Adam Blatner

Well, you can’t pretend to yourself that you really are God. It’s taboo! Don’t even think of doing that!  Indeed, there is a whole category of things you may not do. It’s all mixed in with what we don’t know how to do and what we believe that there’s no way of doing. "Whoa! Can you DO that??!!"

But you can play, which is pretending but sorta kinda know you’re pretending. That’s a very important category. And the fellow who invented psychodrama was unafraid to take all sorts of roles, including imagining what he’s think and do if he were the King of the Universe, God, the Creator.

He was really trying to say, in effect, “I can, and you can too.” That is to say, Moreno imagined the role in order to discover what ideas would come to him. I seriously doubt that he ever really thought he was any kind of actual god. But he did think he could tap into archetypal creativity, at least a little, and I think he thought he could teach us to do it, maybe. Indeed, I do think he opened the door.

What if most people might discover something important about their own values and thoughts by pretending this role? Perhaps they could tap into perspectives and ideas greater than their ego? Of course you can’t begin to begin to begin to really play God, any more than a little kid can be a fireman. (Well, some insane people do.) On the other hand, many mystics claim to “be” god in the sense of everyone potentially recognizing that a bit of divinity comes through every soul.

The point is that role playing indirectly opens parts of the “wondering” brain that have been closed down. (These are the negative voices that say, “Don’t you dare.”  No one may have actually said it, but you picked up their discomfort when you playfully tried. Now as a grown up, if you let those around you know what you’re doing—“I’m exploring thinking creatively in spite of my negative injunctions that I shouldn’t even imagine such things.”