Anthracite, I must admit a certain kinship with that feeling. More sympathy than empathy, but there is even some empathy here.
I moved to the Boston area just over 1.5 years ago. Last October a friend moved here to live with me, and he is undergoing something very similar… strangely as a result of me.
It was a rare day in our life when we didn’t indulge in some sort of philosophic conversation about the nature of things, where we as a civilization were heading, where we should head, whether there can be life after death (both atheists), and so on. We are both very interested, as a hobby, in the implications of quantum mechanics, relativity, and general cosmology and cosmogony (did I spell that right?!?!).
(wow, big personal release time to follow, don’t read if you aren’t interested in super-personal details of my life)
I have always been a huge fan of LSD. Since the first time I tried it in my senior year of high school I’ve felt it to be The Perfect Drug, Trent Reznor’s song notwithstadning. When I felt like being giggly, i could giggle better than a pothead on a fresh toke. When I felt like being serious my seriousness was intense. When I felt like looking for connections between seemingly disparate ideas, events, or things LSD would be there for me, allowing my otherwise skeptical mind to just let go and start making some connections. My roomate had never done it before just last year; he was diametrically opposed to drug use on some principle which I don’t think he actually understood.
Hallucinogens are wont to cause many people to have religious experiences, and neither I nor he were any exception to this rule. Playing the PlayStation’s Silent Hill was no exception: we lived in that town. Tetris made more sense when the music was playing, and in some ways became a metaphor for life. This is the fun of LSD: it is an emotional amplifier of sorts. After a trip, over the next few days, I would spend many an hour going over and over the thoughts I had in my mind, discarding ones which were obviously just caused by the drugs, and paying close attention to ones that seemed to have been released by them, but were otherwise very plausible (if there were any, I must admit that most of the time there aren’t :p).
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So one night, while he and I were tripping, we were hot into the discussion-- with gleeful anticipation-- of next generation gaming and what it was likely to bring.
Here I had a revelation. Little did I know my friend had already had one a few eweks ago during a previous experience. (flashback to a trip follows-- in the literary sense, please)
At that time he had taken a trip up to the store to get something to drink, and when he returned the conversation quickly turned to God, or a Godlike being, and how the universe was conscious. WHOA, I said, no WAY you can convince me of that. We went at it for over an hour or so, I was strenuously questioning his line of thought, we were going off in tangents about what consciousness is and how one could or could not determine whether the universe in its entirety could fit the bill.
That night ended without resolution on my part, but he was still steadfast in his belief: the universe was conscious. Not only was it conscious, but it was never-ending. I mistakenly thought he meant in a big bang–>big crunch–>big bang sorta way, but that wasn’t the truth.
(return to present tense in the story) So there we are, looking at some AVIs he had downloaded showing prerelease footage of new video games, and my trip was really starting to kick in.
What, I asked myself, is the whole point of gaming? Almost instantly I had a very visual image in my mind of a gaming timeline of sorts, starting from punchcard checkers to todays teams of designers and testers to what the future might bring (I could never, ever do this moving image justice in writing, so I won’t even try) and then it happened.
The point of gaming.
I saw, at the end of this timeline, and eager programmer in the unspecific future working on a 3D holographic-style program in the style of RPGs and in front of him was not a monitor, but another person. The person was facing the programmer with a strange look and said, simply, “Hi.”
I couldn’t look at the AVIs anymore. My roommate was rambling on about something and I sorta looked away, then walked away, then sat down. (I am getting shivers just thinking about it-- this is the first time I’ve retold this story to anyone). The conversation I flashbacked to before popped into my mind. “Lets assume,” he had said, “that the universe is conscious.” “The universe’s time is eternal, it cycles and cycles” he had said, and I was thinking big bang big crunch.
“Dude,” I said, “the fucking universe is a game.”
THAT is what he had meant… there was no evidence that the universe was conscious. There was no evidence of a GOD figure in our lives, much like there is no evidence of the programmer in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. That “universe” had its own “phsics” and people and for all Alucard knows he has free will and has chosen to take a quest to rid the world of Dracula.
But we know better; it is just a game.
But what is the point of gaming? What are we doing? Diversionary pleasure? Are we avoiding the “real world” because it doesn’t offer us what the game does?
“Lets assume the universe is conscious…” That is, “Lets assume consciousness exists.” What would it do? Consciousness without body, without form, floating in nothing… why, it would spend its time in diversion from the utter banality of the void it lived in.
Well, truly, it goes on from there and I don’t intend to go on and on about it, but the final conclusion was that we are simply living in the universe’s little game, and it doesn’t even realize we’re conscious. As far as its concerned we’re just a little “program” running, operating according to some rules here or there and carrying on. (And it truly does go on from there, whether or not there is more than one consciousness, whether we are truly conscious or not, whether blah blah blah and what are the situations underlying consciousness, where those (or that) consciousness comes from, did it have to come from anywhere, can a lone consciousness conceive of the possibility of other consciousnesses, blah blah blah lots of boring details he and I have been fleshing out for some time)
For my friend, who felt that there very much needed to be a point to life, the entire idea was very depressing and he was in a bad mood for quite some time over it (still is pretty touchy about philosophical questions), while I finally felt totally released.
I decided in a Douglas Adams sorta way that the point of the game was to solve the problem of the universe’s unhappiness (that is, to solve the problem of it having to create a diversion in the first place) and that the point to us-- and possibly the millions of “people” that have come before us and the millions that may follow-- was this: to be happy. That was the point of the “program.” We had been put in a situation which was diametrically opposed to individual happiness and we had to figure out a way to get it. Not just diversionary happiness, not just contentedness, but pure, unrefined, constant joy. THAT is why we are here, and as long as we are on that quest we are serving our purpose and we will continue to exist. As soon as we give up trying, or we actually achieve the goal, the universe is done with us-- we’ve served our purpose-- and we will continue to exist no more.
We truly are a microcosm of “The Consciousness,” and our job is to fix It.
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One HELL of a trip, I know, and though the mention of drug use may taint this story and remove some of its value to some of you, let me tell assure you that regardless of the source of this feeling, I “know” it and am as confident of its truth as fundie’s belief in God. I have had plenty of little trips where I felt in touch with god or in tune with the universe in some way, but this is the only one I have ever had where I continue to ponder it far after the event.
HOW I handled it compared to how my friend handled it, however, is what caused me to post this in the first place. He felt a sense of utter loss. He felt like a tool. He felt cheated and most importantly betrayed. His suffering was meaningless. His happiness was meaningless. He screamed (internally, of course) to this “God-thing” “Why are you putting me through this?!” He felt utterly and monumentally let down. Life would cycle on and on, seemingly endless universes of different shapes, sizes, and inhabitants, all put in situations where suffering was almost guaranteed, and over and over again-- how many hims were doing the same thing, questioning reality, challenging the “fact” that he had to suffer…
I, meanwhile, have found a new purpose. It is to be happy, to find this happiness. It is my goal to do it to others, as well, to drive them in the pursuit. I want this game to end, I don’t want suffering or pointlessness or unconfirmed beliefs grinding people down. As hippy and trite as it sounds, we’ve got to be happy for the suffering to end. There is no other way.
There you have it, folks. Why *erislover is, in part, an Eris lover.
: bows out :
