the worst sin of education is that it teaches taking life seriously.
There is nothing intrinsically serious about life. In fact, there is a great deal of the obviously comic about human life. But almost all cultures teach seriousness because it is a society’s way of ensuring that its social glue sticks. Once someone begins to consider life as a game, or a play, or a Dumb and Dumber farce, then the social glue loses its adhesiveness. Laughter is the great enemy of society. Armed revolution against a society is a blessing; it lets the society clamp down harder. But laughter – how can a society deal with that? Uneasily, to say the least.
‘But if we don’t take life seriously, then we might as well kill each other!’
Sure. But when was the last time you read of someone killing someone else out of playfulness?
Murder, it is said, is a serious business. It certainly is. And murderers are always intensely serious. And always right.
Seriousness is sickness. A child may be intense, but is at first rarely serious. He becomes serious only after consistent lessons from the adult world. A child’s natural mode is play; random, unserious, only sporadically competitive play. He loves games of pretend, whether he is the pretender or the adult. A daddy pretends to be a monster and the child shrieks and runs. He enjoys his shrieking and running; he even enjoys the fear he feels. It is a great game. In his games of cowboys and Indians or Luke and Darth Vader it is usually more fun to be the one shot and falling in a dramatic death than having the lesser role of simply pulling a trigger. You begin to know a child is in trouble when he always has to be the winner in these games and cries when he doesn’t win.
If we are to make a dent in the intense seriousness with which western man takes the ‘serious’ things of life – death, nature, love, success, work, enlightenment – then the idea of play must be made central to the idea of the liberated human. Of course, there is nothing playful about the concept of ‘liberation’ so we are stuck at the very beginning of our effort with a paradox. To achieve liberation, a ‘serious’ undertaking, we must become playful, which, as we normally use language, sounds unserious.
But this paradox is natural. Since our language is part of our entrapment, it is unlikely we can escape from our trap without doing violence to our normal usage. Yet even our entrapping language contains hints of the truths of liberation.
Take the very term ‘enlightenment’. Although the word is usually taken to mean ‘seeing the light’ or achieving ‘illumination’, it equally could mean ‘lightening up’, taking things lightly rather than seriously.
And even the idea of liberation implies a freeing from something, from bonds, bars, restrictions, limitations, from some sort of forced detention. It points to some sort of openness and uncertainty far more consistent with play than with order and purpose.
Eastern religions and paths have seen man’s sickness as caused by his false beliefs in dualities: self and other, good and evil, man and nature, God and not-God. Yet healthy as is this attack on the illusion of these dualities, it misses the far more basic sickness of seriousness. We live in a world of illusions, and seeing through them to the unity behind the dualities, while healthy and necessary, is not in itself the final goal but rather but one step to that goal. The goal is playfulness. As long as we see death as the opposite of life (a duality), then we can’t play with death. As long as good and evil are real, then life is a serious business. Once we have really destroyed the dualities there is nothing left to take seriously, but reading eastern philosophy one often wouldn’t know it.
Ego and self are built on seriousness. Ego is separation from nature and God and others and thus makes death frightening, nature frightening, God frightening and others frightening. Ego and self are comparison, and comparison is good and evil, right and wrong, success and failure, life and death.
Yet all these dualities, if played with rather than taken seriously, are the very substances that make our game-playing possible. It is not the perception of the dualities in and of itself that is sick. It is living as if the dualities are necessary rather than arbitrary, fundamental rather than artificial, real rather than creations. It is the seriousness with which they are taken that causes our misery.
PARABLE ABOUT A LIGHT FAILURE
In the beginning there was a playing field, with lights, and it was called earth, and the lights were called sun and moon, and it was good.
All creatures frolicked and played and died and were killed and were born and born again, and it was good.
And different creatures developed new equipment, so that the variety and complexity of the games was increased. Some developed fast legs, others hard shells, some wings to fly, others noses to burrow, others aqualungs to swim under water. No matter what new equipment they developed, the games went on and all creatures continued to play and it was good.
And one creature developed a brain which permitted him to outsmart some of the other creatures and to win many of the games and to invent newer and more complex games, and it was still good.
But then, one by one, in isolated, divergent places, some of these brain-filled creatures began to invent the game that there were no games, that the rules of various games were Divine Law and that the referee was God, or that the rules were scientific law and the referee was the scientist.
And the light went out and the playing field became for ever dark.
WHIM AND THE THREE SEEKERS
One day three seekers approached Whim as he sat on a barstool with a dozen of his followers in a local hangout called JOE’S EATS AND BOOZE.
‘O Wisest of Men,’ said the leader of the three, ‘we have searched the earth for a master who would free us from self and today we humbly place ourselves at your feet to await your instructions.’
‘You’re welcome here, friends,’ said Whim, ‘but you got the wrong guy.’
‘But, Honoured Sir, we have heard of your power and wisdom from one end of –’
‘I’ve never had a firm idea in my head in my whole life.’
‘But, Noble Sage, we have heard of miracles which you and you alone –’
‘Nothing but accidents, every one.’
‘But, Most Great Guru, dozens of students whom we’ve met on the road affirm that you have led them –’
‘I’ve never had a successful student leave me who knew his arse from a hole in the ground.’
‘But, Blessed Buddha, all who have heard you say that your words always convey a spec—’
‘My words never convey any more than the next fellow’s. They’re all lies.’
‘But, Most Mighty Seer, what then are we to do?’
‘Beats me, friends,’ said Whim.
‘You won’t help us, O Sacred Sage?’
‘I’m doing all I can,’ said Whim.
‘But, Magnificent –’
‘But you guys keep sticking up your “Great Blessed Mighty Sacred Buddha Sage” crap like a shield to keep me away.’
It is one of the many catch-22s of human existence that we set out seriously to seek enlightenment, and yet seriousness itself is a prime barrier to enlightenment. Carlos Castaneda created a wonderful Yaqui Indian sage named Don Juan (or Don Juan created Carlos – it’s a toss-up), and Don Juan spoke to Carlos of the sage living a life of ‘controlled folly’.
‘We must know first that our acts are useless,’ said Don Juan, ‘and yet we must proceed as if we didn’t know it. That’s a sorcerer’s controlled folly.’
When Carlos asked Don Juan to explain exactly what controlled