To understand and give meaning is to limit infinity. Whether in a model of physics or in an
old myth, we limit reality (whatever it is) and only then claim to understand it. To understand is to
verbalize, to make Logos, speech, and communication. And to do so, our limitation needs some rules
and procedures. That apparent taming of the indomitable Universe is its conversion into a game.
Kant said that we understand the universe insofar as we consider it the creation of an unknown
creator. This amounts to saying that we understand the universe insofar as we consider it a work of
art, or what is equivalent, we understand the universe when we see it as a game. Every explanation
has to be made from outside of the explained system if it aspires to more than being mere
gibberish. However, this simplistic distinction must be clarified: the game we are talking about, the
Cosmic Game, is not a dual-action, there is not a game and a non-game (there is nothing outside the
Game).
In games, ordinary space, the World of Daily Life -with all its gravity and social mediocrity,
weighed down by the most basic struggles for survival, tied to the delirious dreams that we call
certainties- is suddenly transfigured. The game is the magical action par excellence. I realized this
while playing during childhood, before I could express it or understand it rationally, long before I
knew what reason was when my inferences and my analogies proceeded with the same spontaneity
with which I played or got excited. The strength of this transfiguring impulse has its roots in Life
itself, be it everyday life or exceptional living. Play closes space to everything outside itself, so the
game can emerge and with it Bliss-Consciousness. The cell does it with its plasma membrane,
closing the passage to that macromolecule there and allowing this amino acid to pass. Space is
transfigured within the cell, and in the process transforms its immediate environment. Order inside
at the cost of disorder outside the cell. But order and disorder are only relative metaphorical
concepts, a mental tool that limits by projecting its own restriction on life, a binary semantic
operator that clarifies here and confuses there. Translating order and disorder in terms of
temperature (the science of thermodynamics) does not give us a clearer intuition of things either:
what do 1 million degrees mean in terms of a living organism if not death? On the other hand,
could we understand order without disorder? And what happens when we merge order and disorder
into a single representation? Simply that in place of the dual distinction pure movement appears,
and rest and stillness lose their value in a total dance. Then, the Real is understood as pulsation and
is experienced as will, cosmic desire, an inexhaustible impulse that brings to being what is not, and to
not being what is.
What we call the living cell is above all the emerging appearance of a new game in the
substance of the universe. It is our game. Is the cell made of atoms or elementary particles? Is it
matter? None of these concepts is independent of the cellular organic configuration that is the
human being. Human cells are necessary for the appearance in the universe of the concept of
subatomic particle. They are not concepts independent of Life-Intelligence at a relatively complex
stage, our present stage. The cells themselves, as conceptual structures arrived later than human
beings, in the sense that such a concept is ignored by the vast majority of living beings: our cat
does not know that his body is made out of cells, but nevertheless he understands what a game is,
at least some game types...
The game of life closes space through a simple negation: the cell is non-world, and the world is
whatever is outside. And with the denial of the environment, that hostile non-ego that threatens the
fragility of what the membrane-skin encloses, the affirmation of a magical space occurs, more real
than the reality of what is left out of our game. However, world denial is part of the game itself, it
has no absolute value. Without the world there is no game, the passionate difference established by
life in relation to not-life is not produced. Without the outside space life could not construct itself
by playing and doesn’t know itself through play.
As we all know, playing is limiting, first space and time, then actions through rules and
syntax, the will that harnesses pure permutations to create different forms. Limitation, measure,
allows expressing the immensity of the other space, the Cosmos, in the precise form of a game. In
this sense, the magical space generated by playing is analogous to that created by rituals. Rites are
games, but games are something more than rites. The ritual has its origin in the repetition of
emotional protocols for survival, but the game goes beyond survival because its scope is no longer
the life and death of the individual or the social organism, the process of the Bios, but the more
general movement of life that includes death as a vital process. Let us call this force Zoé, life-death,
the necessary process to extend the Cosmic Game of existence. But while rituals and individual life
are not processes of full freedom, playing might be, and it is so to the extent that its magical space
includes death as one more movement, to the extent that the game is that of Life-Intelligence, Zoé.
The limitations generated by the game, especially the limitations of social personae, reduce
any possible identity to an element of the game, and therefore to a mask. Any social identity can
only be understood in terms of social narratives. We see that in many games, there is a
continuous deliberate reference to the players' lives. The player is never identical to his/her lives.
The game is a world within another world, and therefore it is a "meta" point of view, which is
neither in the world of the game nor outside the game. When we play, the magical space of the
game is not that of the game itself, but that which is produced by the extension of that first space
(that we have closed and limited) beyond the world of everyday life and beyond the game itself. Its
transfiguring force resides there. Everyday life ceases to be the real one, and an expanded reality
surrounds us without excluding us: the Cosmos and the individual continue one into the other, they
are the Game. The player discovers himself/herself as played by something, a Self that is the Other,
the Cosmos.
After closing space and making a cycle of time, we introduce objects, and relationships
between them to build our game. The action begins as a mental representation that transfigures
everyday life, like a magician's brilliant trick, but very soon the game conquers its outer space and
transforms it too, it appropriates the outer space by understanding it in terms of the game, a
metarational understanding. As I have already said, we can only understand the world to the extent
that we understand it as a game, i.e. in a metarational way in relation to specific games of limited
rationality, games like the game of science or the philosophical game, which are part of a wider
action with a more complex structure and impulse. In games, there are final causes and purposes, but
above them is the ruling purpose of playing, of being in the game, for there is meaning as long as
there is a game.
The magical space of the expanded game, the one that includes both the game and what is
outside of it, the game that occurs on both sides of the membrane, is the space of the Akasha of the
mystical traditions that have their origin in India. The Akasha is a consciousness force that
generates forms, the substance of all energy in its various limitations. The Akasha is revealed in the
process of the game. From the most basic and illuminating of our human games, hide-and-seek,
through crude death games, and arriving at the mimetic transformations of identity games, playing
reveals the Real. Playing, in its full aesthetic psychological dimension, not only gives the symbolic
structure to our social constructions, but it is also, at this stage of our evolution, the suprarational form
par excellence for the process of unveiling Life-Intelligence. The "Aletheia", the unveiling, is not
the final purpose of the Game, but an intermediate goal that leads to a new configuration, to a new
meaning that emerges from the action of playing, that is, to a New Game.
