The Game of Life and How to Play It

There exists, beneath the surface of ordinary existence, a set of immutable laws, laws as precise as mathematics and as impersonal as gravity, that govern every circumstance a human being will ever encounter. Florence Scovel Shinn spent decades as an illustrator and metaphysical teacher in New York before distilling those laws into a slim but inexhaustible volume. "The Game of Life and How to Play It," first published in 1925, is not a work of comfort literature. It is a field manual for the serious student who suspects that the outer world is a faithful mirror of the inner, and who is prepared to accept full responsibility for what that mirror reflects.

Shinn's foundational teaching is that life operates by exact spiritual law, and that ignorance of the law excuses no one from its consequences. Drawing from the Christian scripture she loved, the Hermetic principle of correspondence, and the New Thought current that ran electric through her era, she maps three ruling forces: the Subconscious, which receives every word and image the mind impresses upon it and builds them into flesh; the Conscious, which chooses, moment by moment, what those impressions shall be; and the Superconscious, the Higher Self or Christ within, which knows the Divine Design of each life and stands ready to guide any student who learns to listen. The reader who enters these pages is not invited to wish for a better life. The reader is shown the mechanism that produces one.

The instrument Shinn employs above all others is the spoken word. She regards affirmations not as psychological encouragement but as literal decrees sent into a receptive and obedient universe. Each chapter advances through a theme, right work, perfect self-expression, fearlessness, the law of non-resistance, and in each, the practitioner encounters specific word-formulas tested in the crucible of her own counseling practice. This is a tradition older than the printed word: the conviction that speech, when aligned with faith rather than fear, restructures the invisible substance from which visible circumstances precipitate.

To approach this book is to accept an initiation into personal accountability of the deepest kind. Shinn makes clear that lack, discord, and delay are not punishments visited from without, but harvests of seeds sown in imagination and word. The aspirant who reads carefully will find, woven through the elegant simplicity of her prose, a coherent cosmology in which every human being is a player on a board whose rules can be learned, whose penalties can be lifted, and whose ultimate prize is the full expression of one's divine inheritance. The game is already in progress. This volume teaches one, at last, how to play it consciously.