From ‘The School for Gods’
The ‘game of encounters’ will allow you to compress time
“…The ‘game of encounters’ will allow you to compress time… You’ll learn more about yourself in the game than an ordinary man could do in ten lifetimes. For you the world is too real. Only the ‘game’ will free you from this petrified, rigid description, and allow you access to a more fluid, more liquid vision of the world.
The world is an emotion
The meetings will help you to measure your level of responsibility, they’ll teach you to know yourself completely, and you’ll realise that every man or woman you meet is an unknown part of you, an opportunity to see one of your wounds or hidden illnesses which you will then be able to heal. The others are states of being which materialise in the world of events… The others are time.”
Q. And the man who gives his own life for others? Who meets them in order to help and heal them? And missionaries?”
Elio. Even the missionary meets himself, his doubts, his fears, his division. He mixes with those who are superstitious in order to conquer his own superstition. He enters the world of suffering to heal his wounds and return to the source, the true cause. And even if he’s unaware of it and believes that he does things on behalf of others, it’s really the others who are doing things for him, taking care of him.
“Once he has understood which states in himself have made his mission possible, he’ll be healed; he won’t need to be a missionary any longer. He’ll put someone else in his place and go beyond.”
“As for whom you’ll meet, for now all you need to know is that I myself will decide on them and point them out to you. The important thing for you is to learn to ‘see.’ If you ‘see,’ you’ll make that man or woman’s history your own and in an instant you’ll gain the benefit of years and years of experiences, efforts, sacrifices, successes and failures.
‘Seeing’ them means recognizing them inside yourself like wounds to be closed or organs to be healed. ‘Seeing’ means forgiving yourself inside. Then every meeting becomes a step on which to rise above and go beyond..
Wherever they meet, for a few moments or years; in the desert or in a business, two men inevitably form a pyramid. Placing themselves on different rungs of an invisible ladder, they respect an inner, mathematical order, a planetary hierarchy made up of brightness, orbits, mass and distances from their sun.
Mankind, as it is, doesn’t seek healing and doesn’t want it. It’s forced to proceed mechanically, under the pressure of unknown forces… Suffering and pain are the driving forces of its evolution.
And even if it seems that most men have exchanged their own progress for the apparent security of a career, or for the mirage of financial wealth or artistic success; even the most ordinary man can’t escape an involuntary, mechanical, imperceptible healing process. The work in organisations, the drudgery of roles, the antagonisms, suffering and problems, which life unfailingly presents him, together form a necessary discipline that betters him and projects him towards the highest zones of freedom…
It’s a very slow system and it might take more than a lifetime to advance even a millimeter in the verticality of being…
You’re still trapped in what you believe you are. What you’ll see in the meetings isn’t what you truly are, but what you are not: the man whom you’ve believed yourself to be.
In the ‘game’ there’s nothing to plan. You’ll have to invent instantly; and purposefully act out the roles and language of existences you’ve never lived. The moment will tell you the strategy, the words to use and all that you have to know in order to ‘satisfy’ the encounter.
The others reveal you, measure you
and perfectly reflect your level of responsibility.
Every man you meet is a door. He can bar access or become a step from which to climb beyond. Every encounter measures you and determines your position on the ladder of human responsibility. Remember! The others are you!… In the “game” you will meet no one but yourself… Within a few seconds, you’ll have to learn which part of yourself is before you, and understand immediately what the aim of that encounter is, which mask to put on, and which role that the other, whether it be a man or woman, wants you to interpret.
The difference between the two of you in the ‘game’ is that you know how to act, while the other acts without knowing. There’s an infinite distance, a difference of eternities between the two, a difference which will allow you to climb vertically at vertiginous speed, the pyramid of human roles, conquering positions which in the horizontal world would take years and entire generations to reach.
