leisure moments, is it any better in the “games” the individual chooses for himself—­hobbies, for instance?  Can these generally “instructive” and “useful,” generally also solitary, occupations be called play?  Are they not merely a reversal of life’s engine, rather than an unmaking and a remaking.  They are merely a variant of life.  They are very truly called a “change of occupation.”  They are led and dominated, commonly, by the intelligence.  They contain no element of freedom.  The same defect is found in all organised “games.”

* * * * *

 Real play, like every other reality, comes from what our mechanical
 and practical intelligences have called “within.”

 Real play arises when the “I” is in direct contact with the myself,
 with Life, with God, with the actuality moving beneath all symbolic
 representations.

It is only when “I,” the practical, intelligent, abstract-making, idealising, generalising, clever, separated “I,” the “I” which has a past, a present and a future, renounces its usurpation of the steering apparatus, that play can be.  “I,” to play or to pray or to love, must be born again.  “I” must relinquish all.  “I” must have neither experience nor knowledge, neither loves nor hates, neither “thought” nor “feeling” nor “will”—­nor anything that can arrest the action of the inner life.  When this complete relaxation, which has its physical as well as its mental aspect, is achieved, then and then only can “I” rise up and play.  Then “I” shall rediscover all the plays in the world in their origin.  “I” shall understand the war-dance of the “savage.”  “I” shall know something about the physical convulsions of primitive “conversion.”  The arts may begin to be open doors to me.  “I” shall have stood “under,” understood my universe, in the brief moment when “I” abandoned myself to the inner reality.  The words of the great “teachers” will grow full of meaning.  My own “experiences” will be re-read.  I shall see more clearly with my surface intelligence what I must do.  I shall be personal in everything, personal in my play.  Surface self-consciousness which holds me back from all spontaneous activity will disappear in proportion as “I” am immersed in the greater “me.”

Look at that woman walking primly down the lane to the sea with her bathing-dress.  She is a worker on a holiday.  But she cannot play.  She goes down every day to bathe in the Cornish sea, the sea that on a calm sunny day is like liquid Venetian glass and flings at you, under the least breeze, long, green, foam-crested billows that carry you off our feet if you stand even waist-high.  She potters in the shallows and splashes herself to avoid taking cold.  Her intelligent “I” is uppermost.  Her world of every day never leaves her.  She will go back to it as she came, unchanged.  Her wistful face betrays the seeker lost amidst unrealities.  If the “I” were a little more intelligent,