Speaking of Mo Gawdat, I listened to his podcast Slow Mo, with Deepak Chopra. I noticed that Chopra’s mind seems to be getting even sharper as he ages, and I love how he articulates that what we call reality exists only in our imaginations.
I emphasize this to my creative writing students. Nothing is real, not even the stories they have about themselves, and if a writer cannot free themselves from structures they believe to be true, it’s unlikely that they will be able to effectively explore the higher realms of the Imagination.
Nothing about our story is real.
The first thing a writer should know is that the only reality is the one they create.
In a sense, we are living in a simulation, not in some kid’s computer, but it how our brains and entire physiology interacts with the energy and matter that surround us and constructs imagery and the other senses of experience and creates memory and pattern recognition.
Gawdat’s talk with Chopra was great conversation (Here’s a link), and if I remember right (because who has time to go back and listen again!) when Mo said that life was a game, Chopra amended that to say that life was not so much a game as it was “play.”
When you’re in a game you want to win. But a great life isn’t about winning, he says, it’s about playing. I couldn’t help but remember one of my favorite novel titles, a book I’ve never read, At Play in the Field of the Lord.
I love that title!
I imagine a bunch of us innocently playing tag in a field, hiding behind trees, jumping into ponds using straw reeds to breath underwater. The field of the Lord is the field of infinite possibility!
That’s something we should all strive for in life, to play in the field of the Lord.
Whatever the Lord is for us. Jesus. Buddha. Love. Poetry.
I don’t have many years left. I know I am dying.
I’m in act three of my life, so this is just a fact, not some morbid rhetoric on my part.
I have a four-year old daughter, Lucinda, who as I write this is next to me in my home office (this picture is now (or was). She’s writing and drawing. I want to teach her to play. I want her know to know that the entire universe is at her disposal.
Let me quote the brilliant Angela Carter from her story with “Wolf-Alice.”
It’s about a girl raised by wolves, one who the authorities capture and put into a convent to teach her how to be a “proper” girl, but who does not lose her wolfen instincts, her intuition, her embodiment of the wild woman archetype of which Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes. Alice begins to leave the convent at night to walk around for hours, like Santa Teresa was known to do inn Avila, and the combination of what she has learned and what she feels empowers her.
“She goes out at night more often now: the landscape assembles itself about her, she informs it with her presence. She is its significance.”
There is not separation from her and the energy and matter around her. It reassembles itself according to what she wants and needs.
I want my daughter to know that she has the power to play in any field she chooses.
Or like Marc Andreessen says:
“The world is a very malleable place if you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.”
The Writers' High 