The Game of Life and How to Play it

Most people consider life a battle, but it is not a battle; it is a game. But it is a game that cannot be played successfully without knowledge of the spiritual law, and the Old and New Testaments show the rules of the game with splendid clarity. Jesus Christ taught that it is a great game of Giving and Receiving. "What a man sows is what he will reap." This means that whatever a man issues in words or deeds will come back to him; he will receive what he gives. If he gives hate, he will receive hate; if he gives love, he will receive love; if he gives criticism, he will receive criticism; if he lies, he will receive lies; if he deceives, he will be deceived. We are also taught that the faculty of imagination plays a primary role in the game of life. "Keep your heart (or imagination) with the utmost diligence, for from it come the outcomes of life." (Proverbs 4:23) This means that what man imagines, sooner or later becomes extrinsic in his affairs. To play the game of life successfully, we must train the faculty of imagination. A person who has a faculty of imagination trained to imagine only good things will bring into his life "every right desire of his heart": health, wealth, love, friends, perfect self-expression, his highest ideals. Imagination has been called "the scissor of the mind," and it is always there cutting and cutting, day by day, the images a man sees in his mind, and sooner or later a man encounters his own creations in his outer world. To train the imagination successfully, man must understand the workings of his own mind. The Greeks used to say, "Know thyself." There are three areas of the mind: the subconscious, the conscious and the superconscious. The subconscious is simply power, without orientation. It is like steam or electricity, and does what it is guided to do; it has no inductive power. Whatever a man deeply feels or clearly imagines is imprinted in the subconscious mind, and is minutely realized.