Essay #37:  The Game of Life

Or might it be that what I sought
Were pleasure, pride, and fame,
And all that ever could be bought
By staying in the game?

What drove my mind to weave the tale–
Or did it weave my mind?–
That mental magic would prevail
And all my hopes unbind? 

We are seeing that the fires of the mind give rise to currents or ripples in the field of Universal Awareness.  These disturbances themselves cause or are the origination of qualities arising in polarities which are entirely dependent upon one another for their existence.  Subsets of qualities become further polarized under such assignations or “meta-qualities” as “happiness” and “suffering.”  All of this goes on, as we have said, in the cauldron of the mind’s conditioning.  This has been our metaphor for the alchemical soup of qualities that determines and is the individual mind.

In Essay #34 we said:

Aversion arises and spontaneously Universal Mind is drawn down into separate minds.  The same thing happens with attraction.  And the process and its endurance is masked many times by ignorance or the belief in improvement.  These things just happen.  There is no ultimate answer to the question why they happen any more than there is an answer to the question why certain waves arise from the sea.  We cannot say why they happen.  But we are able to trace their patterns, observe them, and come to know them better. Through them we are also able to gain a greater sense of the behavior of the ocean as a whole.  

The foregoing elucidation of mind will now permit us to bring this earlier passage to a still deeper level of comprehension.  For as we have been peering over the cauldron’s edge observing the processes of the mind’s formation, we should have once again been struck by the shadow of the huge hulk arching over the frothing brew and even over ourselves.  That is the question of why the mind should persist with the processes of its own conditioning given that they do not issue in any permanent state or ultimate satisfaction.  In other words, why does Universal Mind draw down into individual minds in the first place, and why do individual minds not simply cease to condition themselves and ascend back to Universal Awareness?  In Essay #34 we opined that there are no ultimate answers to these questions.  We cannot say why the conditioning occurs that creates individual minds.  However, as we noted, we are able to trace the patterns of conditioning and thereby to gain a greater sense of the behavior of Universal Mind as a whole.  In the earlier essay, we were able to make the broad brush connection between bodhicitta and Universal Mind.  We observed that within every conditioned state of mind could be found some measure of bodhicitta or a reflection of unconditioned Universal Awareness.  Now, however, we can go farther.  Our elucidation of the alchemy of the mind offers us a much deeper comprehension of the connection between bodhicitta and Universal Mind and also between the latter and conditioned mind.

While we cannot say why Universal Mind draws down into conditioned mind, we can observe that in doing so mind is attempting both to behold itself and to distinguish itself.  When Universal Mind draws down into conditioning it is parsed by itself into self and other.  In itself, of course, Universal Mind remains one and undivided, much as the sun remains one source of light within itself.  However, as mind beholds sets of qualities–one set here and another set there–it identifies with and is identified by the qualities it perceives much as the light of the sun is divided and separated by the objects it falls on and illuminates.  Hence, the very processes of conditioning divide Mind from itself and give Mind the opportunity to know itself in a new way.  As we have said, the processes of conditioning must themselves be driven by the fires of attraction, aversion, and ignorance.  So in some way, these emerge from Universal Mind itself.  Within Universal Mind they cannot actually exist because its oneness admits of no division such as attraction and aversion would presuppose.  Nor can ignorance exist within the dimension of Universal Mind, since that is a dimensionless dimension which admits of no space or measure that is not fully known.  We cannot cross the barrier between our dimensional world and the dimensionless universe of Mind, which we would need to be able to do in order to answer the question why the primordial fires emerge at all.  We know enough about Universal Mind already to say that, in a sense, they don’t emerge.  From that viewpoint, our dimensional world including all its processes of conditioning is entirely illusory.  We could even say that it doesn’t really exist.  To the extent that we are, we exist in a kind of anti-matter, or more precisely, a kind of non-being that is subsumed by the unconditioned pure being of Universal Mind.  Therefore, insofar as we do not really exist at all, there isn’t even the possibility for the question of “why” to emerge in the first place.  Of course, it may simply be easier from a psychological standpoint to say that we cannot cross the threshold between conditioned and Universal Mind and leave it at that.

In any case, we are able to trace the fires of the mind once arisen and to say that those qualities arise in mind in its attempt to behold and to distinguish itself.  Mind wants to behold itself, that is, to know itself as an object.  Secondly, mind wants to distinguish itself.  That is, it wants to bestow upon the object of itself a special status, or it wants to maintain that object in a special state.  Either way, we may call that “happiness.”  In order to maintain itself as an object, of course, mind must distinguish itself from other objects.  These may be other minds or selves or they may be various “inanimate” objects.  In both cases, mind moves among the processes of conditioning to create these objects.  Once again, this is like the light of the sun becoming separated out by the objects it illuminates.  Within the mind, the fire of attraction works together with the fire of aversion both to spawn various qualities and then to separate them out into various aggregates and sets.  The process of conditioning taken as a whole would be a great success if not for one thing:  the mind that beholds one set of qualities here and another there is the selfsame mind–for mind is ultimately one and the same with itself.  In other words, mind is ultimately Mind.  The only difference–although it is not a small one–is that mind is inflamed with the fire of ignorance, whereas there is no ignorance in Mind.  This fire, it turns out, is not an insignificant thing for mind but is quite essential for it to go about its business of conditioning.  For without the fire of ignorance, mind simply could not stay embroiled in conditioning.  It would find no point in it, no substance, not even any authentic being,–rather only illusion heaped upon illusion, that is, the illusion of being separated from itself, which is impossible.

Seen in this light, the mind’s alchemical cauldron is like a shaker where dice are continually being jostled and tossed.  The whole of the Earth upon which the brew is being poured out is like the green felt of a gaming table where the dice are spilled ever in hopes of landing the numbers that bring the game to a rapid and successful end.  To what end?  To an end that firmly and permanently distinguishes the mind:  to undiminished pleasure, to gainful pride, or to declamatory fame of the kind that ceaselessly echoes through all ages.

We see at last that the mood of the mind is essentially a gaming mood.  The mind is all about sporting with itself, lifting itself up here, tearing itself down there.  It can never actually win because winner and loser nullify one another in the end.  Nevertheless, in the smoke of ignorance, the game goes on.  The stakes are raised and the fortunes rise and fall.  On the green turf it is all about staying in the game.  The grand illusion that plays out within the fire of ignorance is that the mind’s ultimate goal of distinguishing itself can be bought once it beholds itself by staying in the “game of life.”

Here self-knowledge becomes compressed by dimensionality within the processes of conditioning into self-dominance and, by necessity, into self-defeat.  The only way out is through an unfamiliar and uncomfortable vertical ascent off the playing field, if only it could be described that way and weren’t something actually much stranger and much less common.  For as we said, the game does give Mind the opportunity to know itself in a new way.  Life on Earth is not in itself a misfortune.  Nor are we fully able or meant to leave the playing field or the gaming table.  Self-knowledge, then, in the highest form we can attain it, represents not so much a departure from but a re-habitation of earthy norms.  It is returning to the same place by a sometimes circuitous route, a route shaped by–if not traversing through–a set of alternate dimensions or perhaps the absence of the same.  This increasing permeability to other dimensions within conditioned mind may fairly be called “the flowering of bodhicitta.”

Once again, bodhicitta may be said to be the presence of Universal Mind within conditioned mind.  Without the awareness of bodhicitta, conditioned mind seems to be something very different from Universal Mind and earthly norms seem to be very different from the unconditioned attributes of Universal Mind, such as pure love, supreme wisdom, and limitless compassion.  With its awareness, we begin to see that the game of life is not, in fact, played out separate from Universal Mind.  Universal and conditioned mind are, ultimately, one.  We would be better equipped to see this if we had eyes in the backs of our heads.  For the knowledge of it is behind us, as it were, back up the mountain, as we described in Essay #36.  We are mostly limited to looking down and to remaining captivated by the game as it unfolds before us.  What bodhicitta allows us to do, however, is to project onto the game whatever nascent sense, whatever enlightened awareness blows down the mountain at our backs.  That pneuma or breath of Universal Mind rolls across the playing field caressing dimensionality with oneness and ventilating the sometimes unbearable states of mind we enter as participants in the conditioned game.

This is like looking forward with the eyes in the backs of our heads, as if we had them.  It allows us to watch our minds weaving the tales of the games with something other than our usual eyes.  And this seeing likewise reveals the ways that the tales themselves spawn mind and weave it into new shapes.  Conditioning gives rise to mind.  Mind as conditioned awareness grapples with its own conditioning.  And this conditioning—or “tale”—in turn reshapes the mind.  The ultimate tale, once more,– the aim of persons and of nations– is for the game to end with minds distinguished and hopes fulfilled once and for all.  The conditioned mind is driven by this tale towards hope, but hopelessly driven.  It is like a magician who has come under his own spell and has himself convinced of the efficacy of his own tricks.  Then at the end of each show he discovers his artifice and is moved by that discovery to invent new and more subtle magic and new tricks.

Unconditioned Mind, through bodhichitta, embraces the game and tends it the way a farmer tends land he knows is in his care but ultimately not his own.  That mind, in awakening to enlightenment, emerges from the sea of suffering that is the game played unaware, and finds itself in a land of happiness that is the norms of earthly life re-inhabited with the awareness of their subsidiary and derivative nature.  Paradoxically, once again, the distance implied in seeing one’s own norms and modes of living as subsidiary creates intimacy, even cherishing.  These are the modes we must live in.  Yet through the miracle of mindfulness we can become aware that although our mind lives in and through them, it is not ultimately of them—that is, borne of them—but issues from another source.  That source gives us the freedom both to see and to cease at some level being quite so tossed by the fires of the mind.  It affords us a strange new sense of direction, backing up the mountain even as we engage and embrace the game of life.  We most certainly do encounter magic here.  However, it is not the magic of the conditioned mind attempting ultimately to remold itself into something timeless through the alchemy of its own conditioning.  It is the magic of bodhicitta, mind become permeable to a Universal and Abiding Awareness that sees and holds all in the light of its own completeness and perfection.