Understand in about 5 minutes
Florence Scovel Shinn presents life as a game won by understanding spiritual law, in which the spoken word, the imagination, and nonresistance shape a person's outer circumstances.
Mind Map
Core Message
Shinn reframes life as a game rather than a battle. The game can only be played successfully through knowledge of what she calls spiritual law, which she draws from the Old and New Testaments and treats as reliable as any natural law.
The book's central mechanism is that words and mental images externalize in a person's affairs. What a person speaks with faith and pictures clearly is impressed on the subconscious and worked out in detail, so speech and imagery must be guarded.
Shinn presents life as a law of cause and effect she names Karma, a game of boomerangs in which thoughts, words, and deeds return to their sender. Giving opens the way for receiving, so generosity and blessing are practical, not merely moral.
Rather than struggling against circumstances, the player practices nonresistance, refuses fear, casts the burden on a higher power, and waits for an intuitive lead before acting. The aim is to align with a divine design rather than to seize what one wants.
Summary
The Game of Life and How to Play It is a short New Thought manual that treats existence as a game governed by definite spiritual laws. Shinn opens by rejecting the idea that life is a battle. It is instead a game of giving and receiving whose rules, she argues, are stated plainly in scripture, which she reads as a guide to the workings of the mind.
Her account of the mind has three departments. The subconscious is power without direction, like steam or electricity, carrying out whatever is deeply felt or clearly imagined. The conscious mind perceives the world as it appears, including sickness, poverty, and limitation. The superconscious holds the perfect pattern for each life, the divine design that flashes to a person as an ideal that seems too good to be true.
From this model Shinn derives her central practice: the power of the word. Because words and images externalize, a person is continually making laws for himself by what he says and pictures. The book's many anecdotes describe people who speak a definite affirmation, hold perfect faith, and then act as if they had already received, so that supply appears for every demand.
The middle chapters set out the supporting laws. The law of prosperity ties supply to faith in the spoken word. The law of Karma makes every thought and deed return like a boomerang, balanced by a law of forgiveness that lets a person neutralize past mistakes. Nonresistance is offered as the most powerful stance of all, like water wearing away rock, refusing to fight an evil Shinn regards as illusion. Casting the burden is the practical shortcut for impressing the subconscious with good.
The closing chapters turn to guidance and self-expression. Intuition is the faculty through which a person receives definite leads and acts only when directed. Perfect self-expression, or the divine design, names the unique place each person is meant to fill, combining health, wealth, love, and right work into what Shinn calls the square of life. The book ends with denials and affirmations, the verbal formulas by which the reader is meant to put all of this into daily use.
Key Concepts
Shinn holds that spoken words carry a vibratory force that does not return void. Through speech a person is continually making laws for himself, so affirmations spoken with faith are her primary tool of change.
It is the engine of the whole book. If the word externalizes, then watching and choosing one's words becomes the most direct way to alter circumstances.
The imagination is called the scissors of the mind, ever cutting the pictures a person dwells on, which sooner or later appear in the outer world through the subconscious.
It explains why fear is dangerous in Shinn's system: a clearly pictured fear can manifest just as surely as a clearly pictured good.
Each person has a unique place to fill and work to do that no one else can, held as a perfect idea in the superconscious mind and awaiting recognition.
It directs desire away from arbitrary wants toward a destined self-expression, which Shinn argues is the only path to lasting satisfaction.
Mental Models
Life is framed as a game with knowable rules rather than a fight against hostile forces. The player learns the law instead of struggling against opponents.
It shifts the reader from resistance and strain toward studying cause and effect and playing by the rules that govern outcomes.
Thoughts, words, and deeds return to their sender with accuracy. Hate returns hate, love returns love, and giving opens the way for receiving.
It turns every emission of word and feeling into a deliberate choice, since whatever is sent out is expected to come back.
Like water that wears away rock, the nonresistant person cannot be overcome. Shinn treats evil as illusion and counsels meeting trouble without fighting it.
It offers a way to disarm conflict and worry by withdrawing the resistance that, in her view, gives an adverse condition its hold.
Selected Quotes
Nothing on earth can resist an absolutely nonresistant person.
Resistance is Hell, for it places man in a “state of torment.”
Man receives only that which he gives.
Source
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/74878/74878-0.txt
Project Gutenberg lists this ebook's copyright status as public domain in the United States.
The Project Gutenberg text carries a 1925 copyright by Florence Scovel Shinn.