VRILL INSIGHTS
SIN; THE PATH TO GOD
You are not playing the only real game and its denying you your existence.
Yesterday I wrote a piece on Sin.
Sin comes from the Greek word hamartia which is an archery term meaning missing the mark.
Missing what mark though?
Well the target obviously. But, what target are we actually aiming at?
This is the fundamental mistake we are making as a culture.
I don’t know if any culture got it right but a lot of people definitively have.
We all know the Greek aphorism, “know thyself”.
I used to think I understood it. I didn’t.
What are you? What are you getting to know?
We live in a culture with a worldview that is reductionistic and materialistic in nature.
Science is a process to understand the material world but we elevated it to replace the process of knowing yourself.
Most who go on a self exploration journey implement the only effective process they have been taught. Define a hypothesis, plan out the experiment, then run it and recalibrate.
The you, you are trying to know is put inside the material frame. It is a thing to grasp, a thing to understand through the process of knowledge.
But you are not a thing to be understood. You are not a concept. You are not something that can be articulated into a page of words. You are an essence of one.
And this essence can become known to you if you stop denying it by not playing the only real game in town.
The game of living. In the archery metaphor: the target is truth. The bow is your essence. The arrows are your actions.
The feedback comes from God.
By trying to define the ultimate game. The spiritual game. The game of reaching your potential, or your ideal. You are playing god.
You’re acting as if the spiritual reality doesn’t exist while the spiritual void is the thing that commands you to go on the journey in the first place.
Why else are you trying to play a transcendent game?
I realized I had denied meaning when I was eighteen and I hated my self for it.
I then went on a decade quest to fulfill my potential. I defined all the games as best as possible, did my best to move toward my target, and got meaning from doing what I thought was good.
Meaning was derived from living in alignment with my own defined ideal. I was in a constant internal battle against myself. I didn’t trust my ideal and I didn’t trust the steps to get there.
I was pushing a boulder up the mountain and derived meaning from my own suffering. Every time I missed the mark the boulder fell. And fell far. Oh, the agony.
This hubris my friends and the Greeks hated that shit. A mortal acting as if he stood level with the gods.
By defining or articulating the game you make it fake by definition. Words are simplifications of the abstract. It is used to be able to create a coherent collective reality so we can do stuff together.
If the ideal (you target) is defined by you then it becomes a concept. The thing that then shoots at the target (you) also has to become a concept. It is the only way you can gather feedback on if you are becoming a better shot.
But the concept you have of yourself is obviously not you. And so if all you do is play fake games you are literally denying your own existence. You are dead while living.
This is why when a lot of olympic athletes finally get their gold medal they enter a massive depression. They made the fake game of reaching an olympic gold medal their only game.
Their animating purpose that gave their life meaning was built on a fake game. Once they win the game there are no games to fill the spiritual void. It is only darkness.
This is the meaning crisis. We don’t solve it by making people better at constructing games. We solve it by stop denying the only game in town.
I’ve always loved the idea of playing the game of life as if it were a video game. A complete detachment to the character and the outcome. It’s all about the process of playing and getting better.
That’s why when I read the book Lean Startup, I loved it. Progress all came down to speed of iteration. Playing games with clear feedback and acting fast in order to get feedback on what works.
It’s just like the video games I thought. I was fucking good at those.
But implementing the same detachment I had to video games in real life was hard. Really hard.
When the the real game is denied the fake games take its place and they become far too important to play in a detached manner.
I used to alway write: “Don’t take your life so serious, take YOUR life serious.” I was pointing at something but couldn’t see what it was.
When we finally stop denying our own existence and realize it is the only game to attach meaning to the illusion of importance slowly fades.
You can now play the fake games as if they were video games. Fast action, enjoyable, getting the actual feedback not clouded by your own judgment of you.
You wouldn’t play GTA fully identified with the character always thinking about what to do next, where you should go, what you should be doing. You’re just playing, having fun, going on side quests all in the purpose of exploration.
The explorative spirit is manifested because it is you playing a game.
And this is possible in reality not only in virtual games that bare no relation to your spiritual progress.
You get to go on an adventure of a lifetime where the game is all about getting to know you while dancing with reality.
If you removed all concepts that you think define you, what is left. Not nothing.
I denied my own existence for far too long.
Don’t do the same.
The best time to plant an apple tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
By @MJ
