the human game

Prologue

"They muddy the water, to make it seem deep." - Friedrich Nietzsche

There's a concept I've been playing with for some time. It's about us humans. It considers why we over-complicate the world and why we allow ourselves to be dominated by others. And mostly, it's about power.

I've been infatuated with power since about the age of 15 when I took mushrooms for the first time. It was late June and the school year was coming to a close. Every summer my high school held a year-end celebration called the Peace Festival. Mediocre bands would play in the gymnasium, there was a bouncy castle on the soccer field, the vice-principal would man a cotton candy station, and the cool kids would get high and stumble about in the sweet, erotic heat of the new summer.

I ingested the mushrooms in a manhole by the old bridge - it smelled like shit and the mushrooms tasted like shit. I ended up taking a shit down in that manhole an hour later because the mushrooms gave me indigestion. But once the onset quivers had subsided the world opened up like a moist vulva and swallowed me up whole.

My skin rippled with ecstasy as I poured over the field on the way back to the school grounds. The sun, like warm hands on my shoulders, gave a godly massage. All material and non-material became tangible and existence was the plain that stretched around me from horizon to horizon to horizon; I collapsed in the grass as I drifted into a solipsistic state. In this place there was no such thing as power - only the pure and essential experience of consciousness. There was no mental capacity for anything more. It was when I returned to the school ground that I remembered authority and who I was to bow down to, the fear of reprimand stole the honey scent from the air, and the world became dark: the school sat under a black cloud of judgement and despair. My ecstasy was stolen in that moment and from that time until now I have asked the same questions: why does anyone have the right to pass judgement and why do some submit while others fight?

It's been about 16 years since that day at the Peace Festival. I have now for most of my life been rebellious against the system because I believe that humans can and should govern themselves - I am an anarchist of sorts. I've spent most of my twenties running away, traveling the world looking for some respite from the plague of capitalism: looking for a certain natural simplicity. I did not find it. I could not find it because I am plagued with a capitalistic mind - a natural consequence of being molded by a system.

In 2013 at the age of 28, I returned to my hometown of Toronto where I began writing out thoughts that I had collected while in the Indian Himalayas at Dharamsala. After six months of work I abandoned the project. My girlfriend was miserable, I psychologically couldn't handle living at my parents house any longer, and I needed a job. Life in the big city had resumed and my dream was over. I lost myself in the business of keeping busy over the next three years. I grew up, I suppose. I let the writer within die out and Peter Pan began to age.

And that could have been the end of the story.

Last night I was working on a project - ironically, I've done particularly well in business over the past few years - and I hit a wall in my planning. When I whittled down exactly what was blocking me in my thinking, a question - a challenge - appeared to me: What is power? I could not find the answer to this question in my consciousness though it was reminiscent of something in my past. I knew the question was more than business: it was life. Just then some pertinent thought prodded the back of my skull. My friend some weeks earlier had given me a tab of acid that was sitting in my kitchen drawer. No, I had never done acid... but it was Saturday night and I had no where to be. No one was expecting me anywhere and no one would come calling. I'm an impetuous little shit, so without thinking much further I promptly stuck the tab under my tongue, sat on the couch and meditated as it came on.

The trip came on strong. I experienced a wide spectrum of feelings from deep bodily sickness to psychotic pandemonium to bliss and awe - I picked apart my book case and revisited my friends Herman Hesse, Nietzsche, Robert Pirsig, and Castaneda. I remembered who I was... and I remembered my writing. I pulled out the works from a dusty old box under the counter and read the yellowed papers piece by piece. I went over what was never shared and realized its time had come.

I call this concept "the human game".