The Ego is a Self-Playing Game

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There’s a loose end I wanted to clarify for those of you who did go back and relisten to that lecture by Aaron Schuster on self-causation and psychoanalysis. How many of you did that, by the way? Oh, OK, wonderful.

There’s one howler in his lecture to me that stands out as a total error, and I wanted to correct that error. As I meditated more on the nature of the error, it unraveled his whole theory. I began to observe this entire, what I would call “language game” of psychoanalysis, from a different perspective. So the obvious mistake that was part of his paradigm (it was essential to the structure of his argument, in fact) was that psychotics do not suffer, right? You remember that? Well, that’s absurd. And anyone who has ever worked as a clinician with a psychotic, or even dealt with them personally or read cases of therapy with psychotics, knows that indeed they suffer and suffer much worse than neurotics suffer.

So then my question to myself was, well, how could such a mistake be made? It’s not stupidity; the guy is obviously very intelligent. But this belief is required by the game of psychoanalysis, I think for two reasons—three maybe. The game was, first of all, invented by Freud, who would be self-labeled as a neurotic. So it’s a game of neurotics for neurotics, because every ego is involved in game playing. That’s really what the ego is, in fact—it’s a game that has its own rules of relationality, and someone who is in an ego state is enmeshed in playing a game which for them is not a game—it’s life. And it’s not simply, to the ego in a game, their variation or preference as to the particular rules of the game that they want to conduct their lives according to, even though every game is in a certain sense a religion—a private religion—as well as a private language game and a private psychic economic set of transactions with gain and loss, etc.

So there’s a game, and the game being played was invented, if you remember, during the Victorian era when women did not have a voice. This was before the early feminist movement—the first one, the suffragettes, and Mary Poppins and that whole struggle of women to have a voice that their husbands as well as other men would give validity to and actually listen to. But in that period, no one listened. No men listened to a woman, other than what, you know, transactionally, was necessary to give them orders or decide what the menu would be or where they’d go on some vacation or whatever. There would be conversation but not a deep listening. So Freud offered a space where he would listen to unhappy women. They paid the price of being labeled/diagnosed as hysterics, but they finally got a man to listen. They had to pay him, but he listened. (Probably the husband paid to have the wife go there and get off of his back.)

But this was how psychoanalysis began. And if the woman found the game of psychoanalysis more interesting than the game she’d been playing with her husband, of being miserable and rebelling, then she would switch out of the first game and take up the second. That’s called transference, right? A shift of game and game partner and game rules and game context.

So the game that developed started out as a metagame. Every game, I think, starts as a metagame. And what’s a metagame? It’s a description of a game that someone is playing, someone other than yourself. If I can analyze your game, then I can have power over it, and I can create a situation where your game will be subsumed by my game. That’s how egos engage in power struggles, if they’re smart, rather than simply by intimidation or seduction or whatever. It’s the differential rules of a language game that are capable of describing at a higher and more effective level of abstraction the patterns that the neurotic (let’s call him that) playing the game cannot see from his own perspective at the ground level of the game. Once they enter the metagame, that becomes the new game that they are now playing together, then the old symptoms that were incumbent on the playing of the first game can drop away. That’s how “cures” happen, right?

The metagame [of psychoanalysis] that became the game then became a struggle for mastery of the theory of psychoanalysis that would control the game but would be rebelled against by the client or patient, who would then morph his neurotic patterns so that the analyst could no longer accurately interpret them and would no longer be in the position of the one who knows. So that was the power struggle, and that was why psychoanalysis became interminable. The analysts began to be defeated in the game because they needed to restructure the patterns and rules that someone was playing by (while hiding cards—in a poker game you hide cards), and because the poker game could morph into a chess game or a game of Go or any other form that the analyst needed to follow to be able to provide another level of metagame enabling the redirecting of life energy from the (let’s say) hostile codependency of the first game. Whenever you play a game, you’re playing with someone but you’re also playing against them, right? You need them because you can’t play the game without the opponent; but you’re also playing against them, so there’s a split motivation.

In any case, the psychotic plays such a very different game that he does not suffer in a way that can be understood by the neurotic analyst and therefore couldn’t be invited to play the game. The analyst had limits on who he or she was willing to invite to a match. And because psychotics did not suffer in a way that could be understood according to the theoretical models, I think the model that developed was that they do not suffer. That let the analyst off the hook of having to feel compassion and therefore a duty to help the psychotic, who could then be sent off to the psychiatrist, who would prescribe drugs or electroshock or whatever else was the means. Also, I think, creating the illusion that the psychotic was a kind of black hole or frozen and not suffering was a way to ease the anxiety of neurotics who were afraid of falling into psychosis.

So the theory itself is a game that is played for the benefit of the egos of those in the profession of analysis, who then were able to feed off of the need—originally—of these so-called hysterical women. But then later on, of course, as the women gained power, then the symptoms would show up in the men—first obsessional symptoms but then hysterical ones, which originally were thought to pertain only to the female. And then, when the theory no longer could contain all the variations of pathology or game-rule variations that developed, psychoanalysis became frozen with only these four options of hysteric, obsessive, perverse, or psychotic.

Because the psychotic does withdraw what the analyst calls his “libidinal cathexis” from the external other and the world in order to cathect (or, let’s say, trigger) the development of internal delusional fantasies to both compensate for and defend against the traumatic environment that exists in the external plane, the delusional modus operandi of the psychotic could include catatonia, autism (or autistic symptoms, at least), and symptoms that would appear to the other as an anesthesia—a kind of non-suffering state because of an absence or depersonalization in which the normal feelings that could be understood and related to sympathetically by the analyst were not present. So they were literally alien, which is why the psychiatrists became called alienists.

The point I want to get to is that all theoretical constructs are games that are played by those who want to feed off the energy that can be gained by playing that game with others if they win. OK? And the game has particular rules. Now, in order to justify the game, the conclusion has to be one that seems worth the effort. So the theoretical conclusion that Schuster comes to in the lecture is accurate: that you have to realize there’s no self and the actual being that you are is not identifiable with the icon that you’re moving in the game. You can withdraw your cathexis (your identification) with the self-image and the self-concept; and then suddenly that game is over, and you can either project your cathexis into another or you can transcend—you can recognize the complete lack of identity of consciousness itself. It has a potential of identification that’s unlimited, but it has no inherent identity; it doesn’t belong to anyone.

But, as soon as consciousness is appropriated, then a game is underway. When consciousness (which is formless) identifies with the body (which will be a self-image in the mind but then projected onto the physical organism), the body is opaque and the consciousness also becomes opaque in the sense that the identification wards off the ability to perceive the Light of God that is actually all that is Real in the field. Now what the consciousness perceives is the shadow of its own body and the other shadows. Now it sees a salt and pepper of light and dark; and then the light and dark morph into other dualities of good and evil, right and wrong, high and low…

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Brahmachari:

One whose consciousness has merged with Brahman, the Absolute, and thus has been liberated from all desire, fear, attachment, and material frames of reference. Thus, a Brahmachari naturally lives a life of celibacy, simplicity, and inner solitude.

Satsang:

Meditative meetings in which the highest teachings are shared. Shunyamurti also offers guidance during questions and answers to resolve the most difficult and delicate matters of the heart.

The process of non-process:

Since awakening is instantaneous, along with the recognition that one was never really in the dream, but enjoying the creation of the dream, it must be understood that making awakening into a process can only be part of the dream, and has nothing to do with Awakening itself.

The Real:

When we speak of the Real, unless otherwise qualified, we mean the Supreme Real. The Supreme Real does not appear. Appearance is not Real. All that appears is empty of true existence. There are no real things. All that is phenomenal is temporary, dependent, and reducible to a wave function of consciousness. The world does not exist independent of consciousness. There is no matter or material world. All is made of consciousness. Pure consciousness is Presence. It is no-thing, non-objective, not in space or time. All that appears in Presence, or to Presence, is an emanation of Presence, but is not different from That. This is one meaning of nonduality.

The Real is also a term used in Lacanian psychoanalysis. What Lacan means by the Real is that aspect of phenomenal appearance which is overwhelming, traumatic, or impossible. We would call that Real One. It is a relative Real, not Absolute. We add that there is a Real Two, which consists of divine love. Love is not an appearance, but it changes appearance, through recognition of its Source, into a divine manifestation, a projection of God’s sublimely beautiful Mind as infinite fractal holographic cosmos. Real Three is the unchanging Absolute, beyond all conception or image.

Dharma and dharma:

When we use the term Dharma (capitalized), we refer to our dedication to living in accord with the timeless principles of impeccable integrity that keep us in harmony with Nature and our Supernatural Source.

When we use the term without capitalization, we refer to our acceptance of the community’s processes, protocols, and chain of command with the “Haji! Spirit” of going the “extra mile” and working overtime when necessary to make the impossible inevitable, as our unconditional act of surrender to Love.