Be Nobody (27 page)

Watts is by no means the first or only person to recommend that we concentrate fully on the task at hand; and he's also not alone in
advising us to conceptualize all our activities in life as “play” rather than “work.” We naturally and easily do the first—engage thoroughly with what we're doing in the here and now—when we do the second, dropping the stress and compulsion to act and adopting instead a relaxed, playful attitude toward our daily tasks.

When we are at play, it is not because we
need
to do something, but because we really
want
to do it. As opposed to the onerous demands associated with the idea of “work,” we play simply because it's
fun
. In play, we continue to row our boats—and we do so quite assiduously and even strenuously—but we also row
merrily
, because it's fun to play.

One of the reasons so many spiritual teachers, theologians, and secular scholars have taken play quite seriously is that when we are at play we don't take things so seriously. We relax (without losing focus) and shed the stressful anxiety that comes when we obsess about the outcome rather than really getting into the process.

It's been said that we should lighten up on our way to enlightenment, and thinking about all our activities in terms of “play” rather than “work” can help us to do this.

Johan Huizinga, the author of the classic scholarly study on this subject,
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
, refers to the irreducible “fun element” lying at the heart of play: “Now this element, the fun of playing, resists all analysis, all logical interpretation. As a concept, it cannot be reduced to any other mental category.”
¹⁶
The essential purpose of play is that it has no purpose, which makes it both “fun” and quite different from our usual compulsive need to act. Play, Huizinga writes, “stands outside the immediate satisfaction of wants and appetites.”
¹⁷

The importance of the concept of play has been recognized for millennia in the world's spiritual traditions. In one branch of the religions of India, the concept of “play,” or “sport,” is known by the Sanskrit
term
lila
, and it was originally introduced as a stratagem for solving a perennial theological question: Why did God create the universe? Did God—who lacks for nothing and is complete in Him- or Herself—nevertheless have some
need
to create, some
purpose
behind bringing the world into existence?

In response to the accusation that God can't be the creator of the world, since God, being God and all, has no motive or reason to act, it was countered that God did create the world—but “merely in play.”
^IV
As William Sax writes in his aptly titled
The Gods at Play
, “The idea is that God's creation of the world is motivated not by any desire or lack, since these would be incompatible with his or her self-fulfilled and complete nature, but rather by a free and spontaneous creativity.”
¹⁸

In the Bhagavad Gita, we are explicitly advised to imitate the divine in our own actions, in the ongoing creation of our own lives. Krishna tells Arjuna, his student and friend, to act—to do what needs to be done—but to act like God does, not out of a compulsive need for self-aggrandizement, but totally and selflessly unattached to the results:

Arjuna, throughout the three worlds there is nothing whatsoever that I need to do. There is nothing unattained that I need to attain, and yet I still engage in action. . . . While those who are ignorant perform actions out of attachment, the wise one, unattached, acts in order to maintain the world.
¹⁹

Lila
describes action done out of freedom rather than necessity, out of a sense of prior and ongoing contentment rather than the neediness of the “if only” syndrome. It is the paradigm for action done for its own sake, the blueprint for karma yoga.

The purity of play has been seriously diluted in our modern, grown-up versions of “games” and “sports” and must be distinguished
from them. The overweening emphasis on winning as the purpose, especially in professional sports, where fame and fortune depend on victory, have compromised the “action for its own sake” nature of play in its essential form.

The quaint old aphorism “It's not whether you win or lose but how you play the game” has largely been forgotten and replaced by football coach Vince Lombardi's famous dictum: “Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing.”
²⁰

This preoccupation with victory is thoroughly tied up in the culture of narcissism we spoke of in the introduction. We're encouraged to think we're not “somebody enough” unless we're a real “winner.” And winners require losers. We often believe that we'll be a real somebody only if somebody else is less of one.

I once met a professional speed skater who was very, very good at what he did—so good, in fact, that he was sent to the Olympics, where he did very, very well. He came home with a silver medal. He was
the second best skater in the world
in his event.

And guess what? He was disappointed, because he was
only
second best.

Play in its uncorrupted sense isn't about trying to be better than others. But it also does not preclude healthy competition. Action done for its own sake, whether done alone (competing against ourselves) or in the company of others (competing against competitors), can bring out the best in all of us.

What the Tao Te Ching calls the “virtue of non-competition” is not about no competition, as the text makes clear. It is rather doing one's best—and wanting others to do their best too—all in the “spirit of play”:

The best athlete

wants his opponent at his best . . .

All of them embody

the virtue of non-competition.

Not that they don't love to compete,

but they do it in the spirit of play.

In this they are like children

and in harmony with the Tao.
²¹

And so it is that to act in the “spirit of play” we are pointed to the example of children. Children, before they are taught that the point is to “win,” exemplify the pure version of playful activity. If you've been around small children (or if you remember being one), you know that kids get totally and tirelessly absorbed in what is, after all, purposeless action.

Imagine going to a playground and asking kids why they're doing what they're doing—that is, asking what the
purpose
of the activity is. “Why are you sliding down the slide, little girl? What is the purpose of all this swinging back and forth? Why the teetering, then the tottering? What is your objective in going around and around in circles on the merry-go-round? And what exactly is the reason for climbing up and down that jungle gym?”

The kid would probably run away screaming to her mom or dad, terrorized and confused by such stupid questions coming from such a crazy grown-up!

The point of play is found not in the completion but in the process. As always, there's a beginning, middle, and end to the activity. You climb up the stairs of the slide and slide down, thus getting to the ground. Sliding ends when one reaches the bottom, but it's not in order to reach the bottom that one slides. In play,
it's all about the sliding
, not the
having slid
.

The kids got it right when it comes to action for its own sake. Play is not puerile or childish in the sense of being fatuous or foolish. But it is childlike to the degree that it embodies the simple, unencumbered
sense of wonderment and joy involved in acting mindfully and unselfconsciously in purposeless action.

It is this simplicity in behavior, purity in action, and humility rather than self-promotion—not believing that “winning is the only thing”—that led Jesus to answer the way he did when asked by his disciples, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
²²

As an Indian text asserts, the wise spiritual practitioner “does whatever comes to him to do, no matter if it's pleasant or unpleasant.”
²³
The adult version of childlike simplicity entails facing every responsibility—“pleasant” or “unpleasant”—with the same playful and lighthearted attitude. And so, the text continues, she “who is without desire in all undertakings behaves in a childlike fashion. Acts done by a pure one like this are without stain.”
²⁴

One final note about play. A
serious
person might, once again, object that using this analogy of “life as play” is immature and irresponsible. But as the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus observed, “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.”
²⁵

For all those good-hearted but perhaps overly earnest people out there, remember what's been said above about the relationship between karmic management and action for its own sake: There's no contradiction between working to improve oneself and the world, on the one hand, and selflessly losing oneself in action—making work into play—on the other. As we've seen, the former is actually done best when the latter occurs.

Acting as if it were all “just a game” (“life is but a dream”) is neither irresponsible nor uncompassionate, and we can once again return to the theology of
lila
to understand why. The “sportive” activity of God's play does not preclude the “supportive” or compassionate element of God's grace, as Norvin Hein has cleverly put it. They are reconciled in that they both are defined by the same absence of “calculation of any selfish gain”:

God's sportive acts and his supportive acts are one because both are done without calculation of any selfish gain that might be made through them. Both are therefore desireless . . . and between God's lila and his grace there is no inconsistency.
²⁶

•  •  •

Many forms of artistic expression also exemplify the purposelessness of action done for its own sake. It's not usually to fulfill some practical function that one paints, dances, sings, writes poetry, plays an instrument, or sculpts—although professional artists need to make a living too!

While the artistic endeavor often results in a product—a picture is painted, a form is sculpted, a dance has been danced—even the finished “work of art” is aesthetic, not utilitarian. Andy Warhol once remarked, “An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.”
²⁷

And the process of artistic creation is arguably more important than the product. “The object isn't to make art,” observed painter Robert Henri. “It's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”
²⁸
The purpose of artistic creation is to get into the flow of artistic creation. Like play, artistic activity in its pure form has no purpose other than itself.

In some instances, art is clearly created as ephemeral and transitory in order to highlight the importance of the creative process over the created product. Tibetan Buddhist monks labor for days, even weeks, painstakingly pouring colored sand to construct a mandala, an elaborate geometrical representation of the cosmos—and then completely destroy it upon its completion. In a similar fashion, Andy Goldsworthy assembles equally intricate designs over the course of many hours, with icicles that melt in the sun, twigs that are blown away by a gust of wind, or rock structures that are swallowed by the sea when the tide comes in.

Graffiti art (aka “street art”) is also often quite detailed and time-consuming to create, but usually with the expectation that sooner or later the civic authorities will scrub it off or paint over it. And performance art of all sorts is by definition, well,
performed
—it's the activity itself that's essential; not something else that is brought about by the activity.

Music and dance are particularly salient examples of artistic expression done purely for its own sake. There's no real purpose to either playing or listening to a piece of music other than the pleasure of aesthetic expression and appreciation. And we dance or watch others dance not because doing so produces some result or attains some goal, but simply because it's enjoyable to do or watch.

The meaning and purpose are in the music and the dance themselves. As Isadora Duncan memorably quipped, “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.”
²⁹

“A strong relaxation and calm comes over me,” reports another dancer. “I have no worries of failure.”
³⁰
Like with pure play, there's no winning or losing, success or failure, involved in pure artistic expression. While others might judge the dance or the poem to be “good” or “bad” according to some criterion or another, the creative
experience
of dancing or writing poetry is rewarding in and of itself.

As one nonprofessional dancer elegantly observed, when we give ourselves over to the dance, our mental afflictions temporarily evaporate, our sense of individual isolation dissolves, and we feel fully integrated with our surroundings:

While I dance, I cannot judge. I cannot hate. I cannot separate myself from life. I can only be joyful and whole. That is why I dance.
³¹

Art imitates life, it is said; and it's also said that life imitates art. From the point of view of karma yoga, we might also put forward the idea that life
should
imitate art, just as “work” should best be regarded as “play.”