Adult toys.

When children play with their toys I feel like that interaction is many cosmically more powerful prayer to an idol. It's as if those inanimate things really have gained a soul. Now our idol worshiping ancestors, or even modern day altar bowers would be pretty angry if you broke their "toys". Can you imagine pulling an Abraham on the Maximus character from Gladiator. Like going up and knocking his little idols to the ground, so small they can literally all fit in his palm. You could see that sort of thing happening to a young boy playing with toys. But try that on Maximus and I'm pretty sure he would make a blood sacrifice to his gods right than and there to the toys you just stepped on.

I suppose the reason why I didn't play with toys as long as Andy did in Toy story is because I encountered more adult toys. Like lion heads. 

I remember finishing up a performance workshop for 2nd graders. We let the kids play with  the head. And one of my students commented how of course the kids liked playing with the head because it wasn't just a toy. I used to think that too. But now I think that the head is a toy. It's just a serious toy with ritual significance that is usually in the hands of adults. In fact, in old time China children would be beaten for even touching the heads or drums. And by old time I mean like 30 years ago. 

Now a lot of people focus on various tricks to do with the head but the essence of it is to make the head look like it is alive. In other words even though everyone knows it is two guys in a giant puppet, that you do it so well that even the adults on some level accept it as a physical manifestation of a spiritual creature. Indeed, with the drums and the firecrackers, even the practitioner, in a tranced focus dance, in some way, is a lion. Not easy. Well no it is easy a child could do it.... but not everyone does it like that.

So in another way it is not easy. The same way a lot of artists paint the way a child could paint.... but adults have trouble painting like that often times.

So children playing with toys may not be as "serious" as ritualized play backed up by thousands of years of tradition.... but then children playing with toys have that essence and imaginative power backed up by millions of years of children seeing the world in that imaginative way and creating souls, worlds and magic.