Metaphysics of Ping-Pong, The: Table Tennis as a Journey of Self-Discovery

“There are two breeds of Ping-Pong players: empiricists and metaphysicians,” says Guido Mina di Sospiro. “By adopting anti-spin paddles, empiricists declare explicitly who they are and what they stand for. Metaphysicians, on the other hand, are fascinated by the mysteries of spin, which propels them, willy-nilly, into the realm of four-dimensional, nonlinear geometry. They strive to bend the laws of physics by giving the ball the exact arc it needs to touch the deep end of the table rather than go long.” The author clearly plays in the latter court. He explores the worldwide passion for table tennis by bringing in Plato and Aristotle, the Perennial Philosophy, and the psychology of C. G. Jung. Topics range from the importance of finding one’s guru in the game, to the shadow side of competition, to ping pong as a form of initiation vis-a-vis Chaos Theory. The higher the level of the game, the more its players are aligned with the Taoist Way, self-actualized in harmony with the cosmos. As Mina di Sospiro shows, Ping-Pong has so many refreshingly illogical qualities about it that the “humble” sport becomes a metaphor for understanding the entire human condition. “If mankind dedicated more time to playing,” he says, “there would be less hostility in the world and probably fewer wars. And table tennis, both enormously popular and thoroughly cosmopolitan, points precisely in this direction.” As with planet Earth herself, it’s all in the spin.

About the author: Guido Mina di Sospiro has been fascinated by table tennis since childhood and regularly plays competitively. Raised in Milan, Italy, in a multilingual home, he trained as a classical guitarist before leaving Italy after university to attend USC’s School of Cinema Production. He then became a journalist and correspondent from Los Angeles on the movie and music industries for one German and two Italian magazines. He has written four books that have been published around the world, one of them co-authored with the scholar of western esoterica Joscelyn Godwin, and maintains a blog on the web-magazine Reality Sandwich and on the alternative views website Disinformation, both based in New York City. Mina di Sospiro lives in the Washington DC area with his wife. Visit his website: https://guido-mina-di-sospiro.com.