Gaming, Dreaming, Awakening
Last week my eldest son (16) had to write a paper in high school about computer gaming addiction. For this he made an interview with a social education worker, a friend of my wife. They talked about different forms of addiction and from when on you cross the point of gaming for joy to gaming out of an addiction.
For him it was important to see that he himself doesn’t fall into the category of computer addicts – though he is gaming quite a lot in the multi-player online game Guild Wars and this since about 1.5 years. With the fighters of his clan he is running for hours through countries of digital magical imagination – forgetting dinner or anything around. But he is still having other interests in the “real” world as well, and school is also demanding its tribute.
There is such a pull of the pictures and action into these digital fantasy worlds, where the entire inner imagination is captured by the spell. It is like a more physical effigy of the worlds you enter through drugs. Also in meditation you come about strata of subtle imagination where you can lose yourself in esoteric fancies.
The awakening in life towards responsibility and commitment to some purposeful activity often takes a long time. Some people seem to evolve only parts of their inner flower of life, and petals remain closed till later years or never open. In my life the process of discovering the thread took quite long and was partly painful. But the pain pushed forward to change: “Change cannot happen, unless one yearns to change.” (K.P. Kumar: On Change)
