The Core of Human Existence

No grand theory here; I’m struggling to echo the Bible in modern Western terms.

Let’s pretend, maybe something along the lines of the Fallout series of video games. Trailers and bits of game play can be found in good quantity on YouTube. However, in our scenario there is no PIP Boy and no reset. If you die, game over.

What happens to your sense of mission? You do have one, no?

Go back to the beginning here, folks: Life and death on this plane are mere circumstances. What you do here is shaped by your understanding of divine justice — AKA, the Law Covenants. Why you do it is the ineffable something beyond this life to which those Law Covenants point. There is a sense in which this whole thing is just a game, though an awfully lot more complicated than what software developers could write.

Game Theory is a set of concepts that allows you to approach a situation with an eye to outcomes. Because you get to restart at will, you have leisure to compartmentalize various elements of game play to see what happens when you do this or that. There are typically elements of deception meant to puzzle you so that you ignore what would seem obvious, entering into a world where the rules of existence might be a little different than meat space. If enough folks play the same game with various analytical approaches, they can share their insights and eventually overwhelm the game even on the most difficult settings. You get to decide whether it’s more entertaining to punch away at things you can’t possibly guess except through endless attempts, or you can read the spoilers and waltz through it. Each of us brings a bundle of preconceived notions about what ought to be against what the game world offers as the virtual reality.

Without a reset button, you’ll need the spoilers. That’s the Law Covenants. In a very real way, the Word of Scripture contradicts whatever it is you bring to this game. Not only do I mock Western epistemology, but I mock the very concept of epistemology, reducing it to a functional definition: assumptions about reality. I get that from the Bible, though hardly in a direct manner. My contention is that the greatest and most effective power you have in this game is not within the game itself, but is within you, the player while you poke around with the controls. In a very real sense (using those words advisedly) your true self is outside the game. Whether you simply merge with the game reality, as so many children do, or retain an awareness of your real self, is the whole point of this and many other blog posts.

When you sense an awareness of eternal existence outside of this universe, you are in the best position to respond when the game does something truly unexpected. The game character is fungible, but yours is not. When you begin to lay hold of that higher spirit self, the game becomes just a game. You can afford to suffer great losses and not give it much thought.

Back near the exit from Eden, there were both nomads and city dwellers. The narrative leaves us with a bitter taste about the latter, and we know that under Moses, dwelling in tents and moving about was regarded as morally superior. So we have this hymn today that starts off with, “This world is not my home; I’m just a-passin’ through.” It’s not as if your character can’t grieve losses, but your real self can’t afford to get too deeply entangled.

Your human self is not the whole; there is at least a potential for a higher, spiritual existence within you.