The Inner Game of Life

Stewart W. Holmes is interested in relations between our symbolic language and our behavior - specifically, within the disciplines of General Semantics and Zen. In Meaning in Language and in Zen Art for Meditation, he wrote about these fields. In The Inner Game of Life, he describes ways in which both approaches may be correlated. The formulation Holmes calls "Reality1 and Reality2" makes evident the interactions between organismal and verbal processes - the rules of the inner game of life. The formulation of "appropriate and inappropriate stresses" helps the reader understand ways of consciously adopting stress-reducing attitudes toward situations that arise daily.