The Game Loop: Part 6 Concentration

[Federica]

It's interesting to consider that, whenever we try to get proficient at something, we are instinctively pursuing higher cognition. To invoke the chess example again, a high level of play is only possible when we work on making our inner gestures very patient, disciplined, and concentrated within the moment-to-moment states of play. Cultivating those inner qualities allows us to more keenly sense the compounded intuitive reverberations of our stacking mental pictures and therefore find optimal moves in the various board states we encounter. Such games are helpful as examples because the rules of transformation are simple, and therefore we can more easily hone in on the inner process at play, but the same principles apply to any life skills that we are trying to develop within the wider IO flows. The main reason such pursuits do not lead to higher cognition is that the goal state, or series of goal states, is arbitrarily limited by our past natural-cultural conditioning. The inner process is cultivated to only reach such myopic goal states that are prescribed for us, rather than being pursued for its own sake in an open-ended way.

I would comment here that, while games are extremely helpful examples (for the reasons given above, and because they are very relatable for many) they don’t have - by nature - “their own sake”. If the reason why pursuits of proficiency in the wider IO flows don’t lead to higher cognition is that the process is only executed myopically, to attain culturally prescribed end goals, and not for their own sake, then games can become dangerous, when used beyond their function of example, because they simply and intrinsically lack an "own sake".

The nature of game is educational. The mere entertainment value of game is an unserious value of game. Game allows the young and the neophyte to learn, under favorable, staged conditions, something that has to be later applied in the wider IO flows. Once, by their simplicity, games have instructed the mind to identify and trace the nature of the cognitive process that navigates them, they have exhausted their function. Any further insistence and persistence in the world of game beyond its educational value (and all that relates to it) is a deformation of the good curvature, in my opinion.

Right, and in a certain sense, all human activities (not only games, but work, relationships, etc.) are only pursued for 'their own sake' when they become pedagogical tools for a higher existence. Until then, such activities remain constrained by myopic cultural and natural conditioning. The native existence of our deeper being, on the other hand, is characterized by cultivating and perfecting the inner process for its own sake. The broad evolutionary goal-states of the Divine flow are themselves the open-ended perfection of the inner process, which then provides the conditions for new waves of perspectives to go through their corresponding evolutionary development, and so on, in an iterative fashion.

All human artistic, scientific, sporting, intellectual, etc. pursuits can be seen as a dim shadow of this native existence, as we instinctively sense the goal states of the Divine flow but lack the inner strength to support our pursuit of this flow without short-term and self-centered incentives, anchored by our mineralized imaginative states. After becoming entangled in this myopic pursuit of the Divine flow for a while, we simply lose sight of the flow altogether and begin to feel that we are involved in the pursuit of an entirely different flow consisting of localized Earthly goal states. We can no longer clearly intuit the nature of what we are doing within its wider Divine context.

If we can properly perceive and orient to the native essence of these human activities, however, then they provide infinite potential for pedagogical lessons. They can help us live through the most varied circumstances (even if only imaginatively in many cases, like video games) and kindle intuitions for the inner dynamics that we would otherwise have no basis to discover. Attaining that proper orientation, however, is no simple task since we are constantly tempted back into the myopic flow through our instinctive soul habits, as also discussed in the other thread. So there are plenty of risks and dangers of deformation, in that sense.

Unless it's only a matter of adjusting the vocabulary, it doesn't seem that we agree. True, human activities can remain constrained by social and natural conditioning, and they often do, but when they don't, I don't think they become pedagogical tools for a higher existence, in the same way that the game metaphor can become a tool. A relationship is not a tool for achieving something else, neither is an artistic activity a tool, or a practice. These are direct expressions of a higher existence - or at least they can become part of such expression, when they are free. They have meaning on their own, while a pedagogical tool borrows its meaning from something else. I am going to post in the other thread, to develop some more.