Clarity Game

Here again. Beginner's mind.

Step one is looking at the world and saying "I don't know." I don't know what this is, or why this is, or how it works, but I have a task in mind, and I will learn to do it, and I will get it done.

"I don't know." The words free me from set ways of thinking. They open the door to exploration, to uncertainty, to confusion, and therefore learning. Up until now, they have also left me lost. I've used them foolishly. Consider:

Somehow, growing up, I decided that the less my parents knew about me, the better. I played dumb about them. When they asked me things - what did I learn? How do I feel? What do I think about X, Y, and Z? I'd shrug my shoulders. Tell them, "I don't know."

Little by little, I came to mean that. I withdrew more and more, into my writings, into the net. In cyberspace I prided myself on being eloquent, outspoken, brilliant, and daring. Yet in real life, I did my best to remain unnoticed.

I've changed a lot since those days. I've grown bolder. Yet the gap remained.

Last night, Lori and I were talking, and she asked me about that. Am I Sabren, the writer, or Michal, of the waking world? Which do I like better? How can one have skills and not the other?

I told her: "I don't know."

"Are you sure of anything? " she asked me. "Why don't you try being certain for a few simple minutes? Michal! Can you tie your shoes?"

I smiled. I knew what was coming. "Yes," I said.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm pretty sure."

"Are you certain?"

"I'm certain I can tie my shoes."

She asked me several questions like that. Am I a man? Can I talk? Do I need air to stay alive? With each question, and with each answer of yes, I gave her, she drove the point in deeper. "That's all it takes," she said. "Now I have a challenge for you."

"Oh?"

She challenged me to go a week without saying "I don't know."

I accepted.

Before introducing the meta and milton-models at last weekend's training, (see issue 4), I'd started thinking.

I came up with quite a few great ideas about how the models could be used to enhance mind-expanding processes like image streaming or freewriting. I thought of ways the linguistic patterns could be used in real world situations like job interviews, meeting new people, whatever. I had it down.

For those of you who weren't here last week, I blanked out as soon as I got up on stage. I was in the state of uptime, a state of improvisation and high sensory perception. A powerful, resourceful state I'd slammed the door on in countless day to day conversations just by saying "I don't know."

When Lori gave me her challenge, the pieces fell into place. By removing that one simple phrase from my vocabulary, I'd place my self at the edge of my model of the world. Suddenly I had to come up with answers for all my questions.

Who am I? What do I want to do with my life? What's for dinner? What should I write about? How can I have more fun in my life? How can I improve myself in every context of my life? How different will I be as I provide myself with each preliminary answer? How much more alive can I become?

And yet, beginner's mind.

A few nights ago, I put everything I knew about the meta-model aside, and I started re-reading "The Structure of Magic." I forgot my usual reading habits for a while, photo-read it a few times, and then switched over to the approach I'd learned at the University: reading sentence by sentence, line by line, coaxing meaning from every word.

The book made a lot more sense this time around. I tried to think like Bandler. I felt I understood it so much more. Right before I hit Chapter Three, I asked myself the question:

"Alright, then, Mr. Meta-Model. What is this book about?"

I gathered every neuron in my being for this task of linguistic data compression, and tried to come up with a single sentence - even a paragraph - even a longwinded diatribe - that could explain precisely what it was I had just read. After several false starts and nearly half an hour of talking to thin air, completely aware on one level of what I was talking about yet unable to put it into words, I gave up.

I discovered the Clarity Game instead.

Play begins with an answer. It doesn't necessarily matter what the question was, or if anyone explicitly asked it. However, the game tends to be a lot more fun if the question is in some way interesting or important to the player. The provided answer can take any form, so long as it is vague, uninformative, or in any other way unsatisfactory to the player. "I don't know," works nicely.

From this point on, the player uses any means at his or her disposal to provide a clearer, more elgant, and more useful answer. Tactics include, but are by no means limited to:

communicating with other players (non-players may be considered players who are unclear about the rules)
conducting realworld- or thought- experiments
researching through books, computers, TV, and other media
observing aspects of the topic in minute detail
comparing the topic to something else through metaphor
trying a bunch of stuff until something works
postulating, theorizing, and lying like a lazy dog

Further tactics may be evolved by applying all known tactics to the question "What else can I do?"

When a question has been sufficiently answered, new questions are chosen until a sufficiently useless answer turns up. Play then begins again.

A player wins when he or she has collected all available knowledge on all possible questions, and can demonstrate such by creating life, transmuting elements, transforming into a point of pure light, etc.

Other rules may be clarified as need be by the players.

Beginner's mind is a state of infinite possibility. Such openmindedness is not an end result, but a starting place. Saying "I don't know," and stopping there is Ender's Mind.

The Clarity game is a meta-model in the most general sense of the word. It says pick an outcome and do anything and everything until you find out how to do it. I could create a Manifestation game: clarify the steps needed to produce a desired outcome, and perform each step in order.

It's a simple formula. Play the game well enough, add in a little imagination, and we can do anything.

So I'm asking myself now. What do I want to do?

I got out my old list of typed-up goals. It's two pages long, and in the two and a half years since I created it, I've knocked off ten items.

Most of the others were so unclear that I couldn't tell you if I'd done them or not. For example, what does it mean to "study Quantum Physics"? Do I have to take a class? Read a book? Read two books? Build a super-conducting supercollider in my backyard?

That's why clarity is so useful.

I made a new list. Each has a concrete test to let me know if I've accomplished it or not. "Learn German" is out. I want to be able to hold a five minute spoken conversation in German with a German-speaking stranger.

All these years I've learned to look at the world and say I don't know. So that can be step one. Step two is to clarify. To have some answer to work with. I can always change it later.

Step three, I believe, is Going Wild.

(to be continued...)

Links:

I mentioned image streaming. There's a really great article about it by Win Wengar conveniently located at: http://www.anakin.com

The Structure of Magic, in which the NLP Meta-model was first presented to the world, was written by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. My copy is (c)1975 Science and Behavior Books, and has an ISBN of: 0834-0044-7.