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The Lila of Maya
The play of Illusion
Buddhism
(likewise Christianity, Islam, Vedanta and the several hundred other
religions now mostly dead) is a game, like football, chess, snowboarding or
snakes and ladders. A game has
four goals. It is designed to 1.
Experience winning (or surviving) and savour the joy of success (or
survival). A game is a means to joy and the benefits that joy brings, namely
the energising (enlightenment) of those who can’t win (i.e. the losers = the
energy depressed). 2.
Train for winning (= survival). A game serves to train for survival
fitness, fitness being demonstrated by surviving/winning. Training by means
of a game (usually provided in specialist schools, clubs or meditation
centres (a euphemism for asylums)) is needed to prepare (i.e. adapt or
upgrade) an individual’s physical and mental functions and skills to survive
(= win) either in the everyday world or in real or imaginary particular
world, for instance, in a limited sub-culture (world) or a ‘next world’.
Preparation for entry to any world is necessary because in it the individual
faces life-threatening competition, indeed mortal combat, or, as medieval
Christian ecclesiastics (including the murderous thugs who ran the Inquisition)
would say, God’s judgement. Unskilled, unprepared, a player in the everyday
or any other ‘world’ is quickly eliminated. 3.
Distract from the current reality, thereby allowing the player to
relax from the stress produced by that reality. 4.
Keep the unruly out of mischief (i.e. from harming themselves and
others). More specifically stated, a game, i.e. play in a specifically
constructed artificial reality/world, is a means of temporarily or
permanently socialising the asocial. A game is an
arbitrary set of functions operating within arbitrarily set limits of time
and space, physical or mental, ending in an arbitrary outcome (i.e. a goal).
Consequently, a game is a fictional reality/world. Because both a (i.e. any
one of n) game’s functions and its spatial (understood as either a clearly
defined physical area or a limited information base) enclosure of those
functions are arbitrary, and its outcome too, a game as such has no meaning
beyond itself. Because in itself a game has no meaning, its stated goal/end
acts as a red herring though its actual outcome, i.e. the side and end
effects of playing, is a real herring. Hence, a
game is fundamentally both empty (Sanskrit: sunja = nil = zero) of
(permanent) own being (Pali: atta or sva-bhava) and temporary.
For the part-time, less than @100% player (i.e. the lay person), a game is
basically a training routine played out in a fictional/phoney world designed
to produce the skills necessary for survival in the everyday world or a
particular sub-world (read: sub-culture). In a word, a game is akin to
sparring in boxing. Sparring is less dangerous than getting into a real fight
for one’s life, and which happens in the everyday real world. For the
full-time, @100% effort professional player, the game is his everyday real world.
The professional lives and dies in his fictional reality and which he
experiences as real because he applies himself fully, hence exclusively to
it. When does a
game stop being a game? When your life depends on it. Nothing concentrates
the mind more than the threat of imminent death (or injury). Full
concentration (into the game) changes a game into a survival means. Turning a fiction into a personal fact Topics Index
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