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.

Play as Being 79

• They believe so much is at stake, these people around me who are separating and judging, minute by minute, generating their own stress and anger and holding on to it. It is so easy to resonate to their perceived reality, but instead I let it wash over me and wash away. Then is the time for faith: faith that I am in good hands, not their hands.
• Browser versions arise and they pass away. How like so many other things! These blog entries may look marginally different with Firefox 3.0 but the experience is the same.
• The image of Kuan Yin hangs, laser-cut, in the crystal block perched above my desk: an illusion of her form within an illusion of form.
• I am making a record: ink or graphite on paper, or twists in the magnetic pattern of a rust covered disc many thousands of miles away from where I sit by the River Clyde. I think "Why am doing this?" and I am reminded of the Akashic records that are already supposed to be recording every thought, word and deed. How can that work? "Easily," I think, as Being pervades all and is all.
  

Play as Being 78

• Launching off the edge into space, why should I fear? Either I catch myself, or a I fall into the arms of unlimited loving compassion. With either model of the universe, I am safe! Safe in that faith, I find I am battling years of wrong faith: the faith of separation.
• "If something can be remedied, why be unhappy about it? And if there is no remedy for it, there is still no point in being unhappy."
  ~ Shantideva, 9th century CE
• Being in a Play!
• Such deep, intense relaxation. Seeing myself in many mirrors.
  

Today I have added a "Books I'm reading" list to the left margin.

Play as Being 77

• How can I not have confidence!?

Achoo!

You normally gets enough forewarning of a sneeze to allow you to take appropriate action, to pinch your nose to prevent it, or to cover your mouth to stifle it. Today I sneezed with no warning at all and had no chance to do any of those things. Unique and very strange.

A few hours later, I realised what had happened. Incredibly it was my Dharma Protector who had made me sneeze, with no warning and with no time for any action, and so bring my dear Teacher out of an overlong meditation!

Play as Being 74

• A row of dancing trees by the roadside. Cars pass not noticing. I am in every car.
• A confluence of coincidences. A delay. A book. A message. And an opportunity to take up, once again, a meditation practice last enjoyed many centuries ago.

Play as Being 73

• Pure consciousness. Steady. Calm. Pervasive. Alive. I am all things.

Play as Being 72

No post for over a week. Has Storm lost interest? No! Storm in his recovery from illness instead lost all notion of time.

• This morning, I feel the bliss that we talked about last night at the tea house. Pure. Calm. Embracing. And it persists. There is no attachment. Only what is real. A place where faith is not a strained attempt to believe but a deep certain knowing.

Playing at Believing: "Why not?"

Last Saturday, on the same day I tried the "DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME" experiment, and in the same place, I was discussing things in Dharma class with a colleague. We recalled that Buddha Shakyamuni had said, "Whenever anyone develops faith in me, I am present," and they expressed to me that this was a difficult stumbling block for them.

I mentioned that one's own faith is a kind of switch. If you believe you are in the presence of a Buddha, you will receive the blessings of a Buddha. If you believe you are in the presence of a frail human teacher, you will receive the blessings of a frail human teacher. And there is no doubt you can feel the difference!

I told them that the secret might be just to say, "Why not?" and just experiment and give it a go. I had developed all sorts of abilities simply by being immersed in environments where people took it for granted they could do this or that thing I aspired to but that I had previously thought was beyond me. It was almost like giving myself permission to try it. Why not play as being that way for a while?

I told my colleague about Piet's Play as Being project and drew similarities for them. Why not just play at believing, I suggested? Just for a while? Suspend disbelief. No one else need know. Nothing to lose. Everything to gain.

I later told this story to my fiancée Michele. It had a profound effect on her. And afterwards she wrote the following:

"After an insightful conversation with Storm about faith and trust, I have done a great deal of soul searching. The way I understood him was to ask the question why not? Why not have faith beyond what we can experience with our worldly senses? Why not open ourselves up to possibilities beyond our wildest imagination?

"Along with my beloved Storm, I know a few (very few) people who see, hear and understand Beings that are totally out of my experience (in this lifetime at least). I sometimes ask Storm to ask a certain Being about a pressing problem I might be having. His response is usually, 'Ask them yourself. You can!'

This latest discussion with Storm has opened me up somehow. Why do I think I can never be in the presence of such beautiful, other worldly Beings? Why am I so different? With my practice of Buddhism now, I am told over and over that yes indeed the Buddha and all the Buddhas are with me during my practice and yes I WILL see them when I have eliminated enough of my delusions.

"One of my biggest delusions is fear. I have feared it. Why? Maybe I was not ready. I did not trust. Now it is clear that I am on the right path and am committed to becoming the most compassionate and loving person I possibly can be. There is no longer a need to fear anything! I no longer must fear somehow being sucked into the dark side. I am headed for the Light!

"So I have been meditating on what it would be like to be free of all delusions, to be stripped clean of any and all of them. What is on the other side of delusion? I have never thought this way before. I have no idea of what being without delusion would really be like, but I trust more and more it WILL all be revealed to me. I will see Buddha and all the Buddhas one day. I will see the other side of delusion! I will experience emptiness! I will know what it is like not to be separate, to be one with whole of everything. I am more open and trusting than I have ever been!