[something I wrote years ago … first around latter half of 1980 or first half of 1981; did some modest revisions/edits later, but I believe this version is quite close to the original (which I believe I still have on paper tucked away in storage … if it wasn’t stolen)]
Games
People play thoughtless games continually. They find they can
never be completely open and honest. They hide things from others
because they are afraid of what others would say, and how these others
would react. People often express themselves in ways contrary to their
instincts. How many times have you been taught something you believed
beautiful was to be considered ugly, or that something you believed ugly
was to be thought of as beautiful? Such teachings often become so
embedded in us that we no longer are in touch with our true feelings.
In our falseness we not only isolate ourselves from each other, but
go so far as to separate our consciousness from who we really are.
We’re told what to attempt to achieve, but we somehow feel a hole in any
reasons presented to us. It’s drilled into out heads that if we don’t
join these common aims that there would be something wrong with us; that
each of us would become a freak and an outcast, and that we would each
become alone and deserted. But how many people in life are already so
alone? There are contacts between people, but isn’t their origin in a
game, and how completely real are these contacts?
Think back about our relationships with ourselves and the world
when each of us was a child. We were at one time uninhibited, honest
and unafraid. Has our change in growing up been a gain, or in this
respect is it much more a loss? Perhaps one of the greatest problems is
that it becomes very easy for people to play these games to such a
degree that they accept them as natural. In some cases they let them-
selves become totally unaware that such games are even being played, and
become nothing more than parts of these games.
Most everyone at some point wants to stand up and say it’s all
crazy, but they usually don’t. Why? Because they’re afraid others will
call them crazy, but these others are not any different.
MichaelBerkeley 