The following is from Hank Wesselman’s October column in The Meta Arts magazine (www.themetaarts.com) titled The Life Game. As Hank points out, religion may be a matter of externals but it may not…
Fortunately, there was, and is, another, quite different element to the Religion Game, and it is here, precisely here, that we may find salvation.
In De Ropp’s words:
All the great religions offer examples of saints and mystics who did not play the game for material gain, whose indifference to personal comfort, to wealth and to fame was so complete as to arouse our wonder and admiration… They played the game by entirely different rules and for entirely different aims from those priestly con men who sold trips to Heaven for hard cash and insisted on payment in advance…
These worthies were (and are) players of the Master Game—the one that De Ropp places at the apex of all the meta games.
The Master Game is the great game that has been played throughout time by the shamans and mystics, the saints and sages of all the world’s cultures—the ones who explored and mastered the inner worlds through the vehicle of their own mind and consciousness.
The Master Game involves the quest for spiritual awakening, enlightenment, and liberation. The goal: to discover one’s own true nature and to know from direct, empirical experience that this nature is sacred as well as immortal.
Note that the emphasis here is on direct experience. The Master Game is decidedly not about embracing magical or mythic belief systems in various culturally determined gods or goddesses or winged super humans called angels, nor is it about having faith… although belief and faith can be greatly sustaining in the short term.
For the full argument, go to his column at www.themetaarts.com.
Didn’t find the article. This part that you are posting seems to me that he hasn’t looked at christianity since the dark ages or the Renassaince. It might be time to take a fresh look.
One way to find the column is to go to http://www.themetaarts.com and scroll down the long list of authors until you find Hank Wesselman. There you’ll find a paragraph describing the current column, and a bit of text in red that says click here. (Of course, you remember what happened to Alice when she drank the bottle that said Drink Me.) That brings you directly to the column in full.
While you’re at it, you could go to the very last columnist listed, namely me as Daisy Mae used to say, and see what I’m up to.
De Ropp’s excerpt of games in “The Master Game” is given at http://www.godlikeproductions.com/bbs/message.php?messageid=451302&mpage=1&showdate=11/8/07&forum=1