Which Game Do You Play?

These three games, Hog in Trough, Cock on Dunghill and the Moloch Game, are all more or less pathological activities. The players who “win” win nothing that they can truly call their own. “Hog in Trough” may emerge twice as rich as Croesus only to find himself embittered, empty and unhappy, at a loss to know what to do with the wealth he has amassed. “Cock on Dunghill” may make himself so famous that everyone knows his name only to realize that this fame of his is a mere shadow and a source of inconvenience. Players of the Moloch Game may wade in blood up to their ears only to find that the victory or glory for which they sacrificed a million lives are empty words, like richly bedizened whores who lure men to their destruction. There is a criminal element in all these games because, in every instance, they do harm both to the player and the society of which he forms a part. So warped, however, are the standards by which men measure criminality that players of these games are more apt to be regarded as “pillars of society” than dangerous lunatics who should be exiled to remote islands where they can do no harm to themselves or others.

The Neutral Game

Between the higher and lower games is the neutral game, the Householder Game, the aim of which is simply to raise a family and provide it the necessities of life. One cannot call it either a meta-game or an object game. It is the basic biological game on which the continuation of the human race depends.

No Game

It is also possible to find, in every human society, a certain number of nonplayers, people who, due to some constitutional defect, are unable to find any game worth playing, who are, as a result, chronic outsiders, who feel alienated from society and generally become mentally deranged, tend to become antisocial and criminal.

The High Games

The meta-games are rarely played in their pure form.

The Art Game ideally is directed towards the expression of an inner awareness loosely defined as beauty. The awareness is purely subjective. One man’s beauty can be another man’s horror. The beautiful of one age can seem ugly to another. But bad players of the art game have no inner awareness at all. They are technically proficient and imitate those who have awareness, conforming to the fashion whatever that fashion may be. The whole Art Game, as played today, is heavily tainted with commercialism, the greed of the collector pervades it like a bad smell. It is further complicated by the tendency to show off that afflicts almost all contemporary artists, whether they be painters, sculptors, writers or composers. As all traditional concepts of the beautiful have been abandoned, anything goes, just so long as it is new and startling. This makes it almost impossible to tell whether a given work of art corresponds to some inner awareness of the artist of merely shows that he was trying to be clever.

The Science Game is also rarely played in its pure form. Much of it is merely jugglery, a tiresome ringing of changes on a few basic themes by investigators who are little more than technicians with higher degrees. The Science Game has become so complex, so vast and so expensive that more or less routine enterprises are given preference. Anything truly original tends to be excluded by that formidable array of committees that stands between the scientist and the money he needs for research. He must either tailor his research plans to fit the preconceived ideas of the committee or find himself without funds. Moreover, in the Science Game as in the Art Game there is much insincerity and a frenzied quest for status that sparks endless puerile arguments over priority of publication. The game is played not so much for knowledge as to bolster the scientist’s ego.

To the Art Game and the Science Game we must add the Religion Game, a meta-game played for an aim loosely defined as the attainment of salvation. The Religion Game, as played in the past, had a fairly well-defined set of rules. It was essentially a game played by paid priests of one sort of another for their personal benefit. To compel their fellowmen to play the game, the priests invented various gods, with whom they alone could communicate, whose wrath they alone could assuage, whose cooperation they alone could enlist. He who wanted help from the gods or who wished to avert their wrath had to pay the priests to obtain his ends. The game was further enlivened, and the hold of the priests on the minds of their victims further strengthened, by the invention of two after-death states, a blissful heaven and a terrible hell. To stay out of the hell and get into heaven, the player of the Religion Game had to pay the priests, or his relatives had to pay them after his death. This “pay the priest” aspect of the Religion Game has caused several cynics to define it as the world’s oldest confidence trick designed to enable certain unscrupulous individuals to make a profit out of the credulity and suggestibility of their fellowmen by interceding on their behalf with some nebulous god or ensuring their entry into an equally nebulous heaven. It was this aspect of the Religion Game that causes Sigmund Freud to exclaim, more in sorrow than anger: “The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that for one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life”.

A particularly hideous aspect of the Religion Game resulted from the insistence by certain priests that their brand of god was the only god, that their form of the game was the only permissible form. So eager were these priests to keep the game entirely in their own hands that they did not hesitate to persecute torture or kill any who happened to wish to play the game by other rules. The practice was started by the Jews, whose enthusiasm for their one and only and very jealous father-god justified those slaughterings the accounts of which constitute so much of the bulk of the Old Testament. The practice was eagerly adopted by so-called Christians, who, not satisfied with slaughtering Moslems and Jews, turned like rabid dogs on one another in a series of ghastly religious wars, Protestant versus Catholic. The Moslems, who borrowed the rules of their Religion Game from Jews and Christians alike, do not fail to copy the bad habits of both. Believers were exhorted in the Koran to wage war on the infidel the slaughter of the unbelievers being defined as one sure way of gaining entry into the Moslem heaven (a much lusher paradise than the rather insipid affair offered by their priests to conforming Christians).

It would simplify our account of the games if we could offer the above description of the Religion Game without further comment. Unfortunately, this is impossible. Simply to define the Religion Game as the world’s oldest con game is as “patently infantile” (to borrow Freud’s words) as it is to take seriously the anthropomorphic father-god floating in his bed sheet somewhere in the stratosphere surrounded by cherubs and seraphs and other improbable species of celestial fauna (the “gaseous vertebrate” so derived by Ernst Haeckel). For it must be obvious to any fair-minded observer that there is another element in the Religion Game besides that of the playing on the credulity of believers and selling them entry permits into a phony heaven. All the great religions offer examples of saints and mystics who obviously did not play the game for material gain, whose indifference to personal comfort, to wealth and to fame was so complete as to arouse our wonder and admiration. It is equally obvious from the writings and sayings of these mystics that they were not so naïve as to take seriously either the gaseous vertebrate or heaven with its golden harps or hell with its ovens. Obviously they played the game by entirely different rules and for entirely different aims from those of the priestly con men, who sold trips to heaven for hard cash and insisted on payment in advance (no refund if not fully satisfied, either).

The Master Game

What game did these mystics play? Within the matrix imposed by their religion, these players were attempting to the most difficult game of all, the Master Game, the aim of which is the attainment of full consciousness or real awakening. It was natural for these players to play their game within a religious matrix. The basic idea underlying all the great religions is that man is asleep, that he lives amid dreams and delusions, that he cuts himself off from the universal consciousness (the only meaningful definition of God) to crawl into the narrow shell of a personal ego. To emerge from this narrow shell, to regain union with the universal consciousness, to pass from the darkness of the ego-centered illusion into the light of the non-ego, this was the real aim of the Religion Game as defined by the great teachers, Jesus, Gautama, Krishna, Mahavira, Lao-tze and the Platonic Socrates. Among the Moslems this teaching was promulgated by the Sufis, who praised in their poems the delights of reunion with the Friend. To all these players, it was obvious that the Religion Game as played by the paid priests, with its shabby confidence tricks, promises, threats, persecutions and killings, was merely a hideous travesty of the real game, a terrible confirmation of the truth of the statement: “These people praise me with their lips but their hearts are far from me…. They have eyes but see not, ears and hear not, neither do they understand.”

So little did they understand that, at least within the matrix of the “Christian” religion, it actually became physically dangerous during several centuries to try to play the Master Game at all. Serious players found themselves accused of heresy, imprisoned by Inquisitors, tortured, burned alive. It became impossible to play the game openly. To survive at all, one had to adopt a disguise, pretend that one’s real interest was alchemy or magic, both of which were permitted by the priests, who did not understand the real significance of either.

Alchemy was particularly safe as its stated aim, the transmutation of base metals into gold, posed no challenge whatever to the authority of the priests. Therefore it was behind the mask of alchemy that many players of the Master Game concealed their real aims, formulating the rules of the game in an elaborate secret code in which the transmutations of substances within the body were expressed in terms of mercury,

sulfur, salt, and other elements. There were, of course, numerous alchemists who tool the whole science at its face value, who believed that the Great Work referred to the production of metallic gold, who impoverished and frequently poisoned themselves in the quest for the great secret, and incidentally laid the foundations of modern chemistry. But for the serious alchemist the transmutation involved the formation of aurum non vulgi, or the genesis of the homunculus, both of which symbolized the creation of fully conscious, cosmically orientated man out of the ego-centered puppet that goes by the name of man but is really only a pathetic caricature of what man could be. So well did the alchemists conceal their secrets that it took all the intuitive genius of Carl Gustav Jung (perhaps the leading authority on the subject) a large part of his life to unravel this mystery.

Today no danger is involved in playing or attempting to play the Master Game. The tyranny of the priests has more or less ended. The Religion Game, though often as much of a con game as ever, is played without threats of torture or death. A good deal of the old venom has gone out of the game; in fact, it is even possible for priests who wear round their necks the label “Catholic” to be moderately polite to those who wear the once hated label “Protestant.” So the game is now played with a certain amount of restraint not because men have become more tolerant, but because the whole issue of heaven versus hell, salvation versus damnation, is no longer taken very seriously. Even the theologians admit that the old father-god (Haeckel’s “gaseous vertebrate”) is dead as far as anyone above the Jehovah’s Witness level is concerned. The fight today is between rival political systems rather than rival theologies.

But although it is safe to play the Master Game, this has not served to make it popular. It still remains the most demanding and difficult of games and, in our society, there are few who play. Contemporary man, hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgets, has little contact with his inner world, concerns himself with the outer, not inner space. But the Master Game is played entirely in the inner world, a vast and complex territory about which men know very little. The aim of the game is true awakening, full development of the powers latent in man. The game can be played only by people whose observations of themselves and others have led them to a certain conclusion, namely, that man’s ordinary state of consciousness, his so-called waking state, is not the highest level of consciousness of which he is capable. In fact, this state is so far from real awakening that it could appropriately be called a form of somnambulism, a condition of “waking sleep”.

Once a person has reached this conclusion, he is no longer able to sleep comfortably. A new appetite develops within him, the hunger for real awakening, for full consciousness. He realizes that he sees, hears, knows only a fraction of what he could see, hear and know, that he lives in the poorest, shabbiest of the rooms in his inner dwelling, but that he could enter other rooms, beautiful and filled with treasures, the windows of which look out on eternity and infinity. In these rooms he would transcend his petty personal self and undergo spiritual rebirth, “the rising from the tomb” which is the theme of so many myths and the basis of all mystery religions, including Christianity.

He who arrives at this conclusion is ready to play the Master Game. But though he may be ready, he does not necessarily know how to play. He cannot draw upon instinct knowledge, for nature has not endowed men with such instincts. She provides for man’s development up to the age of puberty, she endows him with the instinct to propagate his kind, but after she leaves him to his own devices. Far from helping man to develop further into the harmonious and enlightened being he might become, the blind force of evolution has actually put obstacles in his way.

One who would play the Master Game is therefore compelled to seek a teacher, a skilled player who knows the rules. But where will he find such a teacher? A materialistic, spiritually impoverished culture can offer no instruction to the aspirant. The huge, highly specialized training centers that call themselves universities are obviously lacking in universality. They do not put the emphasis on expansion of consciousness first and the acquisition of specialized knowledge second. They educate only a small part of man’s totality. They cram the intellectual brain with facts, pay some lip service to the education of the physical body by encouraging idiotic competitive sports. But true education, in the sense of expansion of consciousness and the harmonious development of man’s latent powers, the do not offer.

The only game.. The Master Game :)

One on One I want to play that game tonite.

I'm hoping to play me some global thermal nuclear war.

i'm a big fan of thor towers
[link to www.bubblebox.com]

I play my own game.

Unreal Tournament

BF2
BF2SF
BF2142

Backgammon

LoL the new Unreal 2007 is badass

ive been playing the Demo and the graffix are serious Next Gen Gaming !

HAHA

Dear Opie,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think the OP meant which "life game" do you play.

Yup!

Backgammon is better

excellent bit of information... thanks for sharing

Right now I'm playing the Ultima:Lazarus add-on to the Dungeon Siege game.

Jenga

although, i personally would not go to the nirubian counsel for any spiritual teaching... and in fact, i left wingmakers, but they are a good place to start... to hocus pocus, no stupid predictions or wierdness... just awesome scientific experiement and document and progress heart opening in order to achieve a fluid intelligence

Still playing Soldier of Fortune 2 here, so stay out of my sights on my sniper rifle. lol

H3

Indeed it is a wonderful!

~what's puzzling you - is the nature of my game~

Great article. Thank you OP

Sounds like division based on ideology. Useless exercise as WWI, WWII, Cold War, Communist/Terrorist/Fundamentalist. US/THEM.

How stupid are these people?

Mario Party 8

The Glass Bead Game.

The "Master Game" is the only one worth playing, for me personally.



"He who arrives at this conclusion is ready to play the Master Game. But though he may be ready, he does not necessarily know how to play. He cannot draw upon instinct knowledge, for nature has not endowed men with such instincts. She provides for man’s development up to the age of puberty, she endows him with the instinct to propagate his kind, but after she leaves him to his own devices. Far from helping man to develop further into the harmonious and enlightened being he might become, the blind force of evolution has actually put obstacles in his way."


Women DO have the intuitive and inner knowledge to play this game wonderfully well. Unfortunately, women haven't been writing the history books...



At least, not until recently, lol!



The games will be over soon though...






(About time, too!)