Life is a Game and the Bad Guys are Winning

Gnostic Wisdom for Modern Times

Have you ever met someone who seems like they’re playing a version of themselves? Behind their smiles or tears is another person, but try as you might you can’t reach them. Maybe you’ve played that game yourself. Maybe we all have.

We’ve built society around this game, and points are won by knowing the right rules and roles. It’s a game in which growth and consumption are worth more than truth and authenticity. Even so, if you ask people if human life is worth more than corporate profits, most will choose life.

So why would we play a game if we know in our hearts it doesn’t really matter?

The answer may lie in a myth you know, but have never heard. Its threads can be found in Vedanta, Sufism and Zen. It has been told by Meister Eckhart, Carl Jung, and The Matrix.

The myth emerges again and again to remind us how agonising and contradictory it is to be a human, and how to free ourselves from the games we get stuck in.

Once you hear it, it’s hard to forget.

Nag Hammadi

Its most beautiful expression might have been lost to history if two Egyptian brothers hadn’t needed some fertiliser in 1945. While searching caves near their home in Nag Hammadi, Muhammad al-Samman and his brother Khalifah discovered a large clay jar.

Hoping to find treasure, they broke it open to discover more than a dozen ancient books. The codices contained the writings of the Gnostics, a group of early Christians. Until then, everything we knew about them came from the many polemics that early church fathers wrote to discredit them.

Unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Catholic Church was unable to gain control of the Nag Hammadi Codices. It’s probably for the best, because they were explosive. With nearly fifty texts, they contained gospels, treatises, poems and discourses. In some gospels, the snake is the hero in the Garden of Eden story. Others claim that Jesus didn’t die on the cross, and that he wasn’t the only incarnation of God on earth. We’re all divine, and he just came to remind us.

That isn’t the myth I’m talking about. The myth I’m talking about is far weirder, and appears in multiple texts in various forms. It goes something like this.

In the beginning, there was an eternal, immaterial realm of pure light and unity known as the Pleroma, or ‘fullness’. Within the Pleroma were emanations of the Monad: the one, ultimate, unknowable divinity. The “Mother-Father of All”. These aspects of the divine were called Aeons, and they existed in masculine and feminine pairs; manifestations of divine essences like Truth, Wisdom and Grace.

One of the most powerful was Sophia. Wisdom. She was full of passion and yearning. A yearning to know. To express. To create. So strong was her desire that it caused a rupture in the divine order, because in her passion Sophia attempted to birth life and she was so wrapped up in the moment that she did it without her masculine half.

This is where it all goes wrong.

Her act of individuation broke the cosmic harmony, and Sophia accidentally created a blind, deformed entity called Yaldabaoth. Yaldabaoth could not understand the Pleroma. Half-born and never whole, the writings describe him as a cracked reflection, a lifeless abortion.

Sophia despaired, and tried to tell him he was only an echo. But Yaldabaoth couldn’t hear her. He was an echo that believed itself to be the source.

Have you heard it before?

Full of blindness and arrogance, Yaldabaoth declared himself to be the one true god. And then, to recreate the Pleroma, he created the world of matter you live in. But he lacked the ennoia, the divine creativity, of Sophia and the other Aeons. The world he created could never capture the fullness of reality. It was, like him, a dim reflection of something greater.

To rule his domain, Yaldabaoth created an army of Archons, lesser rulers to govern the planets. But this wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to create life, and so he made human beings.

Full of remorse, Sophia asked the Monad for help. Together they tricked Yaldabaoth into breathing his own divine half into the first human beings.

And so it came to pass that human beings are both divine and bound in matter. Free souls, and players trapped in a game. And in its infinite grace, the Mother-Father of all sent a redeemer to enter the new world of matter and awaken the sparks of divine light trapped in human beings. To awaken and to guide them back to an inner remembrance of their true origin.

Old Wisdom for Modern Times

For many Gnostics, Yaldabaoth was the god of the old testament. A metaphor for the empty hierarchies, authoritarianism and domination they saw in the early church. In Gnostic services, men and women often took turns as priests to give the Eucharist. The early church fathers despised them. But that’s a story for another time.

The real value of this myth for the times we live in is that it’s a particularly sophisticated version of an insight repeated again and again across cultures to describe the human condition. It’s why Carl Jung saw the Gnostics as the first psychologists.

Their myth captures an insight that, if it’s true, can help us move beyond the broken social and economic games we’re trapped in today. It goes something like this.

You have an essential self. It’s deeper than your culture or your upbringing. A ‘youness’ both unique and mysterious. It connects you to a great ocean of being that was here before you arrived, and will be here after you’re gone. A fullness that is also void. A fullness in which, as Sophia did, we can become blind in our natural desire for individuality.

You can’t ‘make’ your essence, any more than you can make it rain. You can’t know it fully, any more than you can count every grain of sand on earth. But you can feel it in your beating heart.

It’s the ‘you’ that doesn’t ask for permission to be you.

It has many facets. Joy. Freedom. Strength. Grief. Compassion. Hope. Your essence feels these purely and without hesitation. Without judgement or negotiation or second guessing or game playing.

It's why, in the moments when we really feel our essence, we often feel that we’ve arrived home in a world that loves us and always has.

Lovely.

So why don’t we all walk around in perpetual bliss? Why don’t we stay connected to our true selves all the time?

Because we also have a part of us that is, like Yaldabaoth, completely blind to our essence. And that part of us tends to control our societies, because we can become adamant that it’s all that matters.

We grow up in a world that is both beautiful and terrifying, unfair and expansive, dead and alive. And everyone around us has also grown up in that world, and to varying degrees they have held onto their essence or completely forgotten it. Being human means being confused, ignorant and prone to self-deception, with the capacity to love and create like deities.

It’s a lot to cope with.

Adapting to the Game

As you grow up, you develop intelligent strategies to survive in this world. Maybe your unbridled joy as a child was too much for parents who had forgotten their own smiles. Perhaps the gentlest look of disapproval at the dinner table was enough to teach you that too much joy wasn’t welcome here, and you’d better get with the program fast.

Now you faced a conundrum. What do you do if what you feel isn’t welcome in the world, but you feel it anyway? If what’s most important to you is something that, to the world, doesn’t really matter? You’ll have to get away from that feeling somehow so it doesn’t get you in trouble. Or, embrace it unapologetically and risk rejection. Most of us find somewhere in between.

In the process, we build things called personalities. A structure around our essential feelings and desires that is partly made of uniqueness, and partly there to control the frightening power of who we really are. Another word for this is an ‘ego’, which simply means ‘I am.’

There is a reason Carl Jung was so impressed by the Gnostics. He had observed that we walk around with two selves, just as the Gnostics pointed out two thousand years ago. We have an ego which mediates between us and the world, and a deeper Self which is rooted in our deep unconscious experience.

These two aspects of us have a complex relationship. The Diamond Approach, a school that combines depth psychology with wisdom traditions, teaches that in the process of constructing our personalities we create holes inside our psyches. Eventually that pure joy you felt can’t be reached, so you feel it as an absence. But because it is actually essential to your existence, a part of your personality develops as a compensation for it.

The Gnostic myth is brilliant in its understanding of what happens next. Just like Yaldabaoth tries to mimic the Pleroma, our personality structures try to mimic our essences. Compassion becomes people pleasing, co-dependence, and a need for approval. Inner strength becomes a false will, stubbornness or domination. Inner calm and stillness becomes aloofness, nihilism or withdrawal.

The more we grow up, and the more we’re told that aspects of ourselves aren’t welcome in these parts, the more our personality structure becomes dominant and creates a false world within us. Eventually, we decide it is Who We Are.

Perpetual Echoes

This is Yaldabaoth. An echo of something deeper that believes it is the thing itself. An echo that has to keep mimicking because to stop would be to realise its own dependence on something deeper it can never fully know.

Just like Yaldabaoth, our personality structures, or egos, can never match the reality and power of the Self. We are a cracked reflection over a beautiful wholeness. As Jung put it, “The experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego.”

And so reconnection often brings terror, and the ego tries to usurp the Self to gain momentary control, similar to how Iain McGilchrist describes the left hemisphere of the brain becoming the master when it should be the emissary.

Like Yaldabaoth, the personality structure does this by declaring itself to be all there is. It mimics essence, but can never re-create it. For Jung, this is a process called ‘inflation’. Inflated egos are incredibly insecure, because they fear that beneath their bluster lies annihilation, and they are right.

Ever met people like that, who are striving desperately to be seen a certain way? At once inflated and self-centered and insecure and terrified? They play the villain in many of our stories.

In day to day life, we can often see right through their masks. The great tragedy is that this kind of falseness is what gets you ahead in the societies we’ve created.

As the Gnostics warned two thousand years ago, if you build a society rooted in Yaldabaoth’s blindness, you will create hell on earth. A rigged game that rewards weakness, inauthenticity, and ultimately destroys itself.

You probably know all of this already. Assholes control the world, and the nice conscious people almost always lose.

But not always. The Gnostic scholars brilliantly pointed out that Yaldabaoth has a profound weakness: he can’t actually create anything.

He lacks Sophia’s ennoia, her divine creativity. Eventually, systems built on disconnection start to feel unreal. Like a weird reality TV show we’re all living in. We lose our collective essence, and hunger for it again. We grow tired of a world made of empty signs and symbols and ideas and products and void of true beauty and feeling.

In the same way the ego tries to replicate the Self, self-centred societies try to replicate the wider systems of nature they depend on. Her natural hierarchy is mimicked through the warped hierarchy of the state. Skyscrapers replace trees. Products replace meaning. Political theatre replaces genuine human decision-making.

Sound familiar?

Yaldabaoth is the sociopathic tech CEO, the greedy banker, the heartless bureaucrat. He’s the twisted delusion driving our economies, building our technologies and advancing our politics.

We all know his game. The Gnostics knew how to beat it.

Freedom

What the Gnostic myth, the Diamond Approach, Vedanta, Zen, Jungian psychology, Sufism and many other traditions point out is that we can free ourselves from this game by making an unexpected move.

Instead of going outward, we turn inward. We reconnect to our essence. To that divine spark in each of us. That means patiently unravelling our tangled and thorny defences, and bearing the blood and pain, until we can feel ourselves and one another as living, breathing humans.

If there is wisdom to this, can we apply its logic to whole societies rather than just the individual? What would it mean for a society to remember its essence?

This is the question that inspired my documentary Leviathan. The titular leviathan was directly inspired by the Gnostic mythos, as well as by Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch, in which he personifies the zero-sum logic of our economic system as a dark god that cares only about winning, even if winning means destroying everything.

I love Scott Alexander’s metaphor, but I think there’s something in the Gnostic myth that captures more fully the reason we’re facing civilisational collapse. Beneath extractive, zero-sum systems and authoritarianism is a fundamental paradox of the human condition.

Like Yaldabaoth, you can’t look at the Leviathan directly because it doesn’t actually exist. It’s a hyper-object in the psyche that has become encoded in the systems around us. It is a paradox because we are paradoxes. We can’t beat the game by its own rules, but within the game you can’t see any other rules. So we have to leave the game somehow, find new rules somewhere else, and build a better game.

Gnosis

For the Gnostics, freedom from blindness was found through gnosis, spiritual knowledge that reconnects us to the divine spark within.

The Diamond Approach teaches that we can reconnect to essence by deeply inquiring into ourselves and being radically curious about our personality structure.

Zen, Vedanta, Sufism and many other wisdom traditions all have practices and insights that help us to see reality through the eyes of our essential selves.

In fact, we’ve developed many ways of coming home. You’ve probably experienced that reconnection many times. Whether it’s through deep relationships, dialogue, meditation, or psychedelic experiences, coming back is a process of peeling back the layers of defence and delusion until we can touch that hole again and be authentically and unapologetically ourselves.

We don’t know much about the practices the Gnostics used, but it’s safe to say we now have access to more practices today than they would have. We have meditations and philosophies that elicit non-dual experiences. Psychedelic journeys approached with intention and discipline. Dialogue practices that open our hearts. Wisdom traditions to make sense of and contextualise our experiences.

Nature immersion to open our souls to embodied reality. Forest bathing. Ecstatic dance. Mindfulness. Running. Breathwork.

We have gnosis at our fingertips, if we’re willing to put in the work. What we feel when we really connect to ourselves and each other is exactly where we will find the rules of a new social game.

The question is then how to bring essential qualities like compassion, inner strength and stillness into the mainstream in such a way that it can survive Yaldabaoth’s attempts to co-opt and turn them into weak imitations.

This is why art and music are such vital tools in making it through the metacrisis. They have no point outside of themselves, and as such incomprehensible to Yaldabaoth. Deep expressions of the human experience speak to our shared essence.

No one is interested in art about the beauty of corporate policy or the ins and outs of property law. Art reminds us that the essence of human beings matters more than profit and blind progress. This remembering, if we can scale it, could create a revolution. Not a revolution of competing simulations of reality, but a revolution in collective intelligence.

A revolution spread by molotov cocktails filled with bitter truths that turn sweet as they burn. By bricks of insight crashing through the tax office windows and bursting into flowers. A politics of laughter, and visions of hope.

A revolution that starts by rejecting value structures that place simulations over authentic essence wherever we find them. Refusing to comply, and instead showing, in as many institutions and social structures as we can, how much more free we would be if we valued who we really are over the characters we’re forced to play.