Video games and impermanence

"Absorption in a movie or in Nintendo does not reveal the momentariness of phenomena.  We do not see the impermanence and insubstantiality of all things and events, nor do we notice the empty nature of awareness itself."  Joseph Goldstein, Insight Meditation, p. 37.

"Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen."  The Collect for Proper 20 in the BCP.

Goldstein uses 'Nintendo' to talk about the kind of focused awareness that develops in meditation.  Let's do him the courtesy of forgiving his use of a company name for the whole of the art form--many people used such metonymy freely a few decades ago, when he wrote this piece, without lightning strikes.  The image is helpful.  Imagine the archetypal 1980s complaint of the concerned suburban parent, afraid of the vacant looks that overtake gamers in front of the screen--their insensitivity to the world around home, how everything else vanishes, their eyes staring into the middle distance at some partly seen illusion.  But anyone who has ever really played a game--from the prolific Solitaire through the PopCap geniuses all the way to more "AAA" or "Indie" titles--can remember that such a state is one of intense focus.  One could blithely call it "the zone" or some such.  It's quite different from general television watching, although probably not different from watching something really good.

Gaming makes a terrific analogy on that level, as Goldstein suggests, to someone who is meditating, or we could even say praying.  They, too, stare into the middle distance, focused in awareness on a reality that is both present and absent.  They, too, are both here and there.

I would contest him, though, that absorption in a game does not reveal the momentariness of phenomena, or the impermanence of all things.  In an obvious way, if all things are impermanent, than surely games evidence that as well.  But in a deeper and more subtle way, video games teach impermanence.  Why?

1.  Because they end.  We could finish the game, complete the story, fail at the game, or even simply turn it off.  But unlike so much else, we actually experience the end of video games.  Video games are easy to see as impermanent.

2.  Because their limited nature helps us reflect on the limits in our life.  Video games can be exciting, but each game has a limit to what I can do.  That's part of what makes it a game.  And in that limitation, we can see it at once as a game that we are playing, and a game that we are immersed in.  We experience this probably most profoundly with game controls, which distance and unite us to the action in a game simultaneously.  Even in the controller-less examples (Kinect), it's simply the case that our body has become a controller, making the experience if anything more distancing and uniting.

So, I don't know.  I seems to me video games make terrific spiritual practice if we use them well (the same requirement as all other spiritual practices).  If we are going to hold fast to things that shall endure, as the Collect asks, we will have to accustom ourselves to impermanence.  Video games teach that lesson beautifully.

Abject and small

I've been reading a fair amount of Teresa of Avila and Thomas Merton in the last couple of weeks--largely on prayer-life.  And I've been thinking about the material world.  Cue the Madonna song.

Teresa and Merton, like many spiritual writers, emphasize the "abject nothingness" of our existence.  Both commend not only begging to God as essential to contemplative prayer but also recognizing our 'beggar-hood,' our 'beggar-nature.'  Perhaps too much religious parody has entered this broken-down living room I call my mind, but they each seem to argue, essentially, "we suck," followed by the smacking of a book against the forehead.  Primarily, they say, we suck when compared to God--who is so big, so good, so suave.

The problem here lies not so much in something about self-esteem as it does in a mistaken notion of infinity.  If God truly is infinite, without boundary, or even if God really is that great, then God is not limited by seeing things from our perspective.  God isn't "big" to our "small"; God is everything to our limitedness.  It's not like Andre the Giant standing next to me, where my petty concerns are squashed by his might.  It's more like Flatland, where my two-dimensional self has its flat little problems about left and right, but God has a much deeper sight.  As the famous poem in Philippians has it, greatness is not about lording power over smaller things--rather, it's about the ability to step in anywhere.  We are quite different from God--incapable even of maintaining our own being for one, and involved in all kinds of evil for another.  But it seems somewhat mistaken to tell us to get in touch with our beggar-hood, abject-ness.  God doesn't see us that way--maybe we shouldn't see ourselves that way.

Recognizing our dependence on God doesn't, it seems to me, require seeing that we suck.  Rather, it means being realistic--which is not some codeword for pessimism, but instead a plea for getting in touch with reality.  We are not gods--and maybe that is painful, and makes us feel like beggars, if we really paid attention to the way we think and act.  But for most of us, learning that we're not gods is as much relief as abject horror.  It's a terrific blessing to realize I don't have to control everything--like traffic, or whether my airplane stays in the air, or how my family behaves.

For both Teresa and Merton, prayer begins on some level when we see our insufficiency and start hunting around for what would fulfill us.  That seems true to me.  But maybe insufficiency doesn't mean abject.  Maybe insufficiency means interconnected, dependent, communal.  Maybe prayer begins in those quick moments when we see ourselves as we are.