Play as Being 91

• How to teach: "Light the blue touch paper and stand well back"

Play as Being 87

• Outside my window is the same estate as yesterday. But now it is morning. Everyone is away at work. No shields. No clamouring thoughts. No emotions rending the invisible air. No separateness. The sunlight and the earth have reclaimed it and it is all one Being again.

Play as Being 86

• Blackbird sings. Ash keys sway in the breeze. I can stretch out and touch them without moving.
• The estate (US: subdivision), on which I live, is a monument to separateness. On the separate houses with their separate walls, each roughcast with a harl of a million or more separate shell fragments, there stand separate TV aerials, each sucking in the outside world to tuners that separate out the channels for the individual and separate family audiences. And in each home, the family members inside see each other as separate, often keeping their own 'space', feeling their own pain and fleeting pleasures, and doing anything to stop themselves wondering, "Why?" ... ENOUGH! It doesn't have to be this way! I refuse to see it that way any more.
  

Thinking aloud

When I Play as Being, I am exploring; I am on a journey with few tools and no signage. I stumble upon things, I make discoveries, I have realisations. In this randomness, the best thing, I have found, is that I share realisations with others and I share in their realisations. The Play as Being cohort moves on and shares and we all grow. But...

Life is short. Perhaps. At least this one is for sure. Do I have the time for such exploration? For every step towards the goal - whatever that may be - there are twenty stumbles, dead ends and simply general randomness . Such indirect meanderings are luxuries I cannot afford. Though I will continue to walk this path with my friends, I know I cannot rely on it alone.

Fortunately for me, I don't have to rely on the exploration of Play as Being alone. I have a Guide that knows the path well. It is well laid out and well trodden. There is no risk of meandering. It is direct and it works. I just follow that Guide's comprehensive instructions and I forge ahead.

But what of my comrades? Who can tell what is best for them? What will become of them? For some I see a flowering and the discoveries they make with Play as Being are leading to other things. Again, neither I nor they leave the practice of Play but instead we are inspired to explore outside the play. And some will in time, no doubt, find their own Guides and thence their own direct routes.

The odd thing, if it is odd, about all of this is that the core Play as Being technique has existed for a very long time. For centuries it has been known by different names and has been described in different words. The 9 seconds in 15 minutes is new, sure, but it is not the core practice, only a method for applying the practice. The actual practice of Playing as being Being is very old.

So the compassion in me reaches out. I am wondering whether the subversive nature of perception that playing as being (by whatever name) can potentially bring can exist safely for people in isolation from any encompassing practice. Many find it stunning, life changing and even disturbing to see, for the first time, what is actually beyond what convention calls reality. To suddenly glimpse the scale of the delusion we have been labouring under can be a massive shock. The assumption of peace or elation may be counterbalanced by the perception of all that needless suffering.

So I am starting to wonder what extra support Play as Being practitioners may need. I am wondering what extra instruction they might benefit from. On the other hand, I know full well that that would run counter to the idea of scientific experiment and the areligious basis on which the project is founded. Yet the only support environments I know of for this are religious, and I know that making a point of those would doubtless be off-putting to many and cut down the potential diversity of the cohort...

Well, I am just thinking aloud.

Emanations

A new koan: "When one being emanates as another, how can you tell who is emanating whom?"

Not really here

Storm is away at an empowerment retreat.
It's just possible you are imagining this blog entry.

A simple test

A discomforted mind is a deluded mind.