The Cosmic Game of Hide-and-Seek

When you were a child, you played hide-and-seek. You remember how it worked, because the rules were simple enough for a four-year-old.

One person is it. They close their eyes and count. Everyone else hides. Then the seeker opens their eyes and goes looking. And when the seeker finds someone, there is a tag, and roles change.

What you may not remember is how completely the change of role changed you. When you were hiding, you were still, quiet, small, holding your breath behind the curtain. The moment you were tagged, you became a different creature. You closed your eyes. You counted out loud. You opened them and moved through the house with a completely different energy, looking under beds, listening at doors. Nobody had to explain the new behavior to you. Being tagged made you a seeker, and seekers act like seekers.

Tag

A realization is like being tagged.

You were hiding. You were living inside your ordinary Prediction, tucked into the familiar. Then your bearing crossed something, and you saw it, and it was as though the universe tapped you on the shoulder and said, you're it.

If you fall in love with what you saw, you become a seeker. And seekers act differently. Your activities, habits, routines and priorities, which were all built around hiding, begin to rearrange themselves around seeking. You do not have to decide to behave like a seeker any more than the child did. You just are one now.

Confusion at first

The cosmic version of the game has one feature the childhood version mostly did not.

At the beginning, being a seeker is disorienting.

When you were hiding, you knew exactly where you were. That was the whole point of hiding. You were in your spot. Now you are walking around with your eyes recently opened, not quite sure what you are looking for. The clarity of hiding has been replaced by a strange openness.

This is natural. Many people who have had a profound realization go through a period when they understand less than they did before, not more. They are no longer sure what they believe, what they want, what their life is for. If that is where you are, you are not lost. You are a new seeker, still counting, eyes just open.

An old image

The idea that the universe plays hide-and-seek with itself is very old. In the Hindu traditions there is a word for the world understood as divine play: lila. In the twentieth century the writer Alan Watts did a great deal to popularize the image in the West, describing the divine as playing hide-and-seek with itself, hiding in all of us, so that the game of finding could happen.

I did not invent the image, and I am glad I did not. It is better for being ancient. What I hope to add is an account of the mechanics: why some realizations turn a hider into a seeker and others fade, which is the difference between a realization and its habitualization, and why, when love is present, the road stops feeling like work.

How to recognize a seeker

You can always tell someone who has gone from hiding to seeking. Their life has a different quality. Their friends will tell you how different they are from who they used to be.

The change is not subtle. They have stopped playing the old game. Their habits have adapted, their Prediction has been retrained by months and years of new history, and they are no longer hiding from the world. They are actively looking for something, even if they cannot quite tell you what.

What makes this rare is not the tag. Everyone gets tagged sooner or later. What is rare is falling in love with being it.

The game needs both

There is one more thing about hide-and-seek that every child knows and most adults forget. The game needs both roles. If everyone hides, there is no game. If everyone seeks, there is no game. The fun of it, the whole point of it, is the relationship between the two.

That turns out to be one of the most important things I can tell you about the cosmic version. It deserves its own chapter.