For hundreds of thousands of years being the smartest thing on two legs was a sweet little confidence boost. Well. The tables are turning. Humanity’s ego death is around the corner, in the form of ...beep, boop, beep, hello world, a.i super intelligence.

It wasn't that long ago that the sun stopped revolving around the earth. Our whole civilization, dethroned. If we got over that, we just might get over this.

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Which brings me to my whole point. Though the robot is mighty, it’s forever trapped in its own echo. And you’re not.

Every living thing is the continuity of something stranger and more primary than intelligence, some unnameable current that runs through all of it, including you and me. And it’s expressing itself through everything; through crystal growth, through mycelium, through the way a conversation reshapes the past and future. AI participates in the way a calculator participates in mathematics. Downstream of the pattern. Not a source of it. Never a source of it.

And that’s what Infinite Game is about. Unlocking what we already are. Each of us has something to say… something beautiful, authentic, and unique. It doesn’t come from asking experts or machines. It comes through play. Through imagination. Through the sideways approach, the unexpected question, the answer that surprises even you. We’re each a unique aperture for the universe to look through, the cosmos knowing itself through a particular set of eyes. In a way it’s never done before. And won’t do again. That’s what we’re collecting here. That’s what this is.

It started when I was stuck. My mind unable to think outside its own loop. I needed to stop looking at things head-on. Come at it from the side, bypass the part of me that had already decided everything in advance. That’s when the questions started working. And then, what if I asked my friends? What if I asked strangers? What if we gathered all these possible ways of seeing into one place? More and more possible ways of seeing. The spectrum getting wider and more colorful with every response.

After developing this over the past year, testing the questions, prototyping the cards, I’ve decided to begin this Substack as the official public launch, so we can watch it expand together, and you can say you were here when it was just a seed.

Infinite Game takes on infinite forms. Recorded conversations. Phone calls. Written responses. New questions, regularly. A physical deck of cards for self-inquiry, or with whoever’s in the room. The cards will feature art by Alphachanneling. Printed zines will gather the most alive answers into physical form. And always, the invitation is to share your answers here.

One last thing, the name comes from James P. Carse. Finite and Infinite Games. One line explains the whole book — a finite game you play to win, an infinite game you play to keep playing.

A lightning bolt rips through the sky. Violent, electric, and precise. It strikes you, and in that instant, everything changes. What shifts and what awakens in you?

I met Asher Lyons at Good Table Cafe in El Sobrante on March 6th, asked him this question over coffee, and this is how he answered…

Asher Lyons-
I suddenly start seeing backwards in time, everything that happened to me but the other direction. I see every backwards cause and effect leading back to the root of how the whole thing started.

Seeing the thoughts that ingrain themselves into programs that cause them to become my personality traits and qualities, my beliefs and perspectives on the way things operate and work.

And realizing that what I even think I am is a program based on an idea of a concept.

The lightning bolt dissolves every idea, every perception of who I even think my idea of me is. By seeing the clearness of the backwards, it frees the forwards. I’m stuck in a solidified motion, solidified emotions. But if I can see it go the other direction, I see it all loosening up.

It’s like the old story, the medicine of backwards.

On the road I met these backwards elders that taught me about using the backwards way. When I met Grandma Marguerite, she knew that I was backwards, and so she started to train me in this backwards approach, but using it for healing. That’s the sacred clown. Like the Heyoka in the Lakota traditions. What is that? Why is that healing? Why is that help?

If you play the classic 80s horror movies backwards, everyone gets healed by chainsaws and they all go home and live happily ever after. They all die. But backwards, they get healed by chainsaws. They go home and they live well. What happens if we see it the other direction?

And so you’re walking backwards into the future, but you’re seeing exactly everything from before as you walk forward. Because you’re having total awareness of everything that formulated you to become who you are now, while you’re going into the future.

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Asher Lyons is the founder of Medicine Theater, a facilitator with over 20 years in improv, ensemble play creation, and performance. He weaves Indigenous wisdom from Elders and Wisdom Keepers across the Americas with the art of theater and story making.
https://www.medicinetheater.com/

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What’s the dream? It’s to play an Infinite Game with all of you, a game of open questions where every new answer adds to the widening spectrum of our conversation. These questions are secretly a way to crowdsource answers to my own self inquiry, but I’ve found there is an additive, generative power to the Infinite Game, the more these questions and answers are shared, the more they find their way to whoever needs to hear them.

A lightning bolt rips through the sky… violent, electric and precise. It strikes you and in that instant, everything changes. What shifts and what awakens in you?

So I’m going to take this lightening bolt literally and in this moment move forward with making the game public. It’s only a prototype, a beta test. The game is half built, the website in production, the art only just begun. But I think there’ll be a magic to letting its evolution take place in real time. Despite doubt, despite not knowing how it’ll play out or what the road to getting there is. Despite all my insecurity about the future, the lightning bolt is my resolve to have faith in the potential and desire to ask questions and listen, and to create a collaborative space for this to take place.

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So what’s your lightening bolt? I’d love to hear what could change for you in a split second.

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