140 - What if Play Reveals the True Nature of Existence? (Showmanship & Play 22 of 30)

What if our capacity for play is not just a quirk of evolution but a fundamental way we grasp reality? Much like sight reveals color and hearing reveals sound, could play be a sense that unveils essential dimensions of existence otherwise hidden from us?

Captain Frodo challenges us to reconsider the nature and value of play beyond its utilitarian functions. While science often explains play through its evolutionary benefits—practice for hunting, social bonding, developing cognitive flexibility—these explanations miss something crucial: the joy of play itself. When we watch a crow repeatedly sliding down a snowy roof on a plastic lid, flying back up only to slide down again, we witness something more than adaptive behavior. We glimpse a consciousness experiencing pleasure in the moment.

The episode draws heavily from Johan Huizinga's groundbreaking work "Homo Ludens," exploring how play predates human culture and may well be the foundation from which our entire civilization emerged. Law, war, philosophy, art, religion—all these domains of human achievement might have their roots in playful behavior. If so, dismissing play as unimportant or merely instrumental severely limits our understanding of what makes us human.

This perspective reframes our relationship with reality itself. The playful approach to the world isn't an escape from what's real but an engagement with a different facet of it. When we play, we're not just entertaining ourselves—we're accessing a dimension of reality that our purely logical or utilitarian approaches cannot reach. This has profound implications for how we teach, learn, and solve problems.

As this episode marks the conclusion of an extended exploration of play, Captain Frodo invites us to recognize ourselves—especially artists, performers, and "misfits"—as the embodiments of homo ludens, the playful human. In our play, we're not just having fun; we're revealing essential truths about reality itself.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to the Watershed Moment
• 8:02 The Purpose of Play Beyond Utility
• 17:32 Play as Experience, Not Function
• 28:43 The Playful Nature of Reality
• 42:12 Play as a Sense for Grasping Reality
• 50:32 Serious Play and Cultural Creation
• 56:43 Closing Thoughts on the Playful Human

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:11

Greetings, fellow travelers, and welcome to the way of the showman, where we view the world through the lens of showmanship. I am Captain Frodo and I will be your host and your guide along the way, and we're reaching a kind of watershed mark here. This is the beginning of the end of this exploration of showmanship and play. We've spoken a lot about it and we're going to do a kind of long episode today and we are going to then, after that, we sort of put a capstone on the exploration of play. We explored in the beginning showmanship and then we have been exploring play for 20 episodes almost, and then after this we're going to look through the criterias, the five criterias, and kind of just try to make that metaphorical bell ring a little more frequently than it has in the last few episodes, as we have focused mainly on play, and some of that heavy lifting of dinging those bells and looking for the metaphorical connections would have to be made by you, which I hope by now that you are doing so. Just a quick synopsis of what we talked about last time. We talked about serious play and one of the things we talked about was how a child playing Zorro would then be able to live themselves into the character of Zorro, not just running around and being Zorro on the outside, but embodying Zorro, getting to understand what it would be like to be in Zorro's state of mind, or what parts of the world are now available to me that I didn't see or didn't experience before, because I have taken on the mindset of Zorro. I have taken on the mindset of Zorro. So in that way, going with John Wawicki, serious play is a kind of play with identity. But also we look then at the serious nature of play in terms of as if I'm using that term as if which we talked about in season two in regards to Richard Wiseman's work in his book as If, the as If principle of how you know, to a certain extent it is true that if you act like something, then you will become that. Not in terms that if you act like a CEO of the world's biggest company, then you will become that, not in terms that if you act like a CEO of the world's biggest company, you will become that, but if you act and think yourself happier, you can make it that way, etc. But we didn't talk about that last time. That was just to put that into perspective, because this as if principle is also then, through the work that we looked at last time, robert Bella and Johan Heutsinger how they see play, and taking play seriously and being in an as if relationship to reality in a very particular way forms the foundation not just for rituals, but eventually also for religion, and perhaps you could say that then.

Speaker 1: 3:34

I heard JF Martell, on an episode of Weird Studies, talk about how all the different trappings of religions, or all the manifestations of religion, are actually aspects of art, even the books, the stories that are being told. You could think of that very much like art, poetry, literature, the way that the person is standing on the stage or the pulpit and presenting something, the words or the way that the songs go, the way that if you take away the songs and the paintings and you take away the stories and you take away all these things that are aesthetic at their essence, there isn't really anything left, and it doesn't matter which religion it is. Once you take away the artful things, there is not so much left. So that sidesteps the whole issue of whether God actually wrote it or whatever, but we know that there was a human being that wrote the book, even if it was dictated by God, but we're getting off the topic here. That was just a little thought on the end of that, end of that. But it also brings up the fact that this uh, final, um, part of our exploration of, uh, of play as a thing in itself, is indeed heavily inspired by an episode that weird studies, which has rapidly become over the last seven months or something, eight months, has become my go-to podcast to listen, to love the word studies. And I discovered that by searching on a book app that I have called Everand used to be called Scribd and now it's called Everand and there this episode came up when I was looking for something to do with play or whatever. I was looking for one thing and this thing came up in the thing and I listened to it and the episode was wonderful and it set me on a, because they have 150 episodes or something and also comes out biweekly, like my episodes do and it just captured me. And I then read JF Martel's wonderful book, very inspiring, which is called Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. Great book, great book, absolutely. So this episode owes the debt to the weird studies and, with that said, let's move on in to the playful world of ideas, the playful nature of reality.

Speaker 1: 6:17

In the first chapter of Homo Ludens, heutzinger lists some of the many reasons for purposes of play, many of which we have looked at extensively and some we haven't like a superfluous amount of vital energy, a need for relaxation, an imitative instinct, learning and practice for the work of adulthood in the way of securing the propagation of a species. All these are reasons that he looks at, and we've also looked into these questions, and it seems like the most straightforward way to find out why play is valuable and meaningful. You know that's the first step that we do is to go through these things and go oh what are these things? Because we find then out what play does, and often from an evolutionary good of the species kind of way, we go okay, well, they do these things. This thing leads to that, and that it's the kind of questions and roots of interrogation that we pursue when we don't understand something Like dreams.

Speaker 1: 7:20

All animals sleep, and animals as diverse as octopuses, dogs and birds they all dream, so say those who study it. So if everybody dreams, then we must immediately assume that we dream for reasons other than just dreaming. What if, dreaming and play though, it turns out that it wasn't for something beyond itself, which is now, of course you know, it's ringing that little bell to go. Isn't that exactly what play is? It's something that's being done for its own purpose, not for something beyond itself. So what if we took that criteria too? That play is apparently purposeless, but because it is done for its own sake, if we take that seriously and ask what if dreaming and play actually has value in and of itself? So when I sit in my caravan outside the circus and watch Teddy play with one of the four other dogs at the showgrounds, I can immediately see that they are playing. They're chasing and running and fighting, but not really fighting. The behavior is completely meaningless by most measures. Yet, as I will argue, it is necessarily meaningful to the players, not for future utility but for the experience in the moment. Future utility but for the experience in the moment.

Speaker 1: 8:47

That's not to say that all the reasons we have talked about and that Heutzinger mentions aren't real long-term benefits of play. But just because it might turn out that something has a certain function down the road doesn't mean that this is the reason that it exists in the first place. For example, the drug warfarin was initially approved in 1948 as mouse and rat poison, but then in 1956, it became approved as a blood-thinning drug for humans. It wasn't made to help humans avoid blood clots, yet this is also what warfarin is, but the future use was not the reason it exists. Or to go more general, our vestibular sense in our inner ears that allows us to ride unicycles and keep our balance and all that, but it does allow us to ride unicycles, but that's not the reason that it exists. Or even more generally, light at different frequencies appears as colors when we see it, but that's not why there are different wavelengths of light, or is it?

Speaker 1: 9:57

After Heutsinger has looked into all these reasons, practical and instrumental uses for play then he brings up the question of what play is and what it is in itself, not as a function of anything or a producer of anything. What is play when it isn't measured by any other yardstick than itself? What is the phenomena of play? And he has a bit to say about that, which I think is kind of good. So Heutzinger says, all these hypotheses have one thing in common they all start from the assumption that play must serve something which is not play, that it must have some kind of biological purpose. They all inquire into the why and the wherefore of play.

Speaker 1: 10:48

The various answers they give tend rather to overlap than to exclude one another. It would be perfectly possible to accept nearly all the explanations without getting into any real confusion of thought and without coming much nearer to a real understanding of the play concept. They're all only partial solutions of the problem. If any of them were really decisive, it ought either to exclude all the others or comprehend them in a higher unity. Most of them only deal, incidentally, with the question of what play is in itself and what it means for the player. They attack play direct with quantitative methods of experimental science without first paying attention to its profoundly aesthetic quality. The perimeter and primary quality of play as such remains virtually untouched when we're exploring all these other things.

Speaker 1: 11:53

To each and every one of the explanations so-called it might well be objected. Well, so far, so good. But what actually is the fun of playing? Why does the baby crow? The baby crow would pleasure? Not the baby crow. But why does the baby crow would pleasure? Why does the gambler lose themselves in their passion? Why is a huge crowd roused to frenzy by a football match?

Speaker 1: 12:23

This intensity of an absorption in play finds no explanation in biological analysis. Yet in this intensity, this absorption, this power of maddening lies in it, lies this the very essence, the primordial quality of play. Nature, so our reasoning mind tells us, could just as easily have given her children all those useful functions, like that we talked about before discharging super abundant energy, or relaxation after exertion, or training for the demands of life, of compensating for unfulfilled belongings, etc. It could give us to us in the form of a of compensating for unfulfilled belongings, etc. It could give us to us in the form of purely mechanical exercises and reactions, but no nature. She gave us play, with its tension, its mirth and its fun. End quote Could it not be that play, first and foremost, is important as a thing in itself, that to fully grasp what play is, we must seek its purpose and nature not as anything other than play, but as a valuable way for life to interact with the environment.

Speaker 1: 13:47

Reduced or limited to a product of biological function for survival and reproduction, we completely lose the aesthetic and experiential aspect of play, which is the enjoyment of the experience. Play is not about survival, it is about modulation of experience. To be human is to have a human experience. It's what Thomas Nagel points to when he asks what is it like to be a bat? The fact that it is like something, to be a bat or to be a human, is fundamental to consciousness. Thomas Nagel famously said that an organism has conscious mental states if, and only if, there is something that it is like to be that organism, something it is like for the organism, and in this he places the experience of being anything as synonymous with the consciousness of that organism.

Speaker 1: 14:50

Yet the powerful aesthetic dimension, which undeniably is part of our human experience, is almost always neglected, downplayed or ignored. Oh, it's just aesthetic, it's just how it looks, it's just how it feels, it's not important, that's a sunflower. But you're looking at the details, it's of this. Well, that's just that particular sunflower, or whatever. They're picking up the picture that we talked about last time between a scientific planche or illustration of a sunflower and the ecstatic truth of van gogh's Sunflowers. So the fun and enjoyment of the play is refused out of hand as an explanation for the existence of the phenomenon. It's like it can't be that and they just throw it aside, even though practically all scholars of play says that the first person reasons for play, for why we play, is that it is super enjoyable.

Speaker 1: 15:54

Play is ancient as a phenomena. It precedes the human. Goes back at least as far as the dawn of mammals, back in the Triassic Age, as we saw, but arguably it might precede even that. Certainly it's also a behavior that we share with birds and cetaceans like dolphins and whales, killer whales and other kinds too. They all play.

Speaker 1: 16:21

I saw a clip on YouTube of a crow that has been filmed using some kind of plastic lid as a sled to slide down a snow-covered roof, and not just like one time by accident, no, it slides down on its whatever yogurt lid on sled and then it gets to the bottom and it stops itself. And then it picks up the plastic lid in its beak, flies back up to the top of the roof, gets back onto the lid and slides back down again and keeps doing it several times over how I would have wished to be able to fly back up to the top of the hill when I was sledding in my childhood in norway. But my point is that the crow is doing that because it is fun. It is doing it for the experience. That crow is having a great experience, which seems to me to be incontrovertible proof that the bird has an interior.

Speaker 1: 17:18

There's something like I mean, people don't doubt this, but still you, you gotta, you gotta find examples of it so that you can understand it. So it's not probably so controversial a claim, but behaviorism behaviorism like bf skinner and all that big in the 50s and onwards, and also renee descartes their influence which was saying basically that animals weren't conscious and therefore had no capacity to experience pleasure and pain. They said otherwise. Descartes said you can hit a dog with a stick and it yelps, but it's just instinct. It doesn't actually feel pain. But regardless of these idiotic assumptions, all we see in animals as they wince and writhe when we torture them are just empty, meaningless instincts. That's what Descartes said. So I find this to be an absolutely ridiculous claim, and in this I'm not alone.

Speaker 1: 18:20

So if we assign play to all animals and some birds, would it then be so strange to imagine that the flocking behavior of so many more birds is a kind of play, that the swirling balls of herring is not the herring's way of expressing their joyful playfulness? It seems to me that we continue to discover just how much deeper consciousness and sentience goes all the time, and as we get better and better at understanding animals like fish or even organisms like bacteria, it seems harder and harder to argue that it's not like something to be them, that they have some sort of experience of reality and that there is consciousness and, by extension, that there is meaning, if not all the way down, then certainly very much further than what Descartes thought. And where there is interiority and where there is, then, consciousness like this play is potentially, if not present, then certainly an adjacent, possible close by, like a rock just below the surface in the ocean. So if human minds play and animal minds play, how far down does play go? Does it go all the way into the world's production of rainbows and sunsets and rivers? Are we in play, seeing a facet of reality, and can we only grasp this facet of reality when we play? Reality is a multifaceted thing, never ending in the ways it is and presents itself to sentient beings. We're only ever seeing a limited aspect of it.

Speaker 1: 19:58

And if I hold up a book before you, you might if you don't overthink it, it might appear that you see the whole book. Yet at any given moment, the book always has a backside which you don't see, let alone everything which is written inside it, each word making sense on its own, but also connected to the words before it and after it. The meaning of the word modulates as the meaning from the sentence it is a part of is revealed. Each word means something in itself, but when the sentence is done, then you have a different meaning. The layers of meaning keeps expanding as sentences become paragraphs and paragraphs become pages, which forms chapters and then the whole book, each layer from book to book or from beginning to end, and all that.

Speaker 1: 20:49

It's at once a part and a whole. This is called the hermeneutic circle, talked about by people, like many people, but Gadamer and the hermeneutics. It's a whole thing in semiotics and understanding interpretation, the fact that meaning is not just the book, what it means. It's like we can pick things apart and all that. Anyway, what we understand of the book, of any book, is dependent on each part, and each part is also understood by the understanding of the whole. So each part relates to the whole and the whole relates to each part, and that nature itself is a book.

Speaker 1: 21:34

It was a philosophical concept which dates back at least to the Middle Ages, which you know. It predates the printing press, when books were handwritten bits of vellum, like of fine goat skin sewn together, or parchment, I guess, but that the book of nature being the ultimate book is not such a big leap then, once you have this ultimate leap of logic, and that this ultimate book of reality itself, then, can only be understood hermeneutically, like each aspect of reality being informed by any and each other. So any whole, like a mountain, turtle or a continent, is itself a part of something greater and can also be broken down into practically infinite parts, infinite parts, and perhaps this is where we have this, is this joy of discovery that will go on endlessly, because with each discovery and new insight we get, from that we get from reading or grasping a further aspect of reality, I think that there is a pleasure. Each detail and how this fits into a greater whole, or how what we thought was a whole turns out itself to be, um, just a part in an even greater whole, that fills us with joy. It certainly does with me, and at least it does so when, when we sorted out ourselves, when we find it, and then I find those things links and go, oh my, this is connected to this and that's this, and oh, awesome. So there might be times when a geometry teacher reveals how a triangle is related to a line, and there is no joy in the student, but the self-motivated discoveries of connections and relations between things and processes are satisfying.

Speaker 1: 23:34

So for me, when I drew the connection between the two points forming a line, being the showman and the audience, and how then, when the third point arises from it, it's still 180 degrees and we get a triangle, and then we have the show that emerges between the showmen, and when I thought that it felt tremendously, blew my mind. And it blew my mind still blows my mind every now and then, like when I talked about it in 15, 18 episodes ago. So I certainly love moments of insight. And when I realize how certain things influenced and continue to influence each other, how one thing that I've already understood all of a sudden makes me understand something else, I find this immensely pleasurable. And when Archimedes got his insight about displacement of water and mass, as he hypocritically at least that's the story that they say that as he lowered himself into his bathtub and water poured out over the edge, he was so gripped by enthusiasm and joy that he ran naked through the streets shouting Eureka, eureka, which means I've found it, I've found it. He was overjoyed to the point of bursting, getting completely lost in only the outburst of pure celebration.

Speaker 1: 24:53

So what is it about grasping reality that is enjoyable for human beings? It's like that imaginative process of when you lower yourself into a bath and then the water goes out, and that interconnectedness. You see, oh, it's all a whole and you make this connection. What is it about all of that, that act of imagination that happens there, an internal thing grasping something external, when our inner geography is powerfully and meaningfully lining up with the outer geography? Why is this so truly enjoyable? Well, we can hear, of course, go the route of humans as gene replicates, machines of flesh. That secures their propagation, not even of the species, but of the genes in our DNA.

Speaker 1: 25:47

But I'm instead not interested in that. I'm asking the question again what if the joy of play and the enjoyment derived from encountering the ludic universe, the playful universe, is a kind of sense, that revealing a particular property of existence? What if this way of being in the world, when we are playfully in the world, imaginatively in the world, when we're playing with rules rather than following the rules, following our own self-motivation, just doing it for its own sake, for the fun of it, is this a sense that reveals a particular property of existence. Is there something like a play sense, as we have more senses than the common five that we often talk about sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. We also have, like we just mentioned before, the vestibular sense, which is what we use to sense movement and balance, that little spirally snail house thing inside our middle ear, inner ear, and we have proprioception, which helps us understand where our body parts are in relation to each other. And that's so.

Speaker 1: 27:05

Even in the dark you might be able to reach out and flick on the light or whatever. Even in the dark you might be able to reach out and flick on the light or whatever. But regardless of how many senses we have, the sum of them all is one important way for us to grasp reality. When we use microscopes, echolocation, x-rays, infrared telescopes or radio receivers, we're extending those senses and tapping into areas of reality we as a species don't have naturally access to.

Speaker 1: 27:34

With instruments, we can see the ultraviolet markings on flowers that bees can use to guide them towards the nectar, but which is invisible for us. There's all these marks and patterns. That's something to google for you. Google ultraviolet patterns on flowers or be how bees see flowers. It's like landing strips and all sorts of, and you go around thinking you know, have the measure of a flower. And then you look at it in a light, the light frequencies that the bees can see but that we can't see. And then you have to readjust your um understanding of reality and to see that, yeah, you couldn't see it all you thought you did and you're very certain. But then incontrovertibly, right there, the world is more than you thought it was. So without instruments we can't see ultraviolet or infrared light.

Speaker 1: 28:25

All of our many senses and all our tools and instruments are ways to grasp certain facets of reality. We're observers and through the combination of all of our senses and our sense-extending tools, we grasp the environment and the universe. But this is not the end of our way to grasp the world. Within us, we connect all these sensory inputs into concepts, ideas and distinct experiences. Through our thinking we create mental categories, which allows us to go beyond the individual. As important as it is to see a birch tree as a being, by facing it and relating to it as if it was another person, animal or sentient agent, it is also a powerful human capability to be able to see that tree not just as a collection of colors, shapes and movements, but to recognize the kinship of this individual tree or this individual conglomeration of shapes and colors, etc. That you go. Oh, this particular shape or outline has a lot in common with a lot of other conglomerations of colors and shapes. This is in fact the particular conglomeration that we call birch trees.

Speaker 1: 29:48

So I don't think my dog Teddy has much of an understanding of the or interest in the difference between birch and elm as he pees on them when we go for our walks together. It is certainly outside of his interest and perhaps outside of his ability even to conceptualize. Yet, without digressing further, perhaps a birch and an elm smells completely different and that he is completely aware of their distinction. And what I am experiencing as disinterest in him might be a result of it being so matter-of-factly as to not being worthy of it being expressed.

Speaker 1: 30:25

But getting back to the point, the process of perception does not end with the sensory impulses from our eyes and our ears and other organs as it enters into us, the grasping of the world, to the extent that we humans can do, you know, it also includes thinking. Thinking is another major inroad into reality. We also think our way into the world. Sensing and thinking are ways to connect to and discover relations. But what if our ability to play is another way to discover relations in the world and to relate to the world An open, unfinished yet unnamed way of approaching the world.

Speaker 1: 31:14

When I'm hand in hand with my daughter in our local shopping centre and on our way to buy dog food and the latest Donald Duck comic, and she tugs and yanks my arm because she skips and steps and jumps along the tiles to avoid the cracks of grout, she is accessing the world in this third way, not sensing, not thinking. Is she then refusing to take the world as it is given? Those are tiles, merely a practical way to pave the floor. Yet in her choice to step only on the grey tiles and not on the white ones, in her choice to step only on the grey tiles and not on the white ones, is she not so much recreating the world as she is? Being in the world differently, not logically inquiring, not aesthetically looking at it, not just using it as a surface to walk on. She is interacting playfully with it and thereby experiencing the world differently, or even experiencing a different world, a world which is also real, also possible.

Speaker 1: 32:16

Play shakes us free from what we think we know, revealing. Whatever we named it, however much we thought we had the measure of something, there is always more to encounter, always more ways to relate, and that this way of relating it is actually exceedingly joyful. Let's return to the thoughts that we talked a lot about in the beginning, of connection and play, of connection and play, getting those two terms sort of crystallized by Nala in his wonderful book the Clown Manifesto. So we play because it connects us to others and to the world in arguably the most enjoyable way there is. The fact that play is so closely linked to relations means that there is always a level of meaning present. It means something to play. It can be fun, it can be serious, it can be both, but it is not without value to the participants. Play is inherently meaningful as it can only happen in a conscious being, happen in a conscious being.

Speaker 1: 33:33

Two rocks don't play, at least not meaningfully, without us expanding what play is to kind of become a little bit meaningless, even though I did intimate some things like that earlier on. But despite my cosmic dreaming about the possible playful nature of a rainbow when light and rain interact, there is still a conscious entity, often a human, involved, as rainbows only actually come into being, they're only manifested in the moment a person stands with the sun against their back, facing into the rain. In this particular relation between the sunlight, the rain and, importantly, the observing human being, the playful result, the art of the world, if you will, is a rainbow. But in this way I'd say that play is only present when there is conscious interaction between organism, or then, if we accept the rainbow thing, then an organism and its environment than an organism and its environment.

Speaker 1: 34:33

If we reduce play to just one of the many approaches to how genes make sure that they will live on, as Richard Dawkins suggested in his 1975 book the Selfish Gene, we take all meaning and value out of the entirety of human culture. When we reduce play to a mere by-product of biology, we do the same with all human culture. When we reduce play to a mere byproduct of biology, we do the same with all human culture. It is like the ultimate belittling that human culture is without any intrinsic value is something that is argued by some. If you're a nihilist or an antinatalist, which is an antinatalist is someone who thinks that there is a negative value to the birth. Therefore it's immoral to give birth, since it will result in a net negative experience for the one that's born, then human culture is of dubious value. If these are your philosophical standpoints, then no doubt we could see human culture as a byproduct, or even waste product, of biological evolution. Human culture could be seen as gene replication gone wrong. Yet I, together with millions, find the human experience, with all our cultural creations, to be suspiciously valuable.

Speaker 1: 35:43

We are the source of so much of what is bad in the world, but we are also able to perceive this. Some might refuse to believe that humans have the ability to impact negatively on the climate. For a long time we had little to no understanding that we could negatively impact the environment at all. So the dawn of the environmental movement in part started by the seed planted by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring from 1962,. We became aware of the environmental harm of indiscriminate use of pesticides. We expanded our consciousness of how interconnected we are. We are destroyers of the world, but our ability to grasp the world in a deep, ability to grasp the world in a deep ecological way, also affords us the possibility of doing good and repair damages.

Speaker 1: 36:38

Johan Heutsinger and Robert Beller and many others, as we have heard, they argue that it is play and playful behavior which gave rise to all aspects of human culture. We've already looked briefly at how serious play lies at the heart of ritual. Heutzinger has chapters on play's relation to law, to war, to knowing, to poetry, to mythopoiesis, to philosophy and art, and that's practically the whole gamut of human culture right there. And that's practically the whole gamut of human culture right there. And play connects us to all these things and it connects all these things together in a web of complex relation. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that wherever one looks in human affairs you can find elements of or room for at least for, play. When play truly is nowhere to be found, it is a big red flag. Robert Bellah's book is one long argument for how play was the origin of religion.

Speaker 1: 37:42

If we accept Bellah and Heutzinger's expansive and deeply influential arguments, then dismissing play will leave you with the entire endeavor of human existence as a mere byproduct of biological and materialistic functioning of atoms knocking into each other. And there are many ways to approach the world instrumentally, as something that we can use and abuse, from which we can wrest secrets from. If we place Mother Nature on the rack, as Francis Bacon put it, then we can forge certain relations. If we see animals as automatons without inner lives and feelings, then we connect to them accordingly, and terribly, I would say. If we instead imaginatively enter into the world through human love and our ability for serious play, then we see a much different world. Or we see the world differently, if you'd like a playful encounter where the goal more than ever is to make it an infinite game, where we want none of the players animals, nature or other humans to leave the game. It completely reframes our impact on the world and the greatest of all infinite games, the game of life. Each approach to the world material, utilitarian or playful affords us certain ways to act and certain possibilities for enacting change. How we understand our relationship and our effect on the environment determines how we approach our actions in it. We are a pretty resourceful species, and when we put our minds to it at least. But it's not easy to get everyone on board anti-natalist, pro-life, anti-this and pro-that. It's hard to get everyone to pull together in the same direction, the direction of the good, towards the infinite game, where the aim is to continue playing for as long as we can. But as it turns out, it doesn't have to be everyone On a ship crossing the ocean.

Speaker 1: 39:58

Most of the passengers are simply along for the ride. A dedicated captain and crew numbering only a fraction of passengers can guide the ship from port to port. A few can do a lot. For instance, we hunted the beaver to extinction. For all practical purposes, the beaver was doomed. There simply weren't enough of them left. Some estimates say that there was as little as a thousand individuals left, spread across all of Europe and parts of Asia, and through the work of private individuals and one of them, a Norwegian farmer called Peter Martinius Jensen, who took it upon himself to start raising beavers. And at first it was just him, just one guy on his farm. But as time went by and his love and care for his beavers saw the numbers grow, then he continued to release them back into the nature in the south of Norway, where they continued thriving as they once did in the past. And the success drew interest from different wildlife foundations and enthusiasts, and together these growing networks brought the beaver back from extinction. The Norwegian beavers was then collected. Some of them was collected and set out in Sweden and some in the United Kingdom, bringing the beaver back to places where it had gone, completely extinct and a recent estimate is that there is now between 6 and 12 million beavers out there.

Speaker 1: 41:32

And an interesting personal fact of the time, when I was reading about this and when I wrote this, then, taking a break in reading and all that, me and my wife and my daughter, we drove to a place close by where the circus was in the summer when I wrote this and drove down to a little lake and there was a little water slide and all that. And while I was sitting there, the others playing, and I was sitting up there reading, I saw something like a little streak out on the lake further out, because there's kind of like all this reeds and sea uh, sea grass and not sea grass and lake grass, and all this is standing on one side. And then there's sort of like a a little bay which had people in it and something was crossing the water and I got up and hurried down and it was um, it was a beaver that was going across and as I was reading this book and I was reading about, had just read it I was driving further up and then this place where this particular Norwegian farmer that I just spoke about. It was mentioned in the book where he lived, and then I saw the name of that place on a road sign. So I was right there in the heart of it. Anyway, it felt like a bit of serendipity or something. It just felt like synchronicity, like it was all coming together like the beetle the scarab beetle that set Carl Jung on that track of synchronicities.

Speaker 1: 43:11

Anyway, we humans, we can be terrible, but we can also be extraordinarily good. The care of the Norwegian farmer, the resources that he poured into the beavers and the love that he bestowed on them, no doubt was guided by him as homo ludens rather than homo economicus. Nature was not tortured on the rack. It was playfully and lovingly engaged with and from it came good. It strikes me that everybody who watches time travel movies accept that when you go back in time, even the smallest change you do in the past can change the future, whereas not so many people are equally convinced that each small thing that we do today has much impact on the future. But I think that it can and I think that we do and I think that we do. So could we say that through play we see human culture Returning to the idea of play as a kind of sense, a particular way of sensing the world, or sensing something, sensing an aspect of the world.

Speaker 1: 44:26

Could it be that play allows us to experience, much like how our eyes gives us the color and shape of things, certain aspects of reality that aren't easily discovered through our other senses or even through our thinking? Could it be, then, that play is the sense which allows us to see the avenues that lead to all of Heutsinger's domains of law, war, knowing, poetry, mythopoiesis, philosophy and art? Those things were out there in the world as possibilities, when the in the ancient, uh, ancient times or whatever, like before, we had law and knowing and poetry and philosophy separated into it was just all one big mishmash, if they had it at all, if they even had language. You know, those things were out there in the world then, as possibilities, adjacent possibles they were. There was play, the sense that allowed us to see them and to pursue them and manifest them, and I find that the reasoning of Heutzinger and Bella. I find it deeply resonant and plausible. So I think, saying through play, the childlike, neotenous trait which it is, we saw the way that led us to the most human, to the most human in the world, the sum of which we call human culture. What arises in us when we are in a relaxed field? Don't get me wrong. I am aware that the world is filled with sham, drudgery and broken dreams, but it is still a beautiful world. So only an organism that is capable of grasping the meaning of her actions and those of others which is a quote from a man called Rodriguez from 2006, only organisms that are capable of grasping the meaning of her actions and of those of others can play. Playing puts us, as thinking and experiencing creatures, into contact with the playful nature of reality. So who is this person?

Speaker 1: 46:39

Rodriguez from wrote a paper in 2006. I've found this excellent paper by this person and his name is Hector Rodriguez. And he wrote a paper called the Playful and the Serious, an approximation to Heutzinger's Homo Ludens. It's from a journal of computer game research called Game Studies. It's volume six, issue one, 2006, for those who want to look that up and in it he describes the so-called serious games movement in game research and game development, which explores if and how one can make a real world difference, how games can make real world differences to people's lives, whether the arena of serious gaming can be considered a medium for learning and even social change. Can playing games and he's thinking, of course, of video games, but we've spoken about the expanded games, infinite and finite games. But he's asking can playing these games afford real change in the world? And Rodriguez believes it can change in the world. And Rodriguez believes it can.

Speaker 1: 47:52

But he says the roads to this change is not found in the kind of colonization of childhood by using games to teach a subject simply as something which will make the subject attractive or entertaining to kids. Like the sugar on the spoon for the medicine to go down, rodriguez writes. For the medicine to go down, rodriguez writes. In this case the teacher intends to achieve a predefined goal, such as the transmission of some piece of knowledge about mathematics, philosophy or some other science. The teacher does not consider the subject matter to be essentially playful, and so the process of playing has, in her view, no intrinsic connection to the core content. So Rodriguez rather suggests that through play the player will encounter the playful aspects inherent in the subject.

Speaker 1: 48:42

Many manifestations of serious culture intrinsically possess playful aspects. The connection between learning and playing is no longer contingent but essential. Playing can be part of the learning process because the subject to be learned is, at least in some respects, essentially playful. The use of serious games in the learning process therefore illuminates the fundamental nature of the subject being taught. So this distinction might seem subtle, but then again it's a subtle thing. But, as Robert Frost says, two roads diverged in a wood and I I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. That's from the Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. So it might be subtle, but still that little thing it's not a common thing to think that it is is we recognize the playful in the mathematics and thereby we get all the aspects and the benefits of play to live ourself into it. It's the reciprocal or resonance between the two. The playful attitude allows you to see the playful nature of the thing that you're looking at. Now that I'm thinking of it here now, I don't know if I fully see exactly what I meant when I introduced that, because I felt so apt at the time. The road diverged in a wood, two roads diverged in a wood and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference, as beautiful as that is.

Speaker 1: 50:32

Hmm, maybe it is the fact that we we're standing here and we're looking into the wood and we see two roads. One is the um, the road that is led by the teacher that goes today we're going to play shop and now we're going to use these scissors and cut out money. And do you know the difference between a $1 and $5 and $20? Do you know what can you buy for that? And the other one is just all right, let's throw ourselves into it and see what happens. And before you know it, they are cutting out something completely different, or there is no shops being made at all. Maybe that's it, these two different roads, and it might be subtle, but that subtlety might be that road that is a little overgrown, that not many people have walked down, and maybe that's the one we're going to walk down.

Speaker 1: 51:20

Anyway, the results of taking one or the other of the ways or approaches are completely different. One lets you enter into the subject in a deep, experiential way, discovering a resonance between a mode of the approach and a subject matter itself. This means it makes the transferal of the knowledge, experience and the skills from the play into life, causing a real-world impact, very likely. Since the method will have seemed to be self-discovered, thus experienced as true, let's look at that again. This means that if the one, if they're seeing the play and you enter into this subject, whatever it is that you're looking into, and the resonance of these two, the play is resonating with the playful in it, then you experience the subject in a deep, experiential way, discovering a resonance between the mode of the approach, the playful approach, and the playfulness in the subject matter itself, and this means that it makes the transfer of the knowledge, experience and skills from the play approach into life, causing real-world impacts. And that makes that very likely, since the method will have seemed to be self-discovered and thus you experience it as true because you're going through it and personal insight, always by the very nature of the insight that you had it yourself, is experienced as true.

Speaker 1: 53:02

The other method of using play as putting sugar on the spoon to make the medicine go down or trigonometry go down, is like dressing up as a clown and, after getting the attention of the kids, telling them about Allah's prophet, muhammad or Jesus, or or, now that I have your attention, I want to talk to you about a recycling, nothing but a cheap bait and switch ruse which, on a deep, children eventually will see through or perhaps feel through what the approach of using play to discover the playful aspects of reality allows us to see learning as a kind of play and play as a kind of learning which reveals essential playful features of law, philosophy, science, playful features of law, philosophy, science and all the other subjects mentioned by Hötzinger. That makes up our grand human cultural endeavor. And when we remember that the product of learning is knowledge, we see here the exact opposite. It's a kind of a complete reversal of Alan White's double negative, which he believes is imprinted in our children by the playground classroom, inside-outside play-knowledge dichotomies. His double exclusion was where knowledge is, play is not. Where play is, knowledge is not. And our new double inclusion is now not a double exclusion but a double inclusion when knowledge is, play is when play is knowledge is.

Speaker 1: 54:34

So when the dictionary writers and the politicians and bureaucrats who shape the schools as bastions that produce and dictate seriousness, when they present and denotes play and belittle play as unimportant, then they are diminishing fundamental aspects of reality and our way into it. And if we buy into this, accept their claim not just of what is deemed serious but also that it isn't important, then we miss out on arguably the most wonderful part of reality. We miss our joyful way into the world, since only what serious is worthy of careful consideration, as the dictionary definition tells us, we don't carefully consider play and showmanship enough in our life, and the last 20 or so episodes or episodic explorations of play and showmanship is my personal careful consideration of these unserious topics. And as it turns out, the unserious is very serious indeed, much like the policeman standing by a fire in a fireworks factory telling people to move on. Nothing to see, nothing to see. Move on.

Speaker 1: 55:57

Then play and its close relation, showmanship are explosions of insight, meaning and guidance towards grasping reality itself and finding guidance in how to be within it. The playful is all around us, deep inside us and between every living conscious organism. It's a way to be in the world and I believe that we, us, the tribe of show folk artists, entertainers and general misfits, are the textbook examples of the ludic humans, the living embodiments of homo ludens, the playful humans, All right. And thus we come to the end of one big part of this exploration of play. And we've looked at showmanship and we've looked at play. And next episode we're going to begin to look at the five criterias. We're going to make a deep dive into each one of the criterias and see how specifically it relates to showmanship.

Speaker 1: 57:11

So, until next time, it'd be totally awesome if you went to Instagram and followed us, if you haven't already done it, and if not, if you don't want to do that, then that is also totally okay. I don't want anything else, really, than that you listen to this, but if you do like it, it'd be awesome if you told someone. That's all I ask. That's your task. Until next time, tell somebody you like, and until then, take care of yourself and those you love, and I hope to see you along the way.