Learning To Have Fun
By Lazaris
What is the purpose of life? What is my task? Why am I here? Why am I physical? What is my mission?
You are haunted by the desire to know. Deep within your brain stirs the thought that if you just knew the answer to one of these questions, then everything else would make sense. Your heart echoes with feelings that a satisfactory answer would make everything, absolutely everything, all right.
Your purpose, your mission, your task—or, as we prefer to say, your focus—can be stated with disarming ease. The prime reason you are here: To learn to have fun.
Yes. That's it. You are here to learn to have fun! You have created a physical form and a physical world to put it in. You have created all of your reality to give yourself the opportunity to learn—to learn to have fun.
The critics and detractors pounce upon that statement as proof of the shallowness and hedonism of the New Age. They either get angry at the apparent lack of social responsibility or they dismiss the idea as the empty-headed fad philosophy of this yuppie sport called the New Age.
Many who consider themselves part of the alternative spirituality of the New Age want the purpose, the task, and the mission to be more serious or to at least sound more spiritual. Missions should be loftier. A purpose of connecting with your Higher Self or becoming one with the Source sounds much more reasonable. It sounds much more valuable and viable.
At first glance, these criticisms seem to have merit. Upon further investigation the kind of fun we are talking about, the kind of fun you are attempting to learn, is valuable and totally viable. We are talking about the kind of fun derived from accomplishing the lessons you have selected to experience and fulfilling the destinies you have chosen to explore. Your spiritual focus—your spirituality—is all about your living, breathing, loving embracing relationship with God/Goddess/All That Is. This is what learning to have fun is all about.
Your purpose, mission, task—your focus—is not only about achievement; it is also about the means of achieving. It is not just about succeeding—it is also about the way in which you succeed. You can grow through the struggles and hardships of life. Some of you needed to do that. Some still feel the need to struggle and suffer. However, you also have the choice to grow through the love and the laughter.
Which is going to be more fun? Both of them will get you there, but which is going to be more fun? Everyone, regardless of their spirituality or their claimed lack of it, has the same purpose, task, mission—the same focus: Learning to have fun.
Certainly the desire to reach a heaven, whether it is a literal place or a state of mind, is a desire to have fun. Certainly a desire to connect with your Higher Self or with the Source is a desire to have fun—a postponed desire perhaps, but still a desire to have fun. For the Christian, certainly being on the right side of the rapture is a goal of having fun. No matter how much struggle you think is required—no matter how painful the path you decide you must have—the goal, the culmination of your learning, is to reach a state of peace. Peace. That's fun!
There are four keys to understanding this primary focus.
First, learn. The focus is not just to have fun—it's to learn. It is: To learn to have fun. Learning means recognizing and acknowledging that you are the creator of all the possibilities, probabilities and actualities of your reality. It involves figuring out what you did right and wrong. Learning to have fun means being responsible for what works in your life. It means figuring out the why's and the how's of reality creation so that the fun you have is the fun you know you created. It is self-generated fun. You never have to wonder if it will last, because you create it—you are the source of the fun, then the happiness, and finally the joy you are having in your life.
Second, define. Define fun continuously. Fun is not static. Being fluid, it always changes. When you were six, you had very distinct ideas of what a fun day was all about. Now, those same ideas would seem ridiculous! Your current concepts of fun are unique. As you unfold your future, your current pictures of fun will also change. It is vital that you define and redefine what you mean by fun and what you mean by having it.
Third, balance. Despite the parental tape-loops inside your head mumbling something about beds that you must sleep in and cakes you cannot eat, it is important to balance. It is up to you to choose and decide not only what's fun, but when it's fun. For some, a pizza and a six-pack may not only sound like a fun idea—at the time, it just might be the essence of fun! Yet, at another time it would be the antithesis. It is up to you to balance the long-term fun and the short-term pleasures. It is up to you to distinguish among the inner-child, adolescent's, young-adults and the spiritual adult's sense of: What is fun?
Learning to have fun is not just about being at the right place at the right time, knowing where the best parties are on a Friday night, or about knowing the right people. It is about learning, defining and balancing self-generated fun. It is about creating your own reality and being positively responsible for that creation.
The Final Key: Deserving
Fourth, deserve. The final key to understanding the prime focus of having fun is also the major blockage to its fulfillment.
You can learn, define and even balance what is fun for you. You can process and program. You can work with a myriad of techniques. You can be responsible and enjoy the power implicit within that responsibility. You can learn and work through the psychological and metaphysical obstacles that separate you from the reality you ask for.
However, if you don't think you deserve, all of the above are intellectual exercises fast becoming exercises in frustration and futility. The lack of deserving permeates your beliefs and attitudes, your thoughts and feelings, and your choices and decisions. You do not feel you deserve. A primary focus that seems easy enough to accomplish has just been moved out of reach. Because it is beyond your belief and therefore your choice, you can't get there from here.
There are several powerful reasons that deserving is outside the belief-choice matrix.
1) You were taught. You were taught by parents, teachers, spiritual leaders and peers that you do not deserve—especially you do not deserve to have fun. These sources of learning were not necessarily ill intentioned. Much of what they taught you was what they learned and what they thought would protect you from a world they didn't understand, and therefore a world that seems to be the enemy. They did not want you to get your hopes up and have them dashed. They did not want you to get hurt, so they taught you that you did not deserve. Sometimes, they were ill intentioned. Out of jealousy, possessiveness and fear, some did intend to imprison you in their limitations. Whichever, you were taught and you can un-teach yourself now.
2) You are haunted by angers, hurts and resentments of the past. Separate from what you were innocently or maliciously taught, many are followed by the specter of the past. As a child you were so angry you wished your mother were dead. You numbed the hurt with hate. You harnessed the anguish with resentment. Lonely, you punished yourself. You decided you did not deserve to be happy. Ever! You still live by that decision. You are haunted by the past.
3) You feel guilty. The guilt you may feel can be sourced in fact and fantasy, or it can be un-sourced in the belief that you are guilty just by being alive. Perhaps you were taught; perhaps you were conditioned. Now you feel guilty. According to you, you do not deserve. The possibility of happiness, the possibility of having fun, is frightening. It is a threat. This is where your lack of deserving lies if you find yourself feeling guilty when things go wrong and even worse—guiltier—when things go right. Are you constantly apologizing for being here—for being alive?
4) You were caught in the catch-22 of deserving. You come to realize that the lack of deserving is the problem. You are eloquent and articulate about all the reasons you don't deserve. You have even worked at re-learning what the inner-child erroneously learned. You have released the haunting angers, hurts, resentments, and you have freed yourself from guilt. Yet you still don't feel you deserve. Why?
Because, you tell yourself, if you deserved, you would have figured it out long ago! You say you don't deserve because you still feel undeserving. You continue by telling yourself that if you were a person who was meant to feel deserving, you would have done it already. Wrapped in a negative ego of, I'd hate to admit it, you are caught in a catch-22 reality.
Often, there is a feeling of foolishness: I should already know this, I should have already done this. Believe us, you will only feel more foolish to wait even another month. If you feel foolish now, how much more foolish are you going to feel in a year from now?
Admit your foolishness and your embarrassment. Break the catch-22 by realizing you are not alone. Everyone feels the lack of deserving. It is part of your human condition. It is part of what you are learning through the lens, through the focus, of learning to have fun.
5) You lack perfection. You have made mistakes, and you have not forgiven yourself. Perhaps you are waiting for others to forgive you or to apologize to you. Perhaps you have decided that you are unforgivable. Whatever you tell yourself, you have concluded that you do not deserve to have fun. Erroneously you have decided that you can have fun once you are perfect, and not before. Since you already have made a mistake, you are doomed. If you can discover the arrogance rather than feel the self-pity of the position, you can be free of it.
6) You are depressed. Depression is anger that you fear you will get in trouble for having. Many who are depressed in their marriages or relationships are often angry, but fear reprisals should they talk about it. Many who dread going to work because their jobs depress them are really saying they are angry, but actualization carries intolerable consequences. The anger that seeds depression can build over months or many years, or it can come from quick and sudden change. One of the ways you suppress—repress—depress—that anger is by denying fun. You deny it by refusing it, or by choosing to believe that it is outside the realms of possibility or probability. Either way, it is beyond your reach.
7) You decided you do not love well enough. Like the lack of deserving you were taught, many of you have concluded that you simply do not love well enough. In many situations, the Human Potential Movement and the ensuing metaphysics fostered that conditioning. Many have decided that humankind as well as themselves, individually, have a fatal flaw—an original sin of sorts—of an inability to love. Because they can't love, or can't love good enough, they do not deserve anything—especially they do not deserve to have fun. Nor, according to them, does anyone else.
We realize we have not offered concrete solutions and resolutions to these obstacles to your deserving. Knowing what stops you—knowing the hurdles and where they are—can be the first step in finding your own solutions.
Having fun is not the glib and shallow concept so many want to think it is. It sounds simple enough, yet your reality belies that suspected simplicity. After so many lifetimes, fun and learning how to have it seem as elusive as ever.
Having fun involves learning to create your reality, defining the means and the ends you wish to achieve and acquire, balancing the future and the present against the backdrop of the past, and most of all involves allowing yourself to feel and then be deserving.
With new and greater understanding: Learn to have fun!
With love and peace Lazaris
1990, Concept Synergy
For further information about Lazaris, please call or write Concept: Synergy, 302 South County Rd., Suite 109, Palm Beach, FL 33480, (407) 588-9599. Lazaris is the author of three books (The Sacred Journey: You and Your Higher Self, Lazaris Interviews: Book I and Book II), more than 75 audio tapes and 17 video tapes, and conducts seminars regularly in major American and Canadian cities. | 
