Well hello, Traveller!
I opted to take a break from practice a couple or three weeks ago. My exercise schedule and general busy-ness meant that when I sat down in the evenings to meditate, 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 lack of regular social contact situated in different contexts is unhealthy even for introverts. If your only point of contact with the world is the people you work with, then you will be impoverished spiritually in my experience. 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 all sorts of effort to practice walking and sitting. You hit a plateau however and the idea of it as such leads to a negative feedback loop. Meditation as fun, essential, liberating, etc. becomes an occasion for falling asleep.
Fact is, my ability to meditate has gotten better even with the fatigue, but I want to step away from it to reassess things. My thoughts of late 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 was a respite from obsessive thinking, but it has to be balanced out 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, got back into them as an adult before finding it was just 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 has ways of providing correctives to the lack of balance in life via 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 to problems. If these solutions are ignored, then neurosis/es is the end result.
Virtual table top gaming has come along 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 going on 50 years now. 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, GenX Travellers are my type, matching my socioeconomic background and age. They are a fun bunch given to storytelling, morally dubious actions with their characters and humorous. The D&D group, I'm probably two decades older than the other members. There's much laughing, creative roleplaying and camaraderie at both virtual tables.
Role playing is interesting when considered from the perspective of practice. As the name indicates, human 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 the shared narration of stories over many sessions with other humans, an attachment and identity is formed. 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. The length of a campaign in real time can span years and the shared stories between players mean that it can become a substantial basis for thinking and interacting in the real world, in meatspace.
It is insightful as a Buddhist to role play with others. Here is the basis for self-creation 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.
The telling of stories around the hearth, the campfire, is as old as human language. Language as a communication for survival through hunting and foraging has always been followed up with the narration of purpose in a world where want, desire, poverty and brutality are normative, always hanging out just outside of the periphery of life. Humans tell stories as much for survival as for anything. Without a narrative, it is impossible to 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; the psychological creation of him 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, there is the invention and creation of mythos among ordinary people. 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 choose to step out of his skin and adopt attitudes which 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 story telling 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. For in times gone by, few could read and there were no instruments of mass communication being transmitted 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 table top though, the language of story telling can still be very organic, very personalized. A group of humans working together to overcome a tribe of goblins who are in the employee of 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 the idea of sitting down to solve a problem related to survival is. 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 character's hopes and dreams, or what we plan to do to so-and-so come next session. This means grown adults are spending a portion 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 important are on a certain level, but ultimately, as insubstantial as vapor. Our character may get involved in a heated argument with the chief of a space pirate band and we, as the player, may feel it to be real. This happens all the time. Fear can take hold of us when our character's hit points drop closer and closer to zero.
