The first time I played the Samurai Game, I died before the War even began.\u00a0 What happened was that our Daimyo had chosen me Second in Command.\u00a0 I was very honored and gave my allegiance willingly, eagerly, and with a complete sense of authenticity.\u00a0 I was ready to play the Game.\u00a0 What in the world I was supposed to do was another issue.<\/p>\n
The Samurai Game was invented by George Leonard, writer, Aikido sensei extraordinaire, and co-founder of ITP \u2014 Integral Transformative Practice, with Michael Murphy. \u00a0George is the one who coined that term “human potential movement” when he was an editor for Life Magazine. \u00a0George was all about human potential. \u00a0And he thought the best way to explore it (and test it) was through games.<\/p>\n
I think of his games as ordeals<\/em>. \u00a0They weren’t fun. But they were instructive.<\/p>\n The Samurai Game was by far his most extraordinary gaming accomplishment. \u00a0No matter how many times you play it, it takes you to that place you need to go. \u00a0I know that sounds a bit California, really I know. \u00a0But George taught that ‘just’ playing a game could be transformative. \u00a0And more than that, it could be a grand teacher.<\/p>\n This was my first game.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cTrain the troops,\u201d was all my Daimyo had said.<\/p>\n And so, I had lined my warriors up, straightened out their backs, and was about to have them prepare for the Challenge, when I felt something brush against my leg.\u00a0 The War God (that would be George, of course) had stormed right up behind me and killed me out.\u00a0 Threw a sherikan at me.\u00a0 I looked up at him in disbelief and fell down dead.<\/p>\n Really. \u00a0I did.<\/p>\n In that war, I never even got to see the first one-on-one combat.\u00a0 How could the War God do this to me?<\/p>\n I was, it turned out, the only one playing the Game who had actually ever been in a real war.\u00a0 Besides George, that is. \u00a0And I had been so eager to play.\u00a0 Had been thinking about it for weeks.\u00a0 Heart pounding with anticipation.\u00a0 Yeah, I know, it’s just a game, but I couldn’t believe I could die so fast.<\/p>\n Such a meaningless, worthless death, too.\u00a0 Not even on the battlefield.\u00a0 I was lying there in the camp of my own Army, safe behind the vigilant guard of our own Sentry.\u00a0 Safe!\u00a0 Killed out by an Act of God.<\/p>\n How could he have done this to me?\u00a0 The son of a bitch.<\/p>\n I could see nothing.\u00a0 The position I had fallen in was awkward, uncomfortable.\u00a0 Of course, I could still hear the booming disembodied voice of the War God ruling somewhere high and far above me.\u00a0 There were troop movements.\u00a0 People falling.\u00a0 Dying.\u00a0 I heard sobs from a distance, coming from the other Army.\u00a0 It sounded like Lacey.\u00a0 Oh, my God, Lacey was out there dead!\u00a0 Lacey, in real time was about to get a bone marrow transplant for her matasticized cancer the very next week.\u00a0 Why would she want to play a game now in which she was bound to die?\u00a0 Her chance of survival was slim either way.\u00a0 Later, I heard that she was the first warrior to die in the other Army.\u00a0 Her own Daimyo had killed her for disobeying orders.<\/p>\n Lacey learned a lot from playing the Samurai Game. \u00a0She took what she learned quite literally to the grave. \u00a0But she felt prepared. \u00a0She had a beautiful funeral at the Zen Center. \u00a0I still can’t believe that Lacey had played the Game.<\/p>\n That first Game had been psychologically brutal.\u00a0 Dreadful.\u00a0 After Lacey’s death, her Army had no stomach for War.\u00a0 But still, the battles were waged.\u00a0 Compulsively.\u00a0 Demanded by will of the Gods.\u00a0 Now I know why the Maya sacrificed to the Gods for the return of the sun each day.\u00a0 Some Gods cannot be denied.<\/p>\n The War God’s voice became the only thing I was conscious of as I lay dead, safe behind my own Army’s lines.\u00a0 I went back in time and found myself in that pitch black bomb shelter in Jerusalem again.\u00a0 It was 1967 all over again.\u00a0 That disembodied War God voice changed languages on me.\u00a0 And I realized I must be having some kind of war time replay. \u00a0 I was having a flashback. \u00a0I was no longer in Marin County at George Leonard’s dojo.\u00a0 It was the Middle East outside.\u00a0 Iraqi bombers.\u00a0 MiGs and Mirage jets. \u00a0It was Jerusalem outside. \u00a0My Machon was right on the border of the divided city. \u00a0I could hear them overhead. \u00a0I could hear them through the streets. \u00a0We were underground. \u00a0Had locked ourselves in. \u00a0Mattresses lined the floor and shelves. \u00a0We’d taped up the windows so they wouldn’t shatter. \u00a0We had brought the neighbors into our Bomb Shelter. \u00a0They were crying. \u00a0We weren’t. \u00a0We were young. \u00a0North Americans. South Americans. \u00a0What did we know of war?<\/p>\n Someone was poisoning our water supply.\u00a0 Again<\/em>.<\/p>\n Post-traumatic shock.\u00a0 How could a game do this?<\/p>\n In the darkness, everything became clear.\u00a0 We too, had had a War God in 1967.\u00a0 And any attempt to disobey orders had been lethal.\u00a0 You would die a real life death.\u00a0 During the Six Day War, the voice of authority had been one of crackling static over our transistor radio.\u00a0 And that disembodied voice of sobriety had been our only lifeline in the underground bomb shelter on the Jerusalem border.\u00a0 Lying on the tatami mats at the dojo — lying there dead<\/em> — I started to think about the parallels between the Samurai Game and Real War when suddenly a truce was called in order to bury the dead.\u00a0 How much time had passed?\u00a0 Minutes or hours?\u00a0 It felt like days.\u00a0 Maybe months.\u00a0 My body needed burial before decay set in.<\/p>\n I was jostled gently.\u00a0 Lifted, and brought to the dank smelling Tomb, where I lay for another interminable amount of time.\u00a0 Even the voice of God was out of reach.\u00a0 I was simply a body, surrounded by an unknowable number of the dead from my own Army.\u00a0 I felt as if I had been embalmed, which was ridiculous.\u00a0 All I could think of is why I wasn’t warmer surrounded by all these bodies.\u00a0 It was too cold.\u00a0 Then I realized that I was indeed dead.\u00a0 So of course it was cold.<\/p>\n I stayed dead until the following week, when I was reborn as a Ronin and taken by the opposing Daimyo as a samurai warrior.\u00a0 I found, however, that I could not fight for this Army.\u00a0 When I was sent out to battle in a Rock, Paper, Scissors mind game.\u00a0 I\u2019m an academic.\u00a0 Is there any question that I would live or die with anything but Paper in my hand? And so I died again.<\/p>\n I had contempt for my new Daimyo.\u00a0 My original oath of loyalty remained, and for no reason I can fathom, remains to this day, in tact.\u00a0 I would give anything to be able to follow my own Daimyo’s orders once more and go out there and do battle in his name.<\/p>\n You know, I’ve never thought of myself as particularly loyal. \u00a0But it turns out that I am. \u00a0That was one of the things I learned playing the Samurai Game. \u00a0\u00a0Oaths must somehow be magically binding.\u00a0 But they’ve lost some of their power over the millennia.\u00a0 Can you imagine the magnitude of breaking an ancient vow?\u00a0 In the days before contracts.\u00a0 When your word<\/em> was backed up by lineage.\u00a0 Think of the consequences.<\/p>\n But I learned more than that I had honor and loyalty, and wartime flashbacks. \u00a0I learned that I wasn’t going to take dying lying down. \u00a0The next Samurai Game I played, I played to win. \u00a0That time, I prepared for months. \u00a0That time I was the Daimyo, leading her Samurai to success. \u00a0And in that Game I learned that nobody wins. \u00a0That victory, like defeat, in warfare is tragic and obscene.<\/p>\n And in my third Samurai Game … I got to play God.<\/p>\n And that was the most obscene of all.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n George, I miss you, you and your terrible games too. \u00a0And when we play them, we still think about you.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first time I played the Samurai Game, I died before the War even began.\u00a0 What happened was that our Daimyo had chosen me Second in Command.\u00a0 I was very honored and gave my allegiance willingly, eagerly, and with a complete sense of authenticity.\u00a0 I was ready to play the Game.\u00a0 What in the world…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[250,216],"tags":[255,330,332,328,333,329,331],"class_list":["post-2751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-kaddish-in-two-part-harmony","tag-death","tag-game","tag-george-leonard","tag-samurai","tag-six-day-war","tag-warfare","tag-warrior"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2751"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2753,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751\/revisions\/2753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}