Notes on PaB 'Playing Practice'

Pema Pera: The problem with meditation or any form of practice: without really
going for it, you may not get anywhere — but then the very intensity of your quest
tends to blind you — hence playfulness as a key. Playing is energetic without the
dogmatic and fanatic side, or can be.

http://wiki.playasbeing.org/Chat_Logs/2008/05/2008.05.07_19%3a00_-_Never_not

From a Group Email:

Some of a recent exchange may be relevant for a conversation about how to be a greeter at a session.
What I wrote applies broadly to general PaB sessions:

In order to answer questions regarding structure in, let me first sketch how I see the
landscape of possibilities that we have for joint explorations.

We are currently using three different media: wiki, email, chat sessions.
Each of those have their own dynamics. In my experience:

-- wikis allow for the most in-depth coherent ways of conveying ways
of thinking, feeling, experiencing. Examples are the chapters I am
writing, and the reports that are being added every week, soon more
than a hundred already, a very rich harvest.

-- email encourages shorter contributions, written more quickly than
wiki essays/reports and generally less throught-out, but on the
other hand often more lively and more directly responding to a
previous email; glad to see them being used for our Time sessions.

-- chats in sessions invite even shorter remarks, often just a single
idea, like in a haiku or a twitter tweet.

Rarely do sessions lead to coherence over more than a dozen
sentences. Yet they have a liveliness and sense of shared presence
that the other two lack.

Whether we like it or not, sessions generally don't seem to invite
in-depth discussions, not anything like the level of wikis and also
typically not even the level of email exchanges.

Therefore, I don't expect a session to be a way to continue on the
same level of depth of reasoning or exchanging anything longer and
more complex than just a few sentences. Put differently: wikis and
email are for prose; sessions are for poetry.

Or to use another metaphor: sessions are more like meeting in a cafe,
whereas email and especially wiki are more like meeting in a class
room or a conference room. To go to a cafe, and there to try to
engage people as if they were in a class/conference room wouldn't
work very well.

Cafes have their own charm and function: in a cafe you are more likely
to put your head on somebody's shoulder, even just briefly, while sharing
an intense story at the bar, something you wouldn't do in class or during
a conference.

During the sessions, I'm often struck by the willingness of many people
to share sensitive feelings and intuitions and experiences, and I very
much treasure those.

What sometimes pains me a bit, is when somebody
tells a really touching story, in a vulnerable way, like showing a
little bird in their cupped hands -- only to have somebody else react
in a theoretical way, with philosophical arguments or psychological
analysis. Somehow, that doesn't feel appropriate, in such a situation;
like giving a lecture in a cafe would not be appropriate.

But that is just my own reaction; I am well aware that different
people have different sensibilities, and I would not want to tell
others what to do. They may feel that it can help others, after
pouring their heart out, to give a more theoretical perspective;
who am I to judge? I can only follow my own heart and intuition.

I myself do what feels right to me, and I respect others to act in the
way that they feel right. I don't feel any need to tell others how to
behave; I don't even want to guess what is right for them. How do I
know what others need or should do?

The only reason that I am giving this description here is that I respect
your question.. So the answer to "what would you like to see
happening" is: "I would like to see people happy, engaged, interested,
and *doing* something, actually getting into *some* kind of exploration,
beyond the stage of thinking, chatting, speculating."

Paradoxically, it may be that the best way to get people to actually
do something, to actually let them explore, is to give them enough
space, make them feel at home, allow them to let their hair down,
allow them to relax, tell them very clearly "there is really nothing
you have to do" and then when they really accept that and relax, they
may be more ready to actually finally do something.

Such is the paradox of human beings, as I understand it.

In my experience, trying to somehow `create' a meaningful discussion
typically backfires. Pushing and manipulating doesn't work, obviously,
but I have found that even rather subtle forms of pushing and
manipulating still do not work. "facilitating" is a very subtle art.

As far as I understand "facilitating", it is total wu-wei, total
non-manipulation, totally stepping out of the picture and not trying
to "help" others by telling them what you think they should do.

It has taken me a very long time to reach this understanding.

Having been raised in Holland, all that I have written in the
previous paragraph goes totally against the grain of Dutch Calvinist
attitudes: the attitudes of telling the whole world and everybody
in sight what to do :-). For me, spending years in Japan was probably
an important factor in learning wu-wei. Also, TSK helped a lot, since
in TSK there truly are no beings, there is only Space, Time, and
Knowledge, so there are no creatures that need to be helped. But
going even further back, in high school in Holland I was inspired by
Seneca, Stoic philosopher, with his own brand of wu-wei. Over the
course of the 40 years after reading Seneca, via learning TSK and
adapting to Japan, I've come to the conclusion that almost anything
I would consciously "try" to do is probably wrong.

Perhaps I have already quoted Vector Marksman in SL, a medical
doctor and good friend of mine (and somebody who almost
died 15 years ago, and had a profound near-death experience when
his heart stopped for a while; he also has 40 years of meditation
experience). He wrote recently in a Kira email:

Words guide, examples move, but only the giving of oneself transforms.

Like him, I want to be very light on guiding, more engaged with
moving, but what I really want to is to give myself to exploring
reality, together with whoever else is interested to join me.

Cheers,
Pema