WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT?
Introduction
His shoulders were slumped and his head bowed down and forward, as though his immortal spirit could barely hold erect the burden of his humanity. But before he died - and he is quite cold dead now - he rose up and actually lived for a while, fully savoring and participating in the process which LIFE really is (or can be). In the process, he inspired people. Then he sank back into the stupefying manner of living which we have all been taught and, perhaps sooner than necessary, passed on from this life. You, dear reader, will also be dead soon enough. What will you do between now and then? Will you participate in such a way that your children, and others around you, and perhaps even yourself, are inspired? Or will words like "miraculous" and "God" leave only a chilled unbelief in your wake?
Why do so very many people live so dreadfully badly? Why do we have entire professions, populated by such as "lawyers" and "therapists" and "doctors," which are specifically and exclusively designed to participate in people's DeathGames instead of assisting humans in the creation of LifeGames?
Are you winning right now? On a profound level? What about people around you, are they winning? Do you "think" or "feel" that anyone is winning on a consistent basis, that anyone is consistently "effective" at this thing we call "life?"
Winning, even winning on profound levels, does happen, although for most the experience is ephemeral. There are, after all, things a person must know if winning in life is to be the condition. But those are most certainly not the things we have been taught. Not even by the overwhelming majority of our teachers, including our ministers, who give lip service to useful fragments, but whose lives stand predominantly as monuments to mediocrity and depression. Their "good intentions" have paved the path to their own personal hells because they, too, live from the DeathGame-derived ideas, the "truths" which inhabit our "homes" and our "schools" and our places of mere "work" and our places of "worship." These "truths" sit at our tables and devour our children, just as they devoured our ancestors. They consume our passion and our love and our aliveness and our relationships and our health and everything else we truly and deeply value. And they leave us mumbling, as though incoherent, about the importance of "survival." As though thriving was not the real issue.
But Death is in the process of dying. And as DeathGames rasp and rattle toward their special and deserved oblivion, LifeGames are beginning to come to the fore. This emergence is being accompanied and nurtured by the new profession of WinCraftingTM. WinCraftingTM does not have its roots in the deadened souls of the lawyers and therapists and other morticians and "managers" of DeathGames, but rather in the indomitable spirits, if not always the day-to-day lives, of our artists and musicians and actors. These latter have, through it all and in the dim light in which we have been trained and have chosen to live, pointed to the possibility that creation, not reaction, is an option during the experience of being human. As though God is everywhere and the opportunity is, in Mother Teresa's oft-repeated refrain, "to make something beautiful for God." And, in the process, to use the resources of the earth, including the raw materials and the relationships, to create the human experience we universally hope for with regard to our children.
Are LifeGames your consistent experience, moment by moment, in being alive? If such possibilities live only in your hope, or reside mostly there, then set out on the journey, become a pioneer into the domain of the LifeGame and of WinCraftingTM. This invitation is not into a "reasonable" relationship with life, but rather an outrageous relationship. What might your life have been about if you had really lived? What might it yet be about should you stop looking for some path not yet taken and, instead, choose to travel the same path in a manner which is about LIFE, which is full of LIFE, not merely "life," and which generates the manifestations of LIFE, instead of the "life" which must, of its nature, be borne on slumped shoulders?
There are things you will have to know, there are choices you will have to make. The looking must begin in the territory in which we have been "living."