When we can see past our goals then our goals are serving us – they are helping us in a practical way in this case. When we can’t see through our goals however then this changes everything; when the goal we’re aiming at becomes ‘an end in itself’ then everything gets flipped over on us so that the goal – instead of serving us – has now become our master. The user of the tool has now become the used, the exploiter has become the exploited…
When we can’t see past our goals then our goals become what hems us in, they become the limits of what we can know about, the limit of what we’re interested in. Within this limited world, attaining the goal becomes the most we can ever hope for, it becomes ‘the best possible news’ and failing to attain the goal – by the same token – becomes the worst possible news. Our lives then take place between the two poles of ‘succeeding at what the system says we should be succeeding at’ and the pole of ‘not succeeding at this task’. At no point in the proceedings do we go beyond what the set up says we should do, therefore.
The one thing we can’t see when we’re caught up in playing this game is that the limits which we are being hemmed in by (and thus defined by) is that the allocated goals are always going to be purely arbitrary in nature. We didn’t have to pick them, in other words, but rather we freely chose to have them. They don’t represent anything real. Our tacit agreement to take the goals seriously is necessary for the game to work, in other words. Once we have agreed with the goal to be a goal however then the Principle of Reversibility sets in and we become incapable of seeing that voluntary agreement on our part was needed for the game to work as a game.
This is the point at which we ‘hand over responsibility to the mechanism’, therefore – the mechanism says what is and what is not, the mechanism says what we can do and what we cannot do, where we can go and where we can’t go. Handing over responsibility to the mechanism means that we can no longer see that the device is just a device, and – instead – accept it in an unqualified way as the ‘objective’ – and therefore unquestionable – reality. Our only concern now is to satisfy the conditions that have been imposed upon us; in the absence of any awareness with regard to the entirely arbitrary way in which these conditions were arrived at we automatically become their prisoner. The irreversibility of the ‘handing-over process’ sets in just as soon as we pick a viewpoint. Goals are a projection of our chosen viewpoint, and so we can say that everything about us is now totally defined by this ‘point of view’ – our situation is defined in a watertight fashion and the result of this is that we can’t ever see beyond it.
To start off with we have a symmetrical situation – we have the situation of ‘all possibilities being equal’ – and so if we want to have just the one viewpoint (which is the necessary condition if we are to be able to ‘play the game ’) then we have to pick one at random; we have to close our eyes and stick the pin wherever it happens to go. Irreversibility in this case means that we can’t go back to the prior situation of seeing that there are lots and lots of viewpoints that are available. Instead, everything has to be seen from (or done from) the one viewpoint. This is how the Mind-Created Virtual Reality gets to come into being, the only way it can come into being…
In order to have a goal – which is to say, in order for that goal to actually mean anything – we have to narrow down our awareness to ‘only what is permitted by the one selected viewpoint’. Every single viewpoint that we choose will show us a different view of things – this being the nature of perspective – and so as soon as we start taking into account more than just the one viewpoint, we lose the possibility of having a uniquely meaningful goal. It goes right out of the window. If we keep our awareness wide open – excluding nothing – then having a goal becomes impossible. If we ‘keep an open mind’ then the possibility of making a definite (or ‘absolutely true’) statement about reality goes out of the window. When we don’t exclude any viewpoint then there is maximum indeterminacy – nothing can be said, no definite statements can be made, and so nothing can be ‘known’.
When we talk about ‘not being able to see beyond our goals’ then we’re talking about looking at the world from a single viewpoint – it’s the same thing. We could say that it is our goals that are hemming us in (or limiting us) or we could say that it is our viewpoint that is limiting (or ‘defining’ us); again – it’s the same thing. What we could also say here is that our goals are how – on an unconscious level – we allow ourselves to imagine that we can escape from the limitation or restriction that is inherent in our viewpoint. The goal is our ‘theatrical escape’, therefore – it symbolises ‘escape’ (or ‘progress’ or ‘a solution to our problem’) for us without it actually being an escape, without it actually being a solution. Although we aren’t getting anywhere (although we never leave the spot that we’re on) we can via our theatrical escaping experience ourselves as ‘progressing’, we can experience ourselves as ‘moving on’. When we ‘play the game which is the System of Thought’ then this appearance of progress is precisely the illusion that we’re playing at for.
This is hardly a radically new way of talking about games – everyone knows that we don’t really get anywhere by playing games, everyone knows that ‘games aren’t real’. Everybody knows (although it is necessary that we lose sight of the fact at the time) that in playing a game we are actually ‘chasing an illusion’ – we’re getting excited by the chase (which – as we all know – is invariably better than the catch). If we didn’t lose sight of the fact that we’re ‘not really getting anywhere’ then we wouldn’t get excited by the chase, and if we didn’t get excited by the prospect of attaining an illusory goal then there would of course be zero motivation to play the game. As we have just said, this euphoric excitement (the excitement of ‘thinking we’re getting somewhere when the truth is that we’re not’) is precisely what we’re playing for.
We are out-and-out ‘euphoria addicts’ and we’re chasing the euphoria that comes our way when [1] We think that that the illusion of escaping is real, and [2] We perceive it to be the case that we personally are about to do just this, that we ourselves are about to obtain this glittering but illusory prize (i.e., when we perceive it to be the case that there really is such a thing as gaining or failing to gain, winning or losing). The theatre that’s going on here is therefore that we are moving on, that we are escaping, that we are about to hit upon ‘a golden solution’. This is symbolised by ‘winning’ in the game. We could also say that the theatre is where we say that ‘the view’ and ‘the viewpoint’ are two different things (i.e., it is where we say that ‘where we are’ and ‘where we want to be’ are not one and the same thing). There’s a bit of a problem here however because this just isn’t the case – we can pretend that these two things (our origin and our destination) are different and that – therefore – to successfully arrive at the indicated destination, the goal, is actually a real attainment, a very real thing. By means of this pretence we can get this to work for us (in a purely theatrical fashion, of course) but only at the price of also having the ‘reverse proposition’ being apparently true as well. We can’t have winning without there also being such a thing as losing, in other words…
We can therefore only have the illusion of moving forwards in a euphoric direction (in the direction of escaping from our starting off position) if we also buy into the dysphoric illusion of ‘losing ground’, the dysphoric illusion of ‘going backwards’. Implicit in this is the understanding that not to be able to escape from our starting-off position is an unconditionally ignominious fate. There is truth in this – truth that has been adapted to the purposes of the game, as it were. The truth is that our starting-off point actually is a meaningless place, a ‘non-existent place to be’; it only seems to us to be a genuine honest-to-goodness location because we have narrowed our awareness down so much that no other possible viewpoints are available for us, because we are artificially restricted to ‘just the one viewpoint’. The unavailability of this information reifies our position, it solidifies it, it makes it real to us. When we only have the one viewpoint available to us then it becomes invisible to us as ‘a viewpoint’ (as one VP amongst infinitely many others, none of which have any precedence over any other) and it becomes instead the unquestionable basis for everything. The part gets to stand out only when the Whole is repressed, or ‘pushed out of view’.
The single, unquestionable (or unexaminable) VP might be our ‘basis for everything’ but it is – all the same – a total fabrication. The restriction exists in our way of looking at reality, not in reality itself. When our basis for everything – which we are, as conditioned creatures, are utterly incapable of doubting or examining – is a total fabrication then the world that we construct on it is of course going to be equally fictional, equally phantasmic, despite the fact that it seems ‘100% real’ to us. Our perception of our situation is thus entirely hollow and although we cannot directly perceive or acknowledge this hollowness (or lack of content) we do implicitly acknowledge it via the fundamental motivation of all games which is ‘to win rather than lose’. We are playing in order to redeem ourselves from the ignominious status of being ‘a hopeful player of the game’, as yet without any standing, as yet with no way of distinguishing themselves from all the numberless other ‘wannabes’, of whom we are but one. We are playing for ‘existence itself’, we could therefore say – we’re desperate to make that all-important transition from ‘potential’ to ‘actual’.
Our current status is therefore one of ‘non-existence’, of ‘not being anybody yet’. Our current state of existence is ‘without any intrinsic worth or significance’ and this will continue to be the case until we’ve managed to prove ourselves by winning where so many others do not. ‘Winning’ signifies – in an indirect or oblique fashion – ‘escaping from the meaninglessness of the game’, even though we aren’t at all able to appreciate this crucial psychological point. We can’t see that the game is a ‘null state of being’ even though the motivation that drives the game-playing activity is the need to escape from this all-pervasive nullity. The point of the game is thus to escape from the game (which is what James Carse is getting at when he speaks of ‘the self-contradictory nature of all finite games’) and this is frankly ridiculous. A game can never go beyond itself since the goal and our basis for constructing that goal (which is our ‘starting-off point’) are one and the same thing. It’s all a closed loop of logic. To appreciate the inherent self-contradictory nature of ‘trying to escape the game by playing the game’ is to appreciate the utter screaming absurdity of what we’re engaged in and if we could appreciate that absurdity then we wouldn’t be able to continue with it anymore. We would have ‘gone beyond our goals’; we would have ‘escaped from the tautology’, which is actually what we were trying to do all along, if only we knew it…
Image credit – retrostylegames.com
