Once you've lost that original sense of belonging and you're put out there essentially alone, than you're told well you need these little belongings like family, gang, country and so on, so you will do the things in order to satisfy and defend yourself in order to keep those boundaries secure around yourself.  Those little belongings, whether it's a family, a culture, a gang, a team, then hook you in to the things that they support in order to keep you a member. So membership becomes exceedingly important and you are valuable only as long as you're a member. And it doesn't matter whether it's a sports team, an urban gang, a member of an army, it's all the same process of you are good only as long as you abide by our terms of membership and you pay us allegiance. Once you stop paying allegiance, than you're not a member of the team. You're not a member anymore. Not being a member is just absolutely crucial to life's survival for a human.

The duchess game says that, from Alice and Wonderland, the more of something I have it means the less of something you have. So it essentially says those things that are important to us are limited quantities; prestige, awards, money, love, all of those things are instead of unlimited, and they’re limited. That means we have to compete for them. And we make the mistake in play for example that those things that are valuable, the reason that play is there is to compete for the limited goods, as opposed to just having it be unlimited. And when they're unlimited goods, well than all your energy can be focused on play itself and not on the devious things you have to do to make sure you get there and the other person doesn't get there. So that every time your energy gets dissipated, out of the play itself, than that's less energy that you have to actually devote to play. 

I think we make a bargain very early on as adults with our children and I call it a Faustian bargain, in that we give up, we actually say to the child, okay you give up the original state of belonging that you know as an infant and what I'm going to provide for you instead are all the goods of the culture, all of the both emotional and physical and material goods that I have to offer as a cultural being. Will you do that? Will you become part of my bargain? At that age, the people presenting us with the bargain are all we know so there is no out essentially for us. So we accept the bargain and it seems appropriate.  We start to buy into those rewards and never realize that those rewards can never give us back what we gave up. But we can't get out of them because we think well if I just win more, if I just get more of it, perhaps than I will feel the sense of belonging I felt as an infant, and that sense of wholeness. Maybe I just don't have enough yet. And the whole culture feeds that. You don't have enough yet. You don't have enough yet.  I think ultimately we find out, many of us not until it's near death, that those culture games aren't designed, nor can they meet the needs of the original belonging because they're focused on such small parts of us that they can't meet that need of just belonging to life. Not just belonging to family or a team or a country, but belonging to life itself. And that takes a huge sense of safety and love, that the little belongings don't provide for us.  But we're never told that truth. 

I think once you've lost that original sense of belonging and you're put out there essentially alone, than you're told well you need these little belongings like family, gang, country and so on, so you will do the things in order to satisfy and defend yourself in order to keep those boundaries secure around yourself.  Those little belongings, whether it's a family, a culture, a gang, a team, then hook you in to the things that they support in order to keep you a member. So membership becomes exceedingly important and you are valuable only as long as you're a member. And it doesn't matter whether it's a sports team, an urban gang, a member of an army, it's all the same process of you are good only as long as you abide by our terms of membership and you pay us allegiance. Once you stop paying allegiance, than you're not a member of the team. You're not a member anymore. Not being a member is just absolutely crucial to life's survival for a human. And we're never told that there is a membership outside of all the cultural memberships. We knew that in our original belonging and that's what play teaches, but it looks as if we're going to step off into the void of being absolutely alone on earth with nothing to support us. That is so incredibly scary. We don't even know how to think about that. I think that's the terror that poet (Rainer Maria) Rilke was talking about. We just are terrified of that nothingness. 

What play teaches us is that what appears to be nothing is actually the most powerfully loving support that we could ever find. But stepping out of, outside of the little addictions, whether it's the prestige and the money that an athlete may get, or an actor/actress, even a teacher in a classroom becomes addicted to the cultural supports that they've used. And teachers are always saying that kids need structure and without structure they lose themselves. Well the reality is adults need structures. What we assume is that life comes with no structure itself and if we don't put it on there, it just all falls apart. 

What play has taught me is life comes with it. Life comes with its own pattern. That pattern is a sense of belonging that's so immensely powerful, very hard to tangibly get a hold of, and not believing in that, we let go of that for the Faustian kind of illusions of prestige and money and so on and so on. Once hooked into that, it's extremely difficult to let go of them.