Backgammon, nard, billiards: games about overlapping narratives (part 1)
Part of the series Perceiving complexity
The game of backgammon can be an useful example to describe one of the mindsets of men who do not base anymore their minds on classical masculine fictions of mental plateaus of control of the situation, as a result of becoming too aware of the raw reality perspective. I wrote in detail in the general parts of the series Perceiving identity how I see the gender relations and you can find there explained the new psychological terminology I use here.
Men who become too aware of the raw reality perspective developed by the women for hundreds of thousands of years need to face the fact that their masculine mental structures are in fact based on that perspective. The feminine expertise about it offers the man a mediation into the complexity of the real life, the classical man uses it at an intimate, sub-cognitive level while keeping the fiction that he is facing reality by himself.
Some men may become aware that in fact their thinking process is not so straightforward, it is not entirely their own activity. They may not know what to do in this situation and their reaction is to strive to keep the previous fiction alive. The game of backgammon is the case of a man who has some personal awareness that his thinking process is based on the raw reality perspective, but he wants to keep the fiction of the classical masculine control of the situation. As a result of the awareness, he is thinking now in terms of the raw reality fluidity, his goal is to keep his mind fluid. The goal of backgammon is not to conquer new territories or destroy the enemy, but to get rid of your own static mental structures to find back your mental fluidity.
Checkers or chess are like the classical masculinity, your goal is to take the enemy’s pieces out of the game with your pieces and be the victorious one on the battlefield. In backgammon, the goal is to get rid yourself of your own pieces. The perspective is that of the raw reality, in which being mentally fluid is essential. What is seen as an asset in classical masculinity, in backgammon masculinity is seen as a burden preventing you to be mentally fresh. It is not that you want to get rid of your mental structures altogether. Getting rid of your own pieces is about finding a way to get rid of the static manner you see them. This while the static worldview is the base of the classical masculine control of the situation.
Since you want to keep the fiction of the classical masculine control of the situation, you must do this in a way that you still appear you keep the control of the situation. You can get rid of your pieces only in your private area (the home board in the game), which is like the side of the Moon that is not facing the Earth in the allegory I write about in the series Perceiving identity. For this you must bring first all your pieces there, you must first disentangle from the rest of the world and be clearly in control of your narrative to be able to do a coherent fluidization of your mind.
All the time, you must pay attention to not be caught on the wrong foot and reveal that your projected control of the situation is a fiction. A single piece by itself (a “blot” in the game) is exposed and, if the adversary has the opportunity to stumble upon it, he can suspend it from the game. Two or more pieces on the same point are safe, they are enforced by their plurality.
If a single piece that was caught alone is suspended, your entire movements are suspended until you have an opening to reintroduce the piece in the game, in the opponent’s home board. This can be a double-edged sword for the opponent. On the one hand, he brought your piece furthest from your own home board, but on the other hand, the piece is in his own home board and it can hinder his activities there. It depends how well he developed the strength of his own coverage in his home board up to that moment. If the coverage is not so good, the situation can turn into a “Jesus game”, each sacrifice of your own pieces helps you promote your own narrative, disrupt that of the adversary and win the game, like the Christians overwhelming the Roman Empire.
The game has an element of hazard, the movements are decided at each turn by dices. After all, this is about facing the complexity of the real life, not about thinking from the point of view of a belief in the hard consistency of the classical masculine “meaningful world”. The complexity is faced with the rudimentary mental tools such men have available, hence casting dices at each turn is a workable reenactment of how they see the unknown of real life.
The game is developed around issues that appear from the manner the specific structures of the classical masculine static plateaus of control of the situation and the classical feminine raw reality expertise developed in hundreds of thousands of years of human history. The feminine expertise developed by being mentally oriented towards the masculine static plateaus, not as a stand-alone endeavor. Now you have men who are aware of how it works and thus they need to find ways to keep their minds fluid. This while they continue to think from the perspective of the classical masculine projection of power as static control of the situation.
They need to be mentally fluid while projecting static control of the situation. This turns into a cat-and-mouse game between such men, in which they look for breaches in the others’ projection of static power, something to reveal how the other man leans on the fluid raw reality expertise while lacking real classical masculine control over it. Such public revelation (hitting a blot in game) makes the other man look “feminine” and blocks his social standing until he can express how he has classical masculine control of the situation.
Of course, the other man looking “feminine” is from the point of view of the public imagery of the classical gender relations, as a blanket imagery of “strong men” and “weak women”. In reality, as it concerns the women, it depends on how well they studied by themselves the raw reality perspective and how much psychological experience they have with it. They can be comfortable with it and thus psychologically strong, but in ways unexpected from the point of view of the classical human gender relations. Men find inspiration from this experience, but it depends on how well they really have their own psychological mastery of such inspiration. Plus that in such cases in which they still cling to the classical static control of the situation, they look for ways to reinterpret this experience of self-confidence in order to look like static control of the situation.
Backgammon is about one of the angles in which such men tackle cat-and-mouse situations of hiding their own reliance on feminine expertise they do not master psychologically well and revealing other men’s reliance lacking proper psychological mastery. If such a breach comes to light (a blot hit in the game) the specific path in backgammon is to find an opening in the opponent’s home board to reinsert it. This is about the raw reality environment in which the blot was hit. Officially, it is about how you manage to show in a specific context how another man has not real mastery of the raw reality fluidity and you do it from the point of view of the classical masculine projection of power (i.e. as a zero-sum game in which only one narrative is true).
In games using classical masculine projection of power, if a piece is out, then it is out, good riddance. In such a game about men who have some awareness about how the raw reality perspective works, you know that as a man you are not just projecting power in a “meaningful world” of hard meanings. If you show how the opponent has no real mastery in a specific use of the raw reality perspective, then you take over the responsibilities of all the mental abyss that specific use supposes. You dislodged the opponent’s psychological control over it, but, if you think in terms of classical static control of the situation, you can’t admit that there is something in the world that does not have a hard meaning, you don’t want to go nuts by admitting the fiction of the hard meanings in the world without proper psychological preparation. Hence the suspended blot has to reenter in your own home board, where, depending on how fortified you are, it can in fact turn into a nuisance.
The real deliverance is when you can disentangle and fluidize your mental structures as you see fit, the final goal of backgammon. For this, you need to bring all your pieces in your home board. In the meantime, you need to strategize how to deal with the situations in which you showed how the opponent has no real psychological mastery of specific uses of the raw reality perspective, situations in which implicitly you took over the responsibilities of the complexity and mental abyss around that specific use. You have an automatic projection of control of the situation if you show the opponent’s lack of real control in a context. The opponent is blocked until he can find an opening to reinsert his piece in your own home board. He starts again with that piece from the point of view of your narrative, he has to resume the trek of that piece to his own home board.
This context is at a first glance favorable for you, but in practice it depends on what blots you have yourself in that area, on how well you fortified your home board up to that moment (i.e. how much psychological experience you have yourself in working with the raw reality perspective to block as long as possible the opponent resuming the game and, if resumed, not give him opportunities to hit blots of yours or even to move). The initial act of hitting the blot requires itself some strategy. You can spot an opportunity to bring two pieces on the point you hit the blot and thus you are safe, you have classical static control of the situation there. You can have the opportunity to hit the blot and then move your culprit piece further on to a safe(r) point. You can make yourself vulnerable and leave your undefended piece there if you find the area not so dangerous. In some circumstances the result of the dice roll may force you to hit the blot in an unfavorable context. You would not want to do it for the overall strategy, but the result of the dice forces you to do it.
Structurally, the strategy of the game is strongly influenced by the long-term feminine life experiences accumulated along generations. In games following the mindset of the classical masculinity, it is about eliminating the other party from the battlefield (like in the aforementioned chess or checkers). Other games are about spreading your genes and asserting overall supremacy over other men, like in football, rugby, basketball. The goal is about impregnating the women of the other party, while not permitting the other party impregnating your women. Games like volleyball or tennis tackle this situation in a more general terms, in which it is about “your turf” in general, not just specifically your women’s wombs.
In backgammon, the womb has power, the home board is the home board, something entering there is not perceived as a loss if you pay attention to the overall context in which you use the raw reality perspective. The original feminine game in the complementarity of the classical gender relations is like a backgammon game in which the purpose is to manage well both the woman’s own weak contexts and those of the man, i.e. the situations when exposed pieces are captured. It is a game of ongoing management of two different narratives, not necessarily focused on winning, but on managing situational weakness.
The woman finds with her raw reality perspective weak spots in the man’s projection of static power, the man does not understand what the woman notices or, if he gets some idea, he cannot admit he does not have control of the situation. Either way, his focus on keeping static mental plateaus as control of the situation makes him to not pay attention to how he starts thinking from the point of view of the more profound perspective the woman noticed in that spot. His practical change of psychological perspective is like the capture of an exposed piece.
If the relation is good, the piece is taken directly into the home board. If there are problematic aspects, the piece may be kept in limbo. It is captured and this blocks the man’s organization, but it is not permitted to simply just enter the home board. The problematic aspects need to find a resolution. In this case, it depends also on how well has the woman fortified her home board (how much psychological experience and comfortability she has in working with the raw reality perspective) and on how well the man senses the overall situation to find a resolution permitting his piece to enter.
The man may capture exposed pieces belonging to the woman, but it is rather about a focus on weaknesses according to his static mental plateaus. In this case, the woman pays attention to the lack of psychological fortification of his home board and this can actually turn into an asset for her. The man can be under impression he just subdued the woman, but in fact this may only strengthen the woman’s overall control of the situation.
To get some idea, see Yalnız Çiçek (translation) of the Turkish singer Aleyna Tilki. She is captured by that plurality of male characters (the way she sees the man from a variety of diachronic angles, like for example the plurality of TV sets of Yar Ali Senden Medet of the Turkish singer Yıldız Tilbe or the plurality of psychological threads of the Lebanese singer Nawal El Zoghbi in Habeit Ya Leil). They bring her in his world, only for her to turn them against him, and capture him instead. It is like in backgammon when you capture a piece of the enemy only to wreak havoc in your home board if you have your own pieces too exposed there.
The original feminine kind of game is one between an experienced player and a novice, but it does not have the end goal of winning in some way, it is just about managing the situation. In classical gender relations, the woman leans on the man’s static plateaus as a base for meaning in social life, she does not have valuable alternatives. She is experienced and the man is novice at this kind of game, but she is not interested in winning it because she has no other organizational options.
It may be about love in which the woman is paying attention to keep a balance in the backgammon game the man does not understand well what is about. She may also play the game in a more selfish manner, in which his home board is kept constantly weak and overwhelmed by her pieces. If the woman wants to determine significant changes in the relation or even to end it, then she starts the process of bringing all her pieces in her home board to be able to remove them (only this end goal has some similarities to that of the actual game of backgammon developed by the men). She leaned for a while on the man’s static plateaus, now she wants out of that, she wants to find back her mental fluidity as a stand-alone organization.
This is about women relating to the men in the complementarity of the classical gender relations, it is about a fluid undefined view of the complexity of the raw reality versus static plateaus of “meaningful world”. When they are by themselves as independent agents, they need to deal with the fact that they project themselves a sense of personal coherence in the world and thus a personal narrative about the world. In this case, capturing exposed pieces turns into assuming responsibilities, like in the previously described case of the men.
This is something that women tend to know well (or they need to learn early in life). Namely, if you point out someone’s mistakes or you show you are better than someone else, then you take upon yourself the psychological responsibilities of the real complexities around the respective issues. It depends if you have adequate psychological experience to face well those responsibilities, otherwise you find yourself burdened by them and haunted by them and you see women in the latter situation constantly thinking around those responsibilities and trying to find ways to alleviate them (many times by creating localized “meaningful worlds” that show that everything is fine by hiding the real complexity of the situation).
Thus they tend to be weary of playing this game at full throttle and push for a specific narrative as control of the meaning in the world, as a stand-alone feminine endeavor. You are aware of the real complexity and you cannot just escape straight away from this awareness. Those feminine localized “meaningful worlds” are not so much as a direct projection of power like in the case of the men, but rather as a surreptitious development among the relevant people of a belief in a specific narrative or even a larger ecosystem of knowledge as control of the situation that seeks to avoid the complexity.
Then you have the men who ended up with some awareness about the basics of the originally feminine raw reality perspective. They think from its point of view, but they don’t find viable alternatives to the social organization based on static mental plateaus. Among the first reactions of men in such situations is “wait a minute, what is my own narrative that gives me a sense of being in control of my life?” You are used as a man to have your own static mental plateaus projecting a sense of hard meaning in your life, only to find yourself based on a fluid psychological environment whose paradigm you realize it makes sense, but you don’t find a way to make it work directly with those static plateaus that bestow meaning in your life.
The realization of the fluid complexity the static mental plateaus are based on is something like the start of the backgammon game. Your own pieces and those of the opponent are in interposed blocks scattered all over the place, something like multi-thread perceptions from Naghsh e To of the US-based Iranian band Eendo or Habeit Ya Leil of the Lebanese singer Nawal El Zoghbi). This is what the raw reality perspective reveals about the monolithic impression you have about the spider web of mental structures in your mind. At this deeper psychological level, it is not really such a monolith you can call your own.
The man imagines his organization as a monolithic tree with branches spreading in all kind of directions. In practice, to the extent he has based his organization on the woman’s raw reality perspective, his mental branches start to grow from all kind of unexpected places, they are not an unitary tree anymore.
These men work in their minds with such a dispersed psychological landscape, only that the self-image they develop in relation to the women (as a psychological cushion mediating the relation with that landscape) gives them a unified static organization. The men who ended up with some awareness about the raw reality perspective need to face the dispersed depths of their psyche, how does this relate to their fiction of a static monolithic structure?
Even more, it is not only about seeing your own organization dispersed, but also realizing how much it overlaps with other men’s organizations. This is how this raw reality perspective was developed by the women, with the sense of self immersed in the situational complexity, not by paying attention to a personal static organization. This overlap can be annoying for men used to their own little empire in their minds. What is going on with me, what is my own organization, what is my own narrative? I need to clarify that.
But, if you want to find your own organization, you also need to face the psychological approach to the raw reality perspective as it comes attached in the full package of this approach to life developed by women. The game is not to be played in terms of my side annihilating the other side. Whatever action you take has deep psychological responsibilities and you need to face its karma, the only way to win is to find your mental freedom from that overlap.
You can achieve this in a safe space in which you can let the fluidity of your mind unfold (the home board where you can bear off your own pieces). For this, you need to bring all your dispersed pieces into the home board. This can be done in the spirit of what transpired in the West about the liberation, the enlightening in the Dharmic religions (moksha/mukti/nirvana). The West tends to be aware only of the easier-to-understand method, that by retreating mentally from the “meaningful world”. In reality, Hinduism, as the more authentic and raw reality focused view among the Dharmic religions, has a much more varied array of approaches to this endeavor. The spirit from the game of backgammon is about a liberation while continuing to be involved in social life as an active agent.
Bringing your own pieces into your home board is not about retreating mentally from the psychological overlaps you notice, but about finding an overall organizational coherence that can also take in consideration those aspects caught in overlaps. At the beginning of the game a specific piece is somewhere outside of the home board, i.e. in real life you find yourself relying on a psychological aspect you now realize through the raw reality perspective you don’t really control it. Bringing the piece home is finding how you really are in control of the situation by taking in consideration the raw reality perspective around that aspect.
The specific approach in backgammon is that of men who keep the fiction of the classical masculine control of the situation. They strive for regrouping into the home board while not admitting they are not so much in control of the situation as they project to be. Two or more pieces on the same point are safe, this is about a psychological aspect that shows classical control of the situation. A classical man may consider it fine, but a backgammon man sees also the situation through the raw reality perspective and further realizes that the real control is when you have all your pieces into your home board and bear them off.
A single piece on a point is exposed and can be captured by the opponent (a psychological aspect the man does not really master the classical control about it). This is not such a big issue in the mental worlds of the classical men who are unaware of the raw reality perspective. They are not so aware of the exposed pieces of the other men and vice versa. A backgammon man notices this in other men and, if he lives in a society with similar men, he expects to be noticed by the other men too if he has exposed pieces.
Whoever suspends an exposed piece needs to assume the psychological responsibilities around it, this is how the psychological structure of the raw reality perspective works. For example, the men in the ancient Roman society did not have much awareness about the raw reality perspective. The men in the Middle East had it. The way the Christianity overwhelmed the Roman Empire was about some Middle Eastern men starting an ideology that overwhelmed the home board of the Roman organization with psychological responsibilities from the exposed pieces the Roman authorities kept capturing. The latter were under impression they were taking out of the game the Christians with repression like in a game of checkers. In reality this was only turning the Roman authorities into psychological satellites of this ideology, given the poor psychological defenses in their own home board. Women tend to know how this works.
Interesting how male players can give a twist of masculine conquering perspective to such a context that otherwise would look like a moment of weakness. For example, a player who had an exposed piece captured and manages to reintroduce it in the game in a poorly fortified home board of the opponent may say ți-am băgat mortu-n casă (“I brought the corpse in your house”, in Romanian). Having a piece of the adversary in a poorly fortified home board feels like living with a corpse in your own house. Structurally you can’t just take it out as you please, you just have to live with it until you may find an opportunity to suspend it again from the game. From the point of view of the masculinity unaware of the raw reality perspective, taking someone out of the game is the end of the story. But for a man who is aware and has some experience about how it functions, such a loss is seen as a psychological penetration of the other’s defenses.
This is also to give an idea that the application of the psychological perspective supposed by this game is not anymore in the original feminine terms. It is adapted to the more typical masculine approach to life. The original feminine approach was not about winning, but just keeping the game indefinitely in contexts favorable to her. For a man the home board is not about a womb, but “the other side of the Moon”, where he can be in control of the situation and liquefy his mental structures to give them a more favorable shape.
It is not clear who invented the game, there are ancient sources about it from India to Middle East. Structurally, it shows a Dharmic approach to the human mindset, it is about men who are aware of the raw reality perspective and who want to find their own organization in such an environment of overlapping narratives. In the past it seems it was popular in India, now it is by far most popular in the Middle East.
The area between India and the Middle East is the place on Earth with the men most obsessed with not showing any lack of classical masculine control of the situation, while constantly seeking breaches of lack of classical control of the situation at the other men. It is about men who are aware of the raw reality perspective, but with no further ideas about how to relate this with the basics of the classical masculine mindset (well, this area also produced the major religions of the world).
In India, this situation evolved into a study of what to do as a man in this context, with some results, there is openness to diversity and a variety of narratives, with men who know how to have their own point of view in such contexts, but there is still lots to do. Just to remind how they get stuck in casteism, there is a plurality of narratives, but they end up too stuck in mental plateaus.
In the Middle East, the proto-Jewish men sought to be mentally independent from women, this turned them into men very keen about upholding a clear point of view in the environment of the raw reality perspective. They did not have adequate mental tools, this made them rather fragile in terms of identity, but at least they keep to themselves, they really face the mental abyss this perspective suppose. The problem is with Christianity and Islam that sprang out of Judaism, but are not about facing directly the mental abyss, they lean on the egos of their founders. This turned them into hallucinating ideologies with mentally disturbed adherents ready to kill anyone who does not profess their own beliefs. The awareness of the overlapping narratives as revealed by the raw reality is met with murder and destruction, they brought so much suffering in the world, millions and millions of people killed and entire cultures erased.
The women in the area between India and Middle East have valuable expertise in the use of the raw reality perspective, after all this is what made the men aware about it. But, in practice, this awareness determined such a fragile masculinity. The men tend to seek keeping the appearances of the classical masculine control of the situation and they are engaged in a cat-and-mouse competition between them in which everyone tries to hide as much as possible his own lack of control while exposing that of the other men.
The women are seen as liabilities in this sense, a woman under your wing is a vivid expression of that raw reality perspective. You and the other men in that society are aware what is the real role of that perspective. By sticking to classical masculine control of the situation, you need to show you are in control. A woman under your wing doing something that shows how fictional is that control makes the entire organizational structure of that man crumble down. To restore it, he takes measures against the woman to show that he is in control. This is the bottleneck point which makes the men from these area to care so much about what the women in their lives do.
In the West people mostly know about the Middle Eastern masculine excesses and less about India. Maybe in India the situation is not as bad as in the Middle East, but it is still bad. Just to remind of the disparaging use of the word saala in the Indian languages. In itself, it means brother-in-law, i.e. the brother of your wife. People use it also as a degrading insult (irrespective of the fact the person is the brother of your wife of not). Having sex with someone’s sister is seen in this fragile masculine mindset as exposing that man’s lack of masculine classical control of the situation. It is in the idea that “his is the raw reality under his wing that he relies mentally on and he has no control over it, I am controlling it”. You can imagine what a poisoned lifestyle grows around this.
The game of backgammon many of these men play is pretty straightforward about the psychological environment they are using. A struggle to keep a veneer of classical masculine control of the situation while using the psychological perspective the women developed in hundreds of thousands of years.
If you want to move the situation in a better direction, you need still to have some understanding of their situation, they are aware of all the complexity of the raw reality perspective, but they don’t have any other psychological alternatives of mental organization (and the women don’t have either). This is not to excuse bad masculine behavior, when the behavior is obviously bad. But the good side, as a pertinent social organization that takes in consideration that complexity, has to be discovered for both genders.
The current feminist approach of Western origination is too much about a lazy-minded convenient sense of a Platonic pre-existing plateau of goodness in the world (which structurally only perpetuates patriarchal views). This perspective is utterly oblivious of the complexity of the raw reality, there is no such plateau, the good pertinent to the real complexity has to be discovered.
The feminist approach tends too much to continue the classical feminine victimization while it is expecting the men to find solutions under the pretense of a pre-existing plateau of goodness, it just perpetuates the usual feminine leaning on men. It is in the same vein as the approach in backgammon of keeping the pretense of a pre-existing simplistic order. An approach really facing that mental abyss of the complexity of real life is much more efficient in going beyond the structures of the classical masculine control of the situation, but you need to assume personal responsibilities for the organization it requires.
I find the victimization valuable (i.e. letting deliberately some of your own pieces being captured by an opponent with a poorly defended home board) if you stay yourself focused on the complexity of the raw reality and then the other people thus willy-nilly have to face it themselves. This is more about letting them up in the air mentally and let them figure out things further on by themselves, in order to be on their own feet. But, if you have yourself narrow-minded goals, you will find yourself trapped with such victimization. You are just revolving mentally around other people.
