Gaming Fate

When the technology became sufficient, video game designers created open-ended worlds in which characters could roam freely. Obstacles were placed in each character’s way, and if characters overcame them their powers were upgraded. Each character’s “will” was controlled by a higher intelligence, namely the player holding the controls.

Now, where do you suppose the designers got this idea?

In our last column we examined how the universe repeats the same patterns at different levels of resolution. That is also the case with the virtual realities mankind creates. The life lessons offered by sophisticated video games mirror the hard-won wisdom of real life, such as if you encounter a situation that seems unsolvable, there’s probably some key detail you have not noticed. Find your blind spot, and solving the puzzle becomes easy.

Technology’s rise has led some to suggest that reality is a “simulation”; that the material world is designed like a game that ultimately isn’t “real.” The ancients had the same view; they just looked at things metaphysically rather than technologically, believing the world was created by a higher intelligence, and that godly or planetary powers were capable of being upgraded by those who played the game properly.

We moderns think of the world as being matter-based, with Platonic concepts of metaphysical reality belonging to a less-enlightened past. But according to traditional doctrines, the material world is just one plane of reality—the lowest—in a consciousness-based universe. Matter, in this sense, is simply a dense form of consciousness. Hence the saying, “Even a stone is God, it just doesn’t know it.”

This brings up the notion of fate. From the point of view of eternity, past, present and future all exist simultaneously. Ponder this scenario: Say you drop a potato chip in the path of a meandering ant. The ant doesn’t know there’s a chip in its future if it stays on course, but you do. You have a vaster vista of reality, a godlike point of view compared to the ant. Whether it finds the chip or veers on another course is irrelevant to the reality of the chip. Thus, at any moment all future scenarios exist.

You could have chosen not to read this, but you did. And now here you are with a new perspective, wondering what you might do next.