God is the Game Changer
One of the buzz words I find current in postmodern discourse is that of the “game-changer”—events occur that change the nature of the game that one is playing; the balance of forces suddenly shift, a tipping point is reached, something is revealed that forcibly shifts the frame of reference in which you are operating, and the old rules no longer apply, the old values, the old sense of what is going to work, and what won’t, and what is relevant and what is irrelevant—suddenly a shift happens that is almost equivalent to feeling yourself in a parallel universe.
But these game changers are usually occurrences for which one is unprepared. They were unpredicted. And we are living in a time where the game is changing very rapidly to the point where it seems that the game is: can you figure out what the game is? And who sets the rules? And who makes the changes? And who am I in this game? And what is the intention? And how do you win it?
And then, in dealing with such a fluid situation in which the situation is not clearly a situation—because it can change into something other than what it had been conceived to be the situation at any moment—what is the appropriate strategy to adopt in relation to such a flux? Is it to have certain kind of rigidities, and fixations, and immutabilities of response pattern, of character, of ways of responding whether yin or yang, with assertiveness or flight, with aggression or humility? And can one be in a situation of a flux in which the world in which one seems to be inhabiting alters its nature without becoming paranoid, and without losing one’s sense of who one is, and what is one’s purpose?
There is the old story of the scorpion and the frog. Everyone knows that story: scorpion wants to cross the river, can’t swim, asks the frog, “Can I hop on your back and you’ll take me across?”
Frog says, “No way, I know you are going to sting me halfway through and it is all over.”
And scorpion says, “That is ridiculous! It is not logical. Why would I sting you halfway through? We’d both die!”
Frog says, “That makes sense! Hop on!”
Halfway across the river, suddenly the frog feels a terrible pain—oops—and he realizes he has been lethally stung, looks up at the scorpion and says, “Why did you do that? Makes no sense, it is not logical!”
And scorpion says, “You are right, it is not logical, but I am a scorpion, I had no choice. It’s who I am.”
Well, in dealing with this world situation that we are in, is there truth to saying “this is who I am”? With regard to any traits, any patterns of response? Whether that “who I am” is either the aggressive scorpion who cannot stop his own drive to sting even at its own expense—because the drive is not under the control of his logical mind—or the happy-go-lucky but somewhat foolish frog who good naturedly accepts its own demise knowing well in advance that will be the result, but masochistically somehow enjoying it.
Can we live in such a way that we are not doomed to be either the scorpion or the frog? Can we live in such a way that we are not held back by the constructions of drives that got concretized and fossilized in childhood, or even in other lifetimes, and not have the ability to put our response patterns entirely under the control of our highest level of consciousness? And what is it that brings us under that demonic governance of our lives by what Lacan would call the “acephalic drives”, those non-reflective but reflexive automatic reactivities that are often—all too often—inappropriate in situations that do not fit the paradigm in which they were first created, but nonetheless continue outside of the control of our heart and our mind?
Most of the issues that cause us suffering are such fixations of reaction that were originally defense mechanisms that protected us from dangers that were real in the moment at which they were brought into effect, but that once they were put under automatic pilot, because we did not have the luxury of being able to wait and think about it and make it into a response that came from our cognitive level but had to be instantaneous.
Much in the same way that the nuclear weapons today of Russia and the US are on such hair trigger alert that no cognitive decision by a president or a prime minister will be made; it will be made by a computer within nanoseconds, even though it may be mistaking a flight of birds for an incoming group of missiles, but it will be a decision that will have to be made according to the logic of the game that is being played by machines to whom we have given up our own right to determine whether we live or die as a planetary species. And in the same way, the determination of the destiny of our lives has been put on such automatic pilot, ruled by such drives determined when we were probably three years old or less, and those operating systems remain with the same kind of primitive aggression, fight or flight modes and without the freedom from wisdom to intervene.
The process of yoga is the redesign of the operating system of the psyche, to eliminate such acephalus drives;such reactive aggressive or other pathological forms of reactivity, and that have been based on forms of identification long obsolete, and philosophical understandings of the world based on far too little information and far too primitive in the range of responses and nuances of potential shifts of realities and balances of forces and determinations of friend or foe or other kinds of determinations that would shift our degree of open or closed-heartedness at any given moment, and the nature of the projections upon external reality that are emitted from a place within our psyche that our conscious mind is not aware of, and often cannot recognize that it is dealing with, not a reality, but with its own projection that it has bought into and accepted as if it were a reality.
Audio File: God is the Game Changer – Audio File.MP3