Well hello, Traveller!
I took a break from practice a few weeks ago. My exercise schedule and general busyness meant that when I sat down to meditate in the evenings, I would nod off. Meditation for someone with no commitments to a wife or children can still be difficult. That's one reason.
Another is that living alone and practicing meditation might seem like natural allies, and they are most of the time, but humans were not designed by nature and the forces of karma to live this way. Maybe a few hardcore types pull it off, but a lack of regular social contact in different contexts is unhealthy even for introverts. In my experience, if your only point of contact with the world is the people you work with, you will be spiritually impoverished. Like many Americans, I've family but very little contact with them. Most Americans, when they are younger, quickly find social networks to replace their families if possible, or live the lonely life. I am not lonely, but I do not get enough social contact, making real-life interactions, which are rare, harder to pull off smoothly. Varied, sustained social exchange is like exercise, something you do to be well.
In the first couple of years of practice, meditation was engaging, and I made every effort to practice walking and sitting. You hit a plateau, however, and that idea leads to a negative feedback loop. Meditation as fun, essential, liberating, etc. becomes an excuse to fall asleep.
The fact is, my ability to meditate has gotten better even with the fatigue, but I want to step away from it to reassess things. Lately, my thoughts have been especially negative because they are obsessed with work. Work life is like personal relationships: it goes through ups and downs, and if it is the only thing you have that defines you socially... well, let's just say it's not good. Meditation can be a respite from obsessive thinking, but it has to be balanced with other things in daily life. Using meditation as a way to escape from the inner din, or to avoid those parts of your life where the work seems daunting, insurmountable even, leads to it becoming a way to kill time in silence. It stops giving anything back because the merit, the work, however you want to say it, that it provides doesn't go anywhere. Meditators still live as humans, and they have to conduct human lives. Meditation as a loner activity for a loner lifestyle is counterproductive to liberation. It can turn into a form of self-sedation.
For several years, I've had recurring dreams of being in a bookstore, looking at many books centered on role-playing games. I've dabbled in RPGs since early childhood and got back into them as an adult, but found it was too hard to keep a group together for very long. People's lives make regular commitments to a weekly or bi-weekly gaming session very difficult. In the dreams, the point was to get back into them. The normal, mundane mind corrects life's imbalance through dreams. For those familiar with Jung, I expect that this comes as no shock. The mundane mind is resilient, corrective, and urgent in proposing solutions. If these solutions are ignored, then neurosis/es is the end result.
Virtual tabletop gaming has come a long way, and in the last month, I've signed up for two groups, one based on Traveller and the other, Dungeons and Dragons. I got exposure to both back in the early 1980s, and both systems have been a mainstay of gaming culture for nearly 50 years. Most gamers will admit that in-person gaming is still the intended and best way to game, but I'm finding the virtual side to be quite adequate and even better in many respects. The groups I've joined have been composed of all sorts of people. The older, Gen X Travelers are my type, matching my socioeconomic background and age. They are a fun bunch, given to storytelling, morally dubious actions with their characters, and humor. In the D&D group, I'm probably two decades older than the other members. Both virtual tables have lots of laughter, creative roleplaying, and camaraderie.
Roleplaying is interesting when you consider it as practice. As the name indicates, humans assume alternate egos in an imaginary universe. Because the character is an ego wholly fabricated by another ego, there is a pronounced tendency for the players to become attached – even deeply so – to their character. Melman the Archmage of West Endia is no more real than a unicorn or centaur, but through shared narration over many sessions with other humans, an attachment and identity form. If Melman meets his doom at the claws of demons on a demi-plane in a battle to save the Prime Material world from the armies of darkness, the human playing the character will feel saddened. Melman "dies," and the players seated at the table go through a kind of grieving. A campaign can span years in real time, and the shared stories between players can become a substantial basis for thinking and interacting in the real world, in meatspace.
As a Buddhist, I find role-playing with others insightful. Here, the basis for self-creation is laid out in a kind of laboratory of socializing. Are your appetites violent, prurient, or noble and compassionate? Then likely you will see these expressed in your character as he and his fellows confront new problems in an imaginary world. You may find yourself relishing the details and mannerisms of your new alter ego, going so far as to invent a new voice or to craft a deep origin story which becomes grafted into the campaign.
Telling stories around the hearth, the campfire, is as old as human language. Language as a means of survival through hunting and foraging has always been followed by the narration of purpose in a world where want, desire, poverty, and brutality are normative, always hanging just outside the periphery of life. Humans tell stories as much for survival as for anything. Without a narrative, we cannot build social ties, establish functioning social hierarchies, and so on. No matter how ludicrous or obscenely stupid we might think they are, the narratives are the mortar which holds the wall against the forces of chaos. They are also the playground for identity and ego-buttressing.
Stories of Jesus and Buddha were created and embellished by suffering humans who wanted to make some sense of their plight. Jesus, if he existed, became a seed that carried dozens of other pagan motifs and psychological archetypes. His historicity is almost immaterial to us now, whatever our posture; his psychological creation is relevant to everyone, even if we are not true believers, since it has shaped the modern world, from our holidays to our customs and ethics. Jesus is very much a part of your mental landscape whether you live in a jungle in Southeast Asia or in Paris. The collective imagining of him has shaped the course of human history.
But at the table, sitting with friends or over a Discord chat, ordinary people invent and create mythos. If we look at our character and compare him to our "true" personality, we will see shared traits. In some cases, a role player may consciously step out of his skin and adopt attitudes that might otherwise be at variance with his life as an ordinary Joe. I picked up a copy of Vampire: The Masquerade and am highly tempted to find a group just to see what's out there. The lore, people, and places are combined with an atmosphere that is intriguing for someone wanting to explore.
The term PC meant something very different to me as an 11-year-old. It meant "Player Character," not "Politically Correct." The latter meaning would come towards the end of the 1980s, when the pre-woke movement would show itself in the academy as a new speech code. Midgets became the "vertically challenged" and so on. Mentally handicapped became "differently abled." Language is the basis of storytelling, and if it is forcibly changed, then thoughts and actions will change. This is the theory of PC, and its later woke variant.
Throughout history, those with power have forced others to use a specific language that recognizes and protects their position, but doing this was really, really hard. In times gone by, few could read, and mass communication came from a tiny handful of state-sanctioned outlets. In the West, the language of the educated was Latin, which was very fixed, even if precise and elegant, but was confined. Mass communication meant things said or taught at Sunday worship – Mass. Today, it's advertising, conformity, spinning, shaping – in other words, manipulating whole populations.
At the tabletop, though, storytelling can still be organic and personalized. A group of humans working together to overcome a tribe of goblins employed by a mad wizard are engaged in the activity well known to their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Obviously, goblins and wizards were not a fantastic concern of theirs, but sitting down to solve a survival-related problem was. Role-playing is primeval in its roots and inspirations, and whatever the setting, the political ideology of its creators will quickly fade into the background as the players and a GM take over and put their own spin on it. No two groups of Travellers will have an identical take on anything, but there's still plenty of shared material.
It tickles me to participate in Discord chats with the gaming groups. We strategize, talk about our characters' hopes and dreams, or what we plan to do to so-and-so come next session. This means grown adults spend part of their week thinking about worlds, stories, and people that aren't real. But are we real? Buddhism would say no; we're not real, and all the things we believe are important are, on a certain level, ultimately as insubstantial as vapor. Our character may get into a heated argument with the chief of a space pirate band, and we, as the player, may feel it's real. This happens all the time. Fear can take hold of us when our character's hit points drop closer and closer to zero.
