Journeys II Entertainment at the Banquet

You, and each of us, is entertained at a most grand banquet with games.

Imagine a King’s banquet. What do you see around you? Incredible food, for sure. A banquet table where royalty is at the head of the table. Everyone’s is decked out in fine attire and jewelry. We are enjoying live music, dancers, theater performances, jugglers, acrobats, a fireworks display, cultural displays,  and games…lots of games.  What does a game involve? Rules, consequences, winners, losers, risk, learning and getting to know others playing with you.

Every game has rules. Imagine we are playing a game called Royal Quest where two to four players each seek to be the first to progress to the castle and become King. We roll the dice and move along the board, each station having either a surprise or predicted outcome such as lose a turn or win the pot. We compete with each other to be the first to reach our objective. We can get wrapped up in the game and forget that it is a game; we become angry at other players if we are hindered in our progress by their success. We establish an imaginary hierarchy depending on our success or failure in the game. We wear our gold star as a symbol of our achievement if we become the King. We start to believe that we are game-players instead of the Royal Guest that we actually are. We feel sympathy for our fellow game-players and lament their loss. We tout the game as an absolute description of our reality and fail to see what we knew when we arrived; each of us is equal. We fail to see that at the entrance to the castle other guests are departing and laying their gold stars and paper crowns on a table before they walk out to the awaiting carriage. They recognize they were just playing a game and are exactly  who they were when they came into the Royal Banquet.  

Every game has consequences. We could draw an inside straight and win the poker hand OR we could give away on pair of 3s hoping for that inside straight and draw a 10. We attribute it to chance, but as every poker player knows the order of cards in the deck is never by chance. The deck of cards knows what is there. It’s just that we don’t. When we roll the dice we might advance to CHANCE in Monopoly and draw a card putting us in jail or we might advance to GO and collect $200. Again, nothing is ever by chance, it’s only unknown to us as a player. So we continue to play the game and be surprised at our fortune or curse our fate. Either way we have played the game and accepted the consequences of our fate.

Every game has winners… and losers. We discover that games result in winning or losing. We are fascinated by the opportunity. We watch the football score with intense zeal. We want to believe winning is always possible. Outcomes are predictable and already known before the players take the field. We just don’t see it; but we don’t see it BY DESIGN. If we knew in advance the results it wouldn’t be interesting, useful or educational. So our foreknowledge is cloistered and we claim chance can germinate. Philosophers call this approach fate. Accepting your fate during down times is the opiate of the masses as Karl Marx called Religion.