What Game Are You Really Playing?
The Origins of the Metaphor of Life As a Game
Since the 1600s, great thinkers have used the metaphor of life as a game or performance. Shakespeare famously wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” This suggests that real people are like actors assuming alternative identities enacting various dramatic, tragic, and comedic scenarios.
Fast forward to 1925, and metaphysical teacher Florence Scovel Shinn gave the metaphor new spiritual significance in The Game of Life and How to Play It. She suggested that life isn’t random but a purposeful simulation through which souls evolve in a cosmic classroom of sorts. Expanding on this idea, some perceive life on Earth to be a simulation through which souls learn by assuming identities that are not ultimate truths but part of a temporary human experience. In this sense life is intended as a journey in consciousness through which souls learn, evolve, and awaken.
Life As a Game
Much like a game, the journey of a lifetime involves choices, risks, outcomes, and a degree of chance. Indeed, we each make choices that have consequences and inform the possibilities to come. The game of life is a temporary creative process with a beginning and an end. But, unlike a game, our life, once initiated is not optional. We will live it one way or another, even if we choose to end it prematurely.
What is the Nature of Your Game
If life is a game, what kind are you playing?
Are you:
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Fighting for survival?
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Competing for scarce resources?
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Trying to make your dreams come true?
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Seeking to expand your conscious awareness?
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Awakening spiritually?
How would you describe the game of life that you are playing?
Your perception determines your playing field.
The game you see is the game you play. Some games are built around fear and lack. Others are quests for love, awakening, or understanding. Some perceive the games themselves to be hierarchical as in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He theorizes that we must meet our basic survival needs before we can entertain other higher pursuits. As we achieve each level of desire and expertise, we gain the ability to perceive and participate in higher games. But not all of us will. Many are content to live life within the purview of the mind and ego pursuing the temporary sating of perceived material and emotional wants and needs.
Or perhaps these games are multidimensional, where several “games” play out at once.
Multidimensional Games
I have come to experience myself as a soul pursuing a spiritual learning agenda while living life through the identity of Judith Johnson.
It has been my experience that I participate to some degree in multiple games simultaneously and to varying degrees. But I also notice an overarching trajectory whereby I have been focusing more and more of my attention on awakening my spiritual awareness and the process of transcending into soul awareness and beyond.
This typically requires inquiry beyond what is directly observable or measurable by the mind and senses. It delves into fundamental metaphysical questions about reality, existence, knowledge, the nature of being, consciousness, space, time, and causality.
As I elevate my game, what changes is largely a function of what I perceive to be real and what I value. For example, if I were a pickpocket seeing an angel, I would see pockets and if I were a critic I would look for something to criticize. But as I come to know God, other pursuits lose their pull.
Our difference in perception explains why people at different levels of awareness often misunderstand each other.
One interesting aspect of this multi-level game is that the more restricted our perceptual capabilities are the less we can comprehend or understand someone functioning from a different level of awareness. For example, Joe experiences life through his ego and denies the existence of God because he is looking at the world and asking, “how can a god let this kind of pain and suffering exist?” Through Joe’s eyes, Sam who speaks of experiencing God’s presence and love in his life appears naive. But Joe is making a common error. He is assuming that what he sees is reality itself rather than an interpreted reality perceived from a particular point of view.
One of life’s great lessons is that thinking something doesn’t make it true.
Another is that we assume that others perceive the same thing that we do.
So, What Game Are You Playing?
What do you value in your life? What do you believe is the purpose of your life? What are you seeking to experience or achieve?
Take a moment and ask yourself:
“How would I describe the game of life I’m playing?”
“What deeper game might be calling to me?”
When we begin to ask such questions, we move from being pawns of circumstance to conscious players in a sacred journey.
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