The Move to NACH
The Regenesis Blog will soon be moving to a new NACH blog, to be hosted by the NACH (NENA Arts & Culture Hub) community on their new website to be launched in early 2025. NACH is committed to spreading the seeds of relationality as new ways of being, thinking and doing, as we partake in the paradigm shift away from Modernity’s extractivist logic of consumer-driven late capitalism.
Meanwhile we’ll keep the Regenesis blog alive with our posts.
Playful Mind
Within this paradigm of relationality, we want to emphasise the benefits of cultivating the ‘playful mind’, our ability to laugh and dance with life, even when it throws up difficult challenges. A playful mind is one that takes delight in the small and large, where imagination dissolves the boundaries of the seemingly impossible, and explores the ineffable and liminal. A playful mind is how we are able to ‘stay in the trouble’ without closing down, where, in the words of Nigerian philosopher, Bayo Akomolafe, we can allow the imperceptible to blossom.
Playful mind is intrinsically part of childhood—in humans and much of the animal kingdom. Perhaps even in the plant world as they unfold in the dance of photosynthesis, and in the spreading tendrels of mycelium networks in the world of fungi. On a grander scale, we can see it in the dance of cloud formations, and the dynamism of all the elements that comprise our world—our bodies and the cosmos.
We see its stubborn persistence in the face of war and displacement, as children look for ways to run, laugh, kick stones around, make music and toys from rubbish—surrounded by death and starvation. But it is easy to lose this playful mind as we grow up. Our culture demands it as it shapes us into ‘useful’ parts of the economic ‘machine’ of consumer-driven capitalism’s Modernity—whether as producers or consumers, or rage-filled castoffs. The iterations seem endless.
Defiant Playful Mind
I’ve always been struck by the ironically playful way that many Indigenous people have dealt with the heavy cloak of racial and cultural marginalisation that informs their daily reality in modern Australia, a land which their ancestors have shaped and nurtured for over 65,000 years in the spirit of co-becoming with Country as kin. Humming away beneath the detritus of Modern Australia are the living and dynamic threads of their storytelling, encoded in the songlines/songspirals, where Country is ‘read’ as a text of ecological knowledge and the landscape has been fire-farmed to sustain its fecundity. Theirs is a droll, defiant and dark humour, where ‘deadly’ means full of life and possibility, which powerless rage can threaten to undo.
As we look into a world where 2.7 degrees global warming can be expected by the end of this century, promising to make large parts of the world unsuitable for human habitation, along with many of the other species who have co-evolved with us as part of Earth’s great flowering during the Holocene Era, we will all need this sort of defiant humour. We will need to discover how to nurture our capacity for playful mind.
Not as a turning away from the reality of the impending catastrophes towards distractive consumerism—whether than be the curated pleasures of Ocean Cruise ships enabling us to dip into the exotica of other lands, immersion in virtual realities of video gaming, or the many possibilities of the entertainment-industrial complex of Modernity’s late capitalism.
Rather it is a playful mind that will enable us to turn away from the denialism and anger that feeds authoritarian populism and ethno/religious-nationalism, and embrace how to ‘stay in the trouble’, allowing the ‘imperceptible to blossom’ as we search for new ways of being, doing and thinking—of living in the spirit of relationality—an ancient wisdom that encodes the ecological systems design of Planet Earth.
My Own Journey
Gifted with a strong intellectual curiosity that enabled me to escape the cultural desert of my Queensland childhood during the Bjelke Petersen era, I’ve spent my whole life following threads of curiosity into new territories of exploration and understanding. But as I am inclined to seriousness, no fan of canned TV laughter, but prone to TV ‘noir’, playful mind has been my antidote.
In 1968 a university student study tour took me beyond the ‘bamboo curtain’ into communist China during the infamous Cultural Revolution. We were guests of fellow students, the Revolutionary Red Guard, where we were shocked by their humourless wild-eyed fanaticism that brooked no mercy for any among their intellectual elders who were branded the ‘running dogs of US imperialism and capitalism’. When our friend, Garth, responded by drawing a snoopy cartoon with the caption ‘to be Mao is happiness’, he was subjected to an infamous ‘struggle session’ to confess his capitalist sins in our Beijing hotel. We found ourselves losing any romanticism we might have hitherto entertained about Mao’s ‘revolution is not a tea party’.
Inspired by the existentialism of John Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, I escaped Queensland for the metropolitan sophistication of Sydney, as a second-best choice to the Left Bank of Paris. On a student protest march down George Street in support of the Gurundji walk-off at Vesty’s Wave Hill Cattle Station that began the land rights movement, I met and ended up marrying a fellow student from the Trobriand Islands of PNG. Moving to live in PNG in the early 1970s I found myself crossing the colonial divide, becoming the ‘alien other’ in a world that beat to another drum, and spoke a language I could not speak. Where, as my father-in-law told me, I was heavy to things that were clear to their eyes and ears. Where I learned that ‘reality’ is indeed a socio-cultural construction that defied my strongly held beliefs in ‘objective facts’. Where a different kind of playful mind was in full view in a culture that was far, far, away from the world of Modernity that had shaped me.
Divorced and back in Australia, and reeling from the break-up of a new relationship that I thought was going to deliver me into blissful companionship, I discovered the world of Tibetan Buddhism, which took me into a whole other way of thinking about ‘reality’. While at the same time I was pursuing post graduate studies in the sociology of technological innovation and encountering the feminist critique of the ‘masculinity’ of the scientific gaze that has shaped Modernity, which had me reading all of Joseph Campbell’s cross cultural studies on world mythologies.
It’s been a wild ride of competing and contrasting paradigms—from the techno-rationality of objectivism to the experiential mythopoetic world, the ‘magic and mystery’ of Tantric Buddhism, particularly its encoding in the feminine figure of the ‘dakini’ the great disruptor, the inner dynamic aspect of our inherent awareness (Buddha Nature). The impulse to escape our entrapment in the iron-like grip of the ordinary conceptual mind, so beloved of both the academic intellect and the populist conspiracy thinker, searching for ‘answers’. My published memoir, Call of the Dakini, is an ode to how ‘she’ has guided me throughout my life through many turbulent disruptions. Demanding, through many dreams, that I learn how to dance with life’s curved balls
A Buddhist View of Playful Mind
We too often look for a ‘solution’. For the endpoint, the conclusion, a ground that we can stand on. But Buddhism tells us that instead we need to be more playful, to dance with groundlessness, the indivisible union of open potentiality and appearances—both cognitive and materially. Modern physics has mapped this space, but Buddhist methods enable us to live it. From this space we find the humour of a playful way of being.
Buddhist teacher, Thinley Norbu, who in exile from Tibet moved to live in upstate New York in the US, advises us in his book, Magic Dance (pp 47-51), that the answer to overcoming intellectual curiosity’s search for an endpoint of understanding is to cultivate ‘playmind’. He writes:
Through play, spiritual energy can be sustained so we must not think that play is always bad. Whether or not our rigid mature minds reject play, everything is still the display of the natural secret essence of the elements. If we are serious and rigid, our subtle elements become congested and cannot reflect this wisdom display. If our mind is calm and vast and playful, we can always recognize this essence display. In open space there is never turbulence between the gross and subtle elements.
When we study, if we have an open playmind, we can absorb what we study. Flexibility comes from playmind, so when our mind is open, we can accept what we are taught. We cannot learn with a rigid and serious mind because it is tight and unbalanced. Our serious mind is always tired, while our playmind is always rested. When there is no space and no rest, whatever we learn will be limited.
When we work, if we have open playmind we will not have fear of losing anything, so we can work continuously until we attain our goal. With the confidence that comes from playmind, we never hesitate and do not make mistakes. Doubts and hesitation come from a mind that is too rigidly serious.
When we have fears or hesitations, our interest in our work diminishes and we become lazy and weak, losing our confidence. If we do not have confidence, whatever we do, whatever we say, misses the target. Because our mind is scattered and frightened and hesitant, our concentration becomes lost. If we do not have concentration, we cannot penetrate to the target because our mind is always stuck before it reaches its aim. When we realize that we have missed the target, we become frustrated. Our mind becomes even more narrow, unstable, and fragile from this frustration and everything is lost in our life situation….
If we have playmind, we can see, through meditation, that all phenomena are like magic. Then, wherever we go, we are comfortable… When we practice, we need rested playmind. All spiritual qualities are invisible and substanceless and are inherent within all substances. If we are too serious, the aim of our meditation becomes more and more distant, because our mind is divided and obscured, but if we have playmind, our minds will always be clear, like the pond which becomes clear when left alone, free from disturbances.
Tarik Cutuk on Playful Mind
Philosopher, Tarik Cutuk, who is part of my NACH (NENA Arts & Culture Hub) community, and their links with the philosophical posthumanism movement, has also mused on the importance of a playful mind. He says:
Given the state of the world, and collapse-ology, I don’t think there’s any question that we must begin to loosen the relational and affective restrictions modernity has imposed upon our being; and learn to see, sense, and relate otherwise. But how to do this work?
I think play, as distinct from gamification is the key. While we’ve frequently discussed the capacity of games to bring out our creativity, I think we’ve missed the point a little bit. The thing that allows us to be creative when playing games is not their game-y nature, rather I believe it is our mentality when we play games. We are typically playing games for leisure. We are relaxing outside of professional hours. This kind of mentality cannot be manufactured in any setting, it must come about organically.
I’m sure we all know someone, who even whilst engaged in “gaming”, is chronically unable to move into a space of “play”. Let’s all find radical ways to hold space for each other to truly rest, feel cared for and loved, and in so doing enable our inner capabilities and capacities to reimagine a better world!
Recent Comments