Having Fun on the Battleground of Life

Most adults live their lives somewhere between "as if" and "what if" and "if only"... but how often should one employ this Sneak Peek access tool and what should someone do if they find themselves lost somewhere therein?

Language has provided us with an understanding of the use of paradox, suggestions, oxymorons, and so on. But these are all tools and techniques; these are mechanical. Non tangible qualities such as empathy provide us with feedback that fuels, clarifies, and enchants us into higher understandings of self and others.

When deeply reflective type A personality individuals ruminate on language and on the intricacies of the alphabet, the notion of having had lost a bet against stagnant thinking comes to mind. Why must I spend so much time thinking about so many nothings? How does one return to stale, ordinary thinking after one has already thought themselves through labyrinths of paradoxes and nomena out of the phenomena? How does one escape the agon of knowing and not knowing?

The enchantment that arises from having fun feels like a category other than the list of vague and intangible techniques listed above, though this does not distinguish having fun from fascinating an individual.

If we employ a sort of self hypnotherapy as a way of differentiating these Sneak Peek access tools away from their classical forms of dominating our minds, these indirect techniques can empower us to recognize new horizons of significance.

If our self hypnotherapy involves the structure of having fun, we can act out the role of the Magi, Sorcerer, or Goddess from myth and legend (and literature) to induce the state analogous to the sorcerer's magic incantation.

In other words, we can redirect our gaze toward a new object in our self hypnotherapy. We can redirect our gaze toward the object of fun. Most cases of self hypnotherapy send people running into the environing world. More importantly, under what if enchantments. If only I can do this or that, I can experience happiness. In this state whatever is suggested feels like the answer, and thus the motivation for doing all the things that do not produce the desired sensation of having fun or feeling happiness. One can renew their existential meaning of life by ruminating on the results and then feel a sensation akin to happiness, contentment, pride, relief, and so forth, but this is a secondary sensation, one that comes about as a result of what if or if only scenarios playing out as planned.

If one's gaze is directed toward the object of HAVE FUN, then the way in which one plays out the scenarios changes. It becomes more fantasy like. One is not merely painting walls, one is painting a portal to another land or dimension.

Having fun as a final motivation consists of a rather vague notion that some value is to be real-ized. The role of our inner Magi is to create a symbolic horizon that empowers us to achieve this goal. At times the outcomes may be the same, but the experience changes. Think Walter Mitty minus the haplessness.

I would argue that HAVING FUN is a vital part of the essential structure of living a good life. Everyone has some difficulty occur in the course of their lives, but calling upon Athena to fight the good fight while you entertain yourself on the sidelines maintains a healthy barrier between the battlegrounds of our lives and the existential experience of being human.

But what does one do with all the wreckage and emotional carnage that falls on the battleground? The first rule is DON'T PICK IT UP.  Leave it be. Give it a proper burial. Not just a symbolic one. By employing our friend language and the alphabet, we can label it into three piles:

1. Properly Exposed
2. Overexposed
3. Underexposed

Properly exposed emotional wreckage shows the difficulty as is, no filters. This is like looking at an Escher drawing with all its complexities depending upon the angle of one's viewpoint. Here difficulties are less menacing. This is not to say that there are not deep feelings associated with these difficulties, some are transparently tragic; but they are separate from us because we are the ones doing the looking. Thus the tragedy is not entirely within. It is only within when conjured. This properly exposed mental snapshot can then be folded up and placed into an envelope, and set aside. 

Overexposed emotional wreckage highlights those things that life has previously heightened for us, those things for which we are now hyper vigilant or en guarde. We see these things first, and sometimes they are so bright we cannot clearly see what is next to them. Poignant sensations are evoked when our minds see these images. Once our heart rates stabilize, we can fold up the words we used to describe the sensations from these difficulties and place them into a second envelope, setting this aside with the first one. 

Underexposed emotional wreckage keeps us intrigued. It is a perpetual revisiting of that which we think we might have missed. What is that shadow? What does this mean? The underexposed difficulties we experience is what dissipates fears into an eternal oblivion. We simply don't know enough about whatever it is we are considering or seeing in order to know what exactly we should be fearing or doing about it. In this respect, ignorance is bliss. Whatever we missed, surely the universe will find a way to tell us if we really need to know. But the fact that nothing has happened, means there is a higher probability that these difficulties could have manifested but didn't. Forgive my cheekiness, but maybe it is time to move onto new difficulties, giving these ones a rest. Fold these difficulties up (if you can find them), and place them into a third envelope. 

The question here is what do we do with the envelopes? We can keep them, tuck them into our sachets or wallets, place them on top of our desks, tuck them away into a drawer, file them, burn them, blow them up with bottle rockets, turn them into art, etc. 

What we do with the envelopes is a reflection of the transformations we experience while contemplating the difficulties that define what we write on the papers we stuff inside the envelopes in the first place. This turns difficulties into games, which are meant to be fun. 

When we are having FUN we are reflectively aware that our state of consciousness is a hyper-awareness, which is occasioned by the recognized fundamental change in the way we intend our environment. Allowing ourselves to have fun provides the receptivity to a wholly different form-coherence of each overall experience. Some specificity within the environment manifests as the figure against the background we perceive and becomes what Husserl calls the nematic correlate to a noetic core of attention (Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment). In other words, having FUN is the motivator for "having fun" and the sensations of happiness or contentment that follow. 

The fringes of conscious awareness involve the perceived primary environment, which when transformed by our actually HAVING FUN stand out from the suspended horizon of the everyday hum drum signification of the same primary environment. 

2014 Business Climate in Mexico

Even these lamb remain horizontally aware that T-Rex is a little "too close" for comfort. But for now they are choosing team mates in preparation for the upcoming game of 'run for your life'. Turning T-Rex into a player on an opposing team is more fun that being horizontally aware of the consequences from the standpoint of ordinary reality, but the game they are playing is actually a strategic one, potent in that the game allows them to play out the province of meaning in a more creative way. Here the lamb maintains the meaning of the game gained through the fun they allow themselves to experience. On the horizon of mundane consciousness, we can remain aware of the object of fun while reifying the movements one might make were the object of 'run for your life' nothing but a game. This is not to say that all fun happens while huddled in the corner of a toy shelf, but the sensation of being huddled together against a pending doom is not unfamiliar. 

What is unfamiliar is the football huddle. The coming together to formulate a fun new strategy to try out under the mental condition that signifies a this is just a game message to the brain. With FUN as our objective, we create mental scenarios that are interpreted as games. It is a sort of self-enchantment, but the potency is as formidable as that of a foe. 

This new reality context acts as a higher synthetic level of coherence and understanding. It synthesizes the congruencies of the qualitatively new playing field (as opposed to a previously perceived battleground) of intentional experience. It is not merely a fantastical or self-hypnotic state, but rather the successful higher-level synthesis of what the adult brain separated into distinct categories in the first place.

There is no promise for better outcomes with this sort of thinking.  This post merely introduces an efficient motivator that prepares our minds for higher responses by tucking away phobic feelings into three little envelopes. The symbolic meanings of the letters which make up words from our various alphabets written on the sheets of paper inside the envelopes literally become the material content that accommodates our mind's ability to create symbols for the province of meaning and understanding. 

Each person's cognitive style of thinking differs, but incorporating FUN as the object rather than the byproduct increases our finite ability to experience it. The sub-universe of our minds is where we live and the place from which we perceive the world. How we paint it motivates more than our words and our actions, it motivates our feelings and ultimately our experiences through life. 

Every object we think of manifests itself one way or another. It may be sitting plainly next to an overexposed memory, hidden from sight (until one looks for it), it may be barely visible and thus probably less significant than the thoughts or feelings we have ascribed to it, or it may just be there until we tuck it away and move onto new ones. 

All thoughts and feelings are personally chosen propositions, whether attributive or existential, and can be "believed" through the very fact of being conceived, unless they clash with other propositions believed at the same time. "One must be serious to deal with serious matters." 

By affirming our own terms in direct proportion to difficulties that arise in our lives (T-Rex might walk over the huge divisor and eat us, so we should huddle together, come up with some confusing moves, and ultimately run past T-Rex and find homage on another shelf in order to survive vs a phobic driven "he's coming to get us! Run!" response), we can disrupt the correlative province of fear and difficulty with fun and daydreams. 

The results might be the same, or the results may indeed be another viewpoint of what we enacted while under the self hypnotic state of FUN.  Our core attention may not define the entirety of our external environments, but it does motivate transformation into more than an existential gestalt. It motivates new thoughts and actions that sometimes serve to solve difficulties, leading the lambs to safety. 

The horizon of our everyday life-world remains available to our threshold for co-constutive acts of imaginary synthesis. In other words, choosing fun as an objective alters the natural conscious responses our minds deem explicable and turns them into fortuitous ruminations that convert the ordinary, mundane, or unpleasant into fun games of chance and intrigue. 

The qualitative alteration of the tension of T-Rex crossing the plastic barrier does not quantitatively reduce tension, but rather maintains a high tension that enables a player to reach further, run faster, and jump higher. The game offers a radical shift of perspective to symbolic meanings. The synthesis of symbolic significance constitutes our hyper-awareness and ultimately our ability to have fun with difficulties, on what some call the "battlefield of life". 

The transition from one perceptual context to another is not always instantaneous. Sometimes it proceeds through intermediate stages, but the threshold is there should one mentally walk themselves through it. The trick is to jump once one reaches the precipice. The leap is not as far as one might think. It is a simple replacement of the final objective to fun. 

10 Disclaimers: 

1. Choosing FUN as one's final objective is not for those who do not enjoy having FUN. 
2. FUN as a perceivable style of personal experience entails the potentiality for having FUN. 
3. Having FUN requires being receptive to transcendental meanings. 
4. Finding the FUN as a motivator in a difficult situation alters our "orienting mood". 
5. In order to have FUN one must place oneself in a state of readiness for fun. 
6. The material motivators for FUN are not always readily visible (some appear under or over-exposed), one must seek them out. 
7. FUN is known to play games of hide and seek deep within the appearances of irony, or things that seem unbelievable or unthinkable. 
8. Access to FUN requires a shift of coherence from every day forms of symbolic significance.
9. The vision of FUN is entirely subjective, translated into significance by that which is enjoyed by the person imagining the fun. 
10. FUN may be indistinguishable from enchantment.