In terms of video games, anyhow. Baby steps.

Tried a game called Kingdom Two Crowns. ^[1] Hated it.

I need a name for this particular reason to hate a game. Underguided? Too sandbox-y? Anyhow, you start off as a king on a horse and you are guided through the very basics of building and buying things and then totally abandoned.

No indication of what to do next or what the point of the game is. Just, here’s ho to do stuff. Got it? Whatever. Bye!

And I need more than that. It’s like that game I played last month where you’re on an alien planet and are expected to build up civilization Minecraft style.

I’m too lazy to look up the name.

I am not cut out for that low a level of structure. I need a plan, goals, plot, and so on.

At least I have figured out what these games are going for now. I think they are for people who really love to explore and discover new things and figure out how things work. For someone like that, needing to figure the entire game out from the very basics is a slice of heaven.

I ain’t that kind of person, though. Perhaps I am too timid. Too little urge to explore the unknown. I break down when there’s no series of structured tasks to complete, and learn that way.

Hence my love for quest rich environments in large, open worlds. That’s the right level of structure for me. Plenty of tasks and goals, and in the process of completing those, I end up exploring the environment anyhow.

Still, I am learning to wander around in search of adventure. Just ramble around seeing what there is to see. So there is hope for me yet.

That’s the way I want to grow spiritually too. At some point, my urge to explore got near-fatally suppressed by anxiety and that’s just not normal for a child.

Children are supposed to explore and discover and try stuff and get hurt sometimes and learn from that and develop their feeling that whatever life throws at the them, they can handle it and will get through it.

Instead, I hid from the world and explored the world inside my mind instead. And while that definitely has benefits, it’s unbalanced and hence unhealthy.

Especially when you get trapped in there by your anxiety.

I’ve kind of hit a wall in Autonauts, that cute game where you build robots and use them to make automated systems that I wrote about before.

Like before, I built up to a certain level of complexity then got overwhelmed by my own system and lost the thread.

So I will have to start over again. And it’s frustrating because things like this give all the indication that I will be able to build things up in a series of logical linear steps forever, but my brain will not cooperate.

Part of the problem is that my systems in that game still require active maintenance, so I can’t just build them and forget them as I work on the next thing.

And I am not good at multitasking. It’s a trouble issue. When I switch focus to task B, I stand a pretty good chance of forgetting task A entirely. Or at least losing in my place in the sequence of steps of task A.

Oh well. The game is fun enough that starting over is that not huge a deal.

More after the break.

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Beyond this illusion

Obligatory song reference :

That dude looks nothing like I thought he would.

Anyhow, been thinking more about the whole illusion of self thing and the personal issues connected to it lately.

Specifically, looking at the large disconnect between my self-esteem and my actual assets and worth through that lens.

It is my idea of myself – my illusory self – that is infected and compromised by depression. That mirror I am looking at is hopelessly warped and distorted by depression and worse than useless when it comes to giving me any idea of who I really am and what I am really worth.

If I could, I would throw the whole thing out and start over. Rebuild from scratch, like I am doing in Autonauts.

But right now I can’t think of a way to cleanse the doors of consciousness. I don’t have access to the sorts of therapy, religion, or drugs it would take for a clean reboot.

Maybe I could do it with meditation. Stick a pin in that, it might come in handy.

The other way of doing away with the mirror is to simply turn away from it and looks at the world with my own eyes so I can see things as they really are, unfiltered and complete, without the false self getting in the way.

It is an appealing though but also terrifying. After all, if you have believed that the image in the mirror is reality for your entire life until now, looking away from the only reality you know can seem foolish beyond all comprehension.

Giving up known reality for an unknown “higher” one? Madness.

But possibly worth the risk. I know that somehow my issues with looking outside the bright white light of reason are deeply connected to this issue of false self. My Klieg light of a mind is intimately connected with that false mirror of illusory self in some way, and to overcome my flawed false self I must also overcome my faith in what the bright light shows as being the only reality.

I need to wean myself off that dazzling bright light and learn to stop being fascinated by the crystal clear (but completely cold) pictures that mirror captures, and turn around to see the world as it really is, in living color.

It’s going to be one hell of a journey.

But I got nothing better to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.