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.

2014 From Escapism to Self-Responsibility - Using Gaming as A Platform of Self-Change

 2014 From Escapism to Self-Responsibility - Using Gaming as A Platform of Self-Change

Changing Escapism in Real-Time

I started playing a game called 'banished' on my computer recently after years of not playing games, which was actually a decision that I made at some point because I was seeing how immersed I get into the game when I am playing. I would just play for days on end in this zoned-out, spaced-out state and not doing much else. I mean, I would then go into an absolute procrastination and abdication of any other tasks that I had set out for myself to do - like looking for a job or doing something to develop my skills  or even basic stuff like taking a shower, taking care of my physical body and home -- which I eventually realized was quite detrimental in relation to my physical life and living and also my process of growing and developing into a self-responsible and self-directive individual.

So now, I initially made an agreement with myself that I would play only on Sunday, which would be my day off from doing and tending to other responsibilities - and I would thus give myself some 'leisure time' to just relax and 'take my mind off things'. However as I played a first game in Banished, where I had to build a town and make it operational, I wanted to play more because my first and second town were a failure and I had learned some new tips on how to better manage my town, which I now wanted to apply. So I started to try and find ways to integrate playing Banished during the rest of the weekdays - by for instance using a second screen next to my laptop, which I thought I could use to play Banished on while doing other things -- because often in the game you have to give instructions and then wait a while for the instructions to be executed. But then it turned out that I couldn't actually do anything on my laptop while the game was running on the second screen - it just wouldn't work that way - which meant that I had to do one thing at a time and that I ended up spending more time on playing than on getting any work done.

Then this situation got to a point where, whenever there was someone walking in the room or when I would hear someone approaching the room, I would react in my mind with an experience of fear that they would see that I am more playing games than I am working and then the idea of 'hiding' what I am doing so that I could continue playing the game without anyone knowing about it came up within my mind. Also while I was playing the game, I noticed that my mind was moving very fast, as though I was running and hiding from my own awareness of what I was doing -- just so that I could continue playing. Because, in the back of my mind I knew that I have more important things to spend my time on and I am essentially starting to waste a lot of my time on this game and creating physical consequences of for instance not getting the necessary work done in time or not moving as fast as I could and should be. So, to in a way circumvent and 'bypass' actually facing and acting on this awareness, I found that my mind does something very interesting - it 'moves' my awareness away from the actual physical facts of the consequences that my actions are having and going to have on my physical life and reality  and from the realization that I must simply stop playing this game and focus on doing other things, through creating excuses and justifications to talk myself into allowing myself to continue doing what I am doing.

And, the fascinating thing about this was that, I could already see and recognize within my awareness that each and every justification and excuse that my mind was bringing up in relation to justifying why I am playing this game now instead of tending to my responsibilities was in fact false because I have been at this point before and I knew exactly how this will play out and how there really is no excuse to not do what I need to be doing with my time. So, the excuses and justifications in itself was not the reason why I just continued playing rather than simply in the moment, stopping the game and moving on to other tasks -- it was rather what this 'construct' of excuses and justifications was doing in my mind with my awareness, in that it was 'shifting' my awareness from here to there and back and forth very fast within this 'box'/'containment' type structure, basically doing nothing but preoccupying and holding/containing my awareness for a moment, while in physical reality I could just continue doing something purely for the sake of having some energetic 'fix' without taking any responsibility for it because, as I mentioned, my awareness was too busy allowing itself to be entrapped and preoccupied by the irrelevant and irrational excuses and justifications that the mind was bringing up.

I mean, I am writing about 'my awareness' and 'my mind' as apparently two separate things that exist separately from each other and from myself - but in fact in reality, if I look at who I am within all of this in self-honesty, I can see that it is ME within and as the mind distracting MYSELF within and as my Awareness - and it is ME within and as my Awareness, allowing myself to be distracted and preoccupied by MYSELF within and as the Mind. And it is because this 'ME-factor' was missing in this entire equation, meaning that I was accepting and allowing myself to exist in separation from 'my mind' and 'my awareness' by not seeing, realizing and understanding that both are in fact parts of me as how I exist within and as my physical body - that this situation was able to play itself out in the way that I described here.

So, in terms of how I practically applied myself in stopping this self-sabotaging, possessive behavioural pattern that I was busy accessing - and breaking out of that 'boxed-in' mind-state that I found myself in -- the first thing that I realized was that it seemed very difficult to actually get myself to that point of physically stopping myself while I was playing the game.  And this because of the energy that was involved in playing this game - because, the entire reason why I was playing the game and why it was starting to become the centre of my world, is not because of the game itself, no, it is because of the energy that I have connected to playing this game within my mind. And it is that energy that the mind then tries to protect through for instance, in the moment that there is any inkling of an awareness coming up in my mind that it's best if I stop playing and go do something else, bring up that specific 'excuses and justification'-construct that for a moment captures and preoccupies my awareness.

I found that when I was in that specific state, it seemed very difficult if not impossible to actually get myself to make the physical decision and movement to stop doing what I was doing - because each time that I tried to move within my awareness towards making that decision, the mind would give me the run-around into the construct of reasons, excuses and justifications for why I should continue playing and why I shouldn't stop playing.

The technique that I used to get myself out of that specific all-encompassing and -consuming energetic experience in relation to the game that I was playing and to for a moment 'snap myself out of it', was by placing myself within and as the 'ME-factor', meaning the point of self-responsibility within and as the realization that the entire situation and specifically the self-deceiving game that I was playing between my mind and my awareness, was my own creation. And how I did this, was through an application of spoken Self-Forgiveness in the moment.

This means that within the moment where I saw and realized that I was accessing the energetic and physical behavioural pattern connected to playing this computer game wherein I was feeling as though I was 'stuck' within the experience and the behaviour and I wasn't able to actually stop myself from what I was doing - I took a breath and I started speaking Self-Forgiveness aloud.

Specifically:

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to try and hide what I am doing from myself by going into my mind and participate in thinking processes where I am deliberately trying to distract myself from my physical reality and from what I am physically doing just so that I could continue to generate and hold on to a specific energy experience within myself

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to define myself within and as the energy experience that I have connected in my mind with playing this computergame and therefore not want to let go of this energy experience and so not want to stop playing - because I actually believe that I need this energy to experience 'me'

I forgive myself that I have not accepted and allowed myself to see, realize and understand that while I believe that this energy that I experience within myself connected with playing this computergame, is somehow giving me 'more' value -- in reality, I am giving myself away to the mind and inferiorizing myself to my own mind and to my physical reality by accepting and allowing an energy experience within the mind to have complete power over who I am and what I do and how I express myself within and as physical reality -- because I have accepted and allowed myself to actually believe that I have to experience and obtain this energy/feeling within myself so that I can feel 'alive', wherein I don't even see how I am giving away my 'life' as my physical presence, awareness,  expression and directive principle to the mind

I forgive myself that I have not accepted and allowed myself to see, realize and understand how I have created an energetic polarity within myself by connecting a positive energy experience of excitement with playing this computergame - where then, I have connected a negative energy experience and value to the thought and image of 'not playing this computergame' and doing other things in physical reality within my mind

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to give away my directive principle to the thought that comes up in my mind that says that 'I want to play this computergame now', accompanied by an energy experience of excitement as desire -- by having accepted and allowed myself to simply follow this thought and experience and so therein abdicate my responsibility in relation to what I do and who I am in physical reality, by allowing an energetic experience to be at the 'steering wheel' of myself within my physical actions, rather than me within and as absolute awareness directing myself within my physical actions and expression --- wherein I do not allow an energy, triggered by a thought, to move or direct me

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to want to hide what I am doing from others so that I can hide what I am accepting and allowing myself to participate within in my mind from myself -- and to therein use the thought and idea that 'as long as other people don't see what I am doing and who I am within what I am doing - then it doesn't matter what I do' as an excuse and reason to continue playing computergames without in any way taking responsibility  for myself within and as my physical actions --- instead of seeing, realizing and understanding that this thought is an illusion that I have copied and learned and conditioned into myself during my childhood years in relation to and interaction with the people in my environment, and that in fact, I am entirely responsible for my actions in physical space-time reality

I forgive myself that I have never accepted and allowed myself to see and realize my responsibility for my actions in physical space-time reality by hiding myself within and as the preprogrammed belief in my mind that I can do what I want as long as other people don't see it

Self-Correction

When and as I see a reaction of wanting to hide what I am doing when I am playing a computer game come up within myself - I stop and breathe - and I see, realize and understand that the fact that I fear another judging me as doing something wrong, implies that I don't fully understand what I am actually doing and I have not actually taken responsibility for my actions because I am defining my actions within and as my relationship with other people and a desire to receive recognition and approval from others

So here I commit myself to actually look into and investigate in self-honesty what I am actually doing and who I actually am within and as my physical actions because I see, realize and understand that if and when I accept and allow myself to be moved in physical reality by an energy within myself, that I am expressing myself from the starting point of the mind and I see, realize and understand that the mind is a system that exists within and as 'layers' and dimensions and that this energy experience, connected to this one thought, is just one dimension of a much greater system - and that essentially if and when I accept and allow myself to be defined within and as my actions and expression in physical reality and within and as myself by this onedimensional energetic experience and thought, I am lying to myself about who I am and what is real and I am existing and living in an illusion and thus I am essentially not even real as a being

So, when and as I see the energetic movement come up within myself connected with a thought that I want to play a computergame - I stop and breathe - and I see, realize and understand that if and when I accept and allow myself to be guided and directed in my physical expression and actions by this energetic movement within myself, I am giving my power and creative directive away to the mind wherein I do not take responsibility for the consequences of my actions and for my future in this world and reality

Thus, I commit myself to breathe when and as the energy comes up within myself, because I see, realize and understand that it is only energy -- and that I have created this energy through participating within polarities, where if I accept and allow myself to continue participating in these polarities, I am fuelling the experience of desire to play a computergame and thus conditioning myself to experience myself as a slave to these experiences within and of the mind

I commit myself to walk the process of manifesting myself as the directive principle within and as myself where I do not accept and allow an energetic movement to move  and direct me in physical reality -- but rather I assist and support myself to understand who I am within and as the mind completely - so that I can see who I am and what I am doing and what the consequences are of my actions in every moment

And, I see, realize and understand that the consequences of accepting and allowing myself to allow myself to be directed and defined by an energy of desire in relation to playing a computer game - is that I am simultaneously creating the negative energy of resistance in relation to doing other things in my life

    

Wherein, I see, realize and understand that I am sabotaging myself within my life by connecting an experience of resistance to doing my responsibilities in physical reality and thus by playing computergames from the starting point of energy

And so I take responsibility for this energy polarity that I have created within myself  by firstly changing my expression within and as my physical world and reality - and from there changing who I am internally because I see, realize and understand that through my physical movement and expression I prove to myself who I am as a living statement


After and during this application of Self-Forgiveness and Self-Corrective statements in the moment, i had stabilized a lot internally - because i was seeing the points of common sense that were coming up while i was speaking in relation what it is that i was actually doing and participating within. so, from that point, it was easy for me to make the choice to stop playing the game and direct my attention to other things. And this without any judgment or any emotional reactions to and towards the whole thing - it was a simple internal choice and physical movement based on common sense insight and understanding.

This though doesn't now mean that this pattern is completely corrected and that i have changed myself within and as it entirely - not at all. i have ingrained and conditioned this specific pattern of internal reactions and experiences and external behavior all throughout the course of my life and so it will require a step-by step process of physical integration of the new pattern that i am setting myself out to live -- where, within this first step, i have only become aware of how the pattern works and operates in the mind and i have found and developed a way to in a real-time moment, change it within myself. Now i must still prove to myself that i am consistent within my application of real-time change so that, through a constant application of this real-time change, i can condition myself internally and externally to be and become a being that doesn't so easily give its power away to energetic reactions to external stimuli anymore but can remain stable within and as its relationship to for instance entertainment.