God is in the Dice
How do we recognize the correct path at a crossroads? This is the art of living.
My teacher, Reshad Feild, once explained to me, “Some people are destined to know God, and some are destined to know God and His ways.”
I’ve always been curious about “His ways.” As a small child, I lay awake and wondered, “What’s outside our solar system? And what’s outside of that? WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE!?”
The vast gap between our tedious, goofball lives and the majestic endlessness of space made no sense. What’s the point of all this drama?
I became a Sufi, helped bring Rumi to the West, and later studied Fourth Way ideas and “non-dual” meditation. Through it all, two realizations guided my life:
The Octave — This fundamental law of the universe describes the progression of the vibrations that underlie all reality. The Octave explains how we grow, transform, move through life, change, and get stuck along the way. Modeled on the musical octave, the Octave’s momentum drives music, literature, and movies.
Hazard — In short, life is random. The chance nature of Creation is hard to reconcile with its symmetry, order, and beauty. Yet, Hazard is the chaos generator that produces beauty, wisdom, transformation, and love. When we make peace with the Unknown and become attuned to the present, Hazard can become our friend.
I want to talk about how Hazard is guiding my late-life second act. My inquiry into Hazard was spawned by teacher/philosopher J.G. Bennett, whose book BLEW MY MIND in my 20s when I read: “God Himself must be subject to hazard.”
As a devoted Sufi who prayed to the “Absolute,” realizing that God was struggling to find a parking space like the rest of us busted open a new wall in my thinking. In other words, the Universe was making it up as it went along.
The implication: Every picture of the future is imaginary. Reshad went further:
Expectation is the red death. Most of us were raised in expectation. We’re meant to be doing something. That expectation is setting a pattern for our lives. The red death of expectation is what stifles a human being.
Hazard, with all its messiness, is the creative impulse. It bumbles and stumbles to create a meaningful world. Hazard lives at the core of everything we value: love, tenderness, creativity, healing, and breakthroughs of all kinds.
Carl Jung nailed it when he wrote:
“If you destroy the creative impulse, you destroy the intrinsic value of the individual.”
A few weeks ago, I gave a seminar on Hazard right after Trump’s felony conviction. One of my PPT slides showed these news headlines:
Two weeks later, I gave the talk again but had to update the slide. Yikes!
Fast forward one week later, and again, it’s yet a different story:
And then, literally an hour after I posted this blog:
Want more? Eight days later:
And immediately after:
Pundits and prognosticators read trends to predict the future…
…but the immutable fact is that the future does not exist — nada! All we have are opportunities in the present that open and close.
In the days following the disastrous debate, Biden gave interviews, held rallies, hosted a NATO summit, and swatted down calls to bow out. Trump mostly disappeared. Each candidate confronted their “growing edge” in their way. One’s growing edge is where you invest your mental, emotional, and physical energy. The growing edge of a plant is its roots and tendrils. A toddler’s edge is to walk. Candidates push hard to raise money and convince voters. A plant’s roots may hit a rock, the toddler might tumble, and in Biden’s case, major donors pulled back. The roots find a way around the rock, the toddler tries again, and Biden recalibrated his campaign (we hope).
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Pollsters predict that democracy is over — or maybe not. Young voters might wake up to the threat of living in a Hungary-style autocracy and come out for Joe. The United States is at a crossroads.
In his book Hazard, The Risk of Realization, Bennett describes this moment:
All opening is a hazard.
You arrive at a crossroad. If you can see which way, if it is clearly labeled, that the road on the left is the one that leads to your destination, then choosing that way is not an opportunity.
If the way is not labeled at this crossroads—and in life our ways are not labeled—then when we come to the crossroads, there is an uncertainty and a suspense and with that an opportunity.
How to recognize it? This is really the art of living.
The word “hazard” comes from the word for dice in the old Akkadian language. Zar became azar in Spanish and hazard in English.
Opportunities open and close in life, similar to the scheme of backgammon, where the player moves chips from one available hole to the next under the control of the dice.
Bennett uses the analogy of molten glass to explain this phenomenon in life:
There are holes in the glass, and we know that these holes make it possible for one element of the material to enter into a hole and release a place for another one to enter… The melting of a piece of glass is really the same kind of process, governed by the same sort of rules as the game of backgammon. Someone, or something, is throwing the dice, and when the turn comes for the particular little aggregate of silicate to fall into a hole that is available, it will do so, and so the glass flows.
Bennett takes the fluid state further as a key to understanding life:
If you really could penetrate this question to the limit— if you could really feel yourself part of the process and understand what it is like for a piece of glass to melt, if you could go to the end, you would find that you would understand everything that there is in the world.
Can you understand my excitement about Hazard?
I have been thrust into a new chapter of life called “dating.” Suddenly, I’m a backgammon piece looking to fall into an opening. But at my age, the slots all seem closed. People are done flowing, the gates are closed, and they seek to eliminate Hazard from every sphere of life.
If Hazard is the creative engine, how does one let it in?
To start, accept that all experience is contained within the present moment. The present moment is a constant yet always in flux — a dichotomy the mind can’t grasp.
The constancy of the present moment is the exposed edge of Eternity. Joseph Campbell explained eternity to Bill Moyers:
Eternity isn’t some later time; eternity isn’t a long time; eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of the here and now in which thinking in time cuts out.
If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. The experience of eternity — here and now — is the function of life.
You’re wondering: “What do I do with this? What is this art of living that Bennett talks about?”
Backgammon is an interplay of two forces — 1) Hazard from the random throw of the dice and 2) Decision-making based on the positions on the board.
Decision is an act of will.
We access the present moment through the force of will. The game unfolds through will, and the whole of our life works the same way.
Will isn’t willfulness — forcing your way on people. Will is the electromotive force that moves an inchworm or compels me to finish this article before I go swimming.
Joseph Campbell quotes the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who describes will as the writer of our life:
[The whole of our life] seems to have been composed by someone. And those events that, when they occurred, seemed merely accidental and occasional and just something that happened turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot.
So Schopenhauer asks, who composed this plot? And he said, “Just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you.”
Then he says, “Just as those people you met by chance became effective agents in structuring your life, so you have been an agent.”
Watch: Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers
Opportunity and decision play together to make growth and change possible. Hazard, like the throw of the dice, opens these holes so that life can flow.
Bennett underscores that we can’t bank on Hazard to deliver a payoff:
So one must realize that if we are going to think seriously about the law of hazard, we must remember that this is also the law that implies that it is by no means certain that when one takes a risk it is going to pay off.
If one takes a risk, there must be a possibility of failure, even a probability. Nature seems to deal with this contingency by lavishness.
Bennett describes how thousands of acorns fall to the ground for one oak to grow or how a mother codfish lays millions of eggs to produce her offspring.
Throughout the history of the world, innumerable forms have arisen, and the great majority of these have failed to survive and have disappeared. Many lines that appeared promising have been snuffed out.
In my dating life, I can’t cajole my potential girlfriend to take substantive steps toward a relationship, yet something in my heart feels promise. One could question the wisdom of piling my chips on an unlikely bet, but I’m also comfortable living in the crosshairs of Hazard.
The augmentation of potential
Bennett goes further.
Hope does not consist in the realization of potential but in the augmentation of potential.
To spare yourself a trip to the dictionary: AUGMENTATION: The process of increasing the size, value, or quality of something by adding to it.
In other words, a forest will regrow after a fire, but planting seedlings will accelerate the process with the trees you prefer.
Bennett calls this objective hope.
This is objective hope, but there is the other kind of hope; there is the gambler's hope, which is really expecting the law of hazard to do for you what is not its function at all, that is, to give you something for nothing.
One of the great misinterpretations is to see the law of hazard like this. We are very prone to it. We go in for this sort of hope on a very huge scale, of expecting an unearned profit from the law of hazard. This is not how the world is actually put together.
I will admit to my new-age misinterpretation of the law of hazard — expecting synchronicity and beneficence to flow into my life because I was on “Team God.”
Objective hope explains my decision 18 months ago, on New Year’s Eve, while I sat alone in my car on a frigid night. A single word came into my heart: Circulation. I vowed to say yes to every invitation, request, suggestion, and opportunity in the new year—regardless of distance, distaste, or demeanor.
I vowed: “I will step into that stream because life is inherently mysterious, creative, and intelligent.”
Olga Worrall, a famous healer and psychic, understood the power of Hazard:
“If you live in doubt, you close the door to discovery.
In that moment, my beloved Karen became my teacher. I took her advice:
“Face the wave, get on top, and ride it to the end.”
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