The Game I Want To Play

Letter to a friend,

Our eyes meet, my heart pounds at the simple experience of two souls recognizing life in each other. Who are you? Who am I in your presence? The world falls away in this moment of infinite possibility when two people connect and communicate soul to soul.

And so here we are. What will we create in this moment, and the moments to come called our future? The options are limited only by our innovation and our integrity.

As I think about this from the distance of solitude, the question of my life returns to me yet once again: "What do I want?" Given that in every moment, I have complete choice about how I will live my life, unconstrained by who I have been in the past, what will I choose for my life? And specifically in relation to you, what type of relating do I want to create with you?

In a sense, this is a still a radical idea, even though I have revisited it thousands of times. Who am I to decide how I will live my life? If I were a "good boy" I would want and live out what my partner, family, friends, religion, culture, church, society, conventional morality tells me to want. I would want to fall in love, marry, get a good job, have children, participate in my church activities, and …in the end die with a big funeral, I guess. Who am I to think that I know better than what thousands of years of tradition have taught me? Who am I to decide that what I want is mine to choose as I see fit?

Who am I? I am a soul, given the ultimate gift - Life; a human being with a specific nature in a game without a rule book, with only my curiosity, rationality, and a set of cultural "wisdom" to give me guidance. I have choice about how I will play this game and complete responsibility for the consequences of my choices. And from everything I have experienced so far, I make a single choice from which all of my others will be based: I choose to live a life of FunJoyment! I choose to discover my nature and the rules of the game called life, and create a collage of games within that ultimate game which create tremendous joy for myself and those who choose to play with me.

And I see you as a soul with the same choices and responsibilities.

And in your presence a single question forms in my mind and dominates everything else which is to come: What will we choose to create together? How will my desires and skills interact with your desires and skills in this process of relating we might call a "friend" What forms, what rules, what games will we design and explore? Again, what do I want?

I want a soul to soul connection where we support and challenge and love one another without hesitation or fear. I want us to rejoice in each other’s victories and console each other in our defeats. I want to share myself and experience in a spirit of celebration and joy. I want the essence of who I am to connect with the essence of who you are and share this incredible gift called life. I want passionate communicating, and working, and emoting, and movie watching, and idea sharing/refining, and music listening, and eating, and seminaring, and dancing, and hiking, and emailing, and everything else we can imagine.

Most importantly, I want to know that we can share every aspect of our lives and consciousness in an atmosphere of love and acceptance, even when it might be threatening to our unresolved fears; that in the face of all the practical concerns in life, we will choose what to make everything mean from a place of love, power, and joy; that we will choose to love each other, soul to soul, even if the practical aspects of our relating don’t work out how we planned; that we will be big enough, clear enough, and self-secure enough to contain all our interactions in the space of mutual respect and confidence. This is my safety net, which allows me to dance on the high wire with my only considerations being the joy of the dance and the desire to continue dancing.

What I want is an intimate sharing of experience between our souls. I want the magic of being open and trusting with you while sharing this beautiful experience called life. I want the ecstasy of that blossoming joy which naturally flows when two souls connect.

I also know that this is perhaps the greatest challenge I can face as a human being. In the process of being intimate with you, all my fears of intimacy will come to the surface. Not all at once, thank god, but with every new level of intimacy I have experienced, the fear that had kept me from feeling it has been called into consciousness. All the protections I have built that stand between my pure soul and your pure soul will surface in the presence of love.

I want our friendship to be a container in which this process can happen in safety and respect. I want our souls to band together in the face of fear, and support and rejoice with each other as we face our fears and resolve them.

Since this experience is the core of what I want, I should probably explain to you what I mean by soul.

My soul is the part of me that is my essence of who I am as a human being. It is the part of me that chooses and values. It is the genesis point of my consciousness.

Sometimes I find it easiest to recognize what my soul is by differentiating it from what it is not.

My soul is not my possessions or my physical environment. These come and go while "I" remain. It is not my financial or social status. Again, they come and go, but who I am remains. I am also not my family or my sexuality. I could lose my family or my sexuality in an accident, but I would be there to experience the loss. I am not my ability to use my body, as Christopher Reeve demonstrates so well. I am not my emotions; they are transient and almost capricious at times. My personality has changed tremendously over time as well. Finally I am not my mind. If I try to turn it off it just keeps on going - and often thinks thoughts I don’t even like.

I am that which experiences all of these forms of existence. My soul is the place from which I notice all the forms of existence in my environment, social life, family, body, emotions, and mind. It is the architect of all these forms, consciously or unconsciously. It is the part of me that cares, values, and desires. It is the part of me that can experience love and hate and know without question that love is more valuable. It is the part of me that cares about the quality of my life, the life of people I care for, and even life itself. It is the part of me that knows what is truly important in life. It is the part of me that loves.

Who I am beyond my identification with any of the forms of existence, and therefore beyond my fears: that is my soul. And my soul longs to be with your soul, to share, to express, to work, to love, to create, to play.

To the degree that I forget who I am and identify my self with any of the forms of existence in my experience, I will I feel fear, because all forms of existence are temporary – they all change. If I think they are me, if I identify my Self with them, I will think my life is being taken from me when they change and try to protect them. This fear/protection clouds my values and my ability to think clearly. I will often sacrifice my soul’s higher values and desires and end up spending my time and energy protecting the existence of lesser values. At these times, I am not acting consciously, from my soul level, but from an unconscious identification with a form of existence, from fear of losing my self. Although we still act to gain and keep our highest values when acting from our soul level, we do so completely without fear.

This process is especially present for me when I try to protect a "relationship" in the form I think it "should" be in. I have often noticed my partner or I sacrificing our "truth" or our deep desires in order to preserve "the friendship." We have identified our self with the form of the friendship and fear its loss or change. This fear leads us to do insane/stupid things. Perhaps we withhold important information that we think our partner would not want to hear. Perhaps we use our fear of being hurt or judged to close our self down and don’t share ourselves with our partner. Perhaps we deny, distort, or exaggerate our experience to make a point. Perhaps we compromise our own values to avoid confronting our partner. Perhaps we treat the other person badly because they did not act in alignment with our expectations. However we do it, we often sacrifice our higher values in order to protect the form of the friendship. We lie to one another in the name of love.

In contrast, when we relate soul to soul, we recognize these fear and protection dramas, but support each other in simply accepting them as habits of mind. We experience each fear and negative emotion as "just a drama", not who we are. In so doing we create a space where our conscious experience, in all its glory and fear, is recognized, welcomed, and loved. We accept our entire reality for what it is in this moment, knowing that we can go beyond it in the next. We have the freedom to speak the truth, knowing that we can handle the results from a place of power. To the degree we can do this, we can experience true love, soul to soul, you to me. The truth will make us free.

Now, I recognize that such a connection and the freedom it creates does not just magically happen. It takes a commitment and capacity for each of us to transcend our identifications and get in touch with the essence which is beyond them. We must become aware of each identification in the moment and the fear and protection drama that it engenders. We can use our fears as the marker, as signals of our identification with a form of existence and treat them accordingly, from our soul level. From this space, we have the freedom to truly be and express ourselves with each other, and rejoice in the unfolding creativity of each moment.

From the space of soul to soul, we are open to experience the near overwhelming beauty in all things and in each other, including our joy, our fear, our delightful surprises, and our miscommunications/mistakes. We are open to truly love each other for who we are, rather than how much our partner fits the picture of who we thought we wanted.

This is the game I want to play with you, whatever the form our relating takes. This is who I want to be for you, and who I ask you to be for me. It is this space I am committed to creating with you, the space of love.

This is the game I propose. "Wanna play?

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For more on a Game For Intimacy, go here. For more on approaching Relating as a Game, go here.

Mark Michael Lewis