What is Reality?

Whatever appears to be happening.

What is a game?

Something you find yourself playing.

In reality games we play with whatever appears to be happening. Whatever your situation is, it can be played with. For no benefit. This is just an experiment to see what happens. I know you want benefits. I mean there are loads of benefits apparently but that’s not why we play. I know you’re trying to make good things happen, I know you hope you’ll improve your fitness, sleep better, lose weight, make friends, become more productive, be more creative. How do I know this? Because everyone on the planet has been taught that whatever is currently happening isn’t enough. It’s a little bit too…. or not quite…  Everyone on the planet has been taught to use this moment to build a better moment in the future. And often we feel we aren’t able to do that and so we spend this moment feeling guilty that the reason this moment isn’t what we wanted it to be is because we didn’t do more in previous moments. This is all an illusion. Nothing can be different to how it is and no one has made things this way. Life is an unfolding dance of energy that takes the form of apparent individual people running around trying to get their needs met. Whether and how and when those needs get met has nothing to do with the individual’s efforts to meet those needs. This is all a story. We don’t look like trees or rivers or squirrels but we are just like them.  No intentional effort is needed for a tree, a river, a squirrel or a human being to be a successful tree, river, squirrel or human being. There is no separate individual personal entity being or doing tree or river or squirrel or human being. But in the case of human beings at least it is widely felt that there is a separate individual entity controlling actions and thoughts and directing the life of each person. This is a mistaken illusory belief as the Buddha put it : “actions happen, thoughts happen but there is no doer or thinker thereof”. Whether you feel it or not, you are the universe expressing itself as and through whatever you take to be yourself in this moment. The only thing that cannot reasonably be doubted is that something is happening now. Whenever you remember this you can play with it.