The Game Of Love
Played Like A Fiddle & Won Like A Wager
It could be said that Experimental Unit is a game. Such a conceit has been advanced.
The term “love” occupies a special place in the pantheon of concepts, the sacred assemblage of understandings.
Love is set apart, in the same way that everything is. Love is mundane; we forget our love and yet we still love. In some way we are love, as much as we are condensed energy.
Wikipedia Context
The crucial citation here is the alternation between “joyous transcendental consciousness” and “the bitter struggles of pure Purgation” (emphasis lovingly added).
It’s this alternation.
What’s crucial is to take this alternation for granted.
Yet, it is the nature of this alternation to through all defenses into disrepair. There is no planning for it.
Philosophy Of Law
It’s obvious that love is a kind of state of exception. When possessed by love, one makes all kinds of exceptions.
In the precise sense above, the mirroring feature is that it is not possible to write a set of laws that can by themselves govern every possible future circumstance.
You cannot plan for everything. Something weird is going to come up.
The inadequacy of law has everything to do with this irrepressible alternation within love between uncertainty and communion.
It is precisely love which moves people to take extralegal action when they deem it necessary for the good of themselves or those they love.
The love of life will get people to do things they do not want to do, that in some sense is everything they think is wrong with the world. But they do it, and maybe they tell themselves that they are not personally responsible for the overall state of affairs because they are just one actor in an enormous flock of miscreants.
It makes me think of the miles-long flocks of passenger pigeons that once flew across this continent. People killed them indiscriminately, thinking that there were too many to ever make a difference.
Now They Are All Dead.
Wikipedia Context 2: Cultural Crossover
Lila As Shakti’s Game
It’s important to remember that Shiva is Shakti’s boyfriend.
What I mean by that is that Shakti, though herself a complex figure, can seem more happy. Life of the party, super comforting and affectionate. Basically what I am thinking is the lovey-dovey side of love.
We could extend this to the idea of political solidarity for example. Our alignment with the people who are relatively easy to love for us.
We are always hyping up the things we share, how they are so great in a way other people just don’t understand because they have negative character traits.
And similarly you are thinking the loving couple, or the warm friends who are kind to each other.
Things get dicey because this simple affection in the real world must run up against external challenges.
Here you can see Shakti turning (in)to Shiva.
Because you can see that Shiva is an embodiment which includes basically everything left out of that easy sense of love and solidarity.
Shiva is your supposed comrade, ally, or co-partisan who manifests destructive and/or surprisingly malicious behavior.
Shiva is disease, war, subterfuge, manipulation, malice, sadism.
It may be because of my German including Nazi heritage, but it makes me think of the Holocaust. The Holocaust has certainly been seen as in a way the arch-crime of world history (so far) by a wide swath of people.
And in our times, we see again the rise of Nazism. People wonder why this won’t go away. Shiva knows.
And Shiva Is Shakti’s Boyfriend.
King Center Context: MLKing It For All It’s Worth
Beloved Community Gaming
Now we can begin to discuss Beloved Community DLC Pack.
We begin with the insight that love involves alternation. Ludus Amoris refers to love of God or God’s love for us, and how we can doubt it or bask in it. It seems that in a way it is not possible simply to bask. Or perhaps some part of what we love is this doubt of ourselves concerning love itself.
We then go to the philosophy of law to draw homology. We may seek to contain love with certain frames or phantasies of the stakes—we can say fetishes—but love overrides all these.
For love is the devotion to another, it is in a way a blank check, as you are a blank check, house money, given to yourself to spend.
And yet you are not your own. You are your love’s.
What you love winds up loving you. The Only Problem Is That Shiva Is Shakti’s Boyfriend.
The point is that you cannot have a definitive plan or defense against love.
As much as we would say love is dead, has no place in cynical affairs, the opposite is true. We see everywhere slaves to love.
We move then to discussion of Lila, which I guess I’m already in the middle of. The point is the connection to theodicy, the question of why bad things happen. The Holocaust, and at the same time Nuclear Weapons, which are even compared to Shiva.
And the potential Nuclear Holocaust. Or will it be the Drone Holocaust? The AI Holocaust? The Genetically Engineered Bioweapon Holocaust?
Why do bad things happen?
The way it is a holocaust in my heart. The way that it is too much to say that. And what have you said? And what have you done?
And what has been said to you? And what has been done to you?
From Gone Girl, applied to us all as some giant heavenly marriage officiated by quantum entanglement: What Have We Done To Each Other?
Why do bad things happen?
This is the headspace from which Beloved Community must be contemplated.
It is possible that iteration on King’s formulation is required to meet design parameters for the X-Unit DLC Pack.
Beloved Community DLC Pack Primer
Beloved Community DLC Pack constitutes one skin for the love mechanic within the Reality DLC Pack you currently have loaded.
The objective of Beloved Community DLC Pack is to build cores of love and expand them, connecting with other growing cores to eventually subsume all life forms capable of communication into Beloved Community.
The core challenge of Beloved Community DLC Pack is the articulation of love.
The agape love described by King is only truly tested when it comes to the cases of those people who are most hated and despised, those considered the most evil and with the least redeeming qualities.
ChatGPT Evil People List
Loving The Unlovable
Beloved Community DLC Pack has as its core challenge the confrontation with what is deemed unacceptable and revolting.
Players will find obvious examples of behavior they find contemptible or awful. This will occur with other players from the past as well as the present.
Players will also have been personally harmed by other players in the course of their play-through, or again as in the conceit within their fiction inner world histories.
In addition, players must confront their own harmful actions toward others.
These two valleys, of utter sense of victimization since once knows one has been reared in a way by the most subversive and violent elements possible, that one is of them even as one hates them, and that there is even love there in the most unacceptable way;
And the other, the sense that one is oneself a monster, because one has harmed others and in this way been the evil that was done to oneself, undercutting any sense that you didn’t deserve it since that didn’t protect everyone from you.
The first phantasmal experience gives one the impression that not everyone can be in Beloved Community.
While the latter experience gives one the sense that for one’s own sake, one wishes for something that could accept anyone, since it would take something that could accept anyone to accept me.
This is the way in the door, on your knees after burning it down.
And yet the issue is to find the way to the door, the Highway of the Consistent.
Wildin’ With Wilden: System, Structure, Seduction
Poe’s Law
Everything The Rises Must Converge: Coming To A Head
Flourishing means growing in logical type.
Love is like 2-in-1: it is overflowing.
The development or perfection of any partial tendency can be consistent with the development or perfection of any other partial tendency.
King defines Beloved Community as the objective function or Ultimate Goal of mundane activity, or all intermediate goals. We can also say Good Company.
Sim-One, Because
Final Chapter: Beloved Community DLC Pack Tips & Tricks
Sadly, my dear fellow player, this guide has to end at some point.
Beloved Community DLC Pack is only one skin for the love mechanic within Experimental Unit.
The love mechanic is operative in the base game, prior to Reality DLC Pack. Beloved Community DLC Pack is built off your Reality DLC Pack because there are not always multiple agents in-universe when Experimental Unit is played.
For solo lives, Beloved Community is irrelevant although love mechanic is still active and available to the player in that scenario.
This is important for players like you to keep in mind as you continue your play-through of Experimental Unit within your Reality DLC Pack.
Here are some practical tips for navigating the game’s challenges:
Dissimulation: you will inwardly include all within your beloved community, including all sentient beings across all time and space, and even those in other existences including those with no communities of their own. Yet you will not be able to immediately make this clear, as the expectations of others as to your belonging to non-beloved communities require your outward hatred or lack of acceptance for some strict subset of all sentient beings across all time and space ever. This is Taqiyya and it doesn’t make you a hypocrite. Part of the game is that the masks can’t all fall at once; if they did, it would just all be over. What seems awful and unacceptable is in a way prolonging the fun.
Inward grappling: you are basically going to feel like a horrible person sometimes, and that’s normal. There’s nothing I can say here that can help everyone in every Dark Night of the Soul. But the point is that this is a core part of the game mechanic. That is part of the experience you are designed to undergo as part of Experimental Unit. You must confront these challenging moments yourself, and that will completely define your play-through as much as your reveling in the good times. Any pleasure cannot exist without the depths of despair and self-hatred. Incorporating this perspective sheds new light on even the most distressing aspects of self, others, experience, and environment generally.
Trickster Mechanic: each player embodies the trickster archetype. This fundamentally means that all players are liars, mining their secret pleasures. Beloved Community is not straightforward lovey dovey. First of all, getting by requires common purpose within a conflictual and frictive environment, implying struggle and distress, even tragedy and atrocity. Secondly, the simple transparency and unwavering affection implied by the idea of the spreading of goodwill is untenable. Therefore it is necessary to adopt the persona of one who is fundamentally good-natured but still prickly. Per Weil, be honest with yourself and pay attention, and you will simply know what to say or do when the moment comes.
Containment: love can be pathologized. As a mania, or as a crime. What is taken issue with are actions. As much as we must find actions to express our love, an aspect of Beloved Community DLC Pack is the recognition of the depth of love which cannot be expressed. Not only cannot, but must not. In this sense the best way we love is by keeping our love a secret to its fullest extent. Tzimtzum, decreation, edging.