Reality Theory

Back in the early seventies, when the hippies were cross-fading into yuppies, and we were trying to figure out what to do with our newly-expanded consciousnesses, we came across a book by Robert S. de Ropp (1913-1987), a British academic who was interested in spiritual elevation. He was attracted at times to teachers like Madame Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, and though he moved beyond them, got into psychology, and ran with other freethinking seekers, there are elements of the earlier philosophies in his work.

He wrote several books, before, in 1987, he died in a kayak accident.

The Master Game was de Ropp's look at life through his version of game-theory, viz the various roles that people elect (or are forced) to play, and he broke them up into low, neutral, and high categories.

The names are fun:

Hog in Trough. Cock on Dunghill. The Moloch Game. The Householder Game. The Art, Science, Religion, and Master games.

De Ropp offered that the Master Game was the highest expression; that those who could play that were at the peak of the pyramid. This was full consciousness, awakened and realized, and only a relative handful of people would ever get there.

The person who can play the Master Game can play all the others. And if you are on a higher plane, you can dial it down -- but lower players can't play above their level. Thus it becomes your responsibility, if you are a master gamer, to a) figure out where they are, and, b) if you want to communicate with them, go to their level, because they can't come to yours.

And that at whatever level you achieve, you will likely spend some time searching for equals.

It's an interesting notion. And so far as I have been able to tell, true enough.

The reason I believe that I got the book was because, during a discussion with a woman who was running way above me in the realm of spirituality, she talked about games people play. And I allowed as how I didn't do that, I was just plain me. Whereupon she smiled and said, "Ah, yes. The 'just-plain-me' game ..."

No, no! I said, frustrated that she thought I was like those other game-players. But she was right, sort of -- I was and I wasn't. And game-playing didn't have to mean ill-intentioned or fakery, it just was where you were.

All of which brings us to the notion of reality, and my theory about that:

We all make our own reality.

Sure, there is a consensus version that most of us buy into -- trains, planes, automobiles, sun, moon, oceans, and kangaroos -- but every version is, in the end, highly individualized, insofar as what we believe deep in our hearts. And what we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel.

It's all self-generated fantasy, to some degree. No matter how clear you think your vision is, what you see is what you elect to see, and like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, that choice affects your reality. Bounce a photon off it, it changes speed, direction, shape or something else.

When I was in nursing school, training our psyche rotation in the bug house called Jackson -- Louisiana's version of the Cuckoo's Nest -- there was a guy who saw a table the rest of us didn't see. He never once ran into it while I was there, he always walked around it. He saw it. He knew it was there. Yeah, we thought he was looney tunes, but it was real for him, as real as anything the rest of us saw. He was crazy.

Or maybe we were all just blind. Maybe our matter didn't resonate the same way in his universe.

One man's floor can be another man's ceiling. It depends on where you are standing.

"My fantasy is better than your fantasy." gets thrown out a lot, we all do it, certainly I do. But maybe, "My fantasy works for me." is a better way of looking at it. We are all our own masters of Maya, and the ones with the strongest visions might run it all ...