Ascend, Descend, Transcend

Lots of Sending

Ascend, descend, transcend. Lots of sending! What am I talking about here, and what do I really want to share?

I’m not really a very religious person. And I want to quickly steer the reader toward what I mean by gnosticism. It comes from gnosis, a Greek word literally meaning knowledge. I did grow up in a Catholic household, and was confirmed, as in the sacrament. While gnosticism is heavily rooted in religious texts, I want to go a slightly different way without fully abandoning those same roots. So I’ll talk mostly about gaming, movies, and how they relate to my own philosophical studies. But I won’t hesitate to throw an angel or a ghost into the topic one day and ride out how those can exist harmoniously with my thoughts.

To Play Is to Descend

Gaming is important to me, and with it, philosophy and psychology, and even sociology. Combined all together, they open up an area that I like talking about: gnosticism. To me, this is about ascending and descending to and from the temporary worlds we create with gaming.

Simply put, to play a game is to descend. To quit is to ascend. The magic circle, as it were, per Huizinga. Johan Huizinga, in Homo Ludens (1938), listed the magic circle among his play-grounds - alongside the card table, the stage, and the tennis court - and called them all “temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.” Distractions pull you upward, and immersion keeps you glued inside.

I say to have gnosis is to have the ability to quit. An addicted person has weaker control over their gnosis. A strong-willed person has acute control over when to quit, and therefore has strong control over their gnosis.

If you read my post on why we play again, you’ll remember that Quit is the last stage of the gameplay lifecycle, and that it isn’t the villain. Here, it’s something more. Quit is the way back up.

Mind, Body, and Soul

A soul, if you will. Mind, body, and soul. In the Philosopher’s Pot, I reason that the soul is a collection of experiences and memories. In time, this goes on to define who a person is: the things they like, how they act, their personality and flavors.

I’d argue the presence of a soul, even in this definition, is the very thing that provides gnosis. When you lose who you are, and when those things become less important, then you begin to lose your gnosis. This can happen with addiction. And this can be a very non-religious, non-faith-having argument entirely.

A soul to me is not the thing of a faithful man. While it might live in your brain, especially as a type-two sort of memory, I can still soundly separate it. Mind, body, and soul. Strictly speaking, they’re almost all the same thing - all physical pieces of the human anatomy. But I think they can be separated and abstracted away.

Can We Ascend From Here?

Follow with me here. If we can descend into games, and because we have willful gnosis, we can reascend, what does that mean in our real, physical world? Can we ascend out of this plane of existence, upward into something else? Can we even answer that at all?

Plainly speaking, no, I don’t think we can. I think we theorize, or even fantasize, about it. But ultimately, the answer is a resounding no. And that is somewhat frightening.

An Island Alone

The heroes of Dragon Quest 7 had a similar sort-of dilemma. Their island couldn’t be the only island in the world. Yet when they set sail in all directions, they continued to return to their island. Their world was a cage, and a trap. They were in a prison where their home island was all there was: a grand water-world with but a single land. A saddening reality that was unacceptable to the game’s heroes.

It’s a reality we almost held on our own planet, Earth, in the physical world. Except then, we learned to go “up,” into outer space. Space - the odd-sounding name we have for that place that isn’t within our world, but outside of it. A new frontier. And a dream come true.

Except space was almost anything but, due to the sheer unimaginable, unfathomable vastness of it. Space was not the island of Dragon Quest 7 that sailors could fully grasp and understand. While the game’s island had a traversable sea that explained it bluntly, our real space is too vast to traverse. We don’t know if you loop around like in Dragon Quest 7, or if it goes on forever, or if there’s a great border at the end of the star ocean.

Star Ocean - another great game series, by the way, that has in its own way tackled the question of gnosis. Space gives us a frail feeling of how minimal and infinitesimal we truly are. That’s relatable to me, in the same way the heroes of Dragon Quest 7 longed for something grander.

The Fourth Dimension

Star Ocean 3, Till the End of Time, explored the concept of dimensions. And I love it. The universe had external actors that could come in and out of the world as they desired. Descension into an avatar, and reascension to their real body.

To ascend means you must have a body to ascend into, or at least some kind of housing vessel. We’re almost constrained, in a way, to think in terms of bodies. I don’t think a body is necessarily the only kind of house for what I might call the soul - the thing we can abstract away from a body, the thing that might truly define ourselves, no matter the vessel. The outside dimension could have a body. If we ascend, then we are ascended from our existing vessel and into the new one, in the upper dimension.

Star Ocean called it the 4th Dimension. The third was simply a program of sorts, a universe its makers ran as a game, and it even had its viruses and guardian programs. The heroes, it turns out, were the virus.

No Quit Button

If we can ascend, we could descend too, into real physical bodies. Virtual reality almost gives us this. It doesn’t completely take away our willful senses, though.

Ready Player One explored a world where they are almost entirely nullified. Sword Art Online explored a world where those willful senses are completely nullified. In season one, the game’s creator intentionally omitted “Log Out” from the menu. Players who died in the game also died in the real world.

Being forced into a world is almost like being forced into addiction. Forced to forget who they were. Forced to abandon gnosis and take up the new goal of the world, promised as “complete the game and return to your outside lives.” But the heroes of SAO refused to abandon their gnosis - refused to become addicted and forget their true selves. This, I’d argue, is what ultimately led those heroes to victory.

If these aren’t what I love about gnosis and its intersection with gaming, then I don’t know what is.

The Traveler

I also play Genshin Impact, and it’s what gave me the idea for how my thoughts are tied to gnosticism at all.

The original Gnostics were religious movements of the first few centuries AD, many of them Christian. They taught that this world was made by a lesser god, the Demiurge, and that a divine spark sits trapped inside each of us. Gnosis was the way out: knowing where you truly came from.

The story in Genshin is still developing, but I really believe they are describing a digital world whose inhabitants are its NPCs, and the Traveler is the outside visitor who has “descended” into that world. It’s almost a beautiful translation of how we as humans play Genshin Impact and become the Traveler, who has also, like us, descended into Teyvat, the game’s name for its world. Gnosticism is heavily apparent in the game’s lore, and some of the story’s primary plot elements are objects called Gnoses.

The Traveler is a visitor to Teyvat who refuses to abandon his own gnosis. It’s what allows him to be uniquely known in the game as a “Descender.” Others who visit the world leave their gnosis at the door, and willfully descend to live their lives there, abandoning their former bodies. The Traveler must not abandon his role, because he has an important decision to make about the game’s planet. In a lore theory I subscribe to, the Traveler must become the game’s hero, and save the world by not abandoning his gnosis.

The Fall

Maybe the oldest descent story I know is the one I grew up with. Lucifer, one of God’s archangels, descended to the Earth in a literal kind of way.

The Book of Revelation tells of a war in heaven - Michael and his angels against the dragon - and of the dragon, “he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” John Milton turned that war into the heart of Paradise Lost (1667). The rebel angels lose, and fall through chaos for nine days before they land in Hell, with Satan, in Milton’s words, “less than Archangel ruin’d.”

Some readers have even gone looking for that fall in the second verse of Genesis. The first verse says God created the heaven and the earth. The second says the earth was without form, and void. What happened in between? The gap theory, which Thomas Chalmers championed in the early 1800s and the Scofield Reference Bible spread in 1909, reads a long stretch of time into that gap: a first creation, ruined by Lucifer’s fall, and then the six days of Genesis remaking it.

I was never taught that, mind you. It feels almost anathema to religious circles. For me, the gap theory is more the fun thought of where the war of the angels was. “And the earth was without form, and void” - because of the war of the angels. I find it fun to explore what could be there.

Here’s how it ties to our topic. Lucifer’s descent wasn’t a willful one, and there was no climbing back up. In my terms, his descent came without gnosis. Milton’s Satan answers with a line I’ve always found striking: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

A Prison, or a Simulation?

Philosophers have asked these same questions for a long time. Is our world a simulation? Can we prove or disprove that? Is our world a prison of sorts, where we are all cast down to the Earth to prove our worthiness of ascending once we have completed our adventure?

Plato’s allegory of the cave comes first to mind. Prisoners are chained facing a wall their whole lives, watching shadows cast by things carried behind them, and they take the shadows for the real world. One prisoner is freed and climbs up out of the cave into the sunlight. Plato even calls it an ascent. When he goes back down to tell the others, they laugh at him, and Plato says they’d sooner kill him than let him lead them up.

René Descartes, in his Meditations (1641), imagined an evil demon deceiving every one of his senses. Could he prove it wasn’t so? The one thing he couldn’t doubt was that he was there doing the doubting. That’s a long way from proving the world is real.

Nick Bostrom brought it into the computer age with his 2003 paper, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” His argument is a fork with three tines: either civilizations almost never reach the point of running detailed simulations of their ancestors, or they reach it and almost none bother to, or we are almost certainly living in one. He doesn’t claim to know which.

The prison idea is old, too. The Gnostics believed exactly that, a world built to hold the spark. And plenty of Christians read life on Earth as a test of sorts, a pilgrimage with heaven on the far side. Can any of these be proven or disproven from inside? So far, no one has managed it. Which is the same answer I gave earlier. Anyone who may have ever reached the other side had no way to reach back and reveal it. We are all the prisoners in Plato’s cave, who cannot prove or disprove what the ascendant had to say.

Transcension

Transcension is a word I proffered in the first line. In our own world, can we become so adept at technology that we achieve immortality, by abstracting our soul well enough and developing clones we can transcend our souls into?

Avatar has already written deeply about this with the Na’vi of Pandora. At the end of the first film, Jake Sully’s self is passed, through the Tree of Souls, out of his human body and into his Na’vi avatar, for good.

Then, in Avatar: The Way of Water, we saw the story’s main villain, Colonel Quaritch, reborn anew inside a new body - inside a Na’vi avatar. He had no memories of his death itself, since his soul was backed up before the battle. He could only remember everything up to that point, and nothing after. If the soul is a collection of experiences and memories, that’s about as close as fiction has come to moving one from house to house.

I also played Everafter Falls, a cutesy game in the same genre as the popular Stardew Valley. It opens with your character struck by a truck on Earth, and you wake in Everafter Falls, where the townsfolk tell you Earth was only a simulation you’d stepped into. Later, Fin, the character with the avatar of a frog, dies. But his mind was backed up by the one with a robot avatar. When metal-Fin reawakens, he has no memory of his death itself, only up to the point of the backup.

In fact, I believe the entire game is an allegory for the main player’s own mental space, a temporary world invented, likely just prior to a grim fate. I like to imagine the main player is on their deathbed, imagining and dreaming a world in their final moments, recollecting all of their passions for farming and crafting, and recreating all of their friends, family, and acquaintances as the NPC characters we encounter in the game. The game’s own name almost teases it - Everafter Falls. Does the developer want you to play because, as long as you continue to play, forever lives the memory of who they were preserving?

Descending for Good

And what about game worlds? If we are adept enough at technology, can we even recreate Sword Art Online-type worlds, where we can descend into not-so-temporary worlds to live life, in theory, by casting away our physical-world bodies and descending permanently? So long as the servers themselves remain on forever, then we could live inside a game world forever as well.

Anyone who has watched an online game shut down its servers knows how long forever tends to last. But it does make me wonder. Is that what we already live in?

Hollywood has asked it plenty of times, and I’ve watched a good few. In Tron (1982), a programmer is pulled inside the computer and has to fight his way back out. The Matrix (1999) wakes Neo from a simulated world into the real one. In Free Guy (2021), an NPC learns he lives in a game, which isn’t far from my read on Teyvat. Dark City (1998) has outside beings rebuilding a city every night and swapping its people’s memories while they sleep - and if the soul is a collection of memories, that’s an unsettling thought. And The Truman Show (1998) is the other ending to Dragon Quest 7’s sea: Truman sails away from the only town he’s ever known until his boat hits the painted wall of the sky, the great border at the end.

Closing

And so I wonder if our real world here is in some way related to Teyvat, or if it’s more like the world of Star Ocean, with an outside programmer. But it might just be an endless space, like the island at the beginning of Dragon Quest 7. All of these games heavily inspire my thoughts surrounding this series on the search for gnosis, what it means about the reality of our current existence, and how, like the heroes of all these games, we might be equally inspired to rise and ascend.

If you’re interested in these topics as well, you might stay tuned, because I’ll likely write more about them in the future. Anyway, that’s all for now.

But - one last thing. While we’re here, we might as well make the most of it. As Milton’s Satan said, the mind can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven. Temporary worlds are our ability - why not make them your luxury? Just remember to keep your gnosis while doing it.