“Let’s go. Shouldn’t keep the gods waiting for us” says the prisoner as the wagon stops at the site of execution. I have only one God, but perhaps I shouldn’t have kept Him waiting for 323 hours while I played Skyrim…
Actually, I am not quite sure about those 323 hours. The Steam statistic says so, but it also says “last played today”, while last I tried to play was Saturday, I believe. I gave up after about an hour, so that fits since I think it said 322 when I started. Back then it also said “last played today”, although the last time I played was actually on Christmas Eve a bit. But even then I remember that it was over 300 hours, and that bothered me.
I played a lot of Skyrim during my vacation (instead of writing, although the game also inspired me to write on a new story.) But well over 300 hours is a lot of time to spend in a lower world like this.
As I have said before, it is not like I forget the Light (or God) as soon as I dive into such a lower world. But the distance does increase, and the truth is that I have done things in Skyrim that I would never do in the physical world, things I am ashamed of when I look back at them. Actually more than ashamed, but I don’t want to give your imagination wings with jet engines either…
And after reading the beginning of St Teresa’s autobiography, I have been asking myself: “What would have been the outcome if I had spent those hours in a higher world instead of a lower? What would the effect have been on my life if I had spent 323 hours in prayer over that span of time?
Actually, calculating in my head I find it almost impossible that I can have spent quite that much time there. That would be close to 10 hours a day for the first month, when I did most of the playing. Even on vacation that is not realistic, not with my wrists. Or is it? Could it really be true?
Lower worlds (worlds that we create, as opposed to higher worlds which create us) are not necessarily and by definition hells. Some of them are, and I guess they all would be if we were trapped in them. Certainly that was my reaction years ago when I played Daggerfall for hundreds of hours, and a fellow player pondered the possibility that we might go to Daggerfall when we died. Even then, the thought disturbed me greatly. Later I have read at least one Christian philosopher who thinks that could actually happen. Well, Philip Sherrard did not mention Daggerfall, of course, but he held that the soul when leaving the material body would bring along its world, the world that was internalized in its mind. Certainly I did dream many times about being in Daggerfall, and the dreams were usually creepy. Possibly all of them, I am not quite sure.
Lower worlds are softer, more malleable, but also more ephemeral, less solid or substantial. Time flies there, and developments that would take a long time in real life can take place quickly. This is very noticeable in games and one of their major appeals. You use a bow for a short time and your skill goes up. You cast a spell a few times and you becomes a better spellcaster. It takes little effort to change yourself and improve your skills and abilities and to become stronger. This is, I believe, why such games have so strong a claim on me. I wish I could improve rapidly, so I get drawn into an imaginary world where that can happen. This is not unlike a man who wishes he could have a girlfriend to make love to, and is drawn into fantasies and literature that fulfill his wish but not actually in the real world.
The wish itself is not bad. I would say it is actually good, in a certain sense. But spending hundreds of hours in a fantasy world will only improve fantasy skills. Well, and mouse control and such, I guess, but I really don’t think it is the best possible use of time. Perhaps some “downtime” cannot be avoided when I am no better than this, but Skyrim is probably not where I should spend my next 323 hours of free time.
Perhaps I should try spending a couple hundred hours in higher worlds, if I am allowed such hundreds of hours. Our life on Earth is itself an uncertain thing, after all. St Teresa recommends that everyone set aside two hours a day to be alone with God, without doing anything else. Even if you cannot pray, she says, and as such cannot be together with God, you can still give God time to be together with you.
The less saintly of us might want some other form of higher world, like the worlds of music and art, philosophy or natural science. All these are worlds that are higher in the sense that they shape our world, but is less or not at all shaped by it. The value of pi has been pretty much the same since the ancient geeks of ancient Greece started exploring it. We know more decimals, but we know nothing more of its true nature than they. So this is an example of a higher world that is intermediate between us and the Point of Creation.
Right now I am kind of fired up about the whole “spending time alone with God” – in theory, that is. Teresa is really good at making it seem like an awesome idea. She also has a couple saints she recommends spending time with, foremost of them St Joseph, whom I once called “patron saint of boyfriends who don’t get any”. Not that I am anyone’s boyfriend now, contrary to what some may have thought. Anyway, I am sure St Joseph has many other virtues as well.
Actually, in a manner of speaking I spend time with St Teresa on the bus five days a week, so that’s something. But while I am in a certain sense alone with God /the Light most of the day and night each day, I am not actively, attentively, exclusively, dedicatedly spending two hours a day focused on God. Much less 300 hours a month…
The great chain of worlds has its own gravity of sorts – it is easy to move downward, but hard to move upward. Or at least that is so until one leaves the “gravity well” of lower things and is pulled into orbit of Heaven. Or so I am told. Unlike St Teresa, I am still kind of moving like a yo-yo up and down through the worlds fairly close to my birth world, I think. There is far further to go upward. And downward, but that way lies madness. Or as the ancient cartographers would write: “Here be dragons.”