The Universe is like a one-man show

Playing with yourself

Greg Egan's novel Permutation City describes the world of people living in a computer simulation. Their reality is under their complete control: in their virtual worlds, these people are like gods – they can create any objects from the void with the power of their thoughts, build whatever they want there, create other simulations and even other people. These people are immortal and can exist indefinitely – at first this seems to them an incredible gift, but after several hundred years they realize that this is a curse. Having lived for thousands of years, they managed to try all possible activities: they read thousands of books, watched thousands of films, listened to thousands of symphonies and songs, studied all possible sciences, practiced all possible types of art and sports. Even the creation of new virtual simulations with millions of creatures inside their simulation did not give them the same pleasure – they simply became incredibly bored with life. As the Buddha said, even the gods suffer from dissatisfaction.

One of the novel’s heroes is looking for an answer to the key question of his life: “How to find meaning in a world where you are God?” After a long search, he finds the only reasonable answer: he needs to cease to exist, to tear his consciousness into millions of fragments, each of which will become a separate person and will live his own life, experience real emotions – enjoy childhood discoveries, feel the naive youthful hope for a bright future, without crazy to fall in love, suffer from hardships, rejoice in victories. He understands that only when reborn in human form will the pleasure of living become available to him. Tired of the single-player sandbox game, this hero of the novel named Feast decides to play a multiplayer role-playing game where all the players are him:

He generated a thousand different reasons to live on. He pushed his philosophy almost to its limits. But there was only one thing left to do.
“We will leave this place,” said Pir. – Let's launch our own universe. We should have done this a long time ago.
Kate made a sound of displeasure.
– How will I live without the Elysians? I won’t be able to survive like you: rewrite myself, impose artificial happiness. This is not enough for me.
– You don’t need to.
– Seven thousand years have passed. I want to live among people again.
– So you will live among people.
Kate looked at him hopefully.
– Will we create them? Let's launch ontology programs? Adam and Eve in a new world of their own?
“No,” Pir objected. – I will become them. A thousand, a million. As many as you want. I will turn into the Solipsistic People.
Kate pulled away from him.
– Will you transform? What's the point of this? You don't need to transform to the people. You can build it with me and then sit and watch it grow.
Pyr shook his head.
– What have I turned into anyway? In an endless chain of people, each of whom is happy for personal reasons. Connected only by a ghostly thread of memory. Why separate them in time? Why not give up the pretense that all these arbitrary changes are experienced by one person?
– You remember yourself. You believe that you are one person. Why call it pretending? This is true.
“But I don’t believe in her anymore.” Every personality I create is stamped with the illusion that it remains the same imaginary thing called “I”, but in reality it is not part of their essence, but only a distracting detail, a source of confusion. There is no need to do this anymore or to separate these different people in time. Let them live together, meet and keep you company.
Kate grabbed him by the shoulders and looked straight into his eyes.
– It is forbidden turn into in The People of Solipsists. This is bullshit. Empty rhetoric from an old play. This will only mean… death. People created by programs will not exist without you. you not in any sense.
– They will be happy, right? Occasionally? For your own strange reasons?
– Yes, but…
“That’s all I am now.” Everything that defines me. So when they are happy, they will be me.

Many ancient philosophers reasoned similarly to the thoughts of the heroes of Egan’s novel. So in ancient India, thinkers described the creation of the world through the concept lila – divine game. According to this concept, at the very beginning of time, a bored God splits his consciousness into an infinite number of fragments in order to play hide and seek with himself. In his book The Book of the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are, British philosopher Alan Watts describes the concept of lila this way:

It's like playing hide and seek because it's fun to always find a new place to hide. Remember that you don't like playing with friends who are always hiding in the same place. God also loves to play hide and seek, but He has no one to play with except Himself, because there is no one else in the world except God. However, in order to get out of this difficulty, He pretends that He is not Himself. In this way He manages to hide from Himself. God pretends that He is you and me and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks and all the stars. When He plays with Himself in this way, He has extraordinary and amazing adventures, some of which are scary and even terrible. However, they are all just like bad dreams because when God wakes up, everything He dreamed disappears.

So it turns out that when God hides and pretends to be you or me, He does it very cleverly. Therefore, in order to find Himself, it may take quite a long time for Him. But this long search is very interesting – this is exactly what God was counting on when he began the game. He doesn’t want to find Himself too quickly, because it wouldn’t be interesting to play like that. This is why it is so difficult for you and me to discover that we are actually God in a mask playing our roles. But after the game is over, we will all wake up, stop pretending and remember that we are one Self – God, who is everything that is in the world, and who lives forever.

…
You may ask why God sometimes hides in the guise of terrible people and why He sometimes pretends to be those who suffer from terrible diseases and misfortunes. To understand this, remember first of all that He actually does not endanger anyone but Himself. Remember also that in almost all the fairy tales that you like, in addition to good heroes, there are also bad ones. And the whole fascination of the story lies in finding out how the good heroes will defeat the evil ones

Viktor Olegovich Pelevin, a living classic of Russian literature, echoes the British philosopher and in several books at once. In the book “Transhumanism Inc” Pelevin embodies the concept of lila in one of his heroes – Aton Goldenstern, and in the book “KGBT +” the main character writes a “cut-in” in which he describes the very split of the original divine consciousness into an infinite number of fragments:

Do you remember Andersen's fairy tale about the Snow Queen? I think no. So let me remind you where it begins.

This means that there once lived a troll, a feisty, despising troll, according to some sources, the devil himself (but if this is true, why call him a troll?). Once he was in a good mood – and he made a mirror in which everything “good and beautiful” was greatly diminished, and everything “worthless and ugly” stood out brighter and seemed even worse. Well, we know approximately what our kind storyteller calls “beautiful” – this is when wild bears dance and card players fight at their table. So let's not rush to judgment.

The best of people looked like freaks in the trolls' mirror – it seemed that they were standing on their heads, but they had no bellies at all. Every word is important here. “Standing on their heads” apparently means that they rely on reason, and “there are no bellies at all” – that they have overcome the animal nature. What's next? Kind and pious
human thought was reflected in the mirror with an unimaginable grimace… Well, “pious thoughts” from the times of the rampant Christianity – for example,
burning a couple of witches or gays at the stake – they also seem like grimaces to us today. So, most likely, the trolls’ mirror simply showed the world as it is, without any embellishment. The troll’s students said: “Only now can you see the whole world and people in their true light.” Yes, we remember that the troll's students are bad guys. Good guys are angels with spades.

And so the troll’s disciples decided to reach heaven to laugh at the angels and the Creator himself. The higher they rose, the more the mirror twisted and writhed with grimaces – the trolls could barely hold it in their hands. And then they found themselves so high that the mirror became warped, tore out of their hands and broke into pieces…

What is this really about? Let's imagine that the trolls had a mirror in which the truth was revealed. And so they wanted to find out the truth about the Creator. They rise higher, higher, higher… And then the mirror suddenly shatters into fragments. What if the mirror this time reflected the truth as it is?

We know that we live on the ruins of an ancient catastrophe. Something shattered to pieces fourteen billion years ago. We are all fragments of this explosion. And when the trolls’ mirror was pointed at the Creator, it broke not because the creator punished the trolls for their impudence. “Disintegration into fragments” is the most honest photograph of our god. The only one we can do. Be it with telescopes, like physicists, or with your soul, like the ancient poet Nietzsche. Even the most sacred of divine names consists of four fragments – apparently, the ancient Jews observed the creator through their spiritual optics a few picoseconds after his disintegration and were unable to get closer to the starting point of creation…

In the above passage about the broken mirror, Pelevin, with the help of vivid artistic images, retells the very ancient concept of Indra’s network, in which the world is described as a huge network of precious stones, each of which reflects all the other stones and is also reflected in them: all in one, one in everything, everything in everything, one in one. One of the most popular Zen stories tells that when the reflection of wild geese flying past is seen in the water surface of a lake, the water does not know that it is reflecting the geese, and the geese have no intention of being reflected in the water, but it is this reflection itself that creates reality.

One actor theater

The whole world is a theater.
There are women, men – all actors in it.
They have their own exits, departures,
And everyone plays more than one role

“As you like it” William Shakespeare

In one of my posts, I reflect on these lines from Shakespeare:

… in my imagination a picture appears in which the world appears to me in the form of a round theatrical stage. The play of existence unfolds on this stage, and in this amazing performance we are all simultaneously actors, directors, and spectators. At the same time, it is impossible to say exactly what exactly is happening on stage – the play being performed has neither a single plot nor a general message. Therefore, it is incorrect to even consider what is happening as a single play; rather, it is an infinite number of different works – tragedies and comedies, the characters and plots of which are closely intertwined with each other.

None of the spectators sees the entire performance, each watches only a small part of it. Depending on their position on stage, people view the action from their own unique angle. This feature of the scene is somewhat reminiscent of the famous rock garden in Japanese Ryoanji Temple. According to legend, this garden was built in such a way that no matter from which point a person looks at it, out of the fifteen stones located in it, only fourteen will be visible. At least one will always be blocked by others.

Thanks to the round shape of the stage, the number of different points of view is infinite, and among them there will always be both close to each other and opposite. Some will find the performance boring, while others will find it exciting. Some are content with a secondary role, others want to play the main role. Some people just want to watch the performance, while others want to contribute to its direction. Although many viewers are convinced of the opposite, there is no right or wrong among these points of view – the theater is clearly postmodern.

In the story “All or Nothing,” the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges develops Shakespeare's idea from the play “You'll Like It”, examines it through the prism of Eastern philosophy and describes acting as likening God:

In himself he was Nobody; behind the face (not similar to others even in the bad portraits of the era) and countless, ghostly, incoherent words lay only coldness, a dream that no one dreams of.

At first it seemed to him that all other people were the same, but the confusion of a friend with whom he tried to talk about his emptiness convinced him of his mistake and made him understand once and for all that he could not be different from others. He thought to find healing in books, for which – according to a contemporary – he learned a little Latin and even less Greek; Later he decided that he would achieve his goal by performing the simplest rite of human coexistence, and on a long June day he accepted initiation in the arms of Anne Hathaway.

At twenty-something years old he arrived in London. Against his will, he has already learned to pretend to be someone, so as not to give away that he is Nobody; in London he encountered the craft for which he was created, the craft of an actor, going out onto the stage to portray another in front of a gathering of people ready to portray as if they really considered him different. Histrion's work brought him incomparable joy, perhaps the first in his life; but the last verse sounded, the last corpse was removed from the stage – and he was again filled with the disgusting taste of unreality. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamerlane and again became a nobody.

Out of boredom, he began to invent other heroes and other scary stories. And so, while his body performed in the taverns and brothels of London what the body was supposed to do, the soul that dwelt in him was Caesar, deaf to the warnings of the augurs, Juliet, cursing the lark in his soul, and Macbeth, talking in the wasteland with witches. No one in the world has been as many people as this man, who, like the Egyptian Proteus, managed to exhaust all images of reality. Sometimes, in the corners of this or that plot, he left a fatal confession, confident that it would not be discovered; So, Richard lets slip that he is an actor who plays many roles, Iago drops the strange words “I am not me.” The deep identity of life, sleep and performance inspired him to make tirades that later became famous.

He spent twenty years mastering his dreams, but one morning he felt disgusted and horrified to be all these kings dying by swords and star-crossed lovers who meet, part and die with euphonious remarks. That same day he sold the theater, and a week later he was in his hometown, where he again found the river and trees of his childhood and no longer compared them with those others, decorated with mythological allusions and Latin names that his muse glorified. But here, too, it was necessary to be someone, and he became a Retired Entrepreneur, who had some wealth and was now occupied only with loans, litigation and modest interest on turnover. In this role, he dictated the dry testament known to us, from which all traces of pathos and literature were deliberately erased. London friends occasionally visited his solitude, and in front of them he played his former role as a poet.

The story adds that on the eve or after his death he appeared before the Lord and turned to him with the words: “I, who have been so many people in vain, want to become one – Me.” And the eye of the Creator answered him from the storm: “I am not me either: I invented this world, like you invented your creations, my Shakespeare, and one of the signs of my dream is you, like me, who are Everything and Nothing.”

In his novel “The Sacred Book of the Werewolf,” Victor Pelevin describes this most divine actor, trying on thousands of roles through the metaphor of a super werewolf:

The super werewolf is the one you see when you look long enough deep into yourself. But there's nothing there. This is the Superwerewolf. Because this Nothing can become anything. The super-werewolf takes turns becoming you, me, this bag of apples, this cup, this box, everything you look at. This is the first reason why he is called the Superwerewolf. In addition, any werewolf can, figuratively speaking, be taken by the tail. But you can’t take the Super Werewolf by the tail, because he doesn’t have a body. And this is the second reason why it is called that. Superwerewolf is easy a void that can be filled with anything. Nothing can stick to this emptiness. Nothing can touch it, because as soon as you remove what they filled it with, it will again become the same as before.

Compares the world to theater in its interview and Russian actor Vadim Demchog. According to his point of view, the whole world is a game, and a person can only be happy within his own game, created consciously. Adults often fall into apathy due to the fact that they unconsciously play boring other people's games. Every day we follow the beaten, routine path and play long-learned roles, make resource farming our goal and forget that this is not the pleasure of the game. We remember that in our lives there was once this very fire – the sincere pleasure from the game that we had long forgotten.

To free yourself from these unconscious routine actions and monotonous reactions and achieve happiness, Demchog, echoing ancient Eastern teachings, advises us to understand that our feelings and our thoughts are not ourselves. We are not our roles, we are the actor, that same Pelevin super-werewolf, capable of playing any role. And we can achieve happiness only by creating our own game, staging our own play, playing a role written by ourselves.

In the book of the American writer Carlos Castaneda “Journey to Ixtlan”, the Indian shaman Don Juan describes something similar as one of the ways to achieve spiritual freedom – erasing personal history. According to his teaching, only by erasing personal history and thereby abandoning the monotonous reactions to external stimuli learned from childhood can a person achieve the freedom to write his own book of life. In addition, by teaching the main character of the novel to hunt, the shaman conveys the idea that the difference between a hunter and a game is that the hunter does not live according to a schedule – it is the ability to act asynchronously with the rhythm of the animals’ routines that makes it possible to easily hunt them.

Living with clearly defined goals and rigid routines can make a person productive, but not happy. In his book “The Zen Way” the same Alan Watts writes:

Paradoxically, a purposeful life is devoid of content and meaning. She is constantly in a hurry and misses everything. A leisurely life without a goal misses nothing, for only when there is no goal and no hurry are human feelings completely open to accepting the world.

…a purposeless, empty life does not mean something depressing. On the contrary, it means the freedom of aimlessly wandering clouds and mountain streams, flowers in inaccessible gorges, the beauty of which no one will see anyway, and the sea surf, forever washing the sand.