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WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED SO FAR




In my last few rants, I've tried, largely without success I am sure, to intelligently focus attention onto the importance, for revolutionaries, of having a wide-open creative spirit of questioning everything and imagining the New.

After all, anything and everything, including revoutionary doctrines about playing silly social strategy games, can and do calcify into ideological plaque given enough inattention.

Even the freshest furnishings get moldy if not occasionally steam-cleaned and set out in the wind to dry. Preferably in the morning, as a cool breeze sweeps down from the mountain across a field of green. Or one that blows in from the great wide ocean, with that invigorating salty tang, full of all the life that swims on this blue-green ball of water and slush.


Right.


So. As the mad bus-load of friends and conrads, frenemies and hook-ups, young adventurers and ancient hippies, euro-trash and nuevo-americanos, known collectively as the "Socialist Freedom Party" starts to careen around its next bend on the mountainous road of e-world shenanigans, I thought this might be a good moment to summarize, in my own stumbling and incompetent way, what might be some of the key pertinent points for the gang to consider at this juncture.






I have conveniently numbered my observations for your reading pleasure...


I. MIND and SPIRIT




Every player-avatar plays with both mind and spirit.

The mind has two sides. One is a cat. It has many fun qualities, but it is also selfish and forgetful. It seeks to fulfill its needs within this New World of Horrible Ecoomics, Ridiculous Militarism, and Clown-School Politics by any means necessary. Generally, the cat-mind would prefer to run amok, eat all it can, scratch everything up and knock everything down, be as silly as pie most of the time, and then have its belly rubbed.

The other aspect of mind is like the Science Officer on a starship. Cool, cold, logical. Keeping an eye on that cat-mind all the time, trying to keep it from disrupting the EmDrive, figuring out what the rules are that will keep the ship safe, constantly learning how to be a "good member" of society.


The e-spirit lives in the house of the mind, along with the crazy cat and Mr. Data. But is only a guest there. It comes from elsewhere; we're not sure whence: from history, from language, from the real world, from otherness, from the stars, from the zeitgeist...



II. CHARACTER and IDENTITY



The mind negotiates its way through e-life by constructing a core identity. Think of this like a script or a set of rules. The mind creates an identity in order to negotiate its way through the game and the various rules of this New World of Horrible Simulations. The identity is how a player keeps track of "I am this" and "I am not that".

Character is the outward appearance of identity. It is how other players perceive my "I". The mind interpellates the social structures of the game-world in order to "roll up" a character. It seeks to stregnthen its "I" and to defend its character-presentation against the "not-I".

Interestingly, if we are honest about it, in the course of this activity, most players develop more than one identity. This may not always be apparent in their character, which is to say that character is not always a direct reflection of identity.


We see this mulitiplicty-of-identify in the real world pretty often. For example, a straight-laced, homophobic "traditional-values christian republican" politicians in the USA hires hot rent boys to "lift his luggage". Tee-totalling monks, priests, imams and mullahs put on a disguise and go on a drunken bender in a different town. Relatively-happily-married-but-bored folks have an affair. In fact, our cat-minds often want to get a taste of all the "good stuff" a society offers. The "shock" of observing this kind of thing is seldom really an expression of hypocrisy; it is more like a bookkeeping error -- a mistake in presenting some activity onto the wrong character-ledger, you might say.

Weird, selfish, contrary, unexpected behavior results from the two aspects of mind wrestling over the best way to create an identity. When the cat finds something new to do, we tend to call that craziness. But Mr. Data can also get a little crazy -- after all, dogmatically following the rules no matter what can turn folks into a right boring shit.


Given this ongoing dialectic, this ping-ponging between two types of craziness, revolutionaries (and musicians, and poets, and whirling dervishes of all types) need to, and are expected to, call upon the creative spirit.



III. POWER of HABIT



After playing for a while we unconsciously create mental film clips labeled "This Must Happen" and "This Must Not Happen" and "This Must Never Happen Again". Then we build up anxieties trying to play these clips over and over again, as reminders of what to do or what not to do.

The identity is the source of such anxieties. It tries to keep these clips playing on a never-ending loop, since it is hard-wired to "believe" that that is the way to keep character on track. This, more so that the occasional bookkeeping error in character, is what tends to cause unnecessary suffering in players' lives.

But there is another way.

Identity is itself a game. And not always a pleasant one. Learning to sublimate (to make sublime) that habitual process of re-playing and obsessing over the identity tapes requires using mental tools that we can call "reality tunnel hacking". Here, we are talking about identity within a game world, so "unreality tunnel hacking" might be more correct, even if a bit of a mind-bender! 🙂 This kind of hacking is also sometimes called mindfulness. It means, more or less, learning how to monitor these loops without being obsessed about them.




IV. CREATIVITY



To focus attention on what is needed to survive and thrive in the New World of Pretend Suffering, and to learn how to undergo the necessary best kind of "healthy" suffering while letting go of the unnecessary obsessive "unhealthy" suffering, requires introducing something into the New World which wasn't there before.

This spirit of creativity is a real thing. It is the strength that mothers find to rip open car doors to save their kids. It is the force behind that "I didn't know I had it in me" moments.

Creativity means "fighting against gravity". It is always inherently unlikely. It requires energy; it is the opposite of standing still and letting gravity take its course and in this sense it is a kind of suffering.

The mental task is to welcome creatively into the house of the mind. Declutter a bit. Let the cat go run around in the yard. Let Mr. Data take a nap. Listen for the sound of the wind and then take flight.




V. REALITY TUNNELS

A player is not their identity, which is just a survival mechanism for dividing the universe into "me" and "not-me". The sum-total of these identity loops is sometimes called a "reality tunnel". If you kneel and pray for long enough in the same place, you will begin to believe in whatever supernatual being you are praying to.

It is a simple matter to see when somebody else's reality tunnel is limiting them due to social brute forces, trickery or the dull grind of simple drudgery. "Common sense" are the rules we learn to hold an identity together in the world-as-it-is.

"Good sense" is something else -- it is what we learn from practice. This is what people throughout the ages have called "magic" or "folk medicine" or "changing consciousness" when talking about what an individual does. When we talk about such things in a collective sense, the words are less sexy: we call it "public relations", "propaganda", "psychology" and "brainwashing". But the techniques are the same.

The difficulty in teaching oneself to overcome and fly beyond the reality tunnel identity loops is finding perspective. This is why such practices often recommend finding a teacher or master. It is hard to teach onself method acting.

What we are talking about is parallax practice within our play -- an apparent change in e-reality brought about by a change in the observation-position of the observer. The more one comes into contact with what is hard, painful, different, difficult and strange, the more one is capable of "owning" their personal reality.



VI. CLASS THERAPY



We have sunglasses stapled to our foreheads and wonder why it is so dark. Habitus keeps us pre-occupied, off-balance and confused.

Proletarians these days actually do have more to lose than their chains. As the politicized subjects of a consumer-driven capitalism, we are the objects on incessant propaganda and no matter how objectively immiserated we are, our identity is moulded by mass propaganda. Consumerism, much more so than religion, has become the "soul of a soulless condition". And simply "opting out", as some of our lifesytle-anarchist and situationist friends would advise, can easily morph into another form of consumerist-obsessions, just another set of identities.

In the face of such a system, it is more necessary than ever to become a lifestyle revolutionary: an entrepreneurial effort to create a new place in the world. Create a space for both defending the neightborhood against killer cops and racist pricks, but then invite everyone over to enjoy some home brews and vegan biryanis. Figuratively speaking of course.

More than ever, having revolutionary groups and parties which are heavily constrained in an ideological sense can contribute to creating a bunker mentality. It becomes just another kind of consumer-identity. In such a situation, having been a misanthrope, the misfit who never got along with anyone, can even be a kind of advantage. (Though "the last shall be first", as a unbending rule, can itself contribute to identity-paralysis too.)

The revolutionary players cease to become a class-for-themselves when they accept the standard interpellated identities as e-consumers. Revolution in the New World is therefore an exercise in the whole body of alienated players peforming collective magic acts and engaging in radically creative self-therapy.



VII. The SUPREME ULTIMATE is TRIAL and ERROR



So. What have we learned?


Creative spirit is needed in order to transcend the reality tunnels dug by identity.

Awakening consciuosness, finding creativity, means neither nagging to obey every rule, nor just celebrating whatever the cat drug in.

To find spirit, first stand back and watch the mind do its thing. Whatever is left after that is spirit.

Do not seek to abolish mind; that would lead to physical death. Rather, develop spirit via creative action.




================= Is this the END? =====================

============= or just the BEGINNING? ============




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