🙈👁 Existential Hide & Seek

Playing with Concealment & Revelation

Last week, at the Open House for the Deep Play Institute, I invited prospective players into a game of Existential Hide & Seek. We remembered how to play the game by first actually physically hiding, and letting ourselves be found in our super clever hiding spots (under a table, in the bathroom, inside an oven!!), and then considered how we might be hiding “in plain sight" – under our many identities, diagnoses, productive activities. As it always happens, the games I design end up affecting me the most (at least as far as I know), spilling into every part of my life and taking me for an emotional and existential roller coaster 🎢

Not that I’m complaining—I am here to play with everything 🤡 ♾️ 🎲

In my practice (and philosophy!) of Ludic Liberation, Hide & Seek is a core existential game dynamic. More than just a childhood thrill, Hide & Seek mirrors the play of divine awareness as described in some of the teachings of Non-Dual Shaiva Tantra. According to this school of thought, divine awareness (also known as as consciousness, God, spirit, Shiva) is always manifesting itself through five primary acts:

• Creation

• Maintenance

• Dissolution

• Concealment (also known as Occultation)

• Revelation (also known as Grace)

In our current Consensus Reality that privileges the masculine, the cognitive, and the material, we give most of our conscious cultural energy to the act of Creation (innovation, thrust) and to some extent to the process of Maintenance (reproduction, expansion, growth). On the other hand, we tend to ignore and even intentionally repress awareness of the other three universal functions: Dissolution, Concealment, and Revelation. Partly due to my concern for their neglect, and also in part due to my interest in all things secret yet powerful, these three divine acts are my favorite :)

I play with Dissolution (destruction, reversal, unraveling) a lot in my game designs. But I also think the dynamics of Concealment & Revelation especially when taken together, offer quite a bit of gamemaking potential. Concealment & Revelation is the secret pleasure formula behind every puzzle (finding that stubborn fitting piece!), of every escape room (we delight in having the solution hidden from us and having to work to uncover it), of every mystery novel (following the clues of whodunnit) and every action film (we always know the hero will win, but how?). Of course it’s also the pleasure of every romantic pursuit—the thrilling puzzle of concealing and revealing our emotional and physical nakedness from/to one another. I guess we pretty openly appreciate the play of concealment and revelation for the purposes of entertainment and diversion. But we forget that it’s also a primary dynamic of our own existential experience. We have hidden things from ourselves! We have hidden parts of ourselves from ourselves! And we are playing a game of finding those parts! Except sometimes (often) we forget that we are playing this game.

Forgetting that Existential Hide & Seek is a consensual and rewarding game and an inevitable part of our life journey can have pretty detrimental psychological effects.

Feeling like you are lost—when you don’t know that you’re supposed to be “lost” right now, and that you’re not really, actually lost—can be scary, confusing, and frustrating—like the plot of a horror movie rather than a fun adventure of discovery. Being “unfound” for a long time by others and ourselves can make us feel abandoned and alone. And when we are finally “found,” the experience might feel embarrassing—like everyone might laugh at our hiding spot, or mock us for hiding there for so long in the first place. It’s awful to feel like we are playing a game we aren’t sure we’re playing correctly, and so keep messing up at.

I’ve been viscerally encountering these dynamics of Existential Hide & Seek in my own life this past week. In particular, I recently discovered that I have a neurodevelopmental condition that I’ve lived with my entire life but wasn’t aware of. On the one hand, the discovery made me feel extremely seen and found – wow, yes, that’s me, thank you for finally finding me!! On the other hand, it made me feel terribly sad and angry for being hidden and unseen for so long! How could I and everyone else miss the clues? What other “hidden in plain sight” aspects of ourselves could we all be completely oblivious to? Being “found” in the game of Existential Hide & Seek might feel like it needs to be followed with quite a bit of therapy!!!

Where do you (knowingly and unknowingly) play Existential Hide & Seek in your life? What are some ways you’ve been found lately? Are you feeling particularly lost these days. . . or maybe proud of the ways you’ve hidden? Are there certain people you trust to play this game with you more than others? What makes them such skilled seekers?

Reply and let me know, or leave a comment on this letter’s thread ⤵️

I am very excited and grateful to have a container to explore these and other Existential Gameplay questions through the Games We Play With Ourselves workshop series that starts THIS WEDNESDAY 🎉! There are still a few spots left and sliding scale tuition available if you would like to join! I also made a cool Instagram graphic that’s overflowing with existential play symbolism that I’d like to leave for you below to enjoy 😎

Thank you for playing, liberators.

~ Natalia

Existential Game Maker/Destroyer