Eternal Sunshine of the Android Mind
I believe it was Dion Fortune who said that if one is in the right state of mind, even contemplation of mundane objects will reveal esoteric truths. I don't know if this is due to our minds projecting on the objects or some inherit quality in them, (of if indeed there is a difference) but I experienced it recently. I had started playing a computer game that I had first played nearly 20 years ago, called Wasteland. For those of us old enough to remember the times, its one of those Bard's Tale style roll-playing games, set in a post apocalyptic future where your team of paramilitary rangers must survive in the radioactive deserts.
Wasteland is an interesting game. Maybe the second or third time I played it through in my younger years, I noticed that the challenges the rangers faced in the course of the game paralleled the history of mankind. The first challenge was at an agricultural center where animals were fought and food was gathered, and then to Quartz, representing the stone age. Needles and Las Vegas took us through the bronze age to the first expansion of commerce and empire. Then it was on to the Guardian Citidel where the rangers battle well armed catholic monks and nuns, representing the birth of Christianity through the Dark ages. In the scientific Sleeper base and aptly named Darwin Village, we see the rennaisance and flourishing of science and discovery of evolution. And finally, we must defeat the inhuman robot drones of Base Chochise, to finish the game and through the modern age of technology to the present.
Anyway, all of that would really be a side note, except for the way the game ends. In the end you blow of the base, and your characters recieve many experience points and promotions as they have through the game, but are still in the game: the ugly deserts don't turn green, the wrecked houses don't come to life, and the odd biker thug and desert mutant still attacks you. In short, nothing chages. So there's this feeling there, this exestential despair that really resonates with me regarding the obvious parallels with the game and human history. Sometimes when I hear about the latest civilian deaths from bombing or shooting or whatnot, I feel it. So we've mastered nature, built empires and great religions, unravelled the mysteries of the universe through science, built computers that can do a billion calculations a second and we're STILL in the wasteland? We're still killing each other? Sometimes it seems unreal. The cognitive distance between the colorful world of Wii and Fallujah makes the more distant places like Darfur or the Middle east seem less real, and if we are willing to forget for a time, it can seem like we have finnaly left the wasteland. But in the end, as Anthony Swofford says at the end of Jarhead, "We are still in the desert".
But is there a way home?
I noticed something new this last time playing wasteland. I was in Darwin Village, nearer to the end of the game. I entered the compound of the big bad boss there, named Finster. It was a large hermetically sealed base, complete with large mess hall and many rooms but absolutely no people or monsters. On the top floor I meet Finster in his office, which featured a view of a bizzare landscape populated with strange animals which Finster told the rangers that this was his vision of the world transformed, after the pesky humans had been removed from it. Then, angering finster by releasing a multitude of people from a prison he had (the only people in the place) he attacked us and was killed, leaving only his head. My rangers took his head to the conveniently located virtual reality console with a jack for an android head, and I disbanded one of them to use the console where he was transported into Finsters mind. It was a level unlike any others, swirling rainbow colors unlike the drab grey's and brown's of the wasteland, and there were puzzles to solve to open doors, which made me have to look online for hints.
The walkthrough online, in addition to revealing the answers to the puzzles, stated that I had to kill various version of Finsters living inside his mind, and that one of them a key on them I would need to take with me to unlock various doors in the wasteland and win the game. It struck me as odd that I would find a key in a virtual reality I could out carry with me into the physical world of the game, and I almost contemplated it longer, but decided to ignore it and keep playing. At this moment, a robotic Finster appeared with a giant gun and killed my character (in the virtual reality) which also resulted in the actual death of my character. This triggered a strange bug where my party was bound to my dead character, couldn't save him, couldn't move on in the game, and going to the last saved game didn't change anything. I was locked out of the game unless I wanted to go back to the beginning I had played weeks ago.
As I contemplated this strange turn of events, the final esoteric teachings of Wasteland became clear to me. I realized Finster is me, the player, the person who experiences the wasteland in its symboic sense; the sort of materialistic view of human history in its all its existential despair. His android form represents the reductrionistic mechanical view of humanity and his hermitically sealed empy base represents the detachment from relationships this view creates. The envisioned world with only nature and no humans betrays the emotional resentment of this isolation. But the path of redemption, of the final escape from the wasteland, is given in the actions of the rangers.
It begins by freeing the captives. This means forgiving, and setting the people in our lives free of the judgements and projections of our own worldview, which enslaves them to our own definitions. We let them be themselves. Then, the death of Finster in the wasteland, or the "android" self, the self concept which is a slave to our own convictions about the world, rather than the transcendent creator of them. Then Introspection, meditation. One must travel into one's own thoughts, one's own mind. Within the mind, various fears and distorted concepts of self must be defeated (represented as the "night terror" and various Finsters in the game) but we aware at this point that we are fighting thoughts and plow through. And in the end, one attains the key.
Its all about the key, it comes from though yet manifests in the world, its the power of faith in manifestation, the prize of the humble seeker; In the game, the key is found in Finster's mind which we interface with through a virtual reality console, yet is taken from that virtual world to the physical world of the game. The only way this is logically possible is if we are willing to except that the rest of the game, the entire wasteland, is also in Finster's mind. Similarily, the only way to take the key from the virtual world of the game of Wasteland to the physical world of our lives, is if we are willing to accept that the whole meaningless existential wasteland of human affairs, as viewed through the materialist lense, is in our minds. Once we have accepted the power of our thoughts a creative rather than purely analytical force in the world, once we have seen the possibility of taking things from the virtual world of our minds into the physical world around us, our worldview changes. We necessarily see the vital, mysterious or spiritual aspect of man as being more fundamental than the mechanical, the dreamer as being more real than the dream, and in this lies the key with all its beautiful power.
Anyway, this could all be my dream, my projection onto a silly game. Wasteland really is simple compared to the modern stuff. For instance, though you have a party up to 7 rangers, you manipulate a little icon around of a single guy around to move. Also while a clock shows the time in the game on the upper right of the screen, there always daylight in the wasteland.
Maybe its BECAUSE the game is so simple that I can read so much into it. If so, its worth it. I like the Playstation and Wii with their well rendered 3D characters, but in giving the user so much information they leave little to imagination. They give me the sense of controlling a well defined character, but there's something to be said for seeing yourself reflected the game, even if its as an android wrapped in rainbows, dreaming of a ruined lanscape where 7 people are 1, and the sunshine is eternal.
Wasteland is an interesting game. Maybe the second or third time I played it through in my younger years, I noticed that the challenges the rangers faced in the course of the game paralleled the history of mankind. The first challenge was at an agricultural center where animals were fought and food was gathered, and then to Quartz, representing the stone age. Needles and Las Vegas took us through the bronze age to the first expansion of commerce and empire. Then it was on to the Guardian Citidel where the rangers battle well armed catholic monks and nuns, representing the birth of Christianity through the Dark ages. In the scientific Sleeper base and aptly named Darwin Village, we see the rennaisance and flourishing of science and discovery of evolution. And finally, we must defeat the inhuman robot drones of Base Chochise, to finish the game and through the modern age of technology to the present.
Anyway, all of that would really be a side note, except for the way the game ends. In the end you blow of the base, and your characters recieve many experience points and promotions as they have through the game, but are still in the game: the ugly deserts don't turn green, the wrecked houses don't come to life, and the odd biker thug and desert mutant still attacks you. In short, nothing chages. So there's this feeling there, this exestential despair that really resonates with me regarding the obvious parallels with the game and human history. Sometimes when I hear about the latest civilian deaths from bombing or shooting or whatnot, I feel it. So we've mastered nature, built empires and great religions, unravelled the mysteries of the universe through science, built computers that can do a billion calculations a second and we're STILL in the wasteland? We're still killing each other? Sometimes it seems unreal. The cognitive distance between the colorful world of Wii and Fallujah makes the more distant places like Darfur or the Middle east seem less real, and if we are willing to forget for a time, it can seem like we have finnaly left the wasteland. But in the end, as Anthony Swofford says at the end of Jarhead, "We are still in the desert".
But is there a way home?
I noticed something new this last time playing wasteland. I was in Darwin Village, nearer to the end of the game. I entered the compound of the big bad boss there, named Finster. It was a large hermetically sealed base, complete with large mess hall and many rooms but absolutely no people or monsters. On the top floor I meet Finster in his office, which featured a view of a bizzare landscape populated with strange animals which Finster told the rangers that this was his vision of the world transformed, after the pesky humans had been removed from it. Then, angering finster by releasing a multitude of people from a prison he had (the only people in the place) he attacked us and was killed, leaving only his head. My rangers took his head to the conveniently located virtual reality console with a jack for an android head, and I disbanded one of them to use the console where he was transported into Finsters mind. It was a level unlike any others, swirling rainbow colors unlike the drab grey's and brown's of the wasteland, and there were puzzles to solve to open doors, which made me have to look online for hints.
The walkthrough online, in addition to revealing the answers to the puzzles, stated that I had to kill various version of Finsters living inside his mind, and that one of them a key on them I would need to take with me to unlock various doors in the wasteland and win the game. It struck me as odd that I would find a key in a virtual reality I could out carry with me into the physical world of the game, and I almost contemplated it longer, but decided to ignore it and keep playing. At this moment, a robotic Finster appeared with a giant gun and killed my character (in the virtual reality) which also resulted in the actual death of my character. This triggered a strange bug where my party was bound to my dead character, couldn't save him, couldn't move on in the game, and going to the last saved game didn't change anything. I was locked out of the game unless I wanted to go back to the beginning I had played weeks ago.
As I contemplated this strange turn of events, the final esoteric teachings of Wasteland became clear to me. I realized Finster is me, the player, the person who experiences the wasteland in its symboic sense; the sort of materialistic view of human history in its all its existential despair. His android form represents the reductrionistic mechanical view of humanity and his hermitically sealed empy base represents the detachment from relationships this view creates. The envisioned world with only nature and no humans betrays the emotional resentment of this isolation. But the path of redemption, of the final escape from the wasteland, is given in the actions of the rangers.
It begins by freeing the captives. This means forgiving, and setting the people in our lives free of the judgements and projections of our own worldview, which enslaves them to our own definitions. We let them be themselves. Then, the death of Finster in the wasteland, or the "android" self, the self concept which is a slave to our own convictions about the world, rather than the transcendent creator of them. Then Introspection, meditation. One must travel into one's own thoughts, one's own mind. Within the mind, various fears and distorted concepts of self must be defeated (represented as the "night terror" and various Finsters in the game) but we aware at this point that we are fighting thoughts and plow through. And in the end, one attains the key.
Its all about the key, it comes from though yet manifests in the world, its the power of faith in manifestation, the prize of the humble seeker; In the game, the key is found in Finster's mind which we interface with through a virtual reality console, yet is taken from that virtual world to the physical world of the game. The only way this is logically possible is if we are willing to except that the rest of the game, the entire wasteland, is also in Finster's mind. Similarily, the only way to take the key from the virtual world of the game of Wasteland to the physical world of our lives, is if we are willing to accept that the whole meaningless existential wasteland of human affairs, as viewed through the materialist lense, is in our minds. Once we have accepted the power of our thoughts a creative rather than purely analytical force in the world, once we have seen the possibility of taking things from the virtual world of our minds into the physical world around us, our worldview changes. We necessarily see the vital, mysterious or spiritual aspect of man as being more fundamental than the mechanical, the dreamer as being more real than the dream, and in this lies the key with all its beautiful power.
Anyway, this could all be my dream, my projection onto a silly game. Wasteland really is simple compared to the modern stuff. For instance, though you have a party up to 7 rangers, you manipulate a little icon around of a single guy around to move. Also while a clock shows the time in the game on the upper right of the screen, there always daylight in the wasteland.
Maybe its BECAUSE the game is so simple that I can read so much into it. If so, its worth it. I like the Playstation and Wii with their well rendered 3D characters, but in giving the user so much information they leave little to imagination. They give me the sense of controlling a well defined character, but there's something to be said for seeing yourself reflected the game, even if its as an android wrapped in rainbows, dreaming of a ruined lanscape where 7 people are 1, and the sunshine is eternal.
posted by tridentblue | 8:42 PM
1 Comments:
Whoa. Who knew? All that time playing it w. you.
I always thought it was just a shoot-em up. In fact, that's what I thought of the war in Iraq.
I guess I'll rethink that, too.
Me...
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