hidden variables

a game that points toward liberation

I recently stumbled on a Korean word, haan, for which there is no English equivalent. It’s a lexical gap I find unfortunate since haan is a crucial descriptor of human experience, and if I’d had the word a couple of years ago it would have helped me name a ghost I was grappling with but couldn’t identify, like how the term ‘ambiguous loss’ helped us name our shared pandemic fog. The two phenomena have overlaps, but haan is its own fearsome beast, like Gmork from The Neverending Story, and it dragged me into a terrible den, one so noxious and unfamiliar I wasn’t sure I’d exit in one piece. According to theologian Suh Nam-dong…

© Inner Active Cards from Sharon Eckstein

You know haan when you know haan, and to reduce it to a concept is to miss it entirely since haan is a full-bodied emotional and spiritual experience, a mass of teeming yet life-draining energy that’s all-consuming and futile, like fighting a swarm of bees, or wrestling with a vast, weighted blanket. Haan is relentless and heavy and, for me, it involved a pervasive sense that something had gone not just wrong but horribly wrong, karmically wrong. There was an upset in my inner cosmos, a tear in personal space-time, a demolition of things I held dear. Haan had me in its grip for almost two years, and it arrived with great intensity after I finally understood why I am what some experts call ‘an internally displaced person.’ That’s a story for another day, but part of why haan has such power to disturb is because, for better and worse, humans are driven by story and haan brings with it a subtle but pervasive narrative, which is that something should have been different, someone should have intervened, somehow a thing that happened cannot have happened because it defies natural laws we must believe in so we can keep on living.

I tried everything I knew to find an antidote. I listened to the natural world, communed with friends, met with therapists and spiritual teachers, engaged in sacred ritual, practiced mindfulness and meditation. Some days hurt so much I just prayed, asking for wisdom beyond wisdom, hoping for mysterious grace. But haan has a timeline that cannot be rushed, so my practice became witnessing and honoring but not abiding or indulging, because I could see that haan had a gravitational mass, like a black hole, and anytime I fixed my attention on it, it became a point “around which the core forces of greed, hatred and delusion attach themselves.” (Mark Epstein) In other words, if I stayed too close for too long, haan could warp my capacity for benevolence, cloud the channels of compassion I’d worked for years to cultivate, and turn me into someone I didn’t recognize. I saw that haan is both insidious and dangerous, and I understood that many people we perceive as villains are, more accurately, caught in its riptide. Haan is not trivial. It can change the valence of moral molecules and make even the most virtuous go dark. Not only can haan disrupt the process of ethical formation, it can also corrupt the terms of our heroic journeys. To quote Kacy Duke: “When you're angry, you're just a character in someone else's story. But when you let your anger go, you reclaim your own story, become your own protagonist.”

That is the power move, and I was aided by my Zen practice, through which I knew two things for sure. The first was that freedom from haan was possible. With help, I could find a way. The second was that much of my suffering was due to a perceptual distortion. In plain English: I had a belief, a story about how reality was “supposed to be” that I could not see past. It was my clinging to that idea, and my fear of how different the world would look if I dropped it, as well as how much grief would ensue when I redesigned life without it, that was a primary source of my pain. But there is always another way to see - one that can offer relief - and since most of y’all know I’m an experiential facilitator, I designed a game to help me in the process. That game is what I want to share with you today. It was inspired by David Bohm, the most significant scientist you’ve probably never heard of. I call it ‘Hidden Variables’ as a nod to his work, which pointed to a view of the universe as “Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement.” Bohm showed mathematically that reality is a unified field replete with structures, abstractions, and processes that move between form and formlessness. It’s a vast field of potentiation, and from this field spring the joys and frictions of our lives. (Also our actual lives!) If we could know this field entirely in an instance, we would marvel at how exquisite it is. But because most of its activity is hidden from our awareness, we construct limited views of reality, so the opportunity is to expand and refine those limited views. When we do this, we unlock our power to alleviate suffering.

The object of the Hidden Variables game is simple: to widen your field of awareness. In doing so, you may experience a sense of relief, wonder, empathy for yourself or others, compassion, or even gratitude for some event you previously were certain “should not have been or be.”

You can play this game individually or with a team. In this post, the game is focused on dissolving haan, but a great game variation is to also consider how something wonderful - like a mango - made its way to you, or how to find spaciousness around a work challenge. Used rigorously, Hidden Variables can help you rearrange ideas about how you think things are “supposed to be” and instead help you become intimate with and more accepting of what is - even while you still use energy to change or improve it.

The image in the game space below was created by a wonderful friend in Karachi, Saher Kahn, and some of you will recognize that the template is based on a Zentangle. I integrated a tangle because they put you in a contemplative state, and if you’d like to prime this game by dropping into more expansive awareness, a tangle will help significantly.

Play options: Recreate this game template in analog form by doodling it (recommended), download the image and print, or insert the digital image into an online collaboration tool. Here’s an example of that last one.

HIDDEN VARIABLE GAME STEPS (we can debrief in the chat, if you join):

1. If you have a strong sense that you’re afflicted with haan, first set an intention of metabolizing any part of it. Light a candle, take grounding breaths and, if you like, ask God, the universe, angels, your guides, or the implicate order to support you.

2. Draw your tangle. The basic guidelines for tangling are here. If you can’t spare time for this step, slowly doodle some waves and move to the next step.

3. Even while it may be uncomfortable, rest your awareness on what you’ll write in the center. The prompt is ‘a thing that should not have been or be.’ This can range from something minor to something grave. Examples: ‘I should not have been late picking my child up from school.’ ‘Our company should not have been restructured.’ ‘There should not be war in Ukraine.’ What goes in the center must be something that fixes your attention and clogs your energy, something you cannot make immediate sense of, something you return to in your heart and mind because you can’t find resolution.

4. The fourth step will require the most intellectual and imaginative exertion. The goal is to expand your awareness by explicitly mining for nuance and invisible operators - hidden variables - within the systems and processes underlying reality. Use the circular prompts to stimulate your thinking. For those of you keen to practice visual thinking, here are two visual frameworks that help you show aspects of what you’re grappling with so you can deepen your understanding and hopefully shake something loose.

5. Plot each variable, one by one, in your game space. Write directly in the space or use sticky notes of appropriate size. Don’t strive for coherence or brilliance. Just let them come. You can play this game for 10 minutes or leave it in your workspace for 10 days and keep adding content.

6. When you feel you have poured out your observations, close your eyes, put your hands in your lap and rest. Let those insights about the field simply sit in your awareness. If you want a Round 2, have one. Then close your eyes and rest again.

7. With your eyes closed and your breath slow, become present to the subtlety, complexity and mystery of this streaming experience called Life. Consider the possibility that something that happened was not your “fault,” was not caused 100% by you, was not caused by a punitive god, was not a function of something you failed to do, was not a result of other people being 100% wrong, was not the collapse of a sacred order, was not done on purpose to hurt you. Include more of the myriad in your perception and come alongside the unknowable flux out of which things. just. happen. Know that we are limited beings seeking to interpret phenomena largely beyond our comprehension. Remember to breathe. And play again anytime. Speaking from direct experience, I trust it will point you toward liberation.

Love,
Sun

P.S. In the next few posts,

Jose Manuel Redondo Lopera

and I have agreed to do a letter-writing exchange in which we’ll share some of our favorite games for personal development. I think you might enjoy it. :)