The Game of Self.
The Magic, & The Trick.
A Manifesto — More like a note to self…
“It is in the staring off over the cliff, into the abyss that is yourself, that you will find the key to everything you want.”
The treasure, the present, & the prize.
The game of games…
You are constantly talking yourself into and out of everything you want.
You do this on autopilot because you’ve rehearsed it to perfection.
All your little quirks are but coping mechanisms developed in order to deal with your experience. They keep you safe; they’re how you survive.
From this, you’ve created stories about who you are, what the world is like, and how life works or doesn’t.
By doing this, you’ve established a hierarchy of being, call it an operating system…
These stories are instructions and act like programs, all working together to carry out a level of experience in line with or aligned with your expectations.
Any deviation from this results in inner conflict, which then plays out in your experience… through your behavior.
Some call it self-sabotage. Others describe it as getting in your own way.
We call it “fate; not in the cards. Maybe next time. That’s not for me… I don’t deserve that, I didn’t earn it, I don’t have permission, I’m not allowed, this is my punishment for…” and a truckload of other nonsense.
It all works the same.
And, it’s not just the negative “I can’t have that” story. The positive stories you’re telling yourself also work the same way — just like the stuff that goes well or even great, you’ve got narratives about that too.
And guess what? Your stories tend to play out exactly as you keep telling yourself. Good or bad, we recreate what we keep reinforcing.
Each time we play out a story, we add layers to the original story, the base code… each time providing ourselves more proof that you can or cannot have something a particular way.
Accordingly, this forms reinforcement stories that allow the inner conflict to persist, in some cases, to thrive, turning that struggle with self into a game all its own…
That game plays out alongside the other game you are/were playing… the game of “trying” to accomplish, achieve, or acquire some perceived prize. Pretty soon, these two games become associated with each other and make your story even more “true.”
As fucked up as it seems, this is a form of self-preservation, a type of self-trust baked into your base code… put there by you at some point in time.
A knowing, so to speak, that although you want or need something to be different, on a deeper level, you have a setting in place that acts like a rule that “knows better,” and despite your best effort to cause or have the change, the rule that’s in place won’t allow for it.
Creating a self-fulfilling and usually personally tormenting game of keep away.
You want something to be different somehow and never seem to get it… let alone see that you’re the one keeping it from yourself… or, more importantly, how.
You’re so good at being who you’ve become that you think that’s who you are. The fact of the matter is it’s simply a perspective… a perspective that works well enough to survive.
And then you’ve rehearsed that perspective to perfection to keep yourself safe, accepted, and loved… or so you think.
There’s:
Who you are… Who you are being… Who you think other humans think you’re supposed to be… &, who you wish you were.
That’s still not who you really are.
If you only knew what you were doing and how it worked…
This is “the what” and “the how” of getting what you actually want — understanding what that even is, and learning how to actually do it… Get what you want.
Said another way: what you’re already doing and how it works.
One more time in yet another way? Sure. It’s about recognizing what you need to do to get what you want — and stop getting what you don’t.
Relationship with self is our core game. (More accurately represented by: Relationship between “SELF, Self, and self.”)
Relationship with self is the first-tier or First Order game… the main game. All the other games are either 2nd- or 3rd-order games at best… The rest of the games we play merely keep us occupied, perpetuating the game of hide & seek…
Dude. It is a Game. Tag. You’re “It.”
It’s a game, like every game, and it is determined by its rules… the ground rules that establish the game. We’ll revisit this shortly…
That “thing” you’ve been seeking…
The point. The quest. The center of it all…
The key to it… (the instructions, if you will.)
Including The Antidote.
The antidote for what’s wrong, what’s missing, what feels “off” — the essence of what you’re after…
This is “That Game.”
The Game of Self.
The “what” this thing is and is for, this experience you’re having, what you call your life…
It is literally to be and to have experience. If that’s confusing, it should unravel itself over the next few pages.
It’s a game, Dude… a game of hide and seek, a game of keep away, a game of all kinds of weird shit you play with yourself.
Even though it may not feel like play or like fun, it is, in fact, a game you are playing.
The point? The point is “It’s” you, and you’re doing “It.”
And you’re flawless at it… You simply haven’t figured out what you’re actually doing and how it exactly works…
…how we turn chaos into order and order into chaos…
“One more time for those in the back!… the nose bleed section!”
If you knew what you were doing and how it worked, and then learned to do it at will? (With intention, fully consciously aware of your doing it.) You could recraft your entire experience into anything you wanted, whenever you wanted.
(No, you likely can’t turn yourself into a Giraffe… and you probably shouldn’t turn that frog into a Prince… but hey, you do you.)
Anywho…
You might as well sort out what exactly you’re doing and how it works…
If that is, you would rather get more of what you do want and stop getting yourself what you don’t want.
I could be wrong… but I’d bet that’s what you’re seeking… and that, on some level, you know it.
All the other games you play are designed to keep you occupied and distracted… that’s built into the fabric of the game, hard-coded, so to speak, so the game goes on perpetually without needing you to steer it consciously.
A rabbit hole for another day, perhaps.
Which “circles” us back to where we began… or close enough.
That this is a Game, and if you knew how it actually worked, you’d be an even better player than you’ve become. Hell, even in baseball, something like hitting the ball thirty percent of the time is fabulous…
I don’t know about you, but getting what I want thirty percent of the time just won’t cut it.
Fortunately, unlike in baseball, batting a hundred in life every day doesn’t require cheating… only understanding the ground rules so we can make our own.
The real game is the game of self. The way it’s played and won is through a relationship with ourselves.
SELF. Self. self.
Those three, on the same team, playing for the same ends… get you precisely what you want. That’s “The Magic.”
You just gotta know the rules so you can rewrite them.
The rub? Your “self” doesn’t trust you with them…
The way to address that?
Through a relationship with “self”… and establish a different type of “self-trust” than what keeps the original rules in place. And that’s “The Trick.”
