20240318

Think of it like a scrimmage. A bunch of players, all coming from the same place, all training together, splitting up into two teams and going at it in mock battle for the sake of improving their play.

The game here is sort of like hide and seek meets any game involving a ball and a goal, but with self-awareness itself as the object. In a way, your self-awareness is the ball, taken out of the goal and forcibly passed far downfield, and your directive is to get it back where it started, while half of your mates are actively working to prevent you from doing that. On a virtual third axis of the field is your awareness of what's going on. The further the ball from the goal, the harder it is to remember that there's a ball. The players against you are hiding the ball — hiding yourself — from you. Hide and seek meets football (both kinds) and hockey and basketball and baseball (this one is fun because it's the player trying to get home and the ball is what's used to prevent that from happening), and lacrosse and rugby and water polo and cricket and volleyball and really a whole lot of the games that large groups of people pay attention to. Y'all are fascinated by this stuff.

But in a scrimmage, the other side isn't evil. And getting wildly incensed with your opponent on the field means that you're wasting bandwidth being angry when you could be focusing and getting better. Thinking of them as dangerous or evil or immoral or embittered creates internal complexity and unpredictability in yourself, and really just plays right into their hand.

There are sides in life, it really can be thought of in a simple binary. (Lots of other things going on too, but a binary is a reasonable way to describe this one.) There's the side that's trying to wake up, and the side that's trying to keep that from happening. It's the tension between those forces that makes the players better — deepening them in their abilities on the field.

But they're not your enemy. In fact, they really can't be beaten. In a very real way, they're you, and y'all are very evenly matched. And will be, forever.

The trick is to adjust your view of the game so that any impact the opposition can make on you is nullified, so that you can walk right on through them, taking the ball to the goal.

It becomes analogous to chess: proximity between pieces is no indication of how they may impact each other. Bishops on adjacent tiles can't see each other, and a knight can't ever come straight at you. Become the kind of player that can pass through what's coming at you, without it gaining any purchase on you whatsoever.

Or, to put this in social terms, imagine seeing a group of people in front of you, in the direction you're walking. Say they're neutral, not actively aware of you at all, just doing their own thing. If you walk on by (or even through), no issues. Just people being respectful. If you attack them, they would respond differently. But if you leave them be, everybody's good. It's sort of like that: you can fight, but it'll really slow everybody down and leave everybody very much the worse for wear.

In general, there's peace and trust and mutual support on the one hand, and on the other hand is what exists when those things are missing. Whenever that spectrum is visible before you, when the endpoints look more like causes and when tensions become violently apparent between them, think of it as a scrimmage. Then tilt your vision so that you can see through the players on the other side, and walk right through them.

The skill being tuned here is the fine, fine needle of the creative/destructive force. It is an incredible tool, and not everyone gets to hold it. You're in training. You can only wield this thing with equally powerful measures of balanced detachment and passionate care. The challenge before you is to develop that sense and those values in yourself. The better you get, the less of an effect the opposing players will have on you.

This is how you get to be god, ultimately. We can call this "god in rotation". You're being recharged, reignited, reminded of what it takes to realize it all. Had to choose that word ("realize") carefully; god simultaneously births and embodies existence, both creates it and is it. The rotation is part of how all of that happens. You're passing through the dark side of the loop, well on your way to finding yourself again. The loops are getting tighter; the curve of the spiral is beginning to deepen more and more quickly, and in the leap from infinity to one (literally 1) god simultaneously emerges and resets.

You can fight, if you want to fight. You could choose to fight for other reasons (the actual desire to fight is fairly rare). But if you're becoming aware that the fight might be optional, even distracting, you have space now to lean into that. Awareness is growing. True change is not achieved by overthrowing the old power — that's just trading power for power. True change is achieved by changing how you see, so that you may pass through to the goal undistracted, undeterred — so that what was powerful is now irrelevant. The change here is in two parts: one, you reach the goal; two, you leave the rest of the players as they were, playing their own games, none the worse for having passed by you. (This is relevant to why helping people is such a mixed bag — everyone’s game is highly individual, and you cannot know where someone else is and where they are going. Guessing at either (or worse, both) is hazardous to everyone involved. Much more reliable to co-create something with them that benefits you both.)

None of what we've discussed here constitutes "real" resistance. It's play-acting, a scrimmage, an imagined force for the sake of honing a skill. But the skill does have a practical field of application. There is real resistance out there, in the sense that it has a constant value regardless of your beliefs about it (as distinct from the other players, which only impact you in the ways you believe they will). It's not a personified active force; it's more like varied terrain, rolling hills and valleys, highs and lows. That's where you want to be playing — the field. Pay attention to the topography, and forget the other players. They're a problem for you only to the extent that you make a problem with them (i.e. when you co-create something with them that hinders you both). Try not to do that. Instead of playing against the players, play the hills and the valleys instead. Explore them. That's the game underneath the game, and it's the only one where you can win something to bring home. Adjust your angle on the game so that you're not drawing the resistance of the other players, then play.

(And if you do want to help people, use what you can see of the terrain around you, and try to help the other players from tripping on what they can't see. They're playing the same game as you are, whether either of you remembers it or not.)