2015 From Escapism to Self-Responsibility - Using Gaming as a Platform of Self Change -- Part 3

This blog is part of the series about Escapism wherein I have been sharing the process of self-change that I am applying, specifically in relation to playing videogames and the mind-pattern of addiction and escapism it activates within myself. I don't play games often, but I have noticed that when I do, I just get swallowed up in it. All it takes is for me to find one game that sparks my interest and before long as I start playing it, it can start to consume most of my (valuable) time.

In the previous blogs, "2014 From Escapism to Self-Responsibility - Using Gaming as a Platform of Self Change" Part 1 and Part 2, through my application of the tools of self-change in changing this specific pattern, I have been able to see what I am actually doing and what really happens 'behind the scenes' while I get caught up in playing a game and it starts to overshadow my life. This was about half a year ago and since then I haven't been playing any games until recently when I discovered this game called Epic Defence. I was looking for something to entertain myself with so I decided to try it and ended up enjoying it. However this 'enjoyment' turned problematic as I noticed how I was wanting to spend more and more time playing the game than on anything else.

So this gives me a nice opportunity to again investigate the pattern of addiction when it comes to gaming and to see which points within myself still serve as an open window for me to give my power away and let myself get carried away by something instead of standing as a pillar of self-direction and -will. The return of this pattern by no means implies that I 'failed' in my first attempts to change it. All that it shows me is that I have overlooked certain points of self-understanding and self-awareness which still allow a 'weakness' to exist within myself  for certain thoughts/feelings/emotions and mind-programs to 'overtake' me and take me for a ride. So it's then just a matter of applying the tools of self-introspection through self-honesty and writing, self-forgiveness, self-correction and real-time self-change.

Escapism and playing games and getting lost in It is a very strange sensation. Specifically the point where in your awareness you know that there are other things you should be doing and that it is better for you to stop playing the game and just go do stuff that is more relevant and important and self-supportive but then you start fighting that awareness in your mind and questioning that awareness to basically protect the energy that you are experiencing in that moment, meaning the feelings of reward, adrenalin and dopamine as you are playing the game.

So, in theory it shouldn't be that difficult to just pause the game or just stop it and move on to doing other things, because it is literally just a game, it holds no value or importance and that energetic experience of value and reward that I feel inside myself as I am collecting gems and coins and defeating my virtual attacker in the game are simply illusions because the game in itself is virtual reality, i.e. not ACTUAL reality. This means that even though I feel as though I am winning, gaining and achieving something of great value, importance and worth, I am actually not at all and it is all only happening in the virtual reality in my mind stimulated by the game that I am playing.

An interesting point to look at and consider here is that there appears to be a lack of understanding in relation to the word 'game' and thus a necessity to clearly define for myself what a 'game' is and what the difference is between a 'game' and 'reality', to assist and support myself with making decisions that are based on the reality of things and not based on feelings.

So that in other words I don't end up allowing the illusory experience of value and importance within playing a game to override what is important and valuable in fact, which is to for instance pause and put down the game when I see that there are other things to be done with my time. And so that I can assert myself to allow this game nor the energetic feeling experiences that it triggers in my mind to hold any weight when it comes to how I decide to move and direct myself in my life from moment to moment, because  it shouldn't in any way what so ever. A game is after all just a game.

This understanding of what a game is will determine my starting point, meaning who I am when I start playing and the kind of experience I will end up creating while I am playing because of 'who I am'. When my definition and thus my starting point in relation to playing games is that somewhere within myself in the back of my mind I actually believe that the feelings of value, importance and worth which come up as a preprogrammed induced reaction to playing computer games are real, then I will have a really difficult time trying to quit playing because I truly believe that I would be having to give up on something very important if I were to stop the game.

The starting point of playing a game, and of doing anything at all for that matter, would be the 'reason why' I do it. And that 'reason why' can be corrupted and compromised when it is based on a misunderstanding of what certain things are and how they exist. Wanting and desiring to play a game because I want to experience the feelings I get while playing the game, indicates that there exists a belief in myself that to a certain degree those feelings are real. This would be a sign of a corrupted and compromised starting point because in reality anything I might be experiencing internally while playing a computer game is entirely and solely stimulated by the perception created within the game that the participant is achieving and accomplishing things as they move up in levels, earn virtual rewards and defeat virtual adversaries  - none of which is taking place in real life.

Thus to correct the self-compromising pattern of escapism within the example of an addiction to gaming, I will have to correct my starting point as the 'who I am' in relation to playing games. An addiction to gaming and a behavioural pattern of escapism can only exist when there is a 'flaw' in the design of 'who I am' and consequently in my starting point in relation to gaming, and this design pertains to how I see and understand the world that I exist in. The particular flaw in the design would in this case be the belief that I will find worth, value and importance within playing a computer game and that those energetically exciting experiences in the mind of apparent value, importance and worth when unlocking a level or achieving a goal in the game are in fact what real worth, value and importance is, while it is very obvious that realistically speaking this is not at all so.

As long as this faulty perception of reality exists as a belief system in my mind, then the desire, want and need to play games will exist, as well as the potential to develop an addiction to it, which would be the experience of not being able to stop playing and the feeling that nothing else is as interesting, engaging and important as playing that game.

So within redefining the word game, it seems that I actually have to look at redefining words such as importance, worth and value, because it is these things that I have mistakenly understood to be based within feelings, like the feeling of excitement I experience upon being rewarded with something, be it a prize in a computer game or appraisal from peers, family and/or people in my general environment. In this context, importance, worth and value would actually be quite meaningless and empty because it is literally based only on a belief that if I achieve, win or accomplish something, and specifically when something or someone else outside of myself recognizes and tells me that I have, it somehow makes 'who I am' inside myself 'better' and 'more'.

Looking at why and how it is that I don't already experience and see value, worth and importance as an inherent part of myself, I can see that it is because of this separation that I have accepted and allowed to exist within myself wherein I see and define value, worth and importance as things that my environment must give me. The solution here is to thus  through applying the tools of self-forgiveness, self-correction and self-commitments, develop the realization and understanding of how I can start living value, worth and importance as a self-expression that is best for myself instead of it being something that distracts me from living my life to my utmost potential.

This is a process that I will be sharing in the next blog.

2014 From Escapism to Self-Responsibility - Using Gaming as a Platform of Self Change -- Part 2

2014 From Escapism to Self-Responsibility - Using Gaming as a Platform of Self-Change -- Part 2

Changing Escapism in Real-Time

Within the following blog post I will be sharing a second step in a process that I have walked in relation to changing and transforming a tendency within myself to use entertainment within and as a pattern of 'Escapism' - where, in the first step, I had started to notice that within venturing into the realm of playing computer games, I had gone from wanting to do it only once in a while to relax and enjoy myself, to wanting to do it all the time -- indicating that my relationship with playing computer games inside of myself is of a problematic nature and that it requires to be investigated and changed. And I am sharing this process here so that it may serve as a blueprint and platform for others facing similar experiences within themselves in relation to entertainment to also change this self-sabotaging relationship within themselves and find their inner power to direct themselves in transforming their relationship to entertainment from being self-destructive and self-sabotaging to being self-supportive and self-contributory.

So on a second occasion now, after having walked the first step of real-time self-change in relation to having accepted and allowed a pattern of escapism to exist within myself in relation to participating in entertainment such as playing computergames, I found myself participating in a computergame, where it starts out 'innocent', like 'I deserve a bit of time for myself', 'I have worked enough'. And then I start playing and almost immediately I find myself in this energy of like a hastiness and impatience and stress, where like my eyes become big and I get this frown on my face and a tension in my forehead.

And then when I noticed that I was in this energy of like a 'possession', wherein I think 'no, I don't want to stop, just let me play a bit longer - I don't feel like stopping' -- I started applying self-forgiveness within myself in relation to the points that I found in the first step. Which was on placing the energy superior to my physical reality and losing track of my physical world and reality by giving more value to the energy that I am feeling in relation to the game.

I found this to be the point where, if I apply self-forgiveness from that perspective, I can actually see, while I am applying self-forgiveness and incorporating those realizations, how that positive energy that I am participating in while I am playing Banished is actually a 'lie' and an 'illusion' from the perspective that, while I feel 'energized' and 'positively charged' while  and when I am playing the game -- what is actually going on is that I am ALLOWING my attention to get swallowed up by and funnelled into an energy experience that just comes up within me of which  I actually have no real clue of where it comes from and why and how it exists within myself, which then creates an absolute resistance to and towards anything else in my life that is not that one point connected to the energy - aka playing Banished - it makes me isolate myself from my environment only to submerge myself in this onedimensional experience within myself which I now believe to be 'who I am' and 'all that I am', and so completely sabotage my relationships with the people in my world and reality.

So, that positive energy experience and feeling of excitement that makes me feel as though I am actually really doing something substantial is a lie and an illusion because in reality, all that I am doing is give away my power - the power that I have as a living being to direct physical reality. Instead, I allow a preprogrammed construct and relationship of energy within the mind to direct my physical actions and expression -- all because I have defined myself within and as the energy experience and I actually believe it to be 'who I am', rather than seeing, realizing and understanding that there are multiple dimensions and factors at play behind the scenes in relation to how and why I experience this specific energy when playing computer games - dimensions and factors that I don't see or consider if I don't slow myself down and investigate what is actually going on within and as myself.

While I was thus speaking the words of forgiveness in relation to accepting and allowing myself to give my power and self-directive potential away to this energy and placing this energy as the directive principle of myself and my life -- I actually was able to shift myself out of the experience for a moment to see clearly the absurd nature of what I was doing and what I was accepting and allowing within myself and my world and reality -- that I was trading in everything of who I am for an illusion, a preprogrammed Feeling - Wow.

Now, the fact that this experience came up within myself 'again' and that I accepted and allowed myself to sort of tumble into seemingly the same rabbit hole 'again', is a point that I would usually take as an opportunity for myself to go into self-judgment and feeling bad about myself and my process and thus an opportunity for myself to eventually even end up considering to just give up on my Process of walking out of the mind altogether.

However this time, as I was observing these thoughts creeping into my mind at that moment when I realized within myself that I am participating in energy whilst playing the game and that I have thus not yet corrected this point within myself of defining 'gaming' and 'entertainment' within and as escapism and addiction - where the thoughts went like 'I am STILL not getting it', 'I failed', 'I am a failure', etcetera - I did not allow myself to actually access the emotional experience of feeling guilty and ashamed and bad about myself that I have learned to connect to those thoughts in my mind, because I realized that mind patterns such as the pattern of escapism and the specific experiences and behavior connected to it are things that have been existent within my beingness throughout my entire life as a pattern that I continuously and constantly accessed and, if I am honest with myself, I am not really as of yet fully aware of exactly how and when and where I have created this pattern within myself or how it really functions and exist within and as my mind - so, obviously correcting and changing this pattern will take practice and patience.

So, here, I breathed and, instead of accepting and allowing myself to go into a 'low' and a 'negative' experience within myself, connected with thoughts of myself somehow being a 'failure' for apparently not being able to live up to my own expectations - I breathed, and stabilized myself within and as the realization that changing any pattern is a process of constant and continuous application and that 'slipping back' into the pattern is not a bad thing, it is actually a necessity and requirement for me to be able to reassess who I am in relation to the pattern and investigate the deeper layers of how the pattern exist within myself so that I can, with each layer that I face and walk through, more and more start to develop my directive power within myself in relation to this pattern as I more and more start to understand and see and realize how it functions within myself.

Where then, at this point I started applying self-forgiveness and from the self-forgiveness I realized what I was doing to myself by giving my directive power away to this energy in my mind connected to playing the game, and then it became easy to direct myself in physical reality to for instance stop playing the game - whereas in the past I would have allowed myself to go into the emotional low and just continued playing within and as a mind-set of 'it's too late for me, I have failed anyways - so why bother even trying to correct myself' as a point of giving up.

So the point that was an essential realization within this practical process that I have walked of changing and transforming Escapism in Real-Time, is that if there is a point existing within myself that is similar to an 'addiction', where for instance I am addicted to a specific energy that I have connected with a specific action, like gaming or other types of entertainment - then actually changing and correcting that point of addiction to the extent that I am no longer moved by this energy within myself and so no longer 'give in' to the 'experience' will take a process of constant and continuous application of the tools of self-investigation, self-forgiveness and real-time self-correction where I keep reassessing in self-honesty who I am within myself in relation to the energy and to the application of gaming and entertainment. In Self-Honesty meaning that I must not have any expectations or ideas in my mind in relation to how I must stop and change this addiction or about how this process of real-time self-change is going to unfold - I must apply patience with myself and an openness in terms of being willing to really look at and investigate each and every point that comes up within myself each time that this energetic experience of desire and excitement comes up within my mind in relation to playing a computer game or indulging in entertainment.