In an earlier post I mentioned Roger Ebert’s epiphany, during his last days, when he reported to his wife, “This is all an elaborate hoax.”
In somewhat similar vein, transpersonal psychologist Stanislov Grof wrote a book called The Cosmic Game (which I admit I’ve never been able to really get into – but I like the title).
Increasingly I see this life as a kind of game, hoax, charade, simulation … call it what you will. That’s not to say it isn’t real. It’s just not the final, ultimate reality.
After all, a video game is real. You’re not imagining it. It just isn’t quite the same kind of reality as the computer you’re playing it on. A hologram is real, too. It’s a real image, not a hallucination. But a hologram of an apple doesn’t possess the same kind of reality as an actual apple.
The interesting thing to me is that people have different degrees of commitment to the game. There seem to be two extremes. On one end of the spectrum are people who are very lightly attached to this reality. They tend toward mysticism and what psychologists call dissociation. Often they are hyper-sensitive by nature, repelled by the coarseness of physical existence. They experience real pain in even the most minor disagreement. They avoid the rough edges of life – political battles, career struggles, personal crusades.
At the other extreme are people who are fully committed to the game. They are playing hard, and playing to win – or at least to survive. These are people who rarely, if ever, think about their own mortality. They enjoy the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of competitive striving. They like a good fight (though in some cases, only if it’s a purely intellectual fight). They tend toward philosophical materialism and, often, materialism in the popular sense of acquisitiveness.
Each extreme has trouble understanding or respecting the other. Mystics find materialists shallow and vulgar. Materialists see mystics as impotent, deluded dreamers.
Our commitment to the game can also change over time. Young children seem to be minimally committed. They draw little distinction between life and death, and must be constantly supervised for their own safety. They regard everything as a kind of game; nothing is too serious. As we get older, we become conscious of our mortality and, usually, less comfortable with risk. Life becomes important; we learn to worry. In old age, some people revert to a more childlike attitude. They look back and see that they didn’t have to take life quite so seriously after all. In some cases they wish they had spent more time playing, and less time striving and fretting.
It may be natural to assume that the mystics have it right and the materialists are wrong. But this is not necessarily true. If it is a game, it is clearly meant to be an immersive game. We seem to be encouraged to throw ourselves into it. Those who detach themselves from the game and see it as “an elaborate hoax” are not really playing anymore. And what is the point of a game if you don’t play?
People sometimes come to a mystical perspective as a result of a sudden flash of super-awareness, which Richard Maurice Bucke called “cosmic consciousness.” It is possible that such episodes are nothing more than glitches in the system – a kind of information leakage that compromises the intended purpose of the game. Total immersion may be a feature, not a bug – in which case, mystical transcendence, however personally gratifying it may be, can be seen as a kind of cheat, akin to jumping to a higher level of a video game by using a hidden shortcut.
If this is true, we would expect serious obstacles in the path of transcending the game. The whole tendency of this reality would be to keep us immersed and committed. And to a large extent this does seem to be the case. I’ve noticed, for instance, that unless I write down a synchronicity or successful premonition immediately, I will forget it. Within an hour it’s gone from my memory, and I cannot retrieve it. Many people report the same thing. Similarly, most people forget their dreams as soon as they wake up (and dreams may provide insights into other realities which would undermine our commitment to this one). The difficulty of definitively nailing down ESP, PK, or an afterlife is well known. Many cultures have taboos against even investigating these subjects. Our own culture tends to marginalize such interests by relegating them to popular entertainment, tabloid journalism, and seedy strip-mall palm-reading operations. George Hansen has much to say about this in his influential book The Trickster and the Paranormal.
We also see persecution of those whose insights threaten general commitment to the game. The prophets of Israel were harassed by the authorities. Bands of itinerant prophets were hunted down and killed. Jesus was crucified. The Gnostics were declared heretics, and their books burned. So-called witches and warlocks were tortured and burned alive. Christians who embraced reincarnation, such as the Cathars, were killed en masse. Today, anyone in academia who gives a respectful hearing to such outre subjects as psi, the immortality of the soul, or even UFOs is liable to be ridiculed and ostracized. Powerful forces seem to be at work keeping us securely within the confines of the rules of the game. Perhaps we are just not supposed to think outside the box.
Though a lot of trouble seems to have gone into making the game as immersive as possible, I’m not saying there’s any sinister intent behind it. I’m also not saying that we are necessarily being manipulated by some sort of alien intelligences. Actually, I think it is far more likely that we ourselves – in the capacity of our higher self – have designed or co-designed the game and agreed to all its rules and stipulations. (This is a recurring theme of Michael Newton’s books on hypnotic regressions to a between-lives state.) As Plato said, when we are born into this world, we forget what we knew in spirit. This forgetting is necessary in order to play the game and take it seriously. If we knew we had designed it as a test or an exercise, we would not be fully engaged.
Stock traders sometimes practice by making purely hypothetical trades called “paper trades.” It’s a good way of learning the ins and outs of trading without risking your money. But any trader will tell you that there is a difference between a paper trade and the real thing. No matter how much you pretend that real money is at stake in a paper trade, you know you are only playing around. Your emotions do not get engaged to the same extent as they do when actual money is on the table. You can get the full experience of trading, with all its anxieties and roller-coaster unpredictability, only by making real trades, and taking real (and painful) losses.
Commitment to the game may seem like short-sightedness or naivete to those of us in search of higher realities. But maybe we’re the ones who are missing something.
After all, as long as we’re alive on earth, it’s the only game in town.