Chapter 2. The Game of Black-and-White

Walk-thru of Alan Watts The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

The pace picks up and we are going to be covering a lot of interesting topics in this weeks post. To start with we get into polarity, or how opposites are not two separate things, but are necessarily both parts of a single whole.

Then we will examine how our attention or consciousness is inherently limited to our perspective. That our understanding can never be of the whole picture because our bandwidth for understanding and creating meaning is limited. To create meaning we use symbols. A symbol is a signpost to something, they are great tools to improve what we can understand, but we must not mistake the signpost to Rome for the actual city.

We all play games, and at least in western culture, the fear of death compels us to play games of win or lose, instead of games of the hide and seek variety. We wind down with a tantalizing question If, then, there is this basic unity between self and other, individual and universe, how have our minds become so narrow that we don’t know it?.

Commentary

The chapter begins with a sauntering around the concept of polarity and how simple elements can be formed into complex patterns. Polarity means a whole composed of two opposites (on and off, yes and no, day and night, yin and yang, male and female etc). One cannot exist without the other. Many fine allegorical aphorisms are trotted out for our pleasure. A particular favorite, on this site, is of course that there can be no crest of a wave without a trough🌊.

The game of black and white, or finding and losing again is reality. Watts does give this a good and thorough explanation and makes a solid case, but for our purposes we need to understand that our conscious attention ignores the hiding, and only registers the finding. A cup is a cup because of the part of it that is nothing (where the coffee goes), but we generally think of the cup as just the porcelain/plastic/paper.

We can confuse solids and space as two distinct things, but in reality solids exist with and because of the space, and likewise the space exists only because of the solids. We cannot take one away, without also destroying the other. No crest, no trough💔

Until we internalize and start believing that everything exists simultaneously, we are unable to realize that our attention can only ever see a fraction of the universe at any one time. All we can experience is infinitely less than the eternal. Yet our attention is our entire universe. As above, so below.

By looking at life through the key hole that is our consciousness, we can see a part of the truth. For instance, a husband has come home to find his wife laying softly on their bed, but he has heard another man with her, and through the key hole, he can clearly see her body, mind and spirit beckoning to him to have his wicked way with her.

So does the husbands brain do, it does what any rational being would do, and start to piece together the bits of the puzzle using the pieces we have or can make educated guesses or intuitions about other pieces that belong in the picture. Then we try to make them form a complete picture. Except we are not forming pictures, we are uncovering meanings. His voice sounded rough, maybe he smokes, who do I know who smokes, oh yeah, that guy down the road. I noticed her looking at him last week.

We construct meanings out of incomplete information as best we can, and of course this means we are often right, but no right without wrong.

The process of constructing meaning is recognize patterns and then choosing what patterns to focus on. Pattern matching is something humans have evolved to do, just like the machines are beginning to learn how to do too. We recognize patterns, but to optimize our processing power we label recognizable patterns. This means we can only know patterns we have seen before. A new pattern must be pointed out before we can label it and have it on mental speed dial, as it where. That is why when drawing a house, most of us draw a square with a triangle on top, that is our symbol for home. But our actual home is infinitely more complex than the 2d symbol, but the symbol is easier to reason about, because of its simplicity. And when we start making meaning by assembling symbols in meaningful patterns we are creating our reality. The problem is that our reality is like a map, it has symbols showing what is what and we can use it to navigate the world, but the map is a map because it is in the sweet spot of being a complex symbol of meanings and relationships that is useful, exactly because it contains only essential information, but it does not compare in any way to the actual amount of information of the terrain that is symbolizes.

The ego, which most of us believe is who we are, is a part of the universe, just like the crest and trough are part of the ocean. Our challenge is to realize that we are all part of the same universe. But the thing with God, or whatever you want to call him, is that there will always be something that is everything, but we can never understand this thing, because we only understand our little part of it. It is like your fingernail cell trying to comprehend that it is part of you. Ain't gonna happen. That information is above our pay grade. Yet we can be conscious that this is true, though we do not understand how.

By buying into the idea that we are islands, that is isolated entities cut off from the other entities, we are saying we are the crest of the waves, without realizing the troughs that bind us together. This misunderstanding leads us to think of our puzzle pieces as things that will disappear. Our fear comes from losing something, not realizing that all exists forever, it is just hiding or finding itself constantly. We start playing the wrong game.

we do not play the Game of Black-and-White[… i]nstead, we play the game of Black-versus-White or, more usually, White-versus-Black. For, especially when rates of vibration are slow as with day and night or life and death, we are forced to be aware of the black or negative aspect of the world. Then, not realizing the inseparability of the positive and negative poles of the rhythm, we are afraid that Black may win the game. But the game, “White must win” is no longer a game. It is a fight—a fight

That is we fear death. We cannot understand the nothingness of death, of not being, precisely because death and life are a polarity too large for us to comprehend from our key hole into the boudoir of God. And lets just say that religion has done an awful injustice to us, buy peddling its propaganda of fear, shame and judgment awaiting us in the afterlife. Like, that, is just your opinion, man.

We can only be alive as long as we can also be dead. The polarity of life and death, being and non-being. White and black. On and off. One or zero. Everything and nothing. But as Watts points out, we may indeed fear death, but everything we have ever known will die, and when we do take our last breath ourselves, so will we. And we will become what we where before we where conceived. Maybe we will remember who we are, or forget who we where, either way, it is classified information that we all will become privy to in due time. Realize this, and we can play the fun game of hide and seek, instead of the cutthroat zero sum win or lose, but either way we are playing games.

The chapter wants us to understand more about the games we play, and it now veers into thought experiments of what our future holds for us to prepare us for the points about games that it intends to make. Keeping in mind that Watts wrote the book in 1966 his predictions are holding their own.

The gist of it is that a game is that it is a way of bounding chaos by rules. Or the game is to create order from chaos, the winner who creates most order wins. The game evolves by increasing the amount of order is can create. Because most equate order with rules the games rules habitually grow in complexity. But eventually the game becomes dull, because the order that it imposes has made the randomness of chaos to low. The game feels rigged, it is no longer fair. And eventually we turn our backs on it. A bloody example is what happened in France after the starving peasants where told to go eat some cake, they didn't want to play that game any more. So we seek and find again a new game to play.

The game of life is a pattern, to large for us to comprehend, but the analogy Watts gives us is our bodies are constantly changing yet we as a pattern stays the same, we are a continuing process or pattern of behavior. We think we can improve our lot, but we try to do so by controlling the process of life. Technological progress has given us fantastic achievements, but the progress cannot be controlled because we do not have the bandwidth to process all the information. So we end up with progress that develops whatever it can, without an ability to reason if this is something we would want. The American Indians often would consider how a decision they made would affect the next seven generations, us moderns felt compelled to develop the atom bomb. Of course, we do not know if the atom bomb was a good idea or not yet, but the point is we made it because it could be made, and therefore it must be made. And in so doing we create more problems for ourselves.

By seeing ourselves as separate entities we create an illusion that the ego can control the body. This illusion leads to dualism where the good ego is in conflict with the bad body. But of course we are both body and ego. By playing this game we hide what we do not like and call it bad, so that we can pretend to be good and virtuous. But the more we ignore the shadows in our soul, where things festering in our unconsciousness.

At some point we need to decide what game we want to play. Are we love selectively the parts of our selves that we think are worth loving, or are we going to love ourselves unconditionally, warts and all?

Why is this truth so elusive?

Final thoughts

As the universe unfolds, evolves, whatever, we go about experiencing it through our consciousness. We can experience only a small fraction of reality, and therein lies the pleasure of the ultimate universe being able to play hide and seek, where it can find itself and lose itself endlessly. To understand this is to realize also that we are all connected, all part of the same universe and our actions have consequences. A realization that may take some effort to appreciate.