My good friend Oracle of Sweden has a fantastic new series of blogposts on the topic of memetics up at his blog.
The world of pickup and social dynamics has been taking a turn away from scripts and routines towards natural game the last few years. This was a very healthy development, and about time. I’ve seen better things come out of the community the last two years than in all the preceding years together.
The very name of this blog is a play on the puzzling fact that the ultimate destination of this journey is when you find yourself having gone full circle. You don’t feel you’re “doing” anything anymore, you break all the rules, yet it still somehow works.
If I was gonna sum it up as briefly as I can, being natural is being centered. Where scripted game is endlessly polishing the facade, going natural is developing an actual solid core. Once what is on the inside is indeed attractive, what one says and does doesn’t require much thought at all. What’s inside always shines through.
The problem with all the thought and discussion about being a natural is that it is – as the above – kinda vague and airy fairy. This development is still in its infancy, so everyone is still kind of running around like headless chickens, trying to find the way to “center oneself” and “finding core confidence”. How the hell do you do that? Some seem to turn to spirituality, some to religion.
While I certainly can appreciate spirituality, I have a scientific mind, am an atheist at heart and find faithbased and new agy answers unsatisfying. Oracle is the same, so I was not even surprised when we had a discussion recently and it turned out that despite living on different sides of the planet, we’d had many of the same thoughts the last few weeks. Of course, he is as always without equal in clearity of thought and application of the relevant science.
On the top of my wish list for this Christmas is a purely secular unified field theory that bridges the gap between structured game and natural game without invoking ghosts in the machine or chakras. I predict that Oracle of Sweden will be the one providing it.
