A ‘game’ is a state of conflict – an ongoing state of conflict. The point of the game is therefore to bring this state of conflict to a satisfactory conclusion (and we could add here that there are two ways to bring the conflict to a conclusion, either by winning the game, or by losing at it. This is nothing if not straightforward, of course – who doesn’t understand this? This is what we do all the time, this is our Number One Pastime – we play games, we compete, we control… We strive to free ourselves once and for all from the never-ending misery, frustration and strife that is the game.
The motivation to win, the motivation to succeed, is the same thing as ‘the motivation to end the play’ therefore (just as James Carse says). This is what he calls ‘the self-contradictoriness of finite play’ – we perceive ourselves to be striving to obtain an external / objective value (something that genuinely exists and is worthwhile in its own right) whilst the truth of the matter is that we trying to escape the suffering of the game. The state of well-being or happiness we believe we will enjoy when we win isn’t a ‘real objective value’ at all, but merely the relief we obtain when we stop banging our heads against the wall. It’s not ‘a thing in itself’, just the absence of our own self-inflicted pain and misery.
There is no ‘external / objective value’ – there is only the illusory game and our illusory attempts to escape it. When we believe that our illusory attempts to escape the illusion are really working then we call this ‘living our best life’ and when it seems to us that it isn’t then we call this ‘being a loser’; believing that our illusory efforts are bearing fruit constitutes one pole and believing that they aren’t is the other, and between these two extremes we live our lives. What we mean by this is that if something isn’t relatable in some practical way to the Grand Endeavour of ‘trying to be at one pole rather than the other’ (trying to live our best life rather than our worst) then we just don’t care about it. We know what we want and we’re not going to be put off by anyone – we’re like a dog with a bone.
Just as long as we are fully absorbed in the Great Endeavour then we’re ‘facing away from reality’ (so to speak): both of the two extremes we operate between are equally unreal – both the one we love and the one we hate – and yet anything else (anything that hasn’t to do with ‘turning a profit’ or ‘scoring a point’) is of no interest to us whatsoever. We scoff at those who aren’t ‘advantage-driven’ in the way that we are; we assume that there must be something seriously wrong with them, some kind of malfunction, some sort of pathology. We write them off as being mad. This is the only way we can understand things when we’re playing the game because – for us – the game is (wrongly) understood as ‘the world itself’.
For us, reality equals polarity so anything that isn’t polar – anything that isn’t defined in binary terms – simply isn’t ‘a thing’; we can’t conceptualise it and if we can’t conceptualise it then we can’t relate to it. We can’t relate to it since we can only pay attention to those elements in our environment that we can draw lines around, that we can neatly categorise. Polarity thus gets to subsume (or consume) the whole of our attention, in other words, and to have the whole of our attention ‘subsumed within the polarity of the game’ is to have our awareness neutralised. Our awareness in this situation has been turned against itself – we’re caught up in the all-consuming task of ‘striving for the advantage,’ and being caught up in this way means being blind, it means ‘not being able to see that chasing the advantage equals chasing the disadvantage’…
This is the Great Endeavour which we are all involved in – we (unconscious) game players would frame the struggle in terms of ‘us trying to give it our best shot’ (or as ‘us taking the initiative to achieve some sight of worthwhile and valid goal’). We frame what we’re doing in terms of ‘us trying to make the smart move’, in terms of ‘us coming up with a solution to the problem’, whereas what the so-called ‘Great Endeavour’ really comes down to nothing more than stubbornly asserting the positive. Asserting the positive is our ‘clever trick’, our ‘ace card’. We’re being naïve, in other words – we’re taking it that a ‘non-nuanced (or ‘theatrical’) act’ is in fact perfectly legitimate, is in fact exactly what it claims to be. We’re taking the theatre seriously’ in other words, and this is what makes the so-called ‘Great Endeavour’ so preposterous – the most serious we are the more of an ass we make ourselves. Our actions, our efforts, our commendable industry and application when we are in this ‘supremely naive modality of existence’ are the purest folly. Our actions are folly of the most surreal nature.
The more serious we become in ‘doing the positive thing’ the more we potentiate the forces that are acting against us (which means that the more we do the positive thing the more we do the negative, although we don’t realise that it’s us who are doing it). With serious because we’re craving certainty, but what we don’t see is that certainty as a duplex beast, a blade that cuts just as well on both sides. As soon as we get the type of certainty we want it turns into the type of certainty we don’t want, it turns into ‘the opposite of itself’. Chasing certainty – which is what we generally do in life – embroils us in a never-ending state of contradiction, therefore. This fascination of ours in finding security results in the poignant spectacle of ‘us voluntarily feeding ourselves into Mincer’ – we hand ourselves over to the tender mercies of the Great Satanic Mincing Machine as if some good will come of it, as if some marvellous benefit will somehow attach to us because of this.
There’s no way to win this battle and yet the only thing we know is that we have to ‘keep on trying’. All we know how to do is ‘keep on doubling down on our jinxed position’. It as if we don’t have any other gear to shift into, it’s as if we don’t any other ‘tool in our toolbox’ – all we know how to do is keep on shouting out the wretchedly stale old gung-ho ‘positive-type’ slogans that we are so very fond of. All we know how to do is to keep up with the recommended ‘positive self-talk’ and refuse – on principle – to contemplate the possibility of failure, to contemplate the possibility of us having it all wrong. This emphasis of ours on the positive shows our level of psychological naivete as a culture; just as the needle in the temperature gauge in the car going into the red (or danger) zone tells us in no uncertain terms that we should pull over and turn the engine off immediately, so too does the evidence of our positive, gung-ho attitude to all things similarly warns us that we’re lacking in any sort of genuine psychological insight at all…
Struggle (or discord) is in everything we do – the most basic actions that we know – which is to say, ‘going forward on the basis of the self’, ‘making a definite assertion on the basis of the platform of thought’, is a conflicted act. ‘Advancing on the basis of the taken-for-granted self’ (which is the same thing as ‘extending the frontiers of the Continuum of Thought’) is a conflicted action. Extending anything is a self-contradictory (or paradoxical) act – which is basically another way of saying that ‘things can’t be extended’. When we try to extend something then what happens is that we imperceptibly ‘flip over’ on ourselves – just like the surface of a mobius loop imperceptible twists back over on itself as we travel it – and we end up back where we started. As long as we fail to register what’s going on with the Mobius loop of the thinking mind we will ‘flunk the graduation exam’ and so we will be required to repeat the lesson for as many times as needed; we’re not getting the essential point here which is (just as Bodhidharma says) that things aren’t real, which is that things are projections of the thinking mind and nothing more.
Because we only care about our ideas about the world (and not the world itself) this means in practice that all we care about is conflict, the conflict of ‘continuously and obstinately trying to make an impossible thing happen’. The impossible thing in question is to turn our ‘ideas about reality’ into the ‘actual thing itself’, to make our naïve fantasy about ‘how things should be’ actually come true. Since all we care about is making our ‘unexamined fantasy of the world’ be true (and not a fantasy) this in turn means that we have precisely zero interest in finding out that it is flatly impossible for us to do this. It means that we have precisely zero interest in ever seeing the actual truth of the matter…
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