It all begins in unity...
We begin our journey through life as we emerge from the imaginal space of unity
When a caterpillar is fully grown, it weaves a cocoon around itself and retreats from the world. It's commonly thought that while hiding away inside the cocoon, the caterpillar simply grows a pair of wings and changes shape a bit to become a butterfly, but this is not what happens. The caterpillar actually dissolves itself with enzymes, erasing nearly all trace of what once was the caterpillar, until all that remains is a cocoon of liquid potential and a few “imaginal cells” that carry essential information from one life to the next, directing the formation of the butterfly to come.
Late last year, as my wife Vineeta and I stepped back from our roles running the business that we founded 17 years prior, we found ourselves entering the uncomfortable transition of the caterpillar as our older identities began to dissolve into imaginal goop, unaware of what the future might hold. On a beach in Cornwall, we discussed the need to give ourselves a psychological container in which we could hold this goop and enable its potential to emerge. This was the beginning of 42 Mysteries, the cocoon for our creative, philosophical and spiritual explorations. It had no shape or direction, but simply potential to become.
This week, something is emerging out of that cocoon that our own caterpillars just a year ago would never have imagined. It began on a trip to visit family in India where we visited a museum in which we found a historic artwork that looked incredibly similar to the game of Snakes and Ladders, but richer in its design and meaning, painted on fabric with faded Sanskrit notations. We couldn't fully understand it at first, but something deep inside told us that we needed to study this game and bring it back home.
That was the day that the imaginal cells began to move and shift, exploring possibilities and forming visible shapes within the goop. We pulled the thread that the universe had presented to us, and the cocoon began to unravel, revealing glimpses of a new but still unknown world.
After months of research, design, testing and meditative insights, we're excited to now be launching a modern version of the historic game of Snakes and Ladders, known as Gyan Chaupar, meaning the game of wisdom or self-knowledge. The game facilitates personal growth and spiritual development through personal and group reflection. The group dynamic also helps deepen relationships through the sharing of personal experiences and reflections on life in a safe, supportive environment.
Consisting of a grid of 84 tiles, each square of the game represents an aspect of life with the snakes and the ladders connecting squares to highlight key lessons of earthly life and karma. The dice serves as a medium for harnessing the wisdom of the universe to guide you to the squares that you need the most. The first square, Birth, represents the beginning of each earthly life and the last square, Enlightenment, represents the final goal. But the game actually begins and ends outside of the squares of life on Earth in the Mandala of Unity.
Unity, or oneness, is paradoxically both infinitely large and infinitely small, embracing all things without separation or division. It is space, but it is anything but empty. Unity is the imaginal goop from which all of creation is born, like the potential immediately prior to the Big Bang.
But potential wants to be fulfilled and cannot sit in the peaceful stillness of unity forever. It wants to experience the richness of life, to learn and to grow. As above with the expanse of the universe, so below with Vineeta and I in this transitional phase of life. And so from the imaginal space of unity, we are now birthing this modern version of Gyan Chaupar into the world and hope that it can contribute in some small way to the inner healing and development of those who are open to play it. The world is becoming increasingly polarised and we believe that this is why the game has found us now, to support us in healing ourselves as humans and in finding our way back to unity.
To find out more about the game, visit www.gyanchaupar.co.uk, and if you've enjoyed this post, subscribe below for more.
In each future issue, we'll follow the wisdom of the dice through the game of Gyan Chaupar to bring you insights, stories and ideas to support you on your journey through the game of life.