META TROLL
The Game:
The game is life. No, not the one made my Milton Bradley. The one you experience every morning as you eat a bowl of cereal, as you take a shit on the cold rim, as you flirt with a cute barista who looks at you with annoyed eyes. Life is all very disgusting and beautiful. It breaks you down and builds you up. Half the time it feels like it's worth it, the other half you feel like getting stupid with a bottle knowing it's all pointless.
What makes it all the more frustrating is that you, I, and everybody we know are limited to our senses. They give us only a mist which must be interpreted to form any sort of coherence. Video games, if anything, are becoming more lifelike every year (if not more dreamlike). As their landscapes become more layered and textured, they are more visceral, drawing the player further in-- the difference between the two fading at a quickening pace. Like the 1930s pulp fiction story, "The CIty of the Living Dead", where humanity plays in virtual worlds as the one outside falls to ruin, modern people play MMORPGs in lieu of physical relationships, discover new lands in Elder Scrolls, Fall Out, and the Legend of Zelda instead of exploring their own backyard, and tend to crops and animals in social games created by Zynga and not their own gardens.
Like the "real" world, video games give the observer a held perspective and a number of tools in which to interact with it. However, the various digital "realms" are limited to only one sense (sight), whereas the "real" one has at least five. But unlike our day-to-day lives, most games give the player a fixed task to accomplish. Developers are getting further away from this limiting factor however. Originating with Maxis and expanding with their Sims series, these games let the player live their everyday life through an avatar. You can build a house, get married, develop a nice career, and raise children. But that is not all-- there is also the mundane tasks of feeding, bathing, and yes, even making your Sim piss. These seemingly boring activities have given thousands if not millions of game players entertainment over the years. It also makes the perennial question if God watches you piss and fuck all the more personal. If this voyeurism, this living through another, is engaging to a preteen girl and a 50-year old business man alike, surely God must enjoy a little peek-a-boo.
Video games are also a strikingly apt metaphor for the many-armed gods so ubiquitous in Hinduism. The idea goes that all of us, every person, animal, plant, rock, are the sleeping god Brahma. The various arms are one consciousness working in tandem, not knowing the other limbs are being controlled from one source. The Sims, trapped in their own little fantasy home, are completely unaware they are being controlled from one sentient being-- YOU! All their little conflicts stem not from themselves but from the player. If they knew this fact, What would they do? Would they look to the heavens, their middle finger raised? Would they hack the Matrix and come after you? Would they commit mass suicide? Or worse, would they invent philosophy and religion?
This begs the question: are we living in one massive meta-troll hell? A gamer god looking on us from an unseeable universe, influencing or controlling our every waking movement and thought? It might be an experiment, testing us for some sick reason, or perhaps breeding us for our energy, ala the Matrix films. (see David Icke.) Or Are we trapped in a massive virtual game simply for the amusement of some fucked up alien? If any of this true, perhaps we can troll the troller. Perhaps we can rise above his games and get back at him. Perhaps, we as sentient individuals with free will can change what generations of us have been stuck in.
The Trolling Maneuver:
If we are trapped in a game controlled by a voyeuristic GOD, then where do we go from here? Do we give in and accept the inscrutable nature of reality, try to rationalize it with complex theories, or fight back? The through-line of history is different factions of humans waging war on other factions of humans. This is justified through various means but it all boils down to one thing: my group is better than your group. This idea, while necessary as a survival method during our early days, is no longer necessary. This is not to say each group should give up what makes them unique or hand away their national sovereignty to a cabal. My suggestion is instead an ideological one: if we are being controlled by someone or something, let's do something about it as one group, as humanity. This involves looking at our pre-held beliefs and giving up some of the antiquated ones, namely the one brought up earlier-- that one group is inherently better than the other based on race, culture, or some other useless faction-creator. If we are separated from each other, than we are easier to control and easier to scare. So let's get enlightened, let's get rational, and let's start the revolution.
What is the revolution? It's the acceptance that the only person we can truly depend on is the self. A book I read on Buddhism, Buddhism Plain & Simple by Steve Hagen, gave three important things to remember, which will ultimately free and enlighten us: 1. You, everyone, everything you know, love, and hate, is going to die some day 2. You are complete already 3. You are your own salvation. If we do not recognize these three concepts we can be manipulated, controlled, ordered around, spit upon, shamed, and have every evil thing under the sun done to us, but if we do, if there is nothing left to lose, then baby, we are truly free.
And by accepting this inherent truth, the complete power of the individual, we can, according to Chaos magicians like comic cook writer Grant Morrison, start to manipulate this virtual reality game we are forced to play. Magicians do this by tricking their own mind. Occultists and Buddhists have often echoed the same sentiment: the interior world is a perfect reflection of the exterior one. By influencing one we can influence the make-up of the other. However, this "changing" cannot be done with sheer will alone (though was tried with extravagant memory palaces of the Middle Ages) it must be done surreptitiously, through a sort of back-handed hypnosis. The easiest method described is the creation of sigils. Morrison goes into it with his article Pop Magic!.
To shamans in Paleolithic clans, to magicians in the ancient Middle East, to Tibetans monks and today's occultists, researchers of the esoteric have been searching for the same thing: to peal back the layers of reality and be left with the TRUTH, whatever that may be. These truths are sometimes terrifying because they speak directly to what is inside us all. Because absolutely everything is in there-- Angels, demons, monsters, the old and new gods, black holes and supernovas, butterflies, ladybugs, and spiders, EVERYTHING. The beauty of homo sapiens is our self awareness and the fact that however we came to be, we are now studying the thing that created us. This fact gives us unfathomable power and happiness, but also unbearable agony, because we can have alternative intentions than what our actions may showcase, and as occultists know, INTENTION IS EVERYTHING.
To confront God, you have to recognize what you are, and that is infinite. You are not some small, powerless Sim inside a house stuck inside a computer's hard drive, you are everything. Before the advent of language, humans were unconvinced the back of the their head was closed, or that their thoughts were even their own but instead the voices of gods. Each human is unlimited, unfathomable potential, and no one, nobody has the right to control you.
The greatest lie in history was this: being thrown from the Garden of Eden was a "bad" thing. It was the most glorious thing that has ever happened. We now have freewill to decide our paths. Though it may agonize, it is our birth right to confront not only evil, but also our creator. We can do that by not being complacent and by not giving into the one with answers who promises peace and security. That is how we fight the voyeuristic God, by discovering our own potential, the universe within.
Trolling Difficulty Level: 10/10, would try again
Trolling in Pairs:
Some have said that performing rituals in duos is superior, seeing as I haven't tried I can't tell you. However, it might by a fun first date experience ;)
