Life Without Games, Conclusion

The Platonic End Run

The goal of this series of posts has been to describe the theory of transacational analysis, and to demonstrate how it makes sense of human sin and human suffering. Basically, transactional analysis shows us that most of our actions and our mental states are not chosen. Rather, our actions are chosen for us, by patterns rooted in social custom and in the experiences of our childhood, often (though not always) traumatic. I have presented the Platonic model of the soul and a set of practices for its purification. The reason for this is to do a kind of end-run around modern psychology and psychotherapy. By returning to older models and alternative conceptions of the soul, we can circumvent the Parent-Adult-Child system and the three toxic categories of the rescue game. 

Let's take a moment to return to transactional analysis as such, and see what Eric Berne thought about the means of overcoming games.

In Games People Play, Berne writes that the goal of transactional analysis is the attainment of autonomy by the individual. He then defines autonomy as the capacity for awareness, spontaneity, and intimacy.

By awareness, he means the capacity to experience reality on its own terms, unconditioned by cultural expectations. Above all, he means the capacity to be present. 

By spontaneity, Berne means the capacity to choose one's own actions.

And by intimacy, the capacity to have relationships with other individuals uncorrupted by games. 

The first two terms refer to the individual's relationship with himself, the second to the larger social world in which he participates. In our terms, all three relate to the development of virtue, to justice within the soul and the purification of the nous. 

Notice that none of these concepts are foreign either to the Platonic tradition or other, related, traditions of spiritual development. The capacity for an unconditioned experience of reality is precisely the goal of Taoist internal alchemy. The unconditioned child, capable of present awarness and active relationships, is identical to the yuan shen (元神) or "original spirit." For Plotinus, the present is the closest one can come to eternity while incarnate; the past is one step, the future two steps removed. True awareness of the present is thus the closest one can come to awareness of eternity. 

Of course, for Berne, as a trained psychotherapist, freedom from games is attained on the psychotherapist's couch and in the group therapy session. Now, this is where Berne's system seems inferior to the work of the ancients. We are used to these sorts of things. The therapist's couch appears banal, the therapy group, somewhat ridiculous. But is it really so? Can't we rather see in the therapist's couch an analogue to the dialogues of Socrates? And aren't the collective dialogues of the Republic and the Symposium-- and even the Laws-- akin to group therapy? And we might an earlier and more effective echo of the Socratic practices in the private Confessional and the group Confiteor of the Christian Church. 

The one practice derived from Plato that I haven't discussed explicitly, then-- but which is just as important as the others-- is the dialogue. This is too large and important a concept to go into here, and so we'll save it for a future post, or series. 

The Path to the Child is Through the Adult

Although mainstream psychotherapy seems to have minimized Eric Berne in favor of medication and odd techniques like EMDR, many of his ideas have gotten loose into the popular culture. Among the most harmful of these is that of the Inner Child, and I want to talk about this for a moment. 

Like many things, the idea of the Inner Child isn't harmful in its natural habitat, that is, the process of transactional analysis. Here the capacity to reveal the Natural or Unconditioned Child is the goal of a therapeutic process which includes coming into awareness of the games that one plays, healing the Conditioned Child, and learning to reason as an Adult. On its own, the Inner Child seems to have escaped especially into New Age circles, where he does a great deal of harm.  

So let us be clear: The Inner Child isn't Peter Pan. Peter Pan lacks the capacity to grow up, and so he lacks the capacity to either reason as an Adult or to make rapid judgments as a Parent. Don't get me wrong, he's great fun to be around-- as long as everything's going well. But what happens when disaster strikes-- as it always does, in human life? In a crisis, we need to be able to make snap judgments rooted in trained opinion, and then we need to reason as to the best course of action. To take an extreme example, imagine an EMT coming upon a mass casualty event. (Don't imagine it too strongly, as we don't need to bring it into manifestation.) But suppose it's a plane crash, or a train derailment. Our EMT must immediately take stock of the injured and sort them into three categories. Light injuries need to be ignored for now-- but so do mortal injuries. The first will keep, and the second can't be kept. Priority must be given to those whose injuries are life-threatening but amenable to treatment. Hard choices must be made, and discipline maintained in the face of danger. The Child ego state cannot do this. An adult reasons, a parent opines, but a child emotes. In a crisis, the Child's response is the temper tantrum. 

And as our society has careened from crisis to crisis for two decades, we've also seen our capacity for resopnse to crisis reduced to screaming and wailing. At best we manage to shift into a Parental state, judging and condemning, but directing our judgments only at others, the other side, our perceived enemies. This lasts for a time, and then we're back to bawling again. At times the Parent and Child ego states are indistinguishable-- which makes perfect sense, given that many of us have been raised by people who are themselves permanent children. 

Here again we can turn to the Platonic tradition for guidance.

Four, Three, Two, One

Inscribed above the entrance to Plato's Academy were the words "Let no one enter who is ignorant of Geometry." This seems reasonable enough if we think of the Academy as a modern school, but rather odd if we consider it to have been more akin to an ashram or monastery. The latter are centers of spiritual development-- what has geometry to do with God? 

For us, nothing. For the ancients, everything. 

In keeping with the usual custom of the ancient world, Plato's inner teachings were kept secret, not revealed to the public or in the dialogues. We have only hints of what these teachings may have been, but these are very suggestive. Among the best sources for Plato's inner teachings is his wayward student Aristotle, whose work is peppered with sideswipes and direct attacks at his longtime teacher. From the Republic, we know that Plato divided the powers of the soul into four: sensation, opinion, reason, and intellection, in ascending order from the purely physical to the purely intellectual. From Aristotle, we know that each of these was assigned to the numbers of the tetrad: 

 

Mind [that is, noesis or intellection] is the monad, science or knowledge [reason] the dyad (because it goes undeviatingly from one point to another), opinion the number of the plane, sensation the number of the solid; the numbers are by him expressly identified with the forms themselves or principles, and are formed out of the elements; now things are apprehended either by mind or science or opinion or sensation, and these same numbers are the Forms of things. 

 

In the teachings of Plato, we must ascend from the sensory to the spiritual, the outward to the inward, the complex to the simple, step by step. And there is no skipping steps. We must move from the Four, the sensory knowledge of the world of the Four Elements that we share with the animals, to the Three, the capacity to govern our perceptions by traind opinions. We move from the Three, the world of opinions that we share with the other members of our society or our group, to the Two, the capacity to think original thoughts and acquire knowledge directly for ourselves. We move from the Two, which is knowledge in process and knowledge of objects, to the One, which is the nondual state of union, where there is no distinction between knower and known, subject and object. Now this unitive state is the state of our original existence, as we have declined from the One, the state of union with the Divine, to the Two, the realm of Ideas, to the Three, the phantoms of the collective soul, to finally settle in the Four, the world of matter. To ascend to the unitive state is to return to our original condition, in which we have the capacity to choose, to create, and to relate. This, then, is the true Inner Child, the true Yuan Shen. But it is not reached through the world of sense or opinion, but only by cultivating the trained opinions of the Parent, and the reasoning capacity of the Adult. 

To put it in archetypal terms, the Conditioned Child is Peter Pan. He is incapable of maturity, incapable of relationships; he can only play or pout when his fun is spoiled. The Natural Child is Mabon, the Child God. Now Mabon is imprisoned below the Earth, and is only freed after a series of arduous adventures. His prison is Neverland; to be stuck there is to be stuck in the world of Sense and Opinion. (This is also the imprisonment of Ulysses on the island of Circe.) His freedom is the attainment of sovereignty over the reason and union with the noetic realm. 

Becoming Non-Contingent



And another way of saying this is that our goal is to become non-contingent beings. In traditional theology, the argument from contingency states that for everything that exists, there is a cause; therefore everything is contingent upon the existence of something else. But it is impossible for there to be an infinite number of contingent things, because if everything requires something else to exist, nothing could ever come into existence. Therefore there must be a non-contingent being. Moreover, there can only be one such being, as, if there were more than one-- even if there were only two-- then both would have to share some third thing in common in order to both be said to "exist." They would, therefore, depend upon that third thing for their existence, and that would be the actual one non-contingent being. 

The goal of the spiritual life is union with God, and, as Plato wrote in the Theaetetus, to become like God. And this is another way of saying, to gain the capacity to choose our actions, rather than having them chosen for us by our cultures, backgrounds, and childhood circumstances. Our work, then is-- insofar as it is possible-- to become non-contingent beings, dependent for our actions and our choices upon nothing-- save God alone. 

The End