The Game of Life and How to Play It

“Most people consider life a battle, but it is not a battle, it is a game.” Shinn’s opening reversal changes what success requires. A battle rewards force, resistance, and defeating an opponent. A game rewards knowing the rules and noticing how your own moves affect play.

Her rules are spiritual laws: dependable relationships between what a person sends out and what later returns. Whether or not we accept them literally, Shinn asks us to replace helpless struggle with lawful participation. The first question is no longer “How do I overpower this?” but “What move am I making, and what rule does it engage?”

Shinn names life “a great game of Giving and Receiving.” She supports it with the biblical rule, “Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.” Her interpretation is direct: “whatever man sends out in word or deed, will return to him.”

Giving here means more than donating money or offering help. Criticism, affection, dishonesty, and hostility are also things sent into circulation. Every exchange establishes a quality of play. In Shinn’s framework, what you give sets the terms of receiving: love invites love, while deception places the giver inside a world shaped by deception.

What changes when life is treated as a game rather than a battle?

• Other people cease to influence events
• Force becomes the main winning strategy
• Every difficult outcome becomes easy
• Attention shifts to the laws governing participation✓Correct answer

A game still contains difficulty, but success depends on understanding its rules. Shinn redirects attention from overpowering life to examining the moves a person makes within it.

Words and deeds are visible moves, but Shinn adds a third channel: imagination. What you say, what you do, and what you repeatedly picture may all point in the same direction—or quietly contradict one another.

Someone may speak eagerly about a new opportunity while continually imagining rejection. Another may claim to value friendship yet repeatedly act with suspicion. Shinn would not treat the stated wish as the person’s only contribution. She asks which pattern receives the most sustained energy. The whole message includes the inner picture, not merely the outcome named aloud.

Shinn calls imagination “The Scissors of The Mind.” The image is active rather than decorative: imagination keeps cutting out the pictures a person may later encounter in experience.

The important unit is not every stray flash of fear or absurd thought. Her examples emphasize pictures held vividly, felt deeply, or rehearsed continually. A momentary worry and a settled inner scene are not treated as equals. By returning to one outcome, a person gives it shape and familiarity until it begins to feel expected. In Shinn’s system, rehearsed images become instructions—especially when emotion makes them convincing.

In Shinn’s opening framework, imagination counts as something a person sends into the game, alongside words and deeds.

True✓Correct answer

Shinn explicitly gives the imaging faculty a leading role. A deeply felt or clearly pictured scene is treated as an active contribution, not as harmless background noise.