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Not sure how this thread got stated on vortex, but...
All this foolish chatter about some other culture's God being deficient -
not nearly as good/powerful/divine as the God which my cult prefers, got me to
thinking about how to get the thinking members of society to move beyond this
semantic silliness - this "mine-is-bigger" school-boy mentality of
deo-machismo.
The approach of the future will be the Sim. In the past, this was a
literary genre called the "spiritual game" but now with
computers, each of us will soon be able to simulate our personal
divinity, and evolve that composite to become a voluntary group control vehicle.
The Greeks invented the "game," Dante turned in into horror, but Hesse revived
it, and now the information age is set to complete the difficult chore with the
Sim.
WHAT IS THE GBG?
Herman Hesse's Nobel Prize winning tour-de-force, "Das
Glasperlenspiel" or "The Glass Bead Game" lays the foundations for both an
intense intellectual experience, perhaps an ever-expanding philosophy and
evolving religion - and certainly a growing cottage industry. The eventual goal
would be to integrate religious, scientific and esoteric
knowledge, cross-cultural spirituality, neo-Platonic-Pythagorean
number iconicity, and most importantly: A.I. plus... well, you name it, all
into the final syncretism. Since you must give the game a name,
Herman's spiel of is a good place to start looking.
syn·cre·tism, n. Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems
of belief.
.... If you want real glass beads, you can even add a "Go" game into the
mix, as the HH derived variants do not themselves seem as
interesting for a game-game... but the larger subject of the synthesis of
religious beliefs through the game metaphor is of keen interest to
anyone with a combination of spiritual need or anxiety, a questioning mind, and
even a mild distrust of authority.
Of all the many traits that come together in forming *wisdom* perhaps this
surprising one: a mild distrust of authority, is the most important of all... if
only because it is so rare to accompany any individual out of rigorous formal
training. The formal education system, like all good fiction, requires a
'suspension of disbelief' for such an extended duration that it often never
recovers. Hesse himself learned to become distrustful of authority, despite a
classical education, and had the courage to renounce his citizenship as
protest to war.
Let's make it clear that this does not mean that any well established
belief structure is wrong, sometimes wrong, or even seldom wrong. It only means
that the possibility of every established belief structure being wrong should
*always* remain an active possibility. Science itself is in its infancy, despite
what the arbiters of science journalism might want you to believe, and
religion has not even reached teenaged maturity. "The Glass Bead Game" is - or may evolve into a broader metaphor for what
has been called the dance with god, or "Divine Lila" - the true rapture that
church-mice never get to experience by faking glossolalia of fainting in
public. This metaphor has been expressed by "Gnostic" traditions and by
more modern ones which want to sound ancient and mysterious. The players,
the Magister Ludi (Masters of the Game), will use computers nowadays as
their instruments of Wisdom and Magick. They will not need to proselytize
or testify, except as voluntarily indulgences online as there will be an
ongoing Sim which will spare them from a cold pew and the ape-like obligatory
"amens" after ever thump of the book.
Had Hesse known about computers, fractals, Penrose tiles, and Mathematica,
there is no doubt he would have included all these diversion into his utopia (or
pseudopia) for added richness. This will surely, under some name, end-up
encompassing all religion, the Ki-essence of the life-force, the evolving
group-mind (Rupert's 'meme pool' or Teilhard's 'noosphere'), the priesthood of
believers and even a good business model for those seeking to milk bucks from
geeks desirous of participatory spirituality in these post-modern
times - all folding into the vast and infinite wisdom of the www.
The GBG was finished 1943, the culmination of 11 years of writing, and
includes a novel, 13 poems, and 3 short stories. The new reader might enjoy the
novel more by reading the short stories first: 'The Rainmaker,' 'The Father
Confessor,' and 'The Indian Life.' The underlying theme of the whole is not
seen clearly until the end - that theme being that only through
'forfeiture of self' can one find redemption or awakening. But in general,
if you have absorbed Douglas Hofstadter or Jorge Luis Borges, then you have
gotten most of the way through the gist of the novel part in a little more
updated way. There is much 'dated' humor and linguistic word-play in the
GBG, but in a time-warp better appreciated by the Muttersprachers among us. The
parodies - of such icons of the time as Nietzsche and Thomas Mann, are not
as biting now as in the 1940s. The novel is not for everyone - but then again,
how many adherents to anything understand their dusty scriptures very well?
The evolving Sim is what we are after.
The theme of 'forfeiture of self' and voluntary aestheticism in
pursuit of a nobler cause, should not be minimalized just because the
learning experience is an all-consuming substitute for
ego-aggrandizement. This anti-ego goal is canonical in most religions-
particularly Christianity (where it is generally ignored) and many forms of
yogas and Hinduism, where it is more fully practiced. Few Christians will
fit through the *eye of the needle* these days... but perhaps that too can be
rationalized away as only applying to Israelite farmers. There is no fool
like a selective fool.
The pursuit of wisdom without being tied to irrational dogma makes the game
unique - and thus its allure, which will increase with the Sim. The
melancholy realism of Hesse and his urging the reader to question accepted
values, and even to rebel against the system, made him very popular in the
counter-culture days of the 60-70s... when even the Beatles made
the obligatory mystical pilgrimage to India, following in HH's
footsteps. Later as WWII became inevitable, Hesse became an outspoken pacifist
and war-resister, renouncing his citizenship and becoming Swiss. He
was, in fact, the proto-beatnik-hippy but on a 'natural trip.' Before
GBG, Hesse wrote Siddhartha, his story of spiritual awakening spent
"on the road to Benares". And after returning from the Ganges with parasites
unknown to medicine, he never left home again - endemic illness being part of
his natural trip.
The "game" was set in the sequestered province of "Castalia," not
unlike Switzerland. This is a sterile world of classical academia revolving
around theory, analysis, interpretation, and debate - curiously all
elements of the older forms of Judaism. Absent from Castalia however, are
creativity, originality, and experiment... and earthy fun. The protagonist,
Joseph Knecht is not unhappy with this till near the end of his journey. He
also lived in subcultures like the "Bamboo Grove," where he learned to meditate,
cast the I-Ching, learn the Tao, and so on. Later at a Benedictine monastery he
was the student of the restrained dogma of Father Jacobus. Knecht learned
everything in East-meets-West duality in order to prep for "the game" and was
elevated to the role of Magister Ludi. Eventually, however, he feels the need
for active participation in life, and leaves Castalia and to becomes a tutor. On
the second day of his new life, he accidentally drowns. Very existential, no?
Actually, drowning itself is iconic - an implied "rebirth"... as baptism
reminds us.
For Knecht (which means "servant" in German) knowledge was his life - but
went unapplied, and in some ways this emasculation of
knowledge-for-its-own-sake is the subtheme. The conflict between the
intellectual and the participatory life is crucial to understanding the novel.
It might even help to see the Michael Douglas movie, "The Game" which can be
argued to be a further step in the "Spiritual Gaming" genre -
demonstrating the evanescence of status for even the most prominent of
citizens. Other movies, like "The Thirteenth Floor," "Matrix", "Dark
City" and are visions of our present state of unreal/reality where hidden
dualism (our game-role) is put into extreme focus. Truth is stranger than
fiction, but perhaps good fiction is more genuine than reality. The "human
predicament" may not be human at all - as we are little more than
game pieces- semi-autonomous pawns who have been programmed for the amusement of
some higher intelligence. Nowadays we all could be operating as avatars
in a computer program, which is what Hesse's Castalia would have been,
had he lived 50 years into the future.
The GBG, although an artform which came before the computer age, was a
spiel so prescient and obviously pointed in that direction, that the former
cult-novel may one day evolve into this computer-based
philosophy-religion... who knows... even a monastic tradition?
In short, the basic ideas are the same epistemological and ontological precepts
of all of religion, or for that matter of A.I.:
Categorization - collect and order knowledge
Analogy - cross-relate ideas by likeness
Connection - define the "verbs" - the ways to link ideas by
function and action
Contemplation -- contemplate functional ideas in a broader
context
Formalism -- establish rules, rituals and guidelines
Iconicity -- compress ideas, use as metaphor and symbol
Fusion, Syncretism, Objectivation -- reconcile disparate, even opposing
beliefs, find synergy, solve new problems
...and last of all,
Rebirth and reincarnation into the world which you, the pawn, improved if
only by your own level of participatory and existential angst.
Isn't that any (older) divinity's ultimate weakness... not being able to
participate at the lowest level? The Greek gods didn't have that problem, of
course, but then again, few Greeks thought of them as anything more than
beautiful Iconography. Which is the limit of how any human can view God,
some might argue.
Hesse is just the starting point for emerging syncretism, and we can do it
under his name because he is long dead, and never was ambitious enough to
portray himself as anyone's guru or messiah. He was one of the first selfless
modern thinkers to open the door of perception beyond an outdated legacy...
beyond which gate "knowledge" seeks to find its own justification, without the
necessity of bodily participation. Computers will be able to do that soon, and
the three letter name of divinity may shorten to two.
Jones
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