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12 MAR 2006
Funny world game
When we enter funny world, we become bold heretics who dare to follow a radical new rule: must be funny.We are pioneers in this new world of freedom and adventure. Fabulous discoveries and wealth await us.
The must be funny rule says the only valid wealth is laughter. That's what funny money is based on. The goal is to go into funny business and make as much funny money as possible, thereby building funny world and filling it with laughter.
Some take a higher view and strive to achieve the higher consciousness of funniness, and salvation from the sin of seriousness. There are some juicy roles such as missionary and cult leader and it all comes down to making funny money in the end.
What about danger and conflict? We have those too. Serious world can't allow funny world to exist, and has sent an Inquisition to shut us down, take our funny money, and send us back to the dungeons of serious world.
Who plays the Inquisition? We all do, ready to don our red robes, or maybe just a collapsible hat, when we see a vulnerable heretic. It's a way to make a buck.
In fact the Inquisition is enforcing the must be funny rule, and attacking anything that's not funny. Sometimes it's a matter of taste, and players gather funny money in the heretic or Inquisition camps and the winning side takes all.
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12 MAR 2006
Funny world game 2
If we're funny we can always survive in funny world, but if we're serious the Inquisition will eat us up, unless we play Inquisition, so there's a place for serious people as Inquisition, and we can also play audience and students to funny people.What if there are no funny people, or we run out of funny material? Then the Inquisition wins and funny world is destroyed.
We can't let that happen. The survival of funny world is at stake.
How can serious people sustain a funny world? There are a few ways:
1. Deadpan.
2. Structural humor, or sitcom.
3. The very idea of serious people trying to create a funny world is funny.
Deadpan: We use the serious stuff we know and apply it in the crazy context of funny world. For example, we apply traditional religious argument to must be funny to determine articles of faith and practice. Or we create an impeccable business plan for making lots of funny money. Or a bureaucratic approach to regulating funny world.
Structural humor: That's the crazy context. It's ambiguity and level confusion, turning things upside-down, the hoax, the con and the sting, and having it both ways. Funny world is full of this structure, and if we can occupy it like a sitcom the Inquisition can't touch us.
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14 MAR 2006
Funny world game 3
Funny world follows the adventure formula of great risk, great reward. Funny logic adds a third dimension to true and false. While serious worlders are stuck in two dimensions, funny people can fly and have an infinite space to explore.Fantastic possiblilities await, but can our minds cope with triple logic? At any moment our ingrained seriousness can take over and bring us crashing down to serious world.
Since we've gone funny, the Inquisition accuses us of insanity, to be locked up in serious world dungeons. How do we counter this challenge? Defend our sanity, our status as players? No, that would be serious, engaging the Inquisition in serious world. Instead, insanity is much funnier, and we play to the Inquisition's accusation.
More drama: serious world is about to self-destruct. We have to escape and build funny world before it blows.
How is serious world in danger of collapse? War? Oil? Environment? Epidemic? Economy? Social disparity? Corruption? No, those are all serious reasons. We can't use any of them. It must be funny. Serious world is about to succumb to terminal boredom.
That makes it personal, a reason to build funny world, before boredom, or death, pulls us under.
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15 MAR 2006
Mbf as singularity
A strange theme has come in persistently from dreamtime. While mbf is expansive, creating a whole game world of endless variety, this new concept has it spiraling in towards a point of great power, a stable center where we all end up. New players who don't know their way around funny world will tend to return to this point.
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20 MAR 2006
The way to learn a paradox is as a joke
The secret of life is paradoxical. Our minds keep losing it and falling into error. The way to learn it is as a joke.
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30 MAR 2006
World as illusion
It's hard to take serious world as an illusion, as the sages claim. But funny world is definitely an illusion, a fabrication, much easier to understand. Then we're clearly playing on a temporary stage of no importance.
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Trickster MakesThis World
by Lewis Hyde 1998p.154 . . . it is hard to travel in this fallen world if you lose the power of speech every time evil meets you on the path.
p.173 The Fon in West Africa call the female portion of their androgynous creator Mawu; she is the mother of the trickster Legba. In ancient days when Mawu lived here on earth, Legba was her obedient servant. When he did a good deed the people ignored him and thanked Mawu, but when he did an evil deed the people blamed him directly, as if Mawu had nothing to do with it.
p.284 The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas reports the following of Jesus: "His disciples said: When will you be revealed to us and when will we see you? Jesus said: When you unclothe yourselves without being ashamed."
p.292 . . . Krishna, the thief of butter and of hearts, does not steal because the objects of his desires are intrinsically scarce. He steals because they are abundant but human order has reduced their circulation. There is love in marriage, but it is necessarily rule-governed. There is plenty of food in Yasoda's house, but it is laced with local rules about who gets to eat when and under what conditions. The butter laid up in its jars is sealed-off nourishment, a force contained by convention that becomes everywhere available only after Krishna breaks the jars.
p.300 Either there is higher truth but our only access to it is this untrustworthy fellow, so that the messages we get are muddied and ambiguous. Or else "higher truth" is itself an unfortunate fantasy which only serves to obscure what's actually happening.
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