momentary
attention. In this way, we remind ourselves to see the big
picture, many times a day. And this will help us to act based
upon what we know and can verify, without any speculation about
something beyond that. The 9-sec practice thus provides a way
to integrate one's commitments into daily life.
4. Transcendence
However, the majority of humans on our planet do not subscribe
to humanism. The most prevailing views of the world include at
least some elements that go beyond what we know about the world
directly through our senses, through our reasoning, and through
what science has taught us. Using the word `transcendence' to
indicate the notion of `something beyond' we can group all the
major world religions, as well as the more local tribal belief
systems, in this category. In addition, we can also include
ideologies such as communism, when they are based on the belief
in the appearance in due time of a future ideal state. For
anyone who adheres to any form of a belief in transcendence,
the 9-sec breaks can form a welcome reminder to cast their eyes
not only to the world they happen to live in, but also to the
transcendent part that is hidden from view. In that way, the
9-sec practice can help them to `be in the world, but not of
the world' to take Christian terminology as an example; a way
to integrate one's transcendent ideals into daily life.
5. Radical Openness
In contrast to humanism, transcendence adds something to the
world of the visible and the knowable, in the form of additional
ingredients or realms. The normal world we find ourselves in
may be less real or fundamental in some sense, but at least it,
too, exists. It may not exist independently, as in humanism,
and typically it is seen to be created by some form of the
`unseen' but once created, now it's here. This is most clearly
spelled out in the monotheistic religions, according to which
God has created the world, but it also appears in the creation
myths of most tribal traditions, as well as in non-monotheistic
religions, for example in Hinduism.
An alternative move is not to add anything to the world
view of humanism, but rather to subtract that whole world, and
to put into question that anything has ever been established
in any way. Compared to the first four ways of looking at the
world, this fifth way is much less familiar to most of us, so
let me give a bit more background here.
We cannot deny the presence of the appearance of many
things. However, any interpretation or framework on top of
that is open for questioning. There is the appearance of a
linear past-present-future time, but we don't have direct
access to either past or future: they appear to us in terms
of memories and expectations, which strictly speaking are
phenomena that appear to us in the present. Continuing in
this vein, we can subtract, or just put on hold, our natural
belief in the reality of most anything: the reality of time,
the reality of a core self, and so on.
This kind of radical `bracketing' of the world has been
attempted by several individuals and groups in different times
and places. A recent attempt was made by the German-Jewish
philosopher Edmund Husserl, who introduced the term `epoche'
to describe the kind of radically open stance with which to
view all that appears without buying into the usual meanings
that we drape around the phenomena we live in, and even the
phenomena we live as: our own sense of self, as well as our
belief in some kind of existence of that self, all of that
is given in turn as a complex bundle of phenomena.
In various Asian traditions, forms of radical openness
have appeared in various places and times: in Chinese Ch'an
Buddhism, which gave rise to Japanese Zen; in Tibetan Dzog
Chen, with roots in both Bon and Buddhism; in Indian Advaita
Vedanta, a form of Hinduism; and in the writings of a number
of individuals in many other traditions. How radically open
each of those views were that have been presented on different
occasions is difficult to discern. An extra complication is
these views have often been expressed in ways that were more
or less veiled, for various reasons.
Coming back now to Play as Being, it is clear that it
is perfectly possible to apply the 9-sec breaks to this fifth
way of looking at the world, or what claims to be a world: this
tapestry of phenomena that come packaged with a whole world view.
So to the extent that we are interested to go beyond the
first four applications, we can start to experiment with any
element of what appears in our daily life, from moment to
moment. The past-present-future structure of time is one
natural place to start with. But then the question is: how
do we embark on such a radical exploration? Can we find any
handholds or footholds on such an adventure?
A place to start is to take a simple sentence and hold
that in mind, throughout the day, especially during the nine
seconds breaks. Here is one possibility: Appreciate the
Presence of Appearance as a Presentation by Being, APAPB, or
in shortened form APA: Appreciate the Presence of Appearance.
[this is were I stopped, while writing an initial draft for an introduction to PaB, in the fall of 2009]
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