{"id":1604,"date":"2012-01-09T16:41:17","date_gmt":"2012-01-09T16:41:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/?p=1604"},"modified":"2014-08-09T22:45:30","modified_gmt":"2014-08-09T21:45:30","slug":"a-throw-of-the-dice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/?p=1604","title":{"rendered":"A Roll of the Dice"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>How many of us have been sitting somewhere on a dreary winter\u2019s afternoon, looked out the window and thought, \u2018There has to be more to it than this\u2019 \u2014 or felt the impulse to leap up from where we\u2019re sitting to stride off into some great adventure?<\/p>\n

In 1971, Luke Rhinehart wrote The Dice Man<\/em> \u2014 whose subheading announced, \u2018This book can change your life\u2019.\u00a0 One day, Rhinehart\u00a0is inspired by an intriguing coincidence and, bored with his job,\u00a0gives over his life to the idea of living by random options chosen by throwing dice.\u00a0 At first these are quite low-key \u2026 at least, as low-key as crawling to work in a tuxedo can be.\u00a0 But gradually, he gives his life over to an anarchic and amoral rampage …<\/p>\n


\n\"\"<\/a>\u2018Luke Rhinehart\u2019 was actually George Cockcroft \u2014 <\/em>who, as a teenage nerd, started rolling the dice to break down his shyness and stuffiness as a scholarly youth, as a means to break habits and reinvent himself.\u00a0 The scholar went on to gain a doctorate in psychology and then wrote his novel (which posed as a work of non-fiction, apparently written as the autobiography of a successful New York psychoanalyst, Luke Rhinehart) as an explanation of how he discovered his dicing philosophy and the changes brought about by it.<\/p>\n

The Dice Man<\/em> invites the reader to think about how their life might be if left more to fate and chance.\u00a0 While the author was teaching psychology, he posed the same question to one of his classes \u2014 asking them whether the ultimate freedom might lie in making all decisions randomly.\u00a0 He said the use of the dice was a means of challenging the ego and allowing experimentation with the self.\u00a0 As a man who was shy of women, he admitted it was through using the dice that he was able to find a wife.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2018I was driving my car out of the hospital grounds when I spotted two attractive nurses, but being an inhibited chap at that stage of my life, I drove right by them.\u00a0 Half a mile up the road, I resolved to stop the car and consult the dice.\u00a0 If they fell on an odd number, I would go back and try and pick the girls up.\u00a0 They fell odd, so I drove back and offered them a ride.\u00a0 They were on their way to confession, but the church was closed, so I invited them to play tennis the next day. All through the game, I couldn\u2019t help noticing that one of the women was tall, long-legged and full bosomed.\u00a0 Eventually I married her.\u2019<\/p>\n

People are desperate for change, \u2018Rhinehart\u2019 says. \u00a0They\u2019re never satisfied with who they are or what they\u2019ve got, and are trapped by constrained thinking. \u00a0Life too easily becomes a pattern of routines, he adds, insisting that life is too precious to allow it to drift, and to allow habit to dictate, as we make the same kind of decisions again and again.\u00a0 More dangerously, he felt, we become slaves to the perceptions of social convention. \u00a0He believed religious dogma to be equally dangerous \u2014 when others impose on us their view of what their god is supposed to have said \u2014 when we allow people to present morality and belief as textbook certainties that demand blind faith, obedience and adherence.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Luke Rhinehart (c) Sabotage Times<\/p><\/div>\n

The Dice Man<\/em> attracted a cult following that lived by its philosophy. \u00a0It was a controversial work, seen by many as provocative and dangerous \u2014 and was obviously denounced by many religious organizations.\u00a0 Nowadays, the book that was once named \u2018novel of the century\u2019 by one magazine is selling in greater quantities and in more countries than ever before \u2014 a fact that still completely mystifies its author.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We could all begin the dicing lifestyle right now and write out and prepare\u00a0a list\u00a0of options, right this minute …\u00a0\u2018I will not watch TV or read any newspapers for one week …\u00a0 \u2018I will live on a diet of prunes for a year\u2019.\u00a0 For his part, Rhinehart lists five golden rules for betting on your life\u2019s decisions \u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1) Don\u2019t list an option that you would be unwilling to try to do.<\/p>\n

2. Remember, a losing bet could just be the gods of chance setting you up for a bigger winner.<\/p>\n

3. Always list one long shot as an option, because in life one successful long shot can transform everything.<\/p>\n

4. Every day cast a die to determine whether or not you gamble that day.<\/p>\n

5. Periodically ignore every one of the previous four golden rules.<\/p>\n

Ultimately though, you have to ask who or what in me (who or what in Rhinehart) chooses the options in the first place.\u00a0 We can\u2019t control what we\u2019re going to think, before we think it.\u00a0 When a thought appears, we may choose to act on it, or not \u2014 or, in this case, choose whether or not to put it on a list of options.\u00a0\u00a0But it\u2019s never going to be truly random\u2014 as a choice has to be made about what goes on the list in the first place.<\/p>\n

The Dice Man<\/em> reads like an account of the Trickster archetype having a field-day.\u00a0 But behind all the amorality and chaos the author is saying that rolling the dice offers a way into a new identity. \u00a0He says that, everyday, we should make a conscious decision to tell one deliberate lie \u2014 not to encourage deceit or to harm others, but to push us into new areas where we\u2019re forced to live by our wits and think on our feet \u2026 to give us a new perspective on ourself.\u00a0 Underpinning it all, there\u2019s a sense of a man struggling to find a way to wake up and remember his true identity, who and what he really is \u2014 something that really<\/em> would change his life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[Extract from my upcoming book Another Roll of the Dice<\/a>.<\/em>]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How many of us have been sitting somewhere on a dreary winter\u2019s afternoon, looked out the window and thought, \u2018There has to be more to it than this\u2019 \u2014 or felt the impulse to leap up from where we\u2019re sitting to stride off into some great adventure? In 1971, Luke Rhinehart wrote The Dice Man \u2014 whose subheading announced, \u2018This book can change your life\u2019.\u00a0 One day, Rhinehart\u00a0is inspired by an intriguing coincidence and, bored with his job,\u00a0gives over his … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[39,40,43,41,42,44],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1604"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2257,"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions\/2257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brucethomas.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}