SEVEN GAMES OF LIFE

Survival, love, and spiritual enlightenment are among the prizes we must seek, according to this lively treatise on the human predicament.

Smoley, the author of Inner Christianity (2002) and editor of Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society of America, posits seven metaphorical “games” that depict prominent aspects of existence. The survival game is won by procuring basic needs, but these can be quite different, he notes, depending on whether you’re an English aristocrat or a homeless tunnel dweller in Las Vegas. Love is a game that’s usually transactional, Smoley contends, with lovers judging each other by “the Equation” of desirability, but the secret to love is “the perception of the unity of all being.” The power game can involve Machiavellian cunning—“it is never wise to underestimate the extent to which your subordinates can sabotage you”—or a numinous “power-from-within” that draws on a universal “life force.” The pleasure game motivates us in everything from oral sex to champagne connoisseurship, while the creativity game is an interplay between form and innovation in everything from classical architecture to the absurdly standardized rules of movie scripts, which requires that the big plot break occurs on page 25. Smoley celebrates the courage game through the deeds of warriors like Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson—an example whom some readers will find problematic—and he proposes “death in battle is like a famous ride in an amusement park—something not to be missed at one point or another in a sequence of earthly lifetimes.” Finally, the master game is the realm of rare souls who awaken to deeper wisdom, often through meditative exercises. Smoley’s pensées mix an acerbic realism, complete with advice on office politics, with a mystical and even occult sensibility; he is influenced by spiritualist G.I. Gurdjieff, cites astrology as a useful means of assessing romantic compatibility, and mentions a “strikingly and unexpectedly accurate” palm reading he received. The book has a free-wheeling curiosity and erudition, and it approaches profound questions in prose that’s lucid and entertainingly tart: “The lifelessness and superficiality of the current American literary novel cannot be because it has reached the technical limits of what is a very broad and accepting genre, but because, one senses, of some larger social vitiation: a masturbatory self-obsession has supplanted great themes and vistas.” The result is a stimulating read.

An eclectic, spicy smorgasbord of philosophical food for thought.