6/12/2003 12:38:39 PM|||Travis|||

Wierd... Blogger was acting up today. I had to give it a big fat digital slap across its face to get it back into line. It looks nice and spiffy though, with a brand spanking new interface. I dig the dark blue color.

So what's new? Well, school is officially done. That is right, Travis is now a text-book free for a while. I will of course continue to study, but nothing from the forcefull hand of the university. I get to study whatever the hell I want. And so I will probably pick up philosophy, as I have really been into the Matrix as of late. I picked up a book called "Simulation and Simulacra," read the first chapter, shook my head and then read it again. Its pretty thick, but it has stuff that relates to the duality of the world. Maybe even more than a duality, but I picked it up only because it appeared in the Matrix, and the producers of the matrix control to a fine level of detail everything that goes into their movies. And so it undoubtabley must relate to Gnosticism and Buddism, and the Matrix.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Matrix is that it encapsulates the ancient concepts into a beautiful modern world. The simulation, the Matrix, has always been an idea of philosophers. Everything around us is simply an illusion, a mass shared hallucination with no "real" substance. There is always another world that these religions and philosophers speak of, a spiritual realm. The Matrix uses the concept of two realities, the modern times and a techno-holocuast where machines have overthrown humans as the dominant life form on Earth. Not a great reality to wake up to.

The Gnostic influence of the film is present in the form of the illusion (the Matrix) and the agents. It was the Gnostics who believed that archons controlled the illusionary world we inhabit, and these were the people in power. In the Matrix, Morpheous says that the agents are "everyone and no one" meaning they could inhabit any of the forms that you see in the Matrix. I take this as a generally bad world view, as you would like to think that everyone you meet is on your side, not out to get you. I could see a paraoid person believing that everyone was an archon, or has the potential to be, and I think of a lunatic.

I like people. But I also think there is some truth to the our world is a hallucination belief. I like to think that we are in a game show, that is our life. There are people creating this hallucination for a purpose, maybe they are recreating some important event, or maybe you are an imortal being that likes to recreate simulations himself. This is a great world view, and goes something like this:

We are all importal beings, who have eternity to do what we want. So what do we do? We decide to create simulations of our past and inhabit them. We cannot have knowledge of our true self in these simulations, as this would spoil the fun. We want to see how we do without knowing that we cannot possibley die.

Death is what it all comes back to. How do you deal with this fact of life? Surely, this is the basis of all religion. So any belief system must have some sort of "what happens to you when you die" type of belief. Some promise everything... actually most promise something that is better than this life.But I would like to think that the concept of Heaven is already here, all around us.

After re-reading my post on the Bible, I have a renewed faith in Christain Gnosticism. The belief is that we all have a divine spark inside of us that inhabits our material bodies in a mass hallucination called reality. The divine spark exists in another realm, one that is all around us all the time, but we choose not to see it. Now how do we come to understand this Heaven? I have no idea.

Here is a crazy thought I had the other day. What if this really is just a simulation, a "game" so to speak? Then what is the object... how do you win? You have to look back over history, and see who the biggest winner of all time was- Jesus. He had the most influence/power over people, and convinced (and still is convincing) people that he is more than human.

So perhaps the object of this simulation is to be as influential as Jesus.

(I love how crazy some ideas seem after you write them down)

In other news, I haven't done much work on the game lately. The entire project has hit a dry spot, and we have lost about three weeks. Now I know that there was finals, and everyone was racing to finish up school, but that is almost orthagonal to the depression that the company is in. What we really need is someone to lead (I know I have written this before), and that must be me. I keep putting it off, but once Jake gets back from Vegas and the next week starts, it is on. Jay has nothing to do, and niether does Jake- Eschaton will become a full time thing.

It is really going to be up to me to guide this company to victory. That is what it comes down to. I am getting an appreciation for what managers really do, besides futz with silly documents and scheduling software. They keep everyone focused on the project. It is almost a spiritual job, and I have heard it described as such. You really have to lead the company, set examples and be passionite about what you do. Its hard to quantify what you do- engineers actually make something that they can point to and call theirs. Leaders don't have anything concreate like that. All they can do is look out the window when their company is victorious, and look into the mirror when their company falls apart.

Right now, I am looking in the mirror.

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