Imaginal News 7/18/2016: Flickers of Love; Self-Aware Mobs; A New "Weight"

Check out this post on my new blog, A Sea of Glass and Fire.

The imaginal world: the world which everything in our world is a symbol for. Here's what's happening there: 

There is a timbre of love that wasn't there a few days ago. I can't give specific examples, but it is there. People (those with hearts turned the right way) are being kinder. Mercy is being shown to those who need help. 

And yet this is still in the context of a larger struggle. The world remains locked in people's identification with their roles: man, woman, gay, trans, non-binary, or even a person with a single name and set of traits. But this can't happen forever. Identities are defined by their edges, and so they must struggle to keep existing. But they're now locked in their death throes. 

The world is becoming a mob. In Turkey and the Republican National Convention this is very clear, but it's also apparent in Pokemon Go.However, the mob is going to become conscious of itself; the life that flows between us, between our identities, is beginning to wiggle its fingers and toes after a long sleep. 

But mostly, the divine nature of matter or heaviness is still on its way to realizing itself in a way unlike anything that has happened yet. The dust of heaviness in the air is beginning to settle, a bit more this week than last. Divine fire is becoming incarnate in matter. 

Look for more large, violent, massive phenomena in the next bit. This is that heaviness trying to incarnate. You can help by letting it incarnate consciously and on human terms rather than with blind elemental force. Consult your own conscience for this. 

Imaginal News 7/14/2016: Descending Fire and Trapped Rage

Check out this post on my new blog, A Sea of Glass and Fire

Here’s your imaginal news report: the state of the world as seen from theimaginal world, the place where everything that is seen is real, where being is sight. Hopefully what I mean will become clear. Believe everything; doubt nothing.

The gods up on Mount Olympus are beginning to descend into the world of mortals. Or alternatively, divine fire is taking on the shape of human beings. Or more clearly, the various ways that divine love expresses itself (what Swedenborg called “heavenly communities”) are becoming conscious of themselves on earth in a new way.

This means that things are going to get really intense. Divine fire is descending to earth, and that fire figures that we have enough capacity to “hold” it. And they’re right, even though it may not seem like it at first. We’re being baptized by fire, and when we come out, we’ll realize that we can hold it safely within us

Pokemon GO is a manifestation of this fire. It’s wedding heaven and earth in an unprecedented way as love is manifesting between people of all walks of life trying to catch Pokemon. Friends are being made; people are coming out of their shells and coming into the world’s daylight. Activities before done only on the Internet are now being made in the physical world, meaning that the divine world of love in itself (which the Internet reflects) is coming into reality. More specifically, Pokemon GO is the divine reality of communication and connection coming to earth. Hermes is taking on human flesh.

But the fire also comes through in violent ways. With the shootings happening almost daily, a vengeful force from the imaginal world is trying to force her way through where there is no bridge. The truck that rammed into the crowd today in Nice manifests this literally: where there are no bridges between sides, there can only be collisions. The truck could be seen as a metaphor for the force of this extra-human archetype trying to get into our collective crowd of being.

For it is heaviness that we have yet to wed to the connection displayed in Pokemon GO and elsewhere. The divine fire is descending, but the part of that divine fire having to do with forcefulness and inertia isn’t integrated into that descent. Pokemon are bringing people together, but they are incorporeal and pass through our bodies as we see them on the screen. The violence we see in the world manifests inertia and matter’s attempt to wrest its way into our consciousness. Stuff wants to be seen and felt – the density and heaviness of dirt, flesh, and bark.

What does this look like? I’d say it’s the Devouring Mother, the force of instinctual wisdom and terrible power that we have repressed and kept captive for millennia. She is crying from the dust of our ignorance (ignore-ance), and these outbursts of violence are ways that she forces us to pay attention. She can’t do anything else; since we repress her, she is unconscious, and she cannot reason and plan like a conscious being can. She is the force of matter, the divinity of life in its rhythms and pulsation that we don’t pay attention to, what women know by instinct but is ignored by our masculine culture.

Her anger is only her shadow side, though, the side of her that shows without the light of consciousness. We only see her anger because she doesn’t have the luxury of consciously knowing her own depths. We are the mirror in which she can do that. By listening to the hum of the ground and the the blood in our veins, we can finally begin to give her the consciousness she craves. So doing, the force of matter can burst its way into the world with unprecedented force.

Donald Trump manifests a masculine force fighting from her anger. He’s what Jungians would call the “animus of the anima” a force coming out from the dark cave of the Mother’s hollow body. He’s fighting against what makes sense; he violates all our modern cultural propriety, which of course none of us really have. He, ISIS, and the policemen who shoot unarmed black men are manifesting a very primordial, unconscious rage against rationality and consciousness limited by a defensive ego. When these nonsensical things happen, the Devouring Mother shows us that we all hide an unconscious violence held captive since an earlier age. With her, these repressed unconscious energies can be acted out so we can consciously recognize them. That way the Mother can become conscious.

The Hermes figure manifesting in Pokemon GO and the odd connections happening alongside it can help with this. Maybe if we catch enough Geodudes, he can evolve into something that will help Her rise from the dust…

Anyway, that’s that for the imaginal news report. I’ll try to do these often.

The End of Thinghood

I recently got the impression that a bright, divine light is exerting a lot of pressure on the physical world, and I want to explain how that can be true even in this age of shootings, riots, and reality-TV-star presidential candidates.

The physical world is the world of things, and “things” are any real beings that have an identity distinct from other things. You as a person, with a name, birth date, and identity, are a thing. I, as Christian Swenson, am a thing. Everything (or “every thing”) that you can point to in the world is a thing, since by giving it an identity distinct from everything else, you’re separating it from the vast expanse of Being when seen apart from definition.

However, the light that’s putting pressure on the physical world isn’t a thing. It’s what’s real apart from things. This bright light is therefore beyond the world, since the world is a thing, and the light is very literally the absence of things. This doesn’t mean that the light is nothing, at least not in the normal sense of the world. The real nothing is no-thing: not dark but instead overpoweringly bright. It’s bright because, unlike things, its being doesn’t belong to itself, since (as a no-thing) “it” has no “self.” As with all light, it gives without taking; it is giving; it is love.

Since the light is whatever is real apart from boundaries and definition, when I say that it’s putting pressure on the physical world of things, I mean that every “thing” is engaged in a struggle to maintain its stable identity, its thinghood. The walls around things are heavily cracked, and eventually nothing (no thing) will be able to exist in its own stable sense of self. Speicifically, the light pressing in on the world has been apparent for at least the last fifteen years. 9/11 announced that vertical hierarchies around the world were in the process of crashing down, and the ever-increasing fervor of the gay rights movement brought this collapse even further. A hierarchy is another name for a thing; hierarchies are what “stick out” from the sea of Being by claiming that they own themselves. As such, any claim to autonomy and self-ownership is dying. You saw this first with corporations and governments , but eventually even individual people will look in the mirror and find that they don’t recognize what they see there. None of us will belong to ourselves; there will be no “selves” to belong to.

Another way of explaining my intuition is saying that each “thing” is in the process of unraveling. Every thing is a combination not just of other things, but more importantly of forces that pass like rivers between things. Things are not just made of being; they are more importantly made of becoming. As such, they will never be “finished,” even if things necessarily believe that they are complete in themselves. To say that light is pressing in upon the world is to say that the dynamic forces which compose things are becoming conscious of themselves in a new way. No longer needing the fixed mirror of things to see themselves, those forces will begin recognizing their being in-between things, in the process of movement and relationship itself. 

As such, the world is bound to divide into two camps: those who embrace their no-thing-ness and those who stubbornly cling to their thinghood. The more the no-thing camp is true to its own position, the more it will seem naive, open-minded, and odd all at once. On the other hand, those in the “thing” camp will give off an air of arrogance, certainty, and condescension. The forerunners of the former camp, the camp of no-thing-ness, already exist in a place you may not expect: pop culture fandoms. Fandoms, whether of Doctor Who, Sherlock, or Supernatural, are hints of what religion may become in the coming generations. Members of these fandoms devote much of their time to media franchises, even though they know that their franchise isn’t “real.” And yet, Doctor Who is unreal only because it isn’t a real “thing.” However, Doctor Who is a real force, since it produces effects in people’s minds from entertainment to amusement to suicide prevention. To devote one’s time to one of these fandoms is to devote one’s time to its reality as a no-thing, as light. So as the light presses upon the world of things, you’ll get people taking the world less and less seriously. 

However, those who cling to the world of things will become more and more embittered in response to the influx of no-thing-ness’s light. People will spout hatred on social media more and more, and public shootings will continue to increase. However, these flashes of hatred are signs that the world is getting better, not worse. The thing-camp, whether in ISIS, Black Lives Matter, or gridlocked political leaders, are responding to the light’s threat. Thinghood is dying, and things are giving all their ammunition to defend their way of being. They will make it seem as though the world is decaying, but really it’s only the world of things that’s decaying, and they’re trying to reproduce in you some of the fear they feel themselves. Don’t fall for it; they won’t succeed. Eventually, the thing-camp will become so absurdly critical and bombastic that anyone selfless won’t be afraid but, instead, get amused.

You can see the contrast between these two camps even in last week’s events. Within a single week, we’ve had two major cultural events: Philando Castlile’s and Alton Sterling’s death by shooting and the subsequent outrage, and the release of Pokemon GO. It sounds insensitive to imply that these two events are comparably important, but that’s only because we don’t yet have enough perspective to see the effect Pokemon GO will have on the world of culture. With this simple video game, the world of forces or no-thing-ness and the world of things marry themselves in our cultural perception for the very first time. Though Pokemon aren’t real things, Pokemon GO lays the tracks for a way of being that doesn’t care about things’ reality. Instead, we have begun seeing the physical world only as a metaphor for the forces that can (only) manifest through it. Catching a Charmander in my driveway sets the light loose, since by doing so I see through the physical world to the forces of becoming that act through it. In other words, catching Pokemon is  a way to act without re-acting to world of things. However, the reactions to the aforementioned shootings are reactive to the extreme. Both sides fearfully see the other side as a thing, but by doing so they both unkowningly bring through forces of fear and hatred. The way forward is to simply leave the fray and turn the other cheek. The exodus from things has begun, and you can either walk safely amid the no-thing’s forces or get drowned by them.

If you believe me, you shouldn’t. Don’t take this post as gospel, but instead as an impulse to thought. Don’t look at it as a thing; look to the forces within it and follow them to where they want to go. In fact, do that with everything. So doing, you’ll help the light break through even more.

My Dream about Joseph Smith, Swedenborg, and Fallout 4

If you read the post on my dream about the Book of Mormon and a wedding from last September, you'll know that when I accidentally fall asleep on the couch in my family's living room, I'll often have very vivid dreams. So guess what? I fell asleep there again, and I had another vivid, enlightening dream, this time involving Joseph Smith, Emanuel Swedenborg, and the recently released video game Fallout 4.

It looks like these kinds of "dream posts" might become a regular feature on my blog. So let me clarify some things on how I'll go about them: first, don't expect any too intimate personal details about my life. If you can figure them out from the dream itself, good for you, but I won't put them into the interpretation. After all, James Hillman said that dreams are necessarily polyvalent or mean multiple things, so I'll only "extract" the parts having to do with the world at large. Second, know that I'm not really "interpreting" the dream, per se. It's more like I'm letting the dream interpret life, so that it teaches us what's important about life and lets us think of it in new ways. And finally, like the last post, I'll edit out the names of anyone you might know from real life whose image pops up in the dream. It might be embarrassing for them otherwise, after all.

So without further ado, here's the dream:

I'm in a dark, under-construction place like the theater when it was getting new seats. We're in groups of people putting on skits, each one supposed to demonstrate to the others what we've learned. Eventually it comes time for our group to perform next, but I realize that--even though we've made a vague outline--we're not ready. So we decide to go to Diamond City [the main settlement in Fallout 4], where we'll go on the radio station and broadcast our skit, which is now a song, to the whole Wasteland. When we get there, the host has already started playing our song, and he says that we're called "The Eagles," a name which he says is offensive, but he doesn't really care. But it's just dead air. When we get there, we tell him to stop so we can actually perform the song. He delays a bit, when I realize that the dead air was actually music to which we could improvise lyrics. So I pen them down quickly and tell everyone to harmonize with me. It works. Going away from the radio station and Diamond City, our group goes up a hill toward a mountain, hoping to go beyond the Wasteland entirely. But a woman stops us, saying that "you can't travel in time!" She lassoes the rest of the group, but I press onward nonetheless. She tries to catch up with me, but I startle her by observing that she's the late Billy Mays' daughter. She grudgingly follows me up the mountain, poking fun at the fact that I can't ascend as easily as I would like. But she lends her "Endurance" to me (another Fallout 4 reference), so that our scores combine together. Near the top, I almost can't make it and consider turning back. But then the woman tells me to take the Swedenborg book I'd been holding in my left hand and put it in my backpack, so I can use both hands for climbing. I do that, and before we know it, we're at the final stop before the last ascent. The place is green and nicely paved, with a clear blue sky very different fromt the Wasteland below. It's called "Swedenborg's Landing." There's a church on this landing which I go into, where I read a book on the altar which talks about a sculpture somewhere in Utah that depicts Joseph Smith reaching through a veil to Swedenborg. It says that Joseph Smith and Swedenborg were both efforts by the "heaven" side of the veil to reach the "femme fatale" that is the earth itself. The book also gives a map of North America about 10,000 years ago, when humans were just starting to flow in. There was a lot more water there, then, and I realize that those humans must have been Swedenborg's "Earliest Church."

This dream paints a picture of the human condition in the world: we are in the darkness of earthly matter, almost as if we were underground, away from the light of heaven. It's like the Wasteland of Fallout 4--the world has fallen away from what it once was, and all that's left is a dusty, dirty husk. We're all in a theater: a place where we as fallen beings try to re-enact higher principles that we learn here like actors. In that way we're enacting Swedenborg's "Doctrine of Correspondences:" since the universe is a "theater representative of the spiritual world," we need to act out the right roles. But we've messed up, missed the boat, squandered our time, as I think many of us have.This is sin: acting out the wrong roles or forgetting that this lower existence, this "wasteland" is a play at all, the definition of idolatry (not seeing the role in the actor but only seeing the actor).

The "Diamond City" we go to is what one Fallout 4 character calls "the great green jewel of the Commonwealth." It's a refuge of life and of growth in the middle of the earth's wasteland, vividly green despite the drab colors everywhere else, a lot like the enclaves of human love and spirit in a fallen world. And when we go to a radio station hoping that someone will hear our song, it's like prayer: going to a sacred place in my heart (green, according to the chakra color scheme, a color which some medieval thinkers associated with the Holy Spirit), where I can send a message directly above the commotion of this world to God. And while in that central, green broadcasting place, even though we don't know any songs, we astonishingly realize that we have music given to us already. This music is the subtle life behind everything (what some might call "energy" and is doctrinally "The Light of Christ"), and the improvised lyrics correspond to the way a person can adapt his or her actions, words, and thoughts to fit the spirit of the situation. Because this works well in the dream, maybe improvisation is the best way to follow the Spirit.

Afterwards, when we try to go up toward the highest place in the area, we're hoping that we can commune with what lies there: God, heaven, the light, or perhaps even that music. But there is a woman there who tries to stop us, who tells us that we'd be breaking the laws of time by going up there. She is a personification of the rigidity of earth-life itself--the earth as a woman (as the earth is often seen), but a strict, embittered one. When she lassoes us old-west style, she's acting out the archetypal "Devouring Mother," the variety of the mother/earth principle that wants to absorb all development back into herself. But, of course, I escape her snare. I tell her that she's Billy Mays' daughter, meaning that she's very practical, efficient, and cheap, like his products (that is, not concerned with higher things). She--as the earth--is now exclusively focused on solutions and efficiency: time, in other words. She resents timelessness, and she wants to stop all of us from getting to the timeless.

This isn't how she naturally is, though. She's fallen: she's the daughter of Zion, but she hasn't yet arisen from the dust (the dust of the Wasteland). She's still stuck in literalism, bound by "the collective gaze of our idolatry." So I lead her out, despite her resentment. She follows me up the mountain, both of us coming closer and closer to God. She can do the ascent if she wanted to; she's capable enough, but she just doesn't want to go there. In other words, the earth can ascend to its purified state, but it's stuck in its ways; we have to help lead her out. She goes with me because she wants to capture me, but she becomes fonder of me as we go. When she lends me some of her "endurance," the earth is giving me some of her "soul" and lets both of us ascend as one, each bringing the other up to God. And eventually (symbolized by putting the book in my backpack) we have to give up pursuing knowledge and instead bear that knowledge, using our hands to climb instead of researching how to climb.

Swedenborg's Landing" is the place where Swedenborg "landed," where he met with heaven, where heaven met with him, and where he meets anyone who wants to follow his visionary example. The statue I read about there depicts Joseph Smith reaching through the veil to Swedenborg, almost as if he wanted to bring the two sides of the veil together. Swedenborg was excellent at "seeing through" the spiritual world: he taught about the hidden meaning of the Bible, what was beyond its veil. But this isn't very practical, and the incredibly small numbers of Swedenborg's modern followers testify to Swedenborg's lack of practical appeal. When Joseph Smith said, in real life, that "Emanuel Swedenborg had a view of the world to come, but for daily food he perished," it strikes me as possible that he was talking about dense and esoteric Swedenborg is. So in this dream, Joseph is reaching to that hidden meaning across the veil while standing firmly in this world, bringing the hidden meaning down and incarnating it in terms that everyday people can understand. He's doing what Swedenborg could not do: reconciling the actual, concrete earth to the hidden meanings of things beyond the veil, as if through synthesis (like when I shared my "endurance" with the earth-woman). This manifests in the way he didn't distinguish between the symbolic (heavenly) and the literal (earthly), but treated the literal as symbolic and vice versa, infusing each with the other's value.

The bit about the earth being a "femme fatale" is a particularly clever move by the dream. It's talking about the woman whom I brought up and who brought me up, the feminine being who's focused on fatality and fatalism: the limits of time, space, and causation. I bring her out of that, and in that way I re-enact Swedenborg and Joseph Smith's purpose according to the dream. They're supposed to bring the earth out from hiding in its fatalistic imprisonment to the freedom of high places. This would redeem the Wasteland: it would renew the earth and bring the physical up to meet the spiritual.

The last bit of the dream talks about something else in that book: North America as it was first populated. This implicitly references the Book of Mormon, and I knew at the time that it was also talking about Swedenborg's "Earliest Church," whom he says are the paradisiacal first state of humans in history, whom I identify with pre-historic hunter-gatherers (like those who crossed the Bering Strait into North America). So what I gather from this dream is that, like Joseph Smith's synthesis, it brings together the symbolic meaning of the "Lehites" (Nephites and Lamanites) in the Book of Mormon with that of the Earliest Church: they are both what "comes out" from God, what descends from what would later be called Swedenborg's Landing to the promised land, which would become a Wasteland.

In sum, it's our job to redeem that Wasteland, to help the woman personifying it rise up toward God, to "arise from the dust" and meet her husband at Swedenborg's landing, where heaven meets earth and they become one. And this is already underway, if my dream means anything.

Why Halloween is Still about the Dead

Hello, all! Halloween is upon us once again, and I just realized that I've never really done a Halloween post. So why not do it right now?

Halloween is the time of year when we think most about the abnormal. From haunted houses to costumes to skeletons on the lawn, October 31st calls on us to abandon our traditional ideas of what's proper and explore different ways of being. The concept of "death" is also a big part of Halloween, but this preoccupation with death is really just another version of the abnormal focus Halloween does best. In so many words, Halloween is what shows us the "underside" of human reality, the side of it opposite to the one we normally see.

Knowing this, what gets me about our culture's idea of Halloween in contrast to, say, Mexico's Day of the Dead is that our idea of death is almost unanimously associated with horror and the macabre. Just watch any zombie or ghost movie and you'll see what I mean. Why is this the case? I'd wager that it's because we as a culture are terrified of death. Or perhaps more clearly, we're so terrified that we put it out of our mind and give it no thought, like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand.

But in addition to the way we ignore death, we also ignore the dead. Most people outside the LDS church (and many within it, I'm sure) have no idea who their ancestors are past their first set of grandparents. This means that there are legions of the dead who aren't remembered at all, something I'm sure doesn't lack consequences. If there's one idea that occurs in cultures the world over, it's that the dead demand our memory of them, and we have come up drastically short in that department.

The dead aren't just buried in the ground, and they aren't just invisible wisps of air floating here and there. No, the dead are within us and between us. Swedenborg says this, as does psychologist Carl Jung when he writes in his Red Book about...:

"...the dead, not just your dead, that is, all the images of the shapes you took in the past, which your ongoing life has left behind, but also the thronging dead of human history, the ghostly procession of the past, which is an ocean compared to the drops of your own life span. I see behind you, behind the mirror of your eyes, the crush of dangerous shadows, the dead, who look greedily through the empty sockets of your eyes, who moan and hope to gather up through you all the loose ends of the ages which sigh in them. Your cluelessness does not prove anything. Put your ear to that wall and you will hear the rustling of their procession.

As with Halloween, the dead dwell on the side of life we don't see: the underside, even the under-world. And to avoid literalizing the whole thing, the dead aren't just actual departed human beings, but anything and everything which exists but to which we haven't given heed. Among these dead, I think, is the "soul" belonging to animals, to the world, to fiction, and even to things. Yes, you heard me right. Psychologist James Hillman even talks about how "inanimate" objects resent the way we treat them as soul-less in his work Alchemical Psychology:

"Technology is cursed by our mechanical idea of it. It is the great repressed, the unconscious, the realm of the dead, forced to carry the egocentric unimaginative demands we put on it: labor-saving, cost-efficiency, productivity, uniformity, speed. It may break down--only wear out and be thrown away....These things have taken their revenge. The repressed alsways does, by insinuating our notion of them into our notion of ourselves: ourselves as mechanical functions, assemblies of parts, enduring stress and friction, attempting objectivity, until we, too, oxidize in 'burn-out.'"

The dead today rest uneasily. We have given them no thought and no heed, and, as a result, they "stand behind [us], panting from rage and despair at the fact that [our] stupor does not attend to them" (again from the Red Book). Ideally the dead and the living should stand side by side, each helping one another and each interpenetrating with the other's world. But people today don't even think about death, let alone offer the dead propitiation.

I believe that the dead have resorted to forcefully interposing their will on us. This has happened time and time again throughout history--whenever something is forgotten, the corresponding dead rise up and force us to remember them. Think of World War I and how it almost mockingly replaced the propriety of Victorian Europe with an influx of new culture and ideas. In the years surrounding the war, everything changed: this is when Jung wrote his Red Book, when Joyce wrote Ulysses, when Picasso started painting, and when all those stodgy Victorian values evaporated in a flash of shorter skirts and jazz music. I wouldn't be the first person to say that that surge in culture came about by means of the dead from ages past, breaking in through the hole in our consciousness that was the Great War.

They're doing this again today. What our cultural images of a "zombie apocalypse" represent is our unconscious recognition that our way of life is unsustainable, that the dead want acknowledgment from our hearts and mind. But what would this involve? Could it be that--like zombies--they want us to participate in the dead's secret life, to "become-dead?" If true, their subtlest trick would be to come and influence us on that day of the year that was always theirs: Halloween. Originally a day to honor the dead, they--as the repressed, the unconscious--have snuck into our celebration by getting us to honor them more than on any other day. When else do we give up our identity to act out an identity that is neither proper, ours, or even possible? When else do so many people give up their sense of propriety to explore, to dance, to party? Halloween is still the day it has always been--it's when the dead join the living as equals.

But can we extend this principle by, to paraphrase Ebenezer Scrooge, keeping the spirit of Halloween with us all the year? Maybe instead of dressing up as a cat, a potato, or Captain America we can try always remember the soul of the cat, the object, and the fiction, acknowledging their life, their soul, their spirit. Maybe we can always be willing to "try on" new identities, never regarding ours as fixed but only as a costume itself. For beneath all of our masks lay the dead, with us always, and always having a share in our life. Let's remember them on this day of the dead.

Everyday Phenomenology: Netflix

In this post I'm going to return to my "Everyday Phenomenology" series of posts, this time looking at the experience of watching Netflix.

Choosing a show to watch

The first thing I experience when logging onto Netflix is the menu screen, and it immediately confronts me with a wide variety of titles to choose from. And I do mean wide; from TV dramas to foreign films to horror movies, Netflix has more choices than I could ever hope to watch in a year, let alone in a single night. This variety stuns me like a deer in the headlights. When I face this menu screen, I feel almost hesitant to pick something, as though more depended on my choice than a simple night of binge watching. This leads to the many nights I've spent just debating with my friends and family members what we should watch.

Here, I'm actually afraid of committing to a single choice. Staying on the menu screen seems--at least for a time--more desirable than actually picking something. In fact, I feel this way because the menu screen is really just immense possibility, and I give up that potential for limited actuality when I press the remote to choose something. To think: in the next forty-five minutes, I could watch dozens of completely different TV shows! But if I make a decision, I only get to watch one. It might seem silly to think that infinite potential can rival reality (however limited), but it happens.

If you read my tabletop role playing phenomenology post, you might remember my discussion of Ananke, the Greek personification of Necessity as a cosmic principle. Necessity is what must be, that which "is what it is." When I hesitate on Netflix's menu screen, I'm really afraid of Necessity. I don't want to be something specific or concrete, even when it comes to something as insignificant as at TV show--I'd rather have the promise or potential of watching everything. And yet I must choose something, or else I've wasted an evening.

Can we see a parallel to life in a broader sense? If I have a wealth of many different talents, I might be tempted to dabble a bit in each of them without committing to any one. But this would be a mistake. To paraphrase Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise Von Franz, to be something in actuality is to give up being everything in potential. I have to "grow down;" if I want to stay in the "hub" or "menu screen" of life, I'll just end up wasting my energy by spreading out to things too widely to make a difference in the world.

This begs the question: could giving up broad potential for limited reality in this way be a reason we "came to earth" in the first place? As a part of the Mormon tradition of pre-existence, we believe that we abandoned a life with God to inhabit limited bodies on earth. This was necessary to our development--we couldn't have progressed any other way. But perhaps the reason finite earth-life helps us develop is because even finite actuality is better than infinite potential. Instead of living "up there" where we can see everything but participate in none of it, we give up our transcendent perspective to get into the thick of things, to make a difference, even if it's only in a small way.

Binge watching

But there's another aspect of Netflix: binge watching. In a way that would have been impractical for earlier generations, we can now watch episodes of TV shows for hours on end, maybe even finishing a whole season in a day or two. Binge watching has become so commonplace that everyone knows what it means; if it were just one word, the dictionary could have added it by now. Binge watching seems impractical, though. It's not immediately clear why I keep watching episode after episode for hours, even though I know I need sleep for work the next morning? What brings about this lack of self-control?

While a big part of binge watching has to do with cliffhangers and finding out "what happens next," that explanation doesn't get to all of it. I've seen people regularly binge watch story-of-the-week sitcoms, after all. I'd actually argue that we binge watch because the relation between past and future is uneasy for us. When I watch the beginning episodes of a TV show I like, I feel captivated by it. There's an aspect of that show that touches me, excites me, or makes me laugh, and suddenly I think "I want more of that." But I can't just watch that episode again; I know what happens, and re-watching it wouldn't even compare to how new and exciting it struck me when I watched it for the first time. So I watch another episode in hopes that it will give me the same feelings.

Apart from cliffhangers and such, binge watching is really about trying to find old joy dressed in new clothes. I want the same feelings of laughter, excitement, or tenderness to come again, but I want the episode I watch to be just different enough that I can see those feelings anew. I want the same emotional substance with a different form; I want the soul of the experience reincarnated in a new body. But of course this doesn't always happen. A TV show like Heroes, one with a captivating first season that subsequently became lackluster, disappoints me when I try to recapture the excitement I had before. Sadly, the emotional heart of the experience is gone, and I've run out of episodic "bodies" in which it can show itself to me.

Binge watching is therefore a tragedy--whether the TV show ends with a bang or a whimper, it will eventually end, and so the feelings I gleaned from it will eventually disappear, maybe never to return. However, there is at least one way the feeling can come back: re-watching the TV show with a friend who hasn't seen it yet. By watching it with her, I can vicariously relive the joy I experienced when I first watched it, "seeing" that joy through her eyes. This also has a profound corollary in "real life": as poets and songwriters have explained, having a child is one of the ways I can relive childhood anew.

Anyway, that's it for this post. Happy binge watching!

3-D Truth: A Doctor Who Parable

Guess what, everyone? Doctor Who, my favorite TV show on the air, premieres its ninth series tonight!

Partying aside, I think it's the perfect time for me to write a post I've had stewing in my head for a long time: a blog post about the nature of truth, using an episode from Doctor Who's last season (the one called Flatline) as a metaphor.

Invaders from Flatland

The basic premise of Flatline is that a race of aliens from a two-dimensional universe (think Flatland) has invaded our three-dimensional universe. Though it isn't clear at first, they're pretty nasty, and they mean business.

See that red design on the wall there? The Doctor explains that it's a human nervous system, taken from a human being the 2-D aliens have "sucked" into the floor, "flattened," and dissected. That's not a way I want to go. But ignoring the macabre details of what must have happened, I think that these 2-D aliens have a profound lesson to teach us, and that's because I think they're a metaphor for us.

On 3-D truth

What do I mean? Well, in a way we're two-dimensional beings. When I look at a tree, I can only see a 2-D "snapshot" of one side at a time; I can only ever intuit the tree's 3-D nature by walking around it and looking at all the angles. But here's the thing: that means we never see the tree as it actually is. In fact, we never see anything as it actually is; whether it's a toad, a spoon, or my grandmother, I can only ever see one "face" of a 3-D thing at time, and so its complete nature is hidden from me.

That doesn't stop us, however. Like the aliens in Doctor Who, we stumble into a higher-dimensional world trying to capture it, to dissect it, to "pin it down." Whether in technology, business, or science (especially science), the human protocol for the last few hundred years has been to a) assume that--if we try hard enough--we can know anything, and b) poke, prod, dissect, and disassemble everything in that pursuit. But the whole effort is completely misguided. Like the famous story about blind men examining an elephant, no one perspective of the way things are is ever true. Period. What looks a certain way from one perspective looks completely different from another perspective. So if we try to develop a grand "theory of everything," we're then doing exactly what those 2-D aliens were doing: violently trying to subject three-dimensional reality to our two-dimensional perspective.

What should we do, then? Simply be content to "circumspect" reality, to circle around it enough that you can intuit its nature without ever being able to "say" how it is. And what happens when you do this is amazing--you realize that seemingly contradictory ideas don't have to exclude one another; they can both be true at once. Just as Joseph Smith said, "by proving contraries, truth is made manifest," we can know real truth once we learn to think on both sides of a contradiction, to leap those boundaries with ease.

Anyway, that's it for my epistemological rant. Happy Who-day!

Everyday Phenomenology: Tabletop Role Playing

For the next post in my series on phenomenology, I want to analyze what it's like to play tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.

For anybody who isn't familiar with games like "D&D," I'll explain what goes in a typical play session. A group of players sit around a table where each member of the group has a set of dice like the ones pictured above, and they all try to tell a story together using those dice. Someone called the GM or "Game Master" (DM or Dungeon Master in Dungeons and Dragons) helps the game work by coming up with a setting, a story, and characters. If you've heard of video games like The Elder Scrolls series--where a person "levels up" a character after getting experience points--know that the ideas behind that kind of gameplay came directly from D&D and other tabletop RPGs. All video game RPGs owe them a debt.

If you're interested in some of my role-playing exploits, in the sidebar to the right there's a link to one of my other blogs, where I try to record the RPG campaigns I've been a part of. In the most recent one, I'm the GM!

The dice as Necessity

I'll begin my analysis by pointing out that tabletop role playing is only fun because there are dice. Without the chance and risk of failure they give, things would fall apart in one of two ways: first, it could put pressure on the GM to decide who succeeds or fails, and second, it could make everything too safe and easy. In the first case, hostility could easily break out between the players and the GM because they think she's either playing favorites or being too cruel. In the second, the story is way too bland; my character succeeds at everything he does, leaving the players with something not much better than a half-rate improv game.

The dice avoid both these possible issues by bringing risk and honesty to the game. But I'd say that "risk" and "honesty" are actually two sides of the same coin (or die?) and suggest that they're both aspects of something I'll call "Necessity." The word "Necessity" comes from a combination of the Latin words "ne- " (as in "not") and "cedere," which means "to yield." Essentially, what is necessary doesn't yield to my whims or ambitions, because "it is what it is." The Greek word for Necessity is ananke, also the name for its personification as a goddess, and has a few other nuances of meaning. For instance, Plato writes in his Timaeus that Nous, a personification of reason or mind, co-created the universe with Ananke:

This ordered world is of mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union between Necessity [Ananke] and Intellect [Nous]. Intellect prevailed over Necessity by persuading it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best, and the result of this subjugation of Necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of the universe.

From this point of view, everything in the universe is a "mix" between Intellect, Necessity, and the many ways they appear in tandem: order and chaos, mind and matter, meaning and absurdity, etc. The first one is what's under our control, what we can influence by our thoughts and deliberate actions; the second one is what escapes our control, what happens despite our intentions and best-laid plans. What's interesting is that this dichotomy between Intellect and Necessity essentially reintroduces the close relationship between player and dice in RPGs. Like life's Necessity, the dice lend a lack of control to the game by giving obstacles and challenges the players didn't choose. And like Intellect (at least the way Plato thinks of it), my will as a player lets me decide what actions or skill rolls I want to try, even if Necessity's dice don't let me succeed at it.

There's a further parallel in Plato's famous "Myth of Er," a story about an ancient soldier's near-death experience. Near the end of the tale, he writes about Er's experience watching departed souls get to "pick" which life they would live next in their cycle of reincarnation. Each of these souls has a "lot" given to them by Necessity--one that somehow both determines and is determined by their character on earth--which gives them their choice of "lives" to pick from. When each soul had picked a single life to live for their next pass through the world, each of the Fates (Necessity's daughters) does her part to make its choice fixed and irreversible.

What amazes me here is the similarity this process has to the way I've made characters in tabletop RPGs: I go to the Game Master beforehand and use a few dice rolls to determine my character's "stats" (numbers representing things like Intelligence, Strength, and Charisma) much in the same way that a soul coming to the world gets to choose from its lot of lives. If I get seven numbers with seven rolls, I could assign any of those numbers to any "stat:" I could have an 18 in Intelligence and a 3 in Strength just as much as I could have a 3 in Intelligence and an 18 in Strength. But even when we've begun the game (by parallel, when the Fates have already made my choice "necessary" or permanent), many of my actions depend on those stats for a good chance of success. In other words, Necessity has a big role to play the whole way through. Because she determines my traits and whether I succeed or fail at any given action, you could say that Ananke is actually the patron goddess of the role-playing game.

The dice as my limitations

But apart from our mythical digression, what does this mean phenomenologically? I'd suggest that when we play tabletop RPGs, we're recreating essential features of human life as we experience it. What I called Necessity is the part of my life I don't choose--what Adam S. Miller identifies with grace and what Heidegger might have called "facticity": things like my race, sex, personality, or even things like my test scores, choice in partners, etc. The crucial role dice play in role-playing games like D&D shows the importance Necessity has in our lives. If I got to choose the outcome for every action I undertake, life would quickly become dull and lose its meaning. Even if I got to choose my "stats" at the beginning of life (without Necessity limiting my "lot," that is), a world full of Albert Einsteins and Michael Jordans would lose its appeal just as quickly as one without in-the-moment surprise. Tabletop RPGs remind us that the parts of life we didn't choose are as important--if not more so--than the parts we do; without Necessity's apparently meaningless restrictions, meaning itself wouldn't have the contrast it needs to appear.

For example, I implied in a recent post on my blog "Introspecting Autism" that I'm at least partially defined by my limitations as someone with high-functioning autism. If I didn't have the problems with social skills and connection it gave me, I couldn't have become the thinker I am today simply because I wouldn't have had any "food" to feed my intellectual imagination. To put it a different way, the weaknesses I had as a high-functioning autistic gave me something to "work with," and that "something" led me to places I wouldn't have gone if the "material" I worked on had been different. This material is my Necessity; it's what life gave to me from the very start, and though I can't get rid of that Necessity, the greatest parts of my life grow out of it. I guess you could say that my autism is like a "stat" I rolled before my life's RPG campaign started. Despite my handicap, my life's story wouldn't have the same without it.

The Game Master as an "opening"

But the players and the dice aren't the only two elements present in a game session--the GM or Game Master has just an important part to play. If I played an RPG by myself, I might have the dice to work against me as a foil, but it still wouldn't be interesting. The GM gives the RPG campaign a place for the dice and the players to meaningfully interact, since if she isn't present, there isn't any context for the risk of failure that the dice can give. Context is the key word here. Without a context, the players and the dice butt heads directly, and there isn't anything there to make it seem like there's something more there than just players and dice, to suspend their disbelief.

The GM brings about a "separation" between players and dice by making a fictional world that acts as a contextual backdrop for my skill rolls. While I'm still there on the table playing with dice, the GM makes it so I can pretend I'm somewhere else, that I'm, say, a gnome bard and that the dice are just the way the universe works. To put it visually, imagine that the dice and the player are naturally together at the table, but that the GM inserts the game world as a wide space or opening between the two. This lets me forget that I'm so-and-so person playing such-and-such game, at least in a sense. The GM, therefore, does magic, in a way: like Moses parting the Red Sea, she forces apart the dice and the player so that I can enjoy the world in the space he opened up.

But what is this "opening," really? It's what lets the player and the dice interact in a way that I can forget the player is a player and the dice are dice. It's what must exist in order for there to be an in-game world because without it I can't suspend my disbelief enough to forget the physical room I'm in. You could thus say that the in-game world springs into life between the player and the dice. Moreover, the in-game world can only come to life in that way if the GM facilitates it. The GM is the "opener;" she expands the gaming table into a whole world and makes me into a rogue "bibliomancer" or a fast-talking detective.

To put it in still another way, the GM puts a veil between the player and the dice. But this veil and the in-game world aren't different: the world is the veil. But isn't it weird that the image of a "veil" and an "opening" work just as well to describe the GM's role, even though one reveals and the other conceals? Actually, the GM reveals by concealing; by pointing my attention away from the physical game room, she points it to the in-game world.

This has a parallel in the philosopher Martin Heidegger's writings. Pointing out that the Greek word for truth aletheia really means "un-" ("a-") "-covering" ("-letheia"), he teaches that truth isn't just a correct idea of things as they are, but the revelation of Being. Truth takes what is there but still concealed and "shows" it, letting it reveal itself to itself. He also writes that the aletheia of truth rests upon the lethe of "concealment," meaning that truth as revelation relies on what is concealed as its "earth" or ground.

Rolling the dice as consulting NecessityIn gaming terms, aletheia is the GM's opening, because it reveals the game's world to the players who had the raw material to bring that world about. As that opening gives the context for the in-game world to appear, no one can know the physical world without truth or aletheia. And just as aletheia can't exist without the concealment of lethe, the game world can't exist without "normal" physical people and physical dice.

If the dice correspond to life's Necessity and the Game Master corresponds to the "opening" that lets life appear to me in the first place, what does roll the dice correspond to? From what I've said so far, it follows that it represents my conscious will "checking" with my Necessity to see if I can succeed at a given task. Let's say I try my best on a standardized test. Will I succeed at it? Using the RPG as a lens to "read" that situation, you could say that it depends on what Necessity--or the dice--have in mind. Though I have a "stat" that makes me good at tests, Necessity could give me a number that makes it so I fail. Or vice versa: even if I didn't study at all, I could get really lucky. In any scenario where something is up to "chance" (which is pretty much everything), you could say that my will (me as a player) is asking Necessity if I'll succeed (rolling the dice). And though it's really this interaction between Intellect and Necessity or Nous and Ananke going on, the world's opening (the GM) gives me enough context to see that supernatural meeting in terms of everyday life.

In a way I guess you could say that the dice give us the game's story. We go to the dice like diviners using the I Ching or consulting tea leaves, asking them what will happen. But instead of using them to figure out what will happen, we use the dice to make it happen. Perhaps this way of looking at the world is the true meaning behind the Greek philosopher Heraclitus's enigmatic saying:

"Time is a game played beautifully by children."

Anyway, that about wraps up what I have to say. Thanks for reading!

Everyday Phenomenology: Profanity

For my next post, I want to talk about the phenomenology of swearing or profanity.

Though I mostly missed the experience of vulgar language in my private middle school and charter high school, I encountered it full force when I went on to study at Westminster College, where many students and even some professors used "swear words" up to and including "f***" (I'm not writing the actual word so that any filters on young readers' internet connections don't block out my blog). It was there that I really started to see profanity in its true colors. And here's a secret: those colors aren't all "bad." We'll get to why that is as we proceed.

Swearing as shock

Let's start with an obvious observation: people swear to get an effect. This is true in all uses of curse words, even if it isn't immediately obvious how so. For instance, when I stub my toe on a rock and say "dammit!," I use that word to "announce" my pain, or rather, to best communicate that pain to those around me. But why do I feel like I need to get across my pain, and why does swearing do the job better than anything else? It's because swear words carry the "shock" of shock value, and therefore because the power in those words corresponds to the pain I'm feeling.

There is a hidden implication here: that--since I need to use the shock value of a swear word to communicate my pain's energy--I feel a need to communicate that energy. To put it another way, I have an innate desire to feel connected to the emotions and thoughts around me. If that weren't the case, I wouldn't feel compelled to announce it. This has a few consequences, first and foremost that I think of it as normal and natural to exist in a continuous, "at-one" state with the people around me. This turns up in the toe-stubbing example because the pain I feel negates that basic sense of oneness with the people in the room. I personally feel less of a desire to swear when I stub my toe in private (that is, less than I would around others), but it is actually still there a bit. Why? I think it's because basic human nature includes a feeling of "pre-sensory togetherness" with others (or rather, a togetherness that I sense as more fundamental or "internal" than sensation), which includes even the potential of someone hearing. In other words, I feel that I naturally should be "together with" those around me, and when I feel a pain that threatens that togetherness, I announce my pain with swear words to correct it.

Swearing as aggression

I could say the same about language in general as I did about swearing just now--that it physically manifests my feeling of basic oneness with others (which is something that Heidegger said in his Being and Time, more or less). But what's unique about curse words is how they establish that unity. Specifically, swearing establishes that unity through force, or rather, through a kind of "aggressive re-alignment" of others' perspectives. Whether in the pain example or in a case where I use a curse word in anger, fear, or even intense pleasure, I feel my emotion as so powerful that I use the expletive to force the other person into the emotion (or at least an intensity intended to correspond with it), whether she likes it or not. There is then a kind of violation of the other's perspective implicit in my use of vulgar language, since it compels the other person to abandon her previous and/or default sense of things and adopt mine. Swearing essentially says: "look at me!," forcing the other person to "turn her head in my direction" and stop noticing what she was paying attention to before.

This is true even in those times I swear from deliberate choice and not just out of an intense emotion. For example, when I use a swear word as an insult (like b***h or a*****e), I swear to aggressively replace the listeners' perception of the person I'm insulting with my own. When I call someone a b***h, I use the word's energetic "shock" to call attention to my insult; if the word has retained its power in my previous use of language (something that doesn't always happen), the listeners can momentarily only give their attention to my insult. The shock of the curse word "draws in" everyone's attention to it. In the case of insults, a swear word belittles the "insultee," or rather, it makes her "be little" in the hearers' eyes. The energy of the "shock" calls attention to her, only in a negative way. Though you may not agree with me when I use this insulting expletive, the way I use it makes you consider its object at least in the context of my insult. In other words, the insult makes everything you think about her arise with the insult in mind, either in agreement or disagreement. If I hadn't said the swear word, your thoughts about her would simply exist in their own context and not one I forcefully provided for them.

But what about those people who use profanity in a cavalier way, whose every other word is "f*** this" or "f*** that?" This is also a show of aggression, yet one that tries to use the recontextualizing involved with profanity on a more comprehensive scale. For instance, you'll often find that these people are in a liberal or counter-cultural crowd. That is, they want to protest the established order of things on a deep level, and one way that they find helpful for doing that is to use constant vulgarity. Why is this? The culture that they fight against is one that doesn't swear, and so they aggressively try to recontextualize that culture through their curse words. Counter-culturals like these use so many expletives because that language shocks the traditional elements of the society and so calls attention to themselves in the way described above. But more than that, it forces the conservative listener to pay attention to their perspective and at least consider it. Does this mean that all cavalier swearing is politically induced? No, because many times people do it to try joining the "in crowd", and it is this "in crowd" that has political motivations. It might not even start consciously; all it takes is someone who feels daring enough to go against the his hometown thinks. In that respect it's a way to aggressively assert my independence, a task that is admittedly very needed in life. But swearing is perhaps one of the more inconsiderate ways to do this, since it necessarily involves a violation of others' perspectives

There is another kind of cavalier swearing, though, one somewhat familiar to professional comedy. Take Lily Allen's pop song "F*** You," for example: it uses the word "f***" as just another word, here in place of the "thank" in "thank you, thank you very much." This has a very peculiar effect: it uses the word's "shock" power in a context inappropriate for it, and as a result it "shows" us the nature of the word itself. By saying "f*** you" in place of "thank you," Lily Allen's song gives me a contrasting "background" by which to see "f***"'s power, and then something fascinating happens: I realize that the "the F word" is really just another word. To think, I say, all this time I've been fearing a word that has four letters and rhymes with "duck!" Because this is an eruption of meaning, this has the effect of the punchline to a joke, meaning that it strikes me as funny. In reality, all humor is characterized by this eruption of meaning, something I'll hopefully get to in another post.

But what about a comedian that--though he swears a lot and is funny--at least seems to be serious? He's still funny by how much he swears, and yet there apparently isn't the context mentioned above to provide the needed contrast for humor. And yet there is: the needed "mundane" context shows up in how we expect the comedian to act, and when he goes against that implied context, we find it hilarious.

Swearing as dominance

And yet not everyone finds them funny; some, even many, would be offended. Why? It's because these people respect the contexts where they find themselves, and they would prefer them not to be violated. This presents a stark contrast to those who love to be "cursed at" in a friendly way, and so the question arises as to what this difference consists in. I'd suggest that those who like others to amicably swear at them are comfortable experiencing themselves and their own perspectives in a submissive way, whereas the swearer experiences herself or himself as dominant. Swearing is thus an image of or correspondence to the act of physical intimacy, one that I don't need to stress. But nevertheless, there is a kind of intimacy presumed by two or more persons' comfort with swearing to each other--one that consists in my willingness to have my perspective forcefully removed, to be recontextualized.

Moreover, we can conceive of the way religions can protest the use of profanity as similar to the way they protest against premature intimacy. Both involve a perceived disrespect of proper boundaries, the one in terms of physical bodies and the other in terms of mental points of view. This could also imply that the way certain thinkers conceive of chastity (like Adam S. Miller and mystical Taoists, for example) as a conservation of spiritual energy has a parallel with swearing. In other words, if I use my swear words inappropriately, I discharge a weight of meaning that is better used elsewhere.

Does this mean that we should never swear? Though others might say so, I disagree. Words as bad as f*** should be carefully guarded, like a secret, and disclosed only in those cases where the meaning is appropriate enough. What are those cases? I've only ever said f*** when I learned it for the first time as a child, so you could say that I'm saving it for something special. Maybe I'll use it once in my life; then the meaning inherent in it would be very manifest--as powerful as words can come.

What about taking the Lord's name in vain, though? This is different from other swear words, and the prohibition against it comes from their confusion. If I use a religious expletive, I am using the energy inherent in God's name (at the very least one just ensured by a cultural taboo) as the form of aggression and dominance mentioned above. God's name should be used powerfully, but never in this way; to confuse the two uses of power is to muddle my thinking, to confuse sacredness with willpower. And that is pride.

Well, that's that for this post. Till next time!

Everyday Phenomenology: Video Gaming

In my last post I quoted some passages from Gaston Bachelard's book The Poetics of Space. This work is one of my favorites because Bachelard does the philosophical task he sets out to do in a way I hadn't encountered before. That "task" is something called "phenomenology," the philosophical analysis of experience as it is lived. The more I grow intellectually, the more I realize that phenomenology is my calling. I don't really care about analyzing things "as they are in themselves;" I care more about the world as it presents itself to me, about discovering the wrinkles and nuances of that world that are often too subtle for me to consciously notice. Bachelard does this brilliantly, but so do psychologist James Hillman, whom I've quoted here before, and Martin Heidegger, whom I haven't. They are role models for me--they show me sides of the world I hadn't seen before, letting me look at ordinary things with new eyes.
So I've decided to follow in their footsteps. Just as my senior philosophy thesis did a phenomenology of dreaming, I want to look deeply into the experience of not just the "weird" parts of our existence, but the seemingly ordinary parts. What will follow in this series of posts are phenomenological inquiries into the way we experience the extremely mundane. For instance, the first post I want to write about is on video games, and I am not opposed to writing on the deeper aspects of things like Netflix, fast food, or even autocorrect. By doing this, I hope to let the reader see the world with new eyes; just as Bachelard lets us see the lowly house as a shell, a nest, or a blanket, I want to make the mundane mystical, the ordinary profound

My Methodology

But before this first post, I want to talk a little about the methods I'll be using to interpret these everyday things. Know first that I'm open to using any source at all as "evidence" for the nature of an experience. As far as I can tell, as long as the writer is not telling a deliberate lie (and even most fiction doesn't count as that kind of lie), he or she said it for some reason, and though that reason might be false, those justifications still make up part of the writer's experience. And experience is what I'm all about here. 
Second, know that I won't always use academically rigorous language. I will sometimes (perhaps often) use poetic or apparently contradictory phrases to get across the nature of the experience in question, and I do this deliberately. The reason for this is that poetic language evokes specific aspects of the experience I'm looking at that would be difficult to get across in a propositional way. Poetry, imagery, and metaphor help me show you what I see in the everyday, as opposed to just awkwardly describing it. Nevertheless, I will try to keep it in an overall academic context
Third, know that "truth" as it is traditionally conceived is not my concern here. I don't care whether my picture of things is true, unless we mean something atypical by the word. Instead, I am using my language to "open up" different parts of the world to people. For instance, is an equivalence of the dice in a tabletop role-playing game with divination true? Of course not--but neither is it false. Instead, it lets me see the RPG in a new way, allowing me to appreciate it that much more.

A Phenomenology of Video Gaming

The first real video game I played was Banjo-Kazooie, pictured above. While it holds a special place in my memory for that reason, I'd like to use it as an tool to illustrate to you the different facets of the video-gaming experience. For instance, when I first pick up the controller to play as the bear Banjo, I have an experience that would be really weird for someone who hadn't ever picked up a controller. If I move the joystick up, he moves forward. If I move it to either side, he moves sideways. If I move it down, he moves backwards. I suddenly get the impression of being a puppet-master: I am in control of a being who lacks his own independent will. As far as I can tell, I am Banjo's will, and the figure I see before me is nothing more than a vehicle I am driving
This causes me to reflect--just as gamers have called their in-game characters "avatars" (as in the Hindu notion of incarnation), the Banjo I see on the screen is effectively my body. In the same way I will to move my hand and my hand moves, I push the control stick and Banjo moves. But this causes further thought--if I as my physical self am distinct from Banjo, am "I" distinct from my body? As a religious person, I'd like to think so. But still, the experience of playing Banjo-Kazooie makes me very aware of embodiment, at least until even video game avatars became too "normal" to notice
This means that I can lose awareness of the distinction between my body and the in-game avatar, at least to an extent. I've gotten lost in the worlds Banjo-Kazooie, Skyrim, or Mass Effect more times than I can count, and so I can testify to the fact that the real, physical world can become so "transparent" that I stop noticing it altogether. But is there an analogue for the mind-body relationship? Well, most of us don't notice a distinction between my "self" as a will and my body as what is being controlled, so there's that. However, this comparison only becomes useful when I can show that--just as I can find the gaming controls unwieldy--some experience a disconnect between their inner, "body-independent" selves and their physical selves. 
As someone with Asperger's Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism, I think that the subjective experience of autistics is like this in many ways. One person with autism whom I talked to said that having autism was like "trying to drive a car with a manual transmission" (i.e. as opposed to the automatic transmission that "neurotypicals" drive), and another autistic friend said that people with autism have a sense of being both the car and the driver, while most see themselves only as the car. So I suggest that we conceive of autism as a stark awareness of the distinction between mind and body. This can explain the tendency in autism for a) problems with thinking in terms of an embodied self and other (mind-blindness), b) difficulties with social interaction that follow from this, and c) clumsiness and problems with certain physical sensations. Even perseverating or repetitive behaviors in autism could be explained by the religious conception of the spirit's still-intact familiarity with eternity's timeless (changeless) nature, and the well-known literalism could be explained by a familiarity with the un-hidden nature of things in the spiritual world as described by Emanuel Swedenborg.
Thus, playing video games--especially video games with unwieldy controls--gives a good idea of what it's like to live with autism. This comparison also suggests that, just as you can learn to drive well with a manual transmission or to play a video game adeptly, an autistic can learn how to socially interact just as well as a the average person, though it may take a much longer time. Nevertheless, an autistic person at the end of that path is in many ways much better off than a neurotypical with the same social skills, for he is distinctly aware of how social interaction works, where a "normal" person might not even give it a second thought.
Given that video games offer something like embodiment, this opens up the field to escapism of all kinds. Unlike my actual life, in video games I can venture across Tamriel (The Elder Scrolls), save the galaxy from Reapers (Mass Effect), or live as the opposite sex (The Sims, for instance). Part of video gaming's appeal is then to live as I can't in my suburban, 9-to-5 life, to be another person in another place and time. This has considerable precedent in books, but there is a difference between the two kinds of media. Books leave almost everything up to my imagination, whereas video games leave almost nothing. This is perhaps a danger of video games--they limit the imagination by "doing all the work" of embodying the world and its characters. This issue is symptomatic of a problem with our culture in general: as rabid literalists, we can only conceive of things that we can physically see and hear, and we scoff at anything we have to imagine. Instead of letting the imagination assume its traditional place as intermediary between the visible and the invisible, our culture's media brutishly tries to force things from the one to the other, giving up all sense of subtlety, nuance, or (often) creativity.
Yet there are ways in which video games can foster the imagination. Take the 2010 interactive thriller Heavy Rain, for instance:

Heavy Rain tells the story of a father whose son has been kidnapped, and who must undergo a series of "trials" to save him. The game is very "gritty," and as such I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. Nevertheless, it has many virtues, and it shows them in a way that perhaps no piece of art or media had done before. Specifically, the triumph of Heavy Rain is that it allows the reader to simulate the experience of intense trauma and the subsequent intense love. But the game does this in a way that no film or novel could, for it makes creative use of the uniquely interactive nature of video gaming. First of all, the game brings in a tactile element to its immersion of the player. Specifically, the player must do x and y with controller (with the sticks, the buttons, and actual physical "jerks" for the controller's accelerometer) to perform a physical action. These actions can be physically difficult to pull off, and it often takes nimble fingers to succeed. And yet they are different from what the actual action would involve. For example, the most infamous scene from Heavy Rain involves the father character having to willingly cut off a section of one of his fingers. Though this would be a traumatic experience, it's difficult to see how one could incarnate it in the game with the traditional literalism of video games. In fact, they don't go the literal route, but use symbolic analogues of what I would have to do in that situation. For example, before I can do anything about my finger, I must very slowly move the analog stick up and down. This symbolizes a calming breath, and if I am too quick with the stick, I lose my nerve and have to start over. 
These kinds of symbolic analogues are both like and unlike what the literal act would involve. In a way, carefully pushing the control stick up and down is nothing like how I breathe; and yet in another way it is very similar to it. The resemblance here is non-literal or--as James Hillman puts it--imaginal. The symbolic action I do with the controller acts as a mediator between the far-off reality of trauma and the comfort of my living room. It doesn't mindlessly collapse one into the other, but instead shows it to me in a way that best fits the electronic medium's limitations. To put it another way, Heavy Rain's control scheme shows the player an image of trauma's reality, one that isn't literally faithful to the experience, yet presents its essentials. In that way it's rather like an impressionist painting--just as Monet gave up realism to show the viewer an atypical perspective of the painting's scene, Heavy Rain gives a deliberately unrealistic way of living that situation, yet one that captures "what it's like" more than a literal or realistic control scheme (with a Wiimote, for instance) could. This is what brings out the imagination: it lets me see trauma askew, giving me a perspective I wouldn't have ordinarily used. In that way, you could say that Heavy Rain itself does phenomenology, at least in the way I'm defining it here
There is another way Heavy Rain fosters the imagination, one it shares with narrative-focused games like Mass Effect or The Walking Dead.

In these games, it is either impossible or impractical to "undo" a choice you've made that impacts the narrative. In the original Mass Effect, I have to choose whether to save Ashley or Kaiden, and at one point in The Walking Dead I must decide whether to let a traitorous character fall to his death or endanger myself and others by saving him. These choices are a bit contrived, to put it bluntly. And yet I don't think they were designed not to be. Though cliché and hackneyed, these decisions use the admittedly limited framework of the game's branching storyline to give the player a sense of agency and consequence. This sense of agency is the entire purpose behind these branching plotlines, and the actual choices involved only serve to bring that agency about. This sense of consequence or "weight" is something no other artistic medium could reproduce; the closest you come is a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, and with that it is far too easy to turn back the page. What's more, these seemingly contrived choices are also food for the imagination--they let the player experience something like moral responsibility without going into the endless nuances of that responsibility (think of a hardcore simulation game like SimCity 4 as a counter-example). The game's story is a frame for the sense of urgency and agency that comes with its choices, and that's what we ultimately remember about it. The Walking Dead is less about zombies than it is about the feeling of being responsible for my choices, and this feeling too comes through a non-literal intermediary, or rather, it comes through the bridge of the imagination and its suspension of disbelief. 
There is a commonality between the tactile and morally weighty elements discussed above: they're both ways of revealing a human situation to the player in a way that another form of media couldn't facilitate. In light of this, let's re-interpret my idea that video games try to overcome their limitations by collapsing the imaginal gap between the game's setting and my living room. Instead, let's say that many video games are conscious of their limitations, and that they push against those limitations in full awareness that they will never recreate real life. A perfect simulation of real life would be as boring as real life often is. Heck, a perfect simulation of any reality would get boring after a while; that's just how reality is. Video games use the limitations of graphics, processing power, and control schemes as kind of foil to "show forth" or "reveal" different parts of reality. The freedom of exploration Fallout offers me is nothing remarkable; if I wanted to, I could get up from my couch, walk out the door, and wander off in one direction for infinitely longer than I could in the Capital Wasteland.

There are no "invisible walls" in the real world. But truly ulimited freedom isn't the point of Fallout or The Elder Scrolls--they are designed with the limitations of the console in mind, and within that context the freedom I already enjoy becomes remarkable.

The Sims franchise is a very special example of this kind of phenomenon. If The Walking Dead gives me a clear vision of moral responsibility by placing it in contrast with the storyline's limitations, and if The Elder Scrolls does the same thing with the juxtaposition of freedom and the console's processing power, The Sims is audacious enough to show me how wonderful, fascinating, and ultimately entertaining everyday life can be. Of course The Sims doesn't recreate life perfectly. If it did I would just live my life instead, but within the context of the game's and the computer's limitations, it does a pretty good job. It changes a bit here and there to make "real life" more interesting, but in the end I play the game not to accrue points or fulfill need bars, but to live life. The progressive (and occasionally regressive...) improvements in The Sims' realism give me a kind of excitement that my computer is so quickly approaching my life as it is. And what's even more remarkable, one of the most exciting things to do is to recreate either myself or my house in the game's engine. I can obviously take a look at my face in a mirror or look at my house on Google Earth whenever I want, but it's the novelty of a new (slightly pixelated) perspective that gets me going. I create myself because I think that computers shouldn't be able to facilitate that creation, and when they manage it, I stand in awe of my own features. In this way, The Sims "does phenomenology" more than any other game, since its very purpose is to re-interpret and re-contextuaize the mundane realities of modern suburbia. The same fascination that fills me with glee when reading a Bachelard or a Hillman exists in The Sims when I see my Sim-self reading a book, going to work, or striking up a gibberish conversation.

And yet there is also an escapist element to The Sims. I play the game not only to live everyday life, but to live the parts of everyday life that are outside my purview. In The Sims, I can be a woman or a criminal, just as I can be "hot-headed" or a "never-nude." This is similar to the escapism of games like Grand Theft Auto, but the fascinating thing is how amazingly continuous those escapist elements are to those that are mundane for me. The Sims is comprehensive enough that what is unfamiliar to me might be boringly normal to another, and vice versa. What comes out of The Sims, then, is a sense of cosmic scope or objectivity. I am just another Sim, subject to a race, an age, a gender, and a certain number of "traits," just like any other Sim. I could just as easily have been her as I could have been me! And yet do these ramblings make sense? They do in the context of the Sims. This game intimates to me of a "man upstairs" controlling the scene, giving me impulses to do this and that in exactly the way he does to another. In this way I see myself as very small, and yet I find myself aware of at least the possibility of something "bigger" than me.

There are other reasons to play video games, however. Apart from the realism or pseudo-realism of the games discussed above, there are also casual games like my favorites: Threes or Fallout Shelter.

What draws me to a game like Threes is the satisfaction of getting a "high score," either in a micro- or macro-context. This taps into my desire for achievement and collection, to surpass my previous abilities by "catching them all." There is inherent in this desire a kind of competition with myself--I remember my previous achievement, and I want to surpass it. These are thus at least partially a way to prove to myself that I am skilled. Of course, the skills I use in Threes aren't at all applicable to everyday life, but instead create a kind of "local context." I compete with myself and others in the parameters of the game itself. Thus we come to the idea that competition is something desirable in itself, at least to certain people. Competition with myself (that is, with my previous high score) gives me a "jolt" of freedom from normality when I surpass that score. That jolt is very short-lived, though. Games like Threes are compelling because of that jolt or thrill, and the increasing rarity of that thrill as I progress gets me to chase after it all the more. 
As has been pointed out ad nauseam, this is remiscent of how addiction works. There is thus a danger--demonstrated by repeated experience--that these games can suck you in and captivate your attention to extreme levels. What's good about Threes in contrast with Candy Crush Saga, for instance, is that it requests only a small initial payment, one that you can even avoid by watching ads. With less ethical games, though, an unstable or naive player can easily lose themselves and parts of their income that would be better spent elsewhere. But this is common knowledge. However, another appeal of games like Threes or Fallout Shelter is the possibility of multitasking, either while waiting in line or listening to something like a podcast or an audiobook. These games fill a void in our widely stretched attention span, which has become used to doing more than one thing at once. That is both a good thing and a bad thing, but that's a discussion for another post.
What other kinds of games are left to analyze? Gameplay-oriented RPGs give the aforementioned "jolt" through a) defeating enemies, b) collecting items, and c)" leveling up" in all its various forms. Platformers like Banjo-Kazooie (mentioned the beginning) are appealing as yet another variety of the "skill-test" motif. Regardless of how difficult the maneuver actually is, it gives me the jolt of satisfaction when I successfully jump from one platform to another. This is made more meaningful by its contrast with the ever-present possibility of falling, possibly to my avatar's death. Strategy games like Civilization or Starcraft are also somewhat built on the "jolt," but with the reservation that my gratification is very delayed. To succeed at Starcraft on a "hard" difficulty level takes skill, one that gives a sense of accomplishment when I succeed. That accomplishment is limited to the game itself, but it is so satisfying that it perhaps "grew into" the vicarious experience of it as a spectator sport in countries like South Korea. Competitive first person shooters are very similar to strategy games in that respect, only it is less intellectual and more based on quick reflexes. The "jolt" comes in the thrill of the fight, when I manipulate the controls quickly enough to defeat my opponent, whether it be AI or a flesh-and-blood opponent. I admit that I have no experience with such competitiveness myself, but I have experienced it secondhand through the endless hours I spent with my brother in front of the television while he beat online enemies on Halo 3.
To sum up this analysis, let me talk about the ubiquitous importance of limitation in video games. Obvious in casual games and only deceptively present (but still very much there) in games like Fallout or Heavy Rain, limitation is the video game's bread and butter. While a novel can show us fantastic realities beyond description, the limitations intrinsic to video game consoles or game engines define gaming as a medium. A game is appealing to the extent that it successfully presents itself in relation to those limits. An overly realistic game is less appealing than one which presents its subject in a way that fits its console well. A game defined entirely by limitation (perhaps The Stanley Parable, in a way reminiscent of René Magritte's paintings) might be one of the best games of all.
What does this say about human nature? Our constant search for bigger and better can only exist with limitation as a foil for that quest. If I had everything I ever wanted, I would very quickly get bored. But how often do we forget this! Our movies and our gadgets seek to surpass each other ad infinitum with better CGI, thinner bodies, more ease of use. But what happens if and when we go entirely past the limitations of physicality? Our materialistic culture would lose all its meaning, and many wouldn't know what to put their hopes in. Our culture of "bigger is better" forgets that the big only appears big in relation to the small, and unknowingly tries to get rid of the small in its quest for size. And of course this is its suicide. To save the culture we have invested in technology, let us return to the small, to the limited. This is the reason why "retro" games like Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery give me lots of hope, because it kindles our desire for what is past and "obsolete." We need nostalgia just as much as we have anxious anticipation.