We don’t understand what ‘a game’ really is, even though we think we do. A game is a game we say, it’s where we all pretend something is true when it isn’t. What more is there to be said than this, we might ask? There’s a lot more that can be said, however – we can say that game is a trick that we take seriously, a trick that we contrive not to see as a trick. Or – most succinctly of all – we can say that a game is a null situation which we can’t see to be null.
If we could see that the game which we’re playing is a null situation then we simply wouldn’t play it – the only possible motivation we could have for playing a game would be if it wasn’t a null situation (which is to say, if ‘winning’ at the game weren’t exactly the same thing as ‘losing’ at it). The reason we keep playing a game is because we hope to ‘come out ahead’, and so if there’s no way this can ever happen (if ‘coming out ahead’ isn’t a thing) then there’s clearly no point to engaging in it.
A game – we might say – is like a circular racetrack that incorporates both an incline and a decline such that when we’re going up the slope then we feel that we’re ‘doing well’ and when we go down it we feel the reverse, we feel that we’re ‘doing badly’. To get to the very top of the hill is to win the game whilst to be the bottom is to lose, is to be this thing called ‘a loser’. In the first case we are exultant and in the second we feel as bad as bad could be – we carry the indelible taint of failure and so no one wants to know us – even we don’t want to know ourselves, come to that. Even we would like to cross on the other side of the street from us. No one likes a loser…
The burning motivation we feel to play the game is ‘the motivation to get to the top of the hill’, which means that it is also the motivation to get to the bottom – we can’t have one without the other. The compulsion to succeed is the same thing as the compulsion to fail, and yet – perversely – we revere the former and revile the latter. We love the game and yet we hate it at the same time, therefore. This is the ‘hidden self-contradictoriness’ that is inherent in all games – the whole endeavour is totally conflicted, totally banjaxed, but we can’t see it.
We have divided something that can’t be divided, and the result of this illegitimate act is that we are continually in a state of conflict, the result of this is that we are constantly fighting against ourselves. The more single-minded we are in the pursuit of our goal we are the more impossible we are making life for ourselves. Life isn’t about pursuing goals – no matter what Western culture may say – that’s just a sterile, self-conflicted loop, that’s just ‘going around in circles’. Pursuing goals – if we are too serious about it, if we make this ‘the cornerstone of our philosophy’ (so to speak) is simply a meaningless glitch that we have gotten caught up in. Pursuing goals is like trying to run away from our own shadow – it will keep us busy for sure, but it won’t get us anywhere.
Because games are self-contradictory this means that we have to stay superficial if we are to carry on playing them, we have to stay superficial in order for them to carry on seeming meaningful to us. We are obliged to live our lives in a superficial way if we are to keep playing. Any more profound form of awareness can’t be allowed to come into the picture – actual insight into what’s going on can’t be allowed to come into the picture. Consciousness is taboo, in other words. This thing called ‘consciousness’ is strictly prohibited in the game – we have to act as if we ‘don’t know what we know’, we have to ‘disconnect ourselves for own good sense’ so that we may continue to run around like so many headless chickens…
Instead of consciousness, what we have is reactivity – reactivity means that we respond to nominated triggers in a pre-programmed way. When we’re reactive then our behaviour is determined by the stimulus and the way we’re habituated to reacting to it, whilst the key ingredient in consciousness – the only ingredient in consciousness – is freedom. Everything is fresh, everything is new, and nothing is predetermined. There are no echoes, no repeats. ‘Being conscious’ is thus incompatible with ‘playing a game’ – it’s incompatible because consciousness is never compelled in what it does. We don’t care if we win and we don’t care if we lose either. We couldn’t care less. When its reactivity that we’re talking about however then we couldn’t care more – we have no choice in our ‘caring’ (in our ‘bias’) just as we have no choice in our reacting. It’s simple mechanics, from beginning to end.
Instead of saying that a game is all about reactivity (where we passively identify with the impulse that is telling us what to do) we could equally well say that it’s all about not-questioning – authority doesn’t work when we question it and rules don’t work when we look into them. This is because there are no rules in reality, because there is no authority in the un-simulated (or unconditioned) world; it’s only in the Conditioned Reality that there are rules (in fact, that’s all there is in the conditioned reality rules, rules, and yet more rules…) Rules only work when we never question them, rules only control us because we tacitly agree to let them do so.
What this means – to be perfectly blunt about it – is that playing a game means swapping consciousness for mere mechanical reactivity. It means ‘being a machine that doesn’t know itself to be a machine’ (or ‘a rule that can’t see itself to be a rule’); it means giving away our freedom without knowing that we have. We could also (and equivalently) say that playing a game means entering into a null situation that we can’t SEE to be null. The mechanical (or conditioned) realm is ALWAYS going to be null – there’s absolutely no way it could ever be otherwise – and so ‘giving away our freedom’ and ‘entering into a null situation’ are one and the same thing. ‘Identifying with the rule’ and ‘entering into a null situation’ are one and the same thing.
The reason we can’t see that we’re being externally determined (or controlled) when we are immersed in a game is because we have identified with the external authority that is determining our actions and so we think we are this authority. We think we’re the master rather than the slave; we think that we are the jailer and so we don’t see that we are in jail. We don’t see ourselves to be obeying the rule and so the rule has negated us. Because we have identified with the rule it has become invisible to us. We have – in other words – allowed ourselves to be captured by the Great Amoeba – we’ve allowed ourselves to be eaten by it and now we are it without knowing that we are. We might not realise we’ve been subsumed within the mechanical simulation of reality but we have been all the same and we can’t escape the consequences of this the consequences being of passively identified with the system being that we’re trapped in the nullity, that we’ve cancelled ourselves out. All our ‘interiority’ has gone – we have had our insides neatly ‘scooped out’ by the entropic process and so now we’re mere ‘shells‘…
Why this should be so (why it is that we are automatically nullified just as soon as we identify with the rule) is easy to explain. We don’t even need to explain it – we can represent it in a pictorial fashion, we can see what’s happening here just by visualising the rule as a break in symmetry. A break in symmetry means unevenness, it means polarity, it means one side is not like the other. Breaking symmetry means separating the opposites so that there is a <plus> at one end and a <minus> at the other. A rule is another way of talking about symmetry-breaking (‘symmetry’ being the situation where there are no hills and no valleys, no <up> and no <down>). When we say that there is ‘up and down’, then we have as much of the one as we do of the other, and so – altogether – we have nothing. The original symmetry is still there, as we would see if we were to look a little deeper – every positive number on the X-axis always comes with the corresponding negative number and so the axis – taken as a whole – always adds up to nothing. Asymmetrical (or ‘uneven’) situations always cancel themselves out; games pretend to be asymmetrical but the truth is that they’re not…
Image credit – John Everett Millais, The Somnambulist. Photo by Wikimedia
