The Journey to Wild Divine
A Video Game by Corwin Bell

Please note: ordering the Wild Divine game from this link will benefit Myth*ing Links.

From the game's website:

Deepak Chopra says, “The Journey shows how a few minutes of concentrated deep breathing can have long-lasting health effects.”

The Journey to Wild Divine is the first "inner-active"computer adventure that combines ancient breathing and meditation with modern biofeedback technology for total mind-body wellness.

Progress through the realm using the power of your thoughts, feelings, breath and awareness. Not just a game, it's a tool to reduce stress and improve physical and mental health.

BIOFEEDBACK EVENTS: Build stairways with your breath, meditate to open doors and juggle balls with your laughter. Deepen your mind-body awareness...

The Lady of Compassion
from The Journey to Wild Divine

Entering the realm of
The Journey to Wild Divine
By Kathleen Jenks. Ph.D.
31 March / 9 April 2005

Video-games are an entirely new world for me.  Since it is widely known that many are extremely violent, I, like millions of others, have avoided the genre for years.  "Grand Theft Auto," for example, according to a recent 60 Minutes report, may have inadvertently desensitized its fans to such a degree that repeated usage influenced several murders.  The United States military values skilled video game players because such games have already programmed these recruits to be skilled soldiers.

In contrast, however, The Wild Divine programs players to be skilled humans.  One of the game's unique qualities is that it comes with equipment to measure heart rate variability (HRV) and skin conductance levels (SCL), which allows it to work with your own body's rhythms and vibrations.  When my own game arrived, I worried that installing the biofeedback gizmos would be too high-tech for me out but the instructions are surprisingly simple.  I already knew where my computer's USB socket was because my scanner also uses it.  It was easy to unplug the scanner and insert the biofeedback plug.

Then I began playing.  Early on, one gets a magic bag in the cottage of the Lady of the Woods.  When one succeeds in mastering an "energy event," one often gets a crucial treasure to store in the bag for later use.  I'm no gamer, which means I didn't know about saving games so that I could pick up where I left off.  Instead, I thought that the few treasures I'd already collected in my little bag that first day would still be available the next time I started the game.  When they weren't, I phoned the game's Tech Support and learned about saving my progress as I advanced through the game.  After that, I scrupulously saved the game whenever I added a new treasure to the bag.

It took a few days to get the hang of everything but by then I was completely hooked.  The game's landscape is lovely -- and its navigation is complex enough to hold one's interest despite repeated playings.  There are subtle musical shifts as one moves through the many locales, each shift suggesting new mysteries.  And I enjoy the airy, magical architcture, often influenced by Eastern and Moorish elements.

Throughout the game, there are well-placed "energy-events" in which one uses breath combined either with peaceful energy, or heightened energy, to perform magical actions -- these include learning how to levitate balls, spin wheels, create stairs across space, influence the flight of birds, orchestrate an enchanted rainfall, free a caged falcon, control a falling feather, feed a shy rabbit, awaken an entranced woman, open a magical book, dance one's own sacred rhythms, and collect a series of seven enchanted crystals.  Sometimes one feels like a young student in Harry Potter's Hogwarts or a novice in an ancient temple.  At other times, one might even catch a glimpse of one's own wise Yoda hidden within.

As one journeys through the Wild Divine, one learns to watch one's rhythms of blood and heart, breathing and lungs.  A calming happens, a new patience, an acceptance of delays.  In awakening the entranced woman for example, I tried and tried and finally wanted to scream at her to get up.  Why are you still lying there, I wanted to shout.  What more do you want from me?  What's wrong with you?  Get up, get up!, or I won't be able to finish this game!  It had become about me, not her, and I backed off, chagrined but also laughing at the irony.  I then tried off and on for three days.  "Please wake up," I finally whispered.  But she still just lay there.  Worn out, I started playing with my mouse, letting it wander through the trees.  "Look," I said, "lie there like a lump if you must, but look at what you're missing -- all these lovely trees and birds and life!"  To my amazement, she slowly began to sit up and transform herself into the Lady of Compassion, Kuan Yin.

This is a marvelous game.  It awakens ideas, insights, clusters of myths, and archetypal wonder.  It took me a week to complete the first game.  I'm now midway through the second, armed with my own handmade map so that I can find my way through the terrain without making endless mistakes in navigating.  I'm finding that I'm now even more sensitive the second time around, more aware of nuances, and getting a clearer sense of the deeper meanings.

I have my favorite places in the game.  I love being able to hear the exquisite Kyrie in one of the towers, for example, or to open the glowing stained glass dragonfly box in an abandoned Atlantean backwater (see painting above).  There's a marvelous secret room in the corridor between the Tower of Legends and the patio leading to the bridge across the Murdias River -- most people never retrace their steps from the patio back to the Tower but if you do, there's a magnificent special effect in that room -- it comforts one after failing to get across the river <smile>.  Then there are the two delightful Durga dancers:  when my energies ebb in early evening after answering e-mails all day, I find myself revived by going to their temple and watching the crimson-garbed "yang" dancer -- and before turning in at night, I enjoy the soothing grace of the blue-grey-garbed "yin" dancer.

Then there is the wonderful introduction by Jean Houston, her deep, melodious voice filling her meta-verse of wonder as she introduces the sages, or "gardeners," who created everything in the first place.  This is a lovely touch -- that gardeners, dancing through space, created and loved all of life.

In playing the Wild Divine, I kept thinking of Scheherezade: she protected her own life and those of the rest of the kingdom's women, by spinning stories so entrancing that the Sultan kept her alive for one more day, and then another, and another, until he finally made her his queen.

I see the Wild Divine like that.  It's a story-teller, a Scheherezade. When people immerse themselves in these alternate universes, might not the cultural warrior-fixation start to atrophy?  I remember a poster from the '60's that read something like: "What if they called for a war and no one came?"  The military loves getting young people who play violent videogames because they're already de-sensitized to life.  Hopefully, as more and more discover the Wild Divine, violent games will be seen as the distorted mind-programming they really are.

I unreservedly recommend the Wild Divine game -- it's fun, profound, awesome, beautiful, compassionate, funny, sweet, and alternately exhilarating and relaxing  -- best of all, it restores one's awareness of all those same qualities shimmering within the rhythms, neural nets, dreams, and heartsongs of one's own wild-divine body.

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Postscript, 9 April 2005:  Through my longtime friend Jean Houston, I got in touch with Corwin Bell some months ago when I first learned of the Wild Divine.  I am pleased to anounce that he and Karen Sadenwater (his remarkable special effects artist and production manager) have been visiting me in Michigan the past three days and that I am now their mythology-consultant/writer for the second game in the series, which will be released in September 2005.

11 December 2006: I also wrote the game's Companion Guide, which was published in mid-August 2006 in pdf format for an immediate download.

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