David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.
When I was ten years old, I read Homer’s Odyssey (not, I assure you, in the original Greek!). I was enthralled with the whole story of the siege of Troy, the actions of heroes like Achilles, Hector, Ajax, and Ulysses, and the interventions of gods and goddesses. What a tale to fire my imagination! I immediately set about to translate it into a board game so that I could play out the story. It took me a couple of months, but eventually I had a full-fledged board game with rules that only I could understand and play, which nevertheless brought me hours of enjoyment. I was a strange kid!
This began a life-long love of board games. Not just the “family classics” like Monopoly, Clue, The Game of Life, and Careers. In the Fifties, an obscure board game publisher named Avalon Hill produce a line of historical war games in which you could play a famous battle, like Gettysburg, and, in the words of the publisher, “attempt to change history!” I was well and truly hooked.
Avalon Hill was the first of many small, independent game publishers that made up what came to be called the “adventure game hobby.” These companies produced board games that allowed the players to be famous generals from history, run your own multinational corporation, lead an expedition to an unknown planet, or delve deep into an ancient dungeon filled with gold…and monsters. They were all a feast for the imagination.
They also tended to have long, complex rule books, which I loved. In my geeky mind, there was nothing like curling up with a sixty-page rule book! Obviously, this was a hobby for nerds, and when national board game conventions came into existence, there were thousands of us!
For years, nearly all these boardgames were competitive with winners (usually just one) and losers.
Recently, though, there has been a change in the industry. New generations of gamers (including my own children) are enjoying board games that encourage or even require cooperation rather than competition. Either everyone wins or everyone loses. These games not only present compelling challenges to be met and dealt with. They also give players the fun of discovering how to work as a team and of overcoming obstacles together.
The cooperative mode has become so popular among many gamers that now many new board games are designed to allow for cooperative, as well as competitive, play. Many games are entirely cooperative. This is a huge change from the games of my youth.
I think about this when I think about the climate crisis and generally about the various social and economic crises that humanity is facing. For millennia, we have been playing competitive games with each other and with nature. Winning, often called “survival of the fittest,” is everything. We are seeing the consequences of this in our world today.
One of my friends from the Lindisfarne Association was the microbiologist Lynn Margulis. One of her seminal discoveries in her research with single-celled organisms was the vital role symbiosis plays in evolution. As it turns out, it is cooperation, not competition, that gives the greatest advantage in evolutionary survival and advancement.
This is a truth well-known to our indigenous ancestors who saw us as a part of nature, not as a competitor against nature. It’s a truth that the climate crisis and other environmental and ecological crises is forcing modern humanity to remember.
What we are discovering is that it never was really a competitive game. It has always been fundamentally a cooperative game. Ignoring this is now threatening us with species survival, which would make us all the biggest losers ever.
When I listen to the news and look out at the world, what is evident to my gamer’s sensibility is that many haven’t realized that rules have changed. They are still acting, still legislating, still behaving in politics and economics as if competition and winning were the way the game is played. But many others have realized or are discovering that, living on planet Earth, we are in a different game and now need to play in cooperative mode.
It’s not and never has been the game our society taught us to play. It’s past time to learn new rules.
An Apology
In my last David’s Desk, I quoted from an email that my friend Patrick S. Wolfe sent me. Here is what I said:
“I want to close this essay with some thoughts shared with me by another friend, Patrick S. Wolfe, a writer living in Canada. Over the years, he has taken part in several of my online classes and forums, and he always has good, wise thoughts to contribute. After taking part in a recent online forum focusing on how we can meet the future, he sent me these comments in an email. I could not have said this better.
May all who can, open to the qualities of fiery hope, peace, joy, and love, and to the potential and energy of the new civilization unfolding around us. May love, not fear, hope, not despair, joy, not distress, compassion, not anger or hate, enfold each of us in safety, protection, and courage. May we have the will to do what is available to us to bring the new civilization into being. May my strength, my calm, my courage, my joy, my love empower at least one other person to join in this enterprise and become a source of vision and new life.
Be peacefully urgent and aware, open to engage with love and power with what the world brings to your doorstep.”
As it turns out, I may not have been able to say this better, but in fact, I did say it, translating something one of my subtle colleagues had said. The challenge is that when I receive a communication from a non-physical source in the spiritual realms, it is rarely in words. It is a direct transmission of meaning through a blend of telepathy, the sharing of thoughts, and telempathy, the sharing of feeling. I then supply the words so I can put it on paper or share it with another. After doing so, however, I often forget the actual words I’ve written, though I always can remember the actual energetic transmission itself. That, for me, is where the meaning is, not in the words themselves.
For this reason, when Patrick sent me this quote, I didn’t recognize it as something I’d written but went ahead and shared it with you as something he had said. Patrick immediately let me know, wondering humorously if I were setting him up for a charge of plagiarism, making it seem as if he were laying claim to the authorship of my words. It was an inadvertent mistake on my part, a quirk and consequence of “trans-dimensional” communication and a seventy-six year old memory, for which I take full responsibility. You’re off the hook, Patrick, my friend, and I do apologize for any inconvenience my mistake may have caused.