Why We Are Here (The Meaning of Life)

Playing the Game and Shamanic Death

WHY WE ARE HERE (THE MEANING OF LIFE)
July 20, 2010

The doctrine says: Life is a school where we learn lessons. When we die, we return to Spirit where we realize we already knew everything. I always find myself wondering, "So, then, why did we need to learn any lessons?" I also find myself wondering, "What about all those tragic lives that seem beyond any learning of any lessons." I worry about the child soldiers dying in so many of today's civil wars, impoverished women volunteering to be suicide warriors, and on, and on.

So let's dump the doctrine. Skip the school, cancel classes, and take another look. Our world believes in doctrine, right thinking and right behavior, regular attendance, passing and failing. Spirit seems not to think like that, however. I sure don't know just HOW Spirit thinks, but it's unlikely to be so parochial, so constrained, so Islamic/Catholic/Marxist and focused on "rightness."

No one instructs in Shakespeare. No Shakespeare prayer so many times a day, no weekly Shakespeare services with mandatory attendance. No passing or failing, no winners in heaven or losers in hell. Better than doctrine. Shakespeare says: Life is a game we play, a drama we enact. "As You Like It," Act 2, Scene 7: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

To play a game, to perform on a stage, we deliberately forget our full selves and the nature of our true lives. We sink into the card deck, we shrink the universe to the curtains of the footboards. Only the rules of the game matter now—our bodies, our cultures, our planet. Our thoughts are fully occupied only by the unfolding of the play, whether game play, sports play, or dramatic play. We play.

Our most meaningful activity as mewling babes or whining schoolkids is PLAY. Schoolyards are filled with tiny adults setting up new rules to follow, arguing about the rules, or about who played according to these invented rules, and eventually learning the rules that have become a little more durable, like laws, adult society, and the like.

The shamans among us deliberately leave the game, the drama, and all that play that forgets the real universe, and leaving the stage or the game table go and consult with wiser spirits about fixing problems with, and getting better information about, the game and its nature. They talk to the playwright, the director, the stage hands, and they encourage them to do things during the drama. They talk to their buddies who can see the cards in their opponents' hands, the spirits standing over the shoulders of the other players—players who have forgotten the true nature of the game, in which anyone can, in fact, walk around the table and see every hand that's been dealt.

Sorry, John Edward, Sylvia Brown, and Dr. Chopra. Sorry, Lily Dale and Pope Supremus Ultimus. I left doctrine when I left religion. The universe is too complex, too shocking, too TOO, for all our nicey-nice pictures of fine children and proper young teachers. The universe indeed seems quite busy knocking all our pegs out from under us, each time in some unpredictable new way. We are not in control. The universe is. But we are playing along, hammering out new rules and ideas and roles: "They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts." We have forgotten—perhaps intentionally—what the greater Universe is about, and we play the play.

And when we finish playing (or sometimes, when we give up on life and fling our cards on the floor and stomp off, or even sometimes, when some other player kills one of us, shoving us off the stage or sweeping our board clear of the checkers), we go back to the fundamental reality. We meet all our ancestors again, and our spirit guides, and even the true Higher Selves of those who bet against our cards, or acted the role of villain. We go off together to enjoy, to watch other beings at play, or simply to be.

The joy of shamanic practice is the chance to talk to the powers behind it all, the Genuine Grown-ups who remember the full reality of It All. Shamans shove back from the table, travel to the skies, and bring back benefits that astound the other players. Shamans are never "merely players." They are death-walkers.