Why Seriousness Kills Your Creative Power

The fastest way to stop taking life so seriously is to notice what seriousness actually costs: not comfort, but creative power. Field Project doesn't treat playfulness as a nice mood to aim for on easier days. It treats seriousness as something closer to a mechanical failure — a "deal killer" that shuts down the exact process by which beliefs become experience.

Life Is a Game (Even When It Doesn't Feel Like One)

The Companion opens the idea with a borrowed line from an unlikely source: "Florence Scovel Shinn, an early 20th century spiritual lecturer, liked to say that life is a game. One of the many nice things about this idea is the implication that living well is not something to get too serious about. Games are meant to be played, after all, and play, as some of us may recall from days when we didn't yet have jobs or college degrees or contradictions, is fun."

The game Shinn describes, as the Companion frames it, "is a game of getting what you want through taking charge of your faith and your word — the basic premise of most teachings that deal with the creative power of personal consciousness, realized through self-mastery." That's the theory. The practice is where most people quietly abandon it: "it is precisely in the moment that what we want does not appear that we seem to be most susceptible to forgetting the game of life. We get serious. We fret. We doubt. We fume. We start trying to figure out why things aren't going our way, or aren't going our way again, or never go our way."

In other words, the exact moment playfulness matters most — the gap between wanting something and having it — is the moment it's hardest to access. "Since we have to be in faith in something, we unwittingly redirect our faith from playful anticipation and vicarious enjoyment of what we want to measuring what we want against what we have, and the discrepancy sends us spinning off into seriousness and suffering."

The Principle That Never Takes a Day Off

This is where the Companion makes its sharpest claim: "Now, I can tell you without doubt or exception that, in the game of conscious creating, seriousness is a deal killer. The deal it kills is the deal through which we can use what some have called the 'principle of assumption' (Field theory calls it the principle of correspondence) to remain playful, grateful, graceful, and fulfilled in consciousness whether or not what we want is factually at hand."

What can't be killed, notably, is the principle itself — only your access to using it well. "The deal that cannot be killed, of course, is this principle of assumption, or correspondence, itself. That is, we're always living in the dynamic expression of our own beliefs about who we are and what's real, and there's no time off from that." The mechanism doesn't pause because you're stressed. It keeps running on whatever belief is currently loaded, which means seriousness doesn't just feel bad — it actively feeds the machine in the wrong direction: "the moment seriousness gets the upper hand, and we start believing that we don't have what we want, or have what we don't want, and this takes on the power and authority of a conclusion, in that moment we begin creating more of that."

The Companion doesn't soften what follows: "This principle is constant and impersonal. If one is set against it through seriousness and casting one's faith in agreement with what one does not want, it can seem relentless and uncaring, even merciless." That's the same "as within, so without" logic explored more directly in The Principle of Correspondence: Your World as a Mirror — and it's also why resistance itself tends to entrench a problem rather than resolve it, the subject of The Art of Agreement.

Cursing the Light: When Complaint Becomes the Belief

The Companion illustrates the cost of seriousness with an old line reframed for this context — a version of "I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet." The point isn't comparative suffering as a guilt trip. It's a sharper observation: "we might all agree that it's better to 'light a candle than curse the darkness,' but how many of us realize that sometimes we're actually cursing the light!" Complaint, dressed up as realism, can quietly become the very belief that keeps producing more to complain about — a subtler, more socially acceptable version of the seriousness the Companion warns against.

Frogs Not Only Jump — They Seem to Like To

The closing move ties the whole idea together with two images instead of one: "This is such an important point that I would not expect any student who goes about conscious creating 'seriously,' without a sense of playfulness, to do well at it. If, on the other hand, we can bring a spirit of play to the game of life, along with a genuine appreciation for the 'good deal' of being alive at all, we'll understand first-hand G.K. Chesterton's wonderful observation, 'Frogs not only jump, they seem to like to.'"

It's a strange note to end on, and that's the point. The claim isn't that effort or seriousness never accomplish anything — clearly they do, in the Particle world of tasks and deadlines. The claim is narrower and stranger: that the specific mechanism behind conscious creating runs better on delight than on grim determination, the same way a frog's jump is more fully itself when it isn't just locomotion.

Seriousness doesn't protect you from disappointment. It just guarantees you'll meet whatever comes next already braced for more of it.

The full framework behind this idea lives on our Conscious Creating page, and more on the philosophy's origins is on our About page. If seriousness has quietly become your default setting and you'd like help finding your way back to play, a one-on-one session is a direct way to start — and The Field Project Course works with this principle in depth, not as a mood to force but as a practice to build.