Life in the box isn’t life at all but a game. ‘So what’s the difference’, we might ask, ‘Don’t people talk about ‘the game of life’, after all?’
We can talk about game of life if we want to of course, but that’s merely a turn of phrase. The difference between the life and a game is that a game runs on rules – just like a train runs on train tracks – whereas life does not! Technically speaking, games run on tracks and life doesn’t and that’s the difference! Psychologically speaking, this means that we obtain a sense of security in playing games that we absolutely don’t get from what Timothy Leary calls ‘Non-Game Reality’ (which is not a logical system, which is not totally rigid, which does not run on the basis of rules).
Another way of putting this would be to say that the key difference between ‘games’ and ‘life’ is that the latter contains freedom whilst the former does not. Train tracks do not contain the freedom for the train to go in any other way than the way that the tracks tell them to go. There couldn’t be a bigger difference than this; we might naively argue that we are free to make choices within the game with regard to strategies (which is to say, do I make this move or that?) but the thing about this is that we can only ever choose and again between options that the game itself has provided for us. Again, we simply don’t possess the freedom that would enable us to ‘jump the tracks’, and this means that we don’t actually have any freedom at all. There’s no jumping of the tracks allowed here…
This is ‘Hobson’s choice’, therefore – our so-called ‘choices’ have already been made for us and so whatever we choose it’s not really ‘our’ choice. It’s a parody of choice, a parody of freedom. On a superficial – and therefore potentially deceptive – level we can get away with this by saying that what we’re looking at here is a genuine choice, by taking it as such (this is how we get to play the game after all), but when we do look at the matter in a ‘non-superficial’ way it becomes very clear indeed that – as we have just said – this is a caricature of choice, a mockery of freedom. Whilst the two-dimensional appearance of freedom feels pleasant for us, feels empowering to us, the ‘non-superficial awareness’ that we’re talking about here is a very unpleasant sort of a thing when we’re invested in the game and so – as a rule – we just don’t go there. We experience ‘aversion towards the truth’, in other words, and this aversion towards the truth is the hallmark of ‘life in the box’. It’s just not possible to be ‘interested in the truth’ and at the same time ‘live in the box’.
Whilst games are superficial, life itself is not, we could say. Life can contain superficiality life can contain superficiality, but it itself is not superficial. This is equivalent to James Carse’s statement (paraphrased) when he says that the infinite game can contain any number of finite games, but no finite game can contain the infinite game. Deep can contain shallow, but shallow cannot contain deep. Freedom can contain the lack of freedom (since we are of course perfectly at liberty to give our freedom away) but the lack of freedom does not contain the possibility of what it is lacking. Freedom can’t come out of a rule any more than peace can come out of the muzzle of a gun, any more than happiness can come out of the situation where we are being controlled by an abuser.
This brings us back to what we started off by talking about when we said that life in the box isn’t life but merely the superficial appearance of it, which could ‘do the job’ for us – so to speak – just as long as we make very sure to keep everything on just the one level (which is the level of the formal description, which is the level of ‘what is officially said to be true’). Another way of putting this is therefore to say that the game functions as if it were not a game (but ‘just the way things are’) just so long as we make sure to obey all the rules. If we aren’t scrupulous enough in this regard then that – of course – is the end of the game. Obedience is everything, obedience is more important than we are able to understand. Total compliance is required and anything short of this is seen by all game players as wrongdoing, as being due to culpability (which is to say pure badness) on our part. This is how we will be understood and this is how we will be treated – ‘No one is more hated then he who speaks the truth’, says Plato.
This accounts for the special type of horror that we as compliant members of the social order feel when we come across rule-breaking – not only are we totally baffled as to why any right thinking person would behave in such a way, we are also consumed with righteous anger that – as history shows – excuses whatever violence we might subsequently enact upon the rule-breaker. There is – furthermore – no limit with regard to the brutality of the punishment that we might choose to deal out to them. The crime here is therefore simply that the person involved (the ‘wrong doer’) has drawn attention to the fact that the emperor has no clothes. The crime is pointing out that ‘the box only a box’ and that real life – which is to say, life that hasn’t been scripted – is taking place somewhere else since there isn’t a space in the box for it. Our sin is to ‘call out the lie’, in other words, and this is a threat to all of us who have bargained on ‘the lie not being a lie’, ‘the game not being a game’… The system can no longer function if it is examined and the system is super-important to us because it tells us who we are. We depend on the system to validate everything we claim (out of fear) to be true.
When (or if) we do start to question the rules that make up our world then this is the ultimate act of disobedience therefore and we can expect no mercy from the forces that be. Such behaviour in the past was attributed to the Devil and was dealt with accordingly, we have after all been instructed by no lesser authority than God Himself to ‘fight the devil and all his works’. Language like this shows that what is being demonised (or attributed to Satan) in this dramatic way is nothing other than unconditioned consciousness – which is to say, the ability to freely see for ourselves what’s going on, irrespective of what any external authority might telling us. If questioning the position of the Church means that we are in league with the Devil, and if the Devil is the pure essence of badness, then this is of course a very serious discouragement – the most serious type of discouragement there is, in fact…
In modern times things are a bit different in that instead of demonising unconditioned consciousness we pathologize it – we say that it is an illness or malfunction of the brain and that it needs to be treated. From the point of view of the conditioned identity, the incursion of consciousness does indeed seem like the action of some devilish or pathological influence; consciousness is the enemy of the rational identity, it is the enemy because it allows us to see that this ‘identity’ is something has been put together by thought and which has no actual existence of its own. This is the ‘disallowed insight’, the ‘banned awareness’. Unconditioned awareness means that we see that we aren’t this identity – we can’t be this identity because it’s not a real thing and so what we’re up against here is ego death which is – needless to say – the thing we are always most keen to avoid. Avoiding ego death is – we might say – what it’s all about. The rule we cannot question (and must therefore always obey) is the very serious rule that says that <We must never discover that ‘this ego which we think we are’ doesn’t exist>. Anything else is permitted but not this therefore, not actual honest-to-goodness awareness.
‘Playing the game’ thus means acting as if the self we take ourselves to be is real and not a construct of thought. The ‘freedom’ we have in this act is the freedom to do or think anything we want just so long as it doesn’t jeopardize the game (just so long as it doesn’t come into conflict with the super-serious rule that we have just mentioned). We can therefore say that the type of freedom we’re talking about here is conditioned freedom, which is where we are free only on the level of the game (which is itself a fantasy, which is itself a ‘made up thing’). Conditioned freedom isn’t actually any sort of freedom at all, of course – the supposed freedom that we are being gifted by the system is ‘conditional upon us accepting without question the conditions that have been put in place by that system’ and so what this state of affairs ought to be called is ‘camouflaged slavery’. It’s ‘slavery that doesn’t declare itself’, it’s ‘slavery that presents itself in a nice comfortable way’ (at least to start off with). Conditioned freedom is freedom that is at all times carefully regulated by the system that gives it to us, it is ‘the freedom to do anything we want just so long as we make sure to stay in the box’….
Image credit – edwud.com