Years removed from relics like the Atari, Commodore 64 and Intellivision, I still find myself drawn into the vastly superior and sophisticated digital worlds of today's programmers. While the scant moments I get to spend in those universes nowadays pales in comparison to my extended sojourns of simpler days past, you still won't count me among the crowd of social critics who decry the effects of this ever-evolving form of entertainment.

Assuming many digital alter egos, I have saved worlds from destruction, solved great mysteries, and achieved levels of financial wealth not likely to pass my way in this lifetime. I have also maimed and murdered others (including innocent women and children) participated in acts of sadistic voyeurism and wanton social destruction, and even plotted to enslave the masses to my unbending will. No matter which role I chose to play at times, I enjoyed them all.

These games did not turn me into an unpredictable sociopath, alienated misfit, or mind-controlled lemming drooling at every Pavlovian stimulus placed before me. Nor do video games have this effect on others. As with all things, the operational level of one's consciousness awareness is the determining factor in what is seen and acted upon.

These games also did not impart any great redeeming effect on my character. I don't want this editorial to be taken as a wholesale defense of this kind of entertainment. Any model behavior I exhibited in my on-screen characters were shaped by the parameters of my "real" life rather than the rules imposed by digital physics and ethics.

If you've stayed with me this long, there's a point to make if it already has not become obvious. I expect that a great many of you will have a hard time grappling with it, even if you do see it, because to access the level of truth that is about to be revealed requires great honesty. That's a commodity in apparent short supply on planet Earth.

The thing that enables a person to get wrapped up in a video game and enjoy the experience is a dynamic interchange between a believable level of realism and an equally believable detachment from that reality. The key word of emphasis in that last sentence is dynamic.

To successfully enjoy the game, one must identify with the character on screen enough to expend the effort to have that character "win" the game (however the game defines that parameter). In the same vein, the human operator can not become so attached to the game that one would literally suffer while experiencing loss or "death" in the digital realm.

After all, one is able to "unplug" the game, reset the scenario or walk away from it any time this dynamic becomes too hard to bear. If there is a danger to video games, it is that some are not able to walk away from the illusion and see the difference between the digital and the manifest worlds.

But the same can be said for any form of entertainment that degenerates into escapism.

From an unlearned perspective, where one recognizes and understands that the physical level of existence is one of the more illusory kinds of being, there is much to be gleaned by this analogy. Chief among these is that the world we are currently experiencing is somehow contained within us (and that we love it).

This is an easy message to integrate when we ponder all the good that is available to us in this life. It is much more difficult to own up to the shadow-side of it, upon which our understanding of goodness depends.

Like the video games I've played in the past, there must be some aspect of me that enjoys all the depravities that this life can offer. And even if the emotional ladder did not reach as high as enjoyment in the darkest expressions of human existence, there certainly is a rung of curiosity to which all desire for experience is familiar.

What is possible in this grand game of living? What are the high points? How low can one go? Bouncing between the walls of this dynamic, our self-understanding constantly grapples and grows.

It has become clear to me that Earth is where a focus or foci (possibly more than one) of my attention rests because I have a fascination with these human questions and experiences….all of them.

Regular readers of my work may see me as one of the "good guys" on the internet, railing about the inequities of living in fascist America and a world led astray by Western "civilization". You probably see yourselves as "good", too, having come to an awakened place that desires a spread of truth and human empowerment.

Yet I would ask you to look again. For in me somewhere is that desire to control others, maybe torture them, abuse them in all manner of ways. In the very least, I'm curious as to what it all really looks like; those things that happen far from the light of day. In that sense, I must accept my role and place in the design of this world.

On some level, this part of ourselves is so frightening to us that we have collectively personified it in mythology, folklore and fantasy. Many of our demons and devils (dare I say aliens?) are bourne from it. We are even tacitly giving some of our species the permission to act these aspects out.

Are we choosing how this all turns out or just becoming aware of the choices inherent in what is essentially a programmed game to a higher aspect of ourselves? Your answers determine your next move.

Whose Life are You Living?