In The Dice Man the author/anti-hero, Luke Rhinehart, a fictional psychiatrist, describes how he changes his life by making all his decisions by shaking dice.
So he shakes the dice to decide what to eat, who to date, how to behave at a party, whether to set his patients free, annoy his boss, murder, rape his next door neighbour (ahem) or whether to be Jesus for a day.
The book is also a satire on psychotherapy. Rhinehart teaches his patients how to use the dice to improve their lives and discovers that the result is far more effective than therapy.
That's because the Self/Ego is a prison created by the rules made up by your Internal Control Freak. The dice technique is one way to escape from those rules - and also from the illusion of free will.
People who suffer from the delusion that all their major decisions are made in the Head fail to see that Headmind is really controlled by other peoples' rules and ideas. So 'Free Will' is just another disguise for conformity.
But maybe that's not too different from people who imagine that gambling on the horses or the lottery will lead to a better life.
The Dice Man takes to its logical conclusion the insight that, since 50% of your decisions - on average - will be 'wrong', you might as well make them random ones. That will at least free you from making the 'correct' decisions your Headmind maps out for you. And the decisions you make through the dice will free you up from the trap and take you into experiences you never could have imagined for yourself. That, in turn, frees you up from Personality.
Reading The Dice Man is a liberating (but somewhat scary) experience. But I think I know at least one important way in which its basic premise is wrong. More on that in the next article.
"If you are never scared, embarrassed or hurt it means you never take chances."
Julia Soul
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