The Philosophical Perspective of a Gnostic

My approach to reconciling the physical intellect with a Truth that it was designed to avoid seeing. 

Part II: The Great Shell Game

The Game

Manifesting through a body is natural for a mind that was designed specifically for that task.  When these types of consciousnesses inhabit bodies there is no shock, no trauma beyond what appears to be "natural".   Further, whatever goes on in this world which obeys "natural laws" seems to be taken somewhat in stride by these beings.   At least this seems the case when compared with philosophic beings.  Philosophic beings start off with a strong amount of shock and disorientation, and everything about this world seems not only surreal in its mystery, but somehow ominous and foreboding.  There seems something sinister going on, but not merely in the way something sinister might seem to be going on in this or that particular case from the point of view of a consciousness normatively designed for this dimension.  Something seems meta-sinister about this place.  Something seems so fundamentally WRONG with things as they "simply are" that this only becomes compounded by the fact that for the vast majority of "hoomans" this doesn't seem to be the case at all.

So immediately there is a clash of viewpoints, even if it is unspoken and not consciously realized by any who are involved.  There is a real and underlying conflict to any and all common endeavors between these two groups of beings.  This underlying dystopia to the presented and superficial normality which is forced between these two groups is forged in the form of the human body, which is the "counterfeit currency" of exchange between these two types of beings.  They all pretty much look the same as far as certain things are concerned:  They all have the structures which support life, the cellular types, tissues, organs, organ systems and functional processes and homeostatic and heterostatic cycles and feedback loops which enable all that we seen in the life and society of humans.  They have distinctions, of course, but these are relative to an underlying commonality, especially as far as the psychological domain is concerned.

The psychological domain does have a way of being described which, at least conceptually, resembles the physical aspects.  This is understood as systems theories of psychology, especially as they are correlated with general physiological, and especially neurological functions.  This may be the case, but there is a great distinction between thinking about a psychological system and being one from the inside.  The fundamental difference here is exactly the existential versus ideational modes of discourse which underpin the way that humans psychologically live and socially communicate and otherwise interact.  And while a lot of "thinkers" do work hard to pretend that there is a seamless continuity between these modes of discourse, there is a radical disjunction between them, one that is just as wide as that between seeming and being, appearance and substance, phenomenology and metaphysics, phenomenality and ontology.

Because this radical difference is there whether or not beings are aware of it (just as with physical laws normative for this physical universe), so there are results which impact these beings whether or not they are aware of them.  First and foremost is the difference in ontology between these two sorts of beings, the physical beings (consciousnesses by design suited for physical bodies) and the metaphysical beings (beings with an origin fundamentally suited to a domain outside this physical realm and its supporting substructures).  This difference exists whether or not anyone is aware of it, and it puts a strain on the superficial realm of social coexistence between these beings because there is a fundamental asymmetry between these beings in regards to how they interact with the bodies and material realms that they superficially have in common.  This is extremely important because in this shell game of physicality there are two very different peas inside the shells, and they operate by fundamentally different rules within the same game.

The Rules

The social realms where these beings find themselves in coexistence as if they were entirely the same sort of beings, that common grouping called "humanity" (whomanity? or hoomanity! perhaps..) presents a set of appearances of normality which, strictly speaking, only applies to the beings whose consciousnesses were made to coexist it these bodies.  Therefore it is true to say that there are "true humans" in the sense that they belong, by design, in these bodies.  Their existence here is normative "by nature" since they have no design parameters not cut from the same cloth as the bodily systems they inhabit here.  But this can never be true of the metaphysical beings, the "philosophers", because they were of a certain substance which was not designed ever to exist with these sorts of bodies.  They don't exist here by nature, but by force.    If this sounds a lot like The Matrix, hold your horses.  That movie was inspired by a Gnostic anime comic, and that was inspired by Gnosticism, and that is what inspires this philosophy I'm articulating here!   So you can see that The Matrix is a pretty late comer into this game, but the fact that most people haven't heard about this game until the latecomer made it to the field should not be unnoticed, either.

So in this game there are two sets of rules automatically and from the start.  One side is playing in their home court, and they have a very natural sense of being where they belong.  The other side doesn't belong here at all, has a deep sense of alienation from this place, doesn't want to play this game which is totally skewed in favor of the other team, and is having no fun whatsoever.  For one side it is a game, for the other, it is torture.  For one side the game is agreeable, fair and worth playing, for the other it is fundamentally disagreeable, unfair and not worth playing.  But that is not quite the whole issue.  The issue turns out to be that while these two conditions are in every way  not appropriate for the sort of game that is being played, the nature of the way the game is set up is rigidly enforced so as to maintain the pretense that the game is running smoothly and fairly, that there is no difference between any of the beings who inhabit these shells called "bodies" and that there is nothing but a pervasive, blind justice in the form of physical laws held naturally in common with either blind chance or else some fair and just "god" which supervises the entire thing.  From the very beginning, before the whistle blows to begin, the entire game is rigged from top to bottom, and yet both sides are prevented from seeing this!

At least on the lower levels of this game they are both blind to the direct truth.  While the "natives" seem to have the better end of the stick, they are also naturally programmed to have frustrations and grumbles, to go through tragedies and dramas, ostensibly "just like" those which the "captives" must undergo.  The bodies seem themselves all to have been scripted by some rules of order and randomness which show no direct traces of discrimination.  But this doesn't change the fact that such discrimination does exist.  It just means that there is plausible deniability for one side, who feels quite "natural and at home here" and so they may be quite puzzled and genuinely "concerned" if someone else has a "fundamental" problem "inside their own skin", so to speak.  But they won't be inclined to see any great big conspiracy in the matter.

If you were in the position of the plaintiff, it is up to you to prove your case.  Of course, the norms are already set up against you, the other side is totally alienated from your experience except as it normalizes with their experience.  Yet the issue is precisely where those who are forced to exist in this immoral domain of existence are being abused by it.  So it is obvious on several levels that this game can't go well for them.  They are abused by the entire system, and abused as if by nature and so by natural right.  At the SAME TIME, the public and normative discourse automatically throws out any case before it even gets near any docket of consideration in culture.  Indeed, it hunts down and exterminates these beings if they even so much as try to go off and form their own communities.  So those are the rules of the game.  You never know what is going on under the shells as they are slid about, but no matter what shell you pick up, it loses, no matter what, and there is no way that you can prove that there is cheating going on because there is simply no way to demonstrate your damages.

The Winners and Losers 

The losers of the game are supposedly the weaker beings, or the more foolish beings.  Weaker if they are less evolved in power or cunning (if you are in the physical evolution camp) or because they were made with vastly less power than their creator who built into them insufficient cunning to realize that butting heads with him is a no-win situation, yet also programmed them with an abundance of desire and circumstances which contribute in him a profound motivation for doing so...and who knows what threshold is decided as the cutoff between those with sufficient cunning to know better than to buck against God, and/or enough willpower to overcome their urges to do so, only God knows. Either way, atheist or theist, the losers are by default less powerful and less cunning than the winners.  In either case some significant amount of the odds are set by forces beyond the control of the participants by a force that in either case may as well be called fate.  Since fate is "out of everyone's hands" then the beneficiaries cannot be properly blamed unless they hold the belief that their good fortune is unfair.  If they do not feel that way, then they will simply hold the losers in contempt, because for them the universe itself has proven that justice is in the interest of the stronger.

The losers are food for the winners, the weak are the footstool of the stronger.  This is shown throughout the animal kingdom, and in the spiritual realm (for the theist) there is ample evidence that this is the case also (no matter what the claimed theology, the metaphysics will work out the same way, no matter what their insipid protests to the contrary).  Moreover, it really doesn't matter what paradigm you choose, whether it be "natural" or "supernatural", whether it involves matter evolving into minds or minds devolving into matter, or both.  It doesn't matter what the winners are made out of or enjoy doing with the losers, nor what the feelings or viewpoint of the losers.  The winners take all, and the losers take the fall.

Taking this truth from the collection of all the paradigm structures that are possible, and certainly none other than these have been found (there are some fake "win/win" paradigms, but we'll get into the New Age con later), taking all these structures and boiling them down to their fundamental skeletal basis, we find that we can sum it all up best by saying that in in this known universe, as revealed by the senses, this realm of matter and energy with minds apparently grounded or embedded into bodies, and possibly other bodies when not in the grosser physical ones, still altogether taken as a whole this universe is one where no matter what your viewpoint or nature, there is an overarching and objective, public, and by force distributed system of automatic injustice which perpetually attempts to correct itself, but which seems to have a fundamental slant toward favoring power and cunning with opportunities to win and ensconce itself into a permanent power position until another force can take advantage of some weakness within it.  It is just a Tao of strength overtaking weakness, nothing more.

The asymmetry is that in at least the first instance of events, someone is arbitrarily (so it seems) given the upper hand, and as any chessplayers know the first move is a permanent advantage which lasts as long as it is properly cultivated, and even if it is not it is an extra obstacle to the player of the black pieces who is happy if it can equalize.  So in fact the universe is, even in its own terms, anything but fair.  So therefore once again there is no reason for the winners to have anything but contempt for the losers, whether they simply become food before they can reproduce, or whether they fall back in the pack and starve when prey becomes scarce, or perhaps they simply didn't have the "faithpower" to "believe in on" the "blood of Jesus" enough... whatever the disqualification, they lacked something, something which was sufficiently supplied in others...  In the overarching scheme of things, losers lose by their nature, by the laws of nature itself.  Losers are there to lose so winners can win. That's just the way it is.  What a way to win, or lose, the lottery!!!  The "nature of reality" sweepstakes handed one group a check for ten-million dollars and wrote this into the fabric of time-space-matter and energy, and inscribed into the ether the immutable failure of the rest.

The Catch

As described above, the winners are the necessary consequence of the universe "just being the way it is".  The only problem is that there is a group of beings who by their very nature do not fit properly into this scheme of things.  They cannot fit into any normalization which might explain why, either.  And because of this we can see that there is a reality beyond the one which is apparent in which the rules of this game do not hold.  They cannot be normalized because their viewpoint as "losers" is not rationalizable by the scheme of things in which they would supposedly be "the other side of the same coin" with the winners.  In order for reality to be a whole, in order for the game to be "the only one in town", it cannot be that the dissatisfaction with losing is anything other than the frustration of the desire to win.  Yet these beings do not want to "win" as the "winners" do in this universe, and even when they have the power and cunning to do so they often refuse because such a way of being is alien to them!  There is simply no precedent for such a thing in a reality in which the stakes for existence are built into its fabric so deeply that no entity can form without being struck in that fundamental mold which teaches it to be how it is by making it what it is.  And yet in the spectrum of "natural losers" there is this group which does not fit in, which loses as if because they could never win, not even as the winners do.  They don't fit in with the "losers" because they often "lose" even when they have the power to win, either because the game is rigged to prevent them winning unless they "get evil" about it, or because they sense this and simply don't want to take such risks with their moral nature, or because they see nothing in this world worth really gaining.  On the other hand when they "win" they really LOSE, as they find that they sacrificed something inherent to them which this world never gave them, but actually TOOK from them in exchange for "winning", or else when they reach "success" the red carpet which invited all the "winners" to the stage just happened to be pulled when these "winners" were walking it... how convenient...

These particular beings are losers not matter WHAT happens.  But whether they are defined as losers because they were unlucky, inept, or unwilling, they also don't feel like losers in the sense of not getting what they wanted in the world, but they have simply a desire to live in a world where devouring others isn't the ticket to success, where win/win really means something, and they wish for this even with the awareness that attempting win/win scenarios in a world full of the opportunistic scum is simply penalizing them, making them vulnerable to the tendencies of there "brethren" who will simply view their fairness as weakness, and feel fully sensible in doing so.  In fact, they usually simply rationalize such "idealism" as a brand of weakness not unlike other sorts of weakness, like flabby muscles and dim wits.  Many a poet and philosopher has already spilled this idea out into reams of poetry and prose worthy of being chiseled finely into stone.  Regardless of the the incapacity of the "winners" of understanding this special subset of "losers", these beings understand that there is something fundamentally wrong with the system as it is set up.  It isn't just wrong because "they don't win", because their idea of winning doesn't preclude anyone else sharing in success.  Indeed, it often requires this!  But they can't help but feel the system itself, as a whole, is wrong, not just inconvenient, but WRONG.  They also can't help but feel that they are right about this, because if you can't help but feel something is wrong, then you must feel that the contrary is right. Yet by the logic of the public discourse of uniformly yet differentially distributed natures, these beings by all rights experience this to be the case by natural law, and therefore either the law is simply mocking itself by pretending to find something wrong with itself just to make a special breed of Polyannic weaklings, or else it is seriously wrong in fact, and this wasn't declared by it but by another set of laws which are not the basis of the way things are in this universe.

There is no way that it could be the universal laws mocking themselves since that runs against the entire grain of efficient evolution or creation. In either case there would never be a law leading to the development of beings who go fundamentally against the law, since the law would break itself.  The law in this universe is to be strong and thrive and have no shame or guilt in doing so, or else to be weak and attempt to compensate by some measure of cunning, speed, or stealth, or perhaps quantity or other quality, and to seek any opportunity to develop a relative strength, such as finding a different environment in which to exist, away from predators, or else to find a weak spot in the generally stronger being and take advantage of a loophole in the law which allows the weaker to take out the stronger by finding a "weak spot" that is weaker than the attacking "strong spot" of the generally weaker being, then attacking it whenever the opportunity presents itself, often in self-defensive desperation.  But this is not an inclination of the philosophic beings at all, and they repeatedly confess they would rather suffer evil than do it!!!  And while it is safe for me to say that Nietzsche's genealogy of morals is wrong on the nature of this "metaweakness" or "subtle strength", we can't here go into a long discourse on Nietzsche and what was right, and wrong with his thought.

What we can see for sure is that there is a discrepancy in the systemic wholeness of this realm which reveals that some of the relations between beings spring out of it, but some manifest from beyond it.  The major element of this discrepancy is that the system attempts to hide this very discrepancy, not merely to individuals by individuals, but as a whole and without specific regards as to individual cases, but attempts to hide it in all cases. God should have nothing to hide, and neither should Nature bother to hide anything.  There is nothing fitting in either notion.  And this highly undivine and unnatural resistance to being discovered about the discrepancies between types of beings and that one type has origins from beyond the realm which pretends to be the only realm there is cannot be underestimated as perhaps THE KEY feature to notice about this world, one without which understanding it would otherwise be impossible in a special way, in a way such that if this one key is missed, then another is found instead which only opens a smaller door within the larger door, the smaller door only opening to a chamber attached to that door and not going far beyond it.  This gives an illusion of understanding which will then evermore form a resistance to being encapsulated in a larger idea of what is behind the larger door, or even of the existence of that door, or in fact any other door at all.

So it is the ultimate con, a metacon, Con AS SUCH, "The Form" of Cons, the Essence of Conning, the Ultimate Shell Game, for it is disguised as nothing less than pristine reality...when it is nothing but a minor error in a much larger Real Reality which is soon to "burst its bubble"...