An important aspect of the LLP mindset is that it acts as if it is radiating outwards from ourselves.
This is perhaps the easiest to see with respect to love. We naturally start off with caring more about ourselves and those most closely related to us. As we progress in awakening our LLP mindset, our concern grows ever outward from family and friends, to community, to our nation, to the world, and ultimately to the entire cosmos. As Mother Theresa said – we draw the circle of family too narrow. Expanding our circle of love as we expand our awareness, is the key to living a meaningful life.
The same pattern holds for the other two components of LLP: learn and play.
We begin by learning about ourselves – how to crawl, to walk, to speak, and so on. Our learning progresses outwards as well so that we learn about the external world and the social world until we reach the stage of learning following the insights that all is one and interconnected. and all the insights that follow. This is the stage of enlightenment.
Our play naturally also starts with ourselves and the immediate physical gratification. Again, this spreads outward so that our play evolves and becomes not just physical, but also intellectual, creative, emotional, and spiritual.
Love: oneself, our family, our society, human race, the entire creation
Learn: about the external world, about the social world, and about ourselves. Become aware of the interconnectedness of everything there is and start to see things as they really are.
Play: to get pleasures and express ourselves – physical, intellectual, creative.
Another essential truth of LLP is that we can manifest and experience it in all of our quotidian activities.
In contrast, when we engage in activities not oriented towards LLP, then we find ourselves limited in what we can do. For example, we cannot eat infinitely or have sex infinitely.
Oftentimes they have the opposite effect and we enter into a vicious cycle. As we will see below we often misconstrue these other activities as ends or as synonymous with LLP when they are in fact means or ways in which we could potentially manifest LLP. Sex can be a highly intimate act that can manifest LLP and in which we can experience LLP. Eating is the same. It is when we turn these behaviors into the ends or these behaviors begin to crowd out LLP that we run into trouble.
A constantly evolving mindset
We read a book in order to learn. Yes, we may have read the books in a course in order to learn the material to pass an exam but this was a sort of secondary motivation. What preceded that was the desire to learn. With the seven month old babies, we see that they are learning to discover more about themselves and the world, not to pass some test (of which concept they are not even aware). Instead, they are learning instinctually to develop themselves. The children are indulging in autotelic activities.
As LLP is part of who we are, LLP is not limited to or reserved for any particular class. All humans can actualize it. We can do so no matter what faith, religion, philosophy we are wedded to, and no matter our intelligence or level of consciousness. Indeed, Humans everywhere have had, and still have, the same essential nature for thousands of years. People have been actualizing LLP to various degrees of optimization. Although we can all actualize LLP, how we go about doing so will vary from person to person and time to time. The form that our actions take and ways in which we pursue these goals will vary from person to person.If we look back to how we spent time as a seven-month-old child, we can see that we were actualizing LLP because most of our actions were manifestations of LLP. This came naturally to us, because we had not yet learned, the suboptimal ways to manifest and actualize LLP. Later in life we’re likely to find it harder to maintain an LLP mindset.