I was listening to the NPR talk show Fresh Air the other day. As sometimes happens, something totally unrelated to Gor, helped me achieve (what I think is) an important realization about Gor.
The Hostess was interviewing a woman who wrote a book about the Hebrew Sabbath. The author is a modern American woman, a reform Jew, who wants to keep the Sabbath, and does her best to do so, despite the difficulty of raising a family with kids and jobs in modern America. The thrust of the book is in how much or an important part of their lives this Sabbath tradition has become, and what she sees as the value that it provides to her family and her community.
There were four particular places, where she could have been talking about Gor. Her main point is: taking a psychic-break from the complexities of the daily struggle for survival is crucial to the mental and emotional health of her family. Somehow, it’s like a reset button every Saturday, that stops the accumulating stresses of one week from carrying over into the next week.
When I am on Gor, I don’t fret about Afghanistan, or Climate Change, or how I’m gonna handle it if I have to put my old dog to sleep this year. Gor provides a psychic-break that keeps me from fixating on these unsolveable realtime issues.
The Sabbath Author also discusses how the existence of the Sabbath changes her mindset in her mundane realtime. She gives the example of a waiting-room, before an appointment. If her thoughts are all on the pending appointment, she might overstress on it, and perform poorly. But, because she can think of what special dinner she wants to make for Sabbath – she can relax. Thus the existence of the Sabbath fundamentally changes the nature of something completely unrelated, in this case, the waiting-room experience.
I think it might go without saying, how being a Panther can transform the experience of going for a hike in the woods, or a moonlight dog walk, or a candlelit bath. It is, in many ways, like being a playful child again, at my age. I was walking the dog this afternoon, and I came across a discarded thing that would have been an ugly piece of trash to almost anyone else. A 6’ BalloonBobber, that somebody lost the balloon off of. It’s thinner than a broomstick, but heavier. And it is a little bent near the end, so if I turn the bend downwards, it changes the center of balance, and makes it feel like that end is heavier than the other. It struck me that a broomstick is more like a spear, and this is more like a lance. Then, that dog walk transformed into Kimba experimenting with some different ways of fighting with a couched lance.
The thing that I thought was this Author’s most pertinent point, for Gor; was the idea that the importance of the Sabbath is the way that it forces her family, and their community of like-minded people, to take time-out from the world together. She stresses that this is a very different thing from taking an individual time-out from the world.
I think this is very much what we do when we roleplay. We take time-out from the world together with like-minded people. Perhaps that definition fits every kind of group recreation that there is, so perhaps it is not as valuable as the other points.
The Author’s final point was that the Sabbath is “Holy Time.” But when she defined that, it would have worked just as well to define Gorean roleplay. Holy Time is when a group-experience changes mundane reality into something else.
