Life is like a video game (yes, I know how that sounds but I challenge you to keep an open mind).
You take on the form of an avatar, a selected character that is necessary for you to interact with the make-believe world and achieve the objective of the game – the objective that you selected prior to pressing “start”.
The game is an imaginative world full of detail and wonder, with other characters that you can interact with and rules that govern how the fictitious world works.
From your perspective, you are the main character, the game is created for you and there is a purpose to it – that is, there are missions that you must complete in order to progress through the various stages of the game, learning as you go along.
Progress is key.
In order to complete the game and achieve your ultimate objective, you must move forward and unlock the stages required for you to reach the end.
Each stage has a unique challenge to overcome and a lesson to learn, with you acquiring new skills at each level that assist you as a player to move through the next stage.
As you progress, your avatar becomes stronger. They might be able to jump higher, run faster or influence other characters in the game more easily.
You, the player, are learning the rules of the game as you experience the various aspects of this digital world through the lens of your avatar.
Some levels might be easy to progress through, with you passing them on the first try. Some levels, however, might be trickier and require multiple attempts in order to figure it out.
Because it’s a game, you can keep trying until you learn the lesson required to advance to the next level. If you aren’t able to learn the lesson, you will stay at the current level as the script runs on a continuous loop until you do.
However, there’s a crucial aspect to this game that makes it particularly interesting.
When you press “start game”, you enter the world believing that the avatar is who you are.
The memory of you being the player behind the avatar is wiped clean as you forget the truth of who you actually are.
You then believe the world around you to be real which you perceive from the perspective of your chosen character whose programming dictates the version of reality you experience.
The purpose of the game remains the same – to move through the various stages, learning the lessons you need to learn and completing the assigned missions – however, you’ve forgotten that you’re actually playing a game.
You’ve become like a blind mouse running around in a maze.
As you move through the game, which you call life, your true self tries to communicate with you and guide you.
This comes through as an internal voice or feeling that your character experiences, but depending on how absorbed you are in the game, you might not be able to hear it or understand it. And even when you can hear it, you might not trust it as you allow the fear and need for control that’s innate to your avatar keep you stuck.
The player, your true self, might also try other tactics to get your attention and help guide you through the game.
Finding loopholes in the digital reality, the player might plant various signs on your path – things like repeating numbers, words or animals, books that contain the exact confirmation you need, other players coming into your life who influence you, social media posts that find their way into your feed, and other synchronicities that appear as “coincidences” from the avatar’s perspective.
Your true self tries to communicate with you and guide you, either as an internal voice or feeling, or by coordinating various synchronicities in your reality.
This is because the player needs you to progress, as they cannot learn and grow if you stay stuck in the same stage of the game.
The key therefore lies in being able to detach from your character long enough to remember who you are and what you came here to do.
At first, these moments of detachment will be short-lived as the gravitational pull of the digital world you find yourself in seeks to keep you hypnotized, but the more you’re able to detach, the longer those periods in a more objective state will be – and the more you’re able to piece the puzzle together, remembering that you are the player, not the avatar.
This changes the game entirely.
You can now play the game from a higher perspective, more connected to your true self as you start to notice and decipher the player’s clues and guidance, navigating your way through the game in a much more effortless way.
You start to move through the various stages, learning and growing at a faster rate, not allowing the entrancing allure of this fictional world to distract you back into a state of forgetfulness, aligning yourself more and more with the main objective for why you entered the game in the first place.
You get to experience the game from a place of enjoyment and peace, knowing that the character is not truly who you are and so you are not defined by what happens to them or by the programming that runs in their mind.
As your avatar advances through the game in this state of ease, they start to express an energy that affects the reality around them, impacting the other players and helping them to see what’s possible – helping them to learn their own lessons and advance in their individual games.
And when the time comes that you’ve reached as far as you can reach with the time you’ve been given, or perhaps you’ve even achieved your ultimate objective, the game will come to an end and you will return to the state of being the player, in full remembrance of who you are.
Depending on how you did, you (the player) might decide to re-enter the game and give it another shot, hopeful to learn the things you wish to learn a second (or one thousandth) time around.
It’s here that you might wonder who or what the player is, and what world they’re part of.
Now isn’t that the million-dollar question?
Questions to reflect on