A summary of Play as Being

from: 2008.07.21 07:00 - Seeing the Path

Pema Pera:

The idea is simple: for a few hours a day, you pay 1% of your time in a kind of time tax --- 9 seconds each fifteen minutes. During that time you stop what you’re doing, or at least drop your exclusive focus on it, and instead you look at what is, or what you are, or at “I am”

And one way to do that is to look at what you have. We normally say “I am a plumber” instead of “I have the profession of plumber”, we say “I am English” instead of “I have the English nationality”. So if we try to rigorously scrutinize all that we have, then we may see what is left over, as what we are.

Temporarily shifting focus away from what we have, temporarily dropping the role play, and the remaining 99% we can play all our roles as much as we like, in RL and SL both

At least half the effect of the 9-sec is the high frequency, almost more important that what it is you do.

I recommend to keep a lab journal at hand, a note book or just a piece of paper or a computer file, and just to jot down whatever comes up during the 9 seconds. The very fact of recording helps to focus the mind, and later it may be interesting to reread.

  Here in SL we get together four times a day to talk about our experiences in RL in the four times an hour practice: 1 am 7 am 1 pm 7 pm SLT.

* who attend PaB?

Pema Pera: whereas Play as Being is more general; actually several of our guardians are not particularly interested in any religion or form of spritituality, although most are. So some come from a scientific angle, others from a philosophical one, etc
Pema Pera: what is common to us is an interest in exploring reality, directly, here and now, experientially.

Pema Pera: traditionally, you spent first several years of mediation and then many more years to integrate what you have seen into daily life, the latter being the more difficult of the two
Pema Pera: PaB is a rather crazy attempt to do something new for the modern mind :-)
Pema Pera: it turns the order on its head: you start integrating before you have something to integrate, or in fact you take an absolutely minimal form of meditation

Pema Pera: It is a way to combine what traditionally was separate:
Pema Pera: 1) monastic life
Pema Pera: 2) lay practice
Pema Pera: we have the intensity and continuity and availability of monastic life
Pema Pera: and yet we can all continue with our own work and family
Pema Pera: a truly novel gift of the internet . . . .