Eric Berne makes the argument that the reason we play games is to avoid unstructured time. ‘Games’ and ‘pastimes’ are how we get through that space that exists between ‘waking up in the morning’ and ‘going back to sleep last thing at night’. Games are nothing else but structure and so just as long as we can link up enough games hand in hand to bridge the gap between where we start the journey and where we finish then we won’t have to encounter unstructured space. We will never have to encounter what Timothy Leary calls Non-Game Reality.
What we’re doing here, Eric Berne tells us, is that we are ‘avoiding intimacy’; intimacy is too much of a challenge for us since it demands a unique response rather than a generic one (although Berne doesn’t explain it in quite these terms). We prefer to keep things ‘at arm’s length’, we like to be ‘insulated from intimacy’. We could go into this matter a bit more if we wanted to however by asking why it is that we fear into intimacy so much, why we are in dread of it, in fact. We could answer by saying that we avoid intimacy because it’s ‘hard work’ but this isn’t saying anything new, we’re merely rearranging the question. ‘Why is it hard work?’ and ‘why are we so averse to work?’ would be better questions to ask. We could also ask ‘What does this term <intimacy> actually mean?’
One way to approach this is to think in terms of rules. When we live life on the basis of rules then this suits us very well because the rules tell us what to do at every single point in the proceedings, and so this is a great ‘space filler’. It is the great space filler and – what’s more – continuing to act on the basis of rules completely does away with the need to be intimate with our environment (or any of the people that might be in it). It completely does away with the need to encounter anything that hasn’t been previously structured or formalised. To put it perfectly bluntly, living life on the basis of rules saves us from having to actually live…
When we’re busy obeying rules the whole time then there is exactly zero intimacy in this situation (which is just another way of saying that there’s no life in a mechanical sequence of events). ‘Intimacy’ – in this context – would mean that we are personally (or ‘uniquely’) relating to our environment whereas when we’re simply obediently following instructions from some bland external authority then we’re ‘hiding behind the mask that has been provided for us’. The mask takes my place, freeing me up in this way from ‘the responsibility to personally relate’. We can be as haughty and aloof as we like now because our meaningless generic response has been validated by the Extrinsic Authority (which is to say, the authority that is the ‘act of automatic agreement’ involuntarily which is taking place on the part of the collective).
The rules not only ‘tells us what to do’ (or ‘how we should interact with our environment in such a way so that no personal / unique response is ever needed on our part’) they also tell us how to interpret our environment, how we should understand both it and ourselves, what everything means, and so on, and this also does away with the need for intimacy. Interacting with what is around us has become a formalism (or routine) that we can mechanically engage in. Very curiously, this so-called ‘interaction’ doesn’t involve us and it doesn’t involve the actual environment either – it’s a loop of logic feeding on itself.
The External Authority isn’t just telling us how to relate to our environment, it’s telling us what that environment actually is. The EA is providing us with the entire package, it’s a one-stop shop. It tells us everything – it tells us ‘who we are’ and ‘what the world is’ and ‘how we should behave in that world’ (or ‘what type of activities it is that are proper for us to engage in’). Everything has previously been ‘coded for’ by the External Authority, right down to the nth degree. There is no part of our ‘life’ that it hasn’t provided for us by the authority and there’s no ‘intimacy’ in it therefore simply because we never have to venture outside of the system of thought. Everything is thus a mere formality – our lives are made up of ‘patterns that we have been given and which we must keep on repeating for as long as we possibly can’. This is the ‘mechanical life’ in a nutshell.
Intimacy means ‘relating to the world on the basis of who we really are’ (the actual real bone fide world that is, not ‘what we’re told it is’) and there is no formula for this. There’s no trick to it. There’s no guidance to be had whatsoever – it’s up to us and nobody else and nothing we think we know can help us. Intimacy means that there has to be an original response, a creative response, a unique response, and that’s a huge challenge when we are habituated to ‘following rules without even knowing that this is what we’re doing’. Calling it ‘a challenge’ is drastically understating the matter – for us, it’s something we don’t know how to process, for us, it’s ‘the worst experience ever’. We have been challenged to be ‘who we really are’ when we are totally convinced that we already know who we are (and – more to the point – when we totally convinced that we already ‘are who we are’) and we simply ‘don’t have the wherewithal’ regarding how to work with this. We’ve been ‘challenged’ to ‘wake up when we thought we already were awake’ and this comes as a terrible shock to us. We’d rather just stay asleep…
It’s so much easier just to go along with the formalism that has been provided for us – it is in fact infinitely easier to go along with the mechanical pattern that has been provided for us. The problem here however is that it’s all completely meaningless! We’re buying into a package in which the EA gets to tell us everything about everything; it tells us what the world is, and who we are, and what the relationship between the two should be like. A ‘relationship’ – however – can only happen between two different things; there can therefore be no relationship between ‘who the system says I am’ and ‘what the system says the world is’. There is no possibility of relationship between ‘the mind-created image of me’ and ‘the mind-created image of the world’ – the relationship between a thing and itself is not a relationship but a glitch. It’s ‘a tautological loop of logic that feeds voraciously on itself but never gets anywhere’. It’s a ‘null situation’, in other words…
Another way of approaching this is to say that there is no freedom in obeying the rule. Of course there’s no freedom in obeying the rule – that’s pretty much common knowledge. But if there’s no freedom in following the rule (which is to say, if there’s no freedom in allowing ourselves to be guided by the EA) then everything that’s done on this basis is quite meaningless, quite hollow. When I do what the rule tells me to do then what I am doing can be relied upon to be 100% meaningless. I’m not doing anything – I might as well not be there. In reality, I’m not there – I’m only fooling myself if I think that I’m there. I am only going to be there I do something what isn’t what the rule tells me to do – this doesn’t mean rebelling against the rule or doing the opposite of what it tells me because the rule is still controlling me then. My reactions to the rule are the rule. To ‘exist’ means to be independent of the rule – existence is independence, existence is freedom…
The game that we’re playing (the game that the System of Thought facilitates us in playing) is that we are ‘independent’ when we’re not, that we’re ‘free’ when we’re not. We ‘free within the game’ but the game itself is completely predetermined. The game itself is unfree. As we have already said, there is no part of the game that hasn’t been scripted in advance – we can’t do anything that we haven’t been instructed to do by the System of Thought. If I was to take it into my head to try to do something without first being told what to do by thought then I would find myself in a quandary – how can I do something without thinking about what I am going to do? If I try to do something without first thinking about it then I find that ‘doing something without first thinking about it’ is itself a thought and so I’m caught already. I’ve fallen at the first hurdle. The very intention to ‘act independently of thought’ is a thought, so how am I going to get out of this one? As soon as I conceive a goal then I’m playing into the hands of the thinking mind because all goals are thoughts; I want to be ‘free from thought’, but this ‘wanting’ is itself based on a thought; the idea that I have of ‘being free from thought’ (which seems attractive or desirable or useful to me) is itself just another thought.
We don’t usually run into this glitch however because we don’t try to become free from thought, or free from our ideas. We don’t see that everything we do is prefigured by thought and so we imagine that we’re already ‘free’ – we have the idea that we’re free and we don’t see that this is ‘only an idea’. We don’t see that this is only an idea. We don’t see that the idea which we have about ‘being already free’ is an idea because all we know are ideas, all we know are thoughts. Ideas are all we have and so we don’t know that are ideas are only ideas – in order to see this there would have to be something there that isn’t an idea, that isn’t a thought, and there isn’t. In order to know that we’re ‘playing a game’ there would have to be something there that isn’t the game, and in a game all that’s allowed is that game! The System of Thought doesn’t allow anything to be in it that isn’t a thought; the ‘Simulation’ (by definition) doesn’t allow there to be anything in it that hasn’t been ‘specified in advance’; there is no mechanism by which anything ‘independent’ can be incorporated in the simulation. If there was such a mechanism then whatever came out of it would be contrived, not independent.
The External Authority which is the System of Thought tells me what to do, what to think, and it tells me what the meaning of my acts is, what the meaning of my thoughts are. It supplies the entire package – it tells me when I’m winning and it tells me when I’m losing, it tells me when I have succeeded and when I have failed, and it also tells me exactly how I should feel about this! It walks me through it, step by step… The EA tells me everything and everything it tells me is a lie. Everything it tells me is an empty tautology and I myself – as the player of this game – am also an empty tautology. I only perceive myself to exist (and to have actual genuine autonomy) because the game tells me that I do, but the game itself isn’t real…
Image credit – integrate.io
