Inspiring Words

I’m in the middle of doing research for another book in the works, and I came across this from Brian Sutton-Smith in his book The Ambiguity of Play:

However, modern chance games and modern festivals have fallen away from religion and become secularized. Yet one can see that, along with all forms of play, they both still provide experiences of “otherness,” “alterity,” or “altered states of consciousness.” And these or similar states of mind are as essential to religious ritual and prayer as they are to game involvement. In both cases one becomes “lost” in the experience and thus transcends everyday care and concerns. It is worth considering that because the two (religion and play) are in modern times so separate, they are in fact rivals for the promotion of such altered states of consciousness. Which means they are rivals for the positive qualities that such alterity provides. One can say of both religion and play that they make life worth living and make everyday activities meaningful, because of the transcendence that they propose, one eternal and one mundane. Perhaps the unwillingness to attribute such experiential transcendence to games of fate exists not just because games of fate are heretical to the work ethic but because, through sharing transcendence with religion, they are actually rivals for its value…One may suppose that with the development of the rhetoric of “optimal experience”, secular civilization may be gradually transforming itself to the point that it can indeed admit that play is as fundamental to life as are survival and religion.