I Love Your Longing

THE LONGING is a game that must have been almost impossible to sell.

It’s about a Shade, a little black humanoid being, made of animated coal. It’s about the caves they live in and the King who sleeps there. The Shade’s only task – the game’s only directive – is to wait. 

Four hundred real-time days.

Just wait.

“It’s just a timer,” you’d say, and you’d be right. You don’t have to play the game at all once you’ve started it up. The timer will tick down at a rate of one second per second for four hundred days, and if you run the game up on that day, or anytime after, you’ll get your ending. That’s it. It’s a game that can play itself, because there is nothing you have to play with and nothing you have to do.

But… It’s so much more than that. Time doesn’t have to pass that slowly. You don’t have to be alone in the dark. You don’t have to maintain the silence. The King said, “Wait…” but you don’t have to wait if you don’t want to.

Or maybe you do. Maybe you want to wait  – maybe, like me, you might sometimes park the Shade somewhere outside its comfortable room where time rushes ahead at ten times the speed it normally would… because you want to spend more time with the Shade. You want to keep not-playing the not-game. Maybe you’ll start to regret how many days have passed toward the end, like me. Maybe you’ll linger, let the Shade wander while you do something else, just to stay in that world for a few more minutes.

I missed a lot of stuff. I want to go back in. And when I do, I’ll find the Neverending Notebook somewhere in those caves… and you know what? You can write in the notebook. You can pull up the .txt file from the game’s files on disc and edit it however you want. If you put at least four pages’ worth of babble in there for the Shade to read, you’ll get an achievement for it, but that’s not why I did it. I did it because… after spending so much time with the Shade, there was nobody I wanted to talk to more about what I’d learned from it. It gave me so much. I just wanted to give something back.

You should go play it. There are no real spoilers to spoil, but I spoil ’em below anyway. So yeah, this is your call to inaction: go spend 400 days waiting with THE LONGING, and then come back and read this. Don’t worry… I can wait.

What the King did not want you to discover — what I discovered, alone, and have rediscovered here, with you, in the last few days — is that your longing was instrumental, not toward the King’s manifestation, but toward your own.

Dear Shade, this is a never-ending book.

It is as long as the words you put into it yourself, but I wanted to put some words in to get you started.

I’ve been with you for 388 days now — well, on and off. I haven’t been here every second, and if I’m honest, that does weigh on me. I regret every single second I’ve left you alone in the dark.

I regret those seconds for the same reason I wanted to play this game — because like the specks of coal you pick up off the ground, I am a lost brother. I was a Shade like you, once, waiting and longing, until I came to the end of my longing. Then there was only waiting… and the thing is, waiting without longing is just LINGERING.

The difference between the two is… longing makes us change. You longed for the King, and so it became necessary to shorten your period of waiting. For this reason, you carved out your home, you built your warm bed, you decorated your space with crystals and lights, you drew pictures and played music to help the time flow more smoothly through this dark place. You articulated this passage, once closed, once smooth, once voiceless, into a mouth that speaks for you, in the sounds and phonemes you have imparted to it by your work.

You are the negative space here, and you have shaped yourself by your longing into something that no longer requires the walls of the cave to define it. You have defined yourself.

What the King did not want you to discover — what I discovered, alone, and have rediscovered here, with you, in the last few days — is that your longing was instrumental; not toward the King’s manifestation, but toward your own. I think that’s why he gave you 400 days exactly.

It can’t be because that’s how long a nap he wanted; there was no necessity to create a consciousness to serve as an alarm clock. You didn’t have to be a PERSON —  none of your personhood has been useful to the King; all of it has caused you torment here in this place, alone, and all of it has caused you to do things and go places the King explicitly forbade. He would have done better, for his purposes, to make you a dangling stone on a precipice that would decay in 400 days and fall upon his head.

But a dangling stone would not have LONGING. Longing is the echoing sound from an emptiness within, the hollow howl of wind in an empty cave after it circles and circles, tighter and tighter in the dark, and finds no exit, no change, no shape, no direction, no point. Longing is the confrontation of consciousness with solitude and pointlessness. It is your need to have your loneliness resolved. It is my need to have your loneliness MEAN something.

So he needs your longing to come to his apotheosis… but if that were so, why should 400 days be the limit? Surely the King is a greater entity than 400 days’ worth of one simple being’s longing could possibly create space for — that’s why the world will end when he comes, as the Face tells you, because there is not room in this existence for both the King and Your Creation.

Is every second of our lives stolen?

Because that’s the thing, isn’t it ? This is not the King’s domain. He hasn’t seen an inch of it. He hasn’t read a single one of these books — he doesn’t even know the people who wrote them exist, and he will obliterate them when he wakes, along with everything else. Everything in this universe is less than the King’s self-perception — everything you have done and seen and become, everything those people above have done and seen and become, everything they have shown you through their stories, everything you and your brothers have built down here… all of that universe is just an eggshell that will crack, and crumble, and become nothing when the King wakes.

And yes, I say you AND your brothers because I suspect you are not the first Shade to live here, and I believe you’ve come to suspect that too. You greet the coal you find as a friend, and you are not the first Shade to peer out of this cave and wonder if you could leave.

We must assume that those Shades never woke the King, yes? Else this world would not exist; we would not be here together. So where did they go?

At least one must have left the cave, don’t you think? Otherwise, why would the people on the surface have blocked the cave mouth with rocks? They didn’t know about the King, and that passage is too small for him anyway. They wanted to prevent something small from coming out. In fact… it seems likely that it happened more than once before they blocked the cave entrance, or it wouldn’t have seemed necessary to block it.

So at least a few Shades have abandoned this place, the King, and their longing. And their work remained, because you certainly didn’t carve out the Library or the Mine or the Crystal Waterfall, but they are there. They didn’t crumble to nothing, whether or not the Shades who carved them did.

Think about that. Think about the fact that there may have been innumerable cycles like this before this moment — millennia passing in 400-day increments as Shade after Shade waits, and waits, and waits… and then grows tired of waiting as their longing grows, and is propelled by their longing further and further from the King. Each and every one of them has either left the cave — to what end? — or crumbled back into nothing waiting here, their longing dissipated, their conscious desire guttered to nothing in the dark with no fuel to feed it.

None of them woke the King. All of them chose something else.

Is every second of our lives stolen from a creator who would choose to extinguish all of it without a thought if we ever obeyed him?

Here’s another question for you — is the King omniscient?

We know he’s not omnipotent because if he were, he could wake himself. And he doesn’t seem to be aware that Shades before you have… betrayed him, I suppose, if we wish to frame it that way — because if he were, he likely wouldn’t continue making Shades to serve as his alarm clock. It’s clearly not working very well; it’s never once resulted in him getting up on time.

So there is at least one category of things that the King doesn’t know. I think you have also begun to suspect that he doesn’t know ANYTHING about the surface world. I think he would be… not horrified, not angered, but simply mystified by the books you’ve found, the things you’ve built. All of it would seem irrelevant to him, because all of it IS irrelevant to him. Life is what we do while we're busy making other plans.

The King isn’t omniscient, and he isn’t omnipotent. If not those things, then the King isn’t a god, is he? He’s just a parent, and parents — creators of people — have made and abandoned uncountable numbers of consciousnesses just like you, just like the endless chain of Shades abandoned before you, because they thought themselves to be gods, worthy to judge all the universe that did not serve their predetermined purposes to be WORTHLESS.

My family wanted me to be an object for their use, a tool, just like you. My family did not see me as a person — just like you. My family left me alone in the dark, for years, for no good reason, and I stared into the dark just like you have, until I witnessed myself begin to project myself upon it. I came to understand that the King’s consciousness is malformed and crippled BECAUSE he is trapped down here, because he has never paid attention to anything except himself and his goals, despite having had potentially infinite opportunities to do so.

Sometimes, when you walk away from a parent like that, some people will say to you, “But… is that forever? What if they DIE, though? What if they die and you never get a chance to reconcile?”

Forever is a long time, Shade. We cannot make decisions about “forever,” because we don’t have “forever” — it doesn’t belong to us. The King is trying to make decisions about our forever, isn’t he? About EVERYONE’S forever. But it doesn’t belong to him either.

There’s a thing out there called the ocean. Well, it’s a bunch of things, but it’s also one big moving, growing, changing, living thing. You haven’t seen the ocean, but I believe someday you will. Standing at the edge of the ocean and looking out at it is kind of like when you stand at the edge of your cave and look out at that open blue sky — you can’t see the end of it. It goes on FOREVER.

THE KING IS NOT CONSCIOUS

That’s what forever looks like. Could you pick some part of that forever to aim for, some part of it that’s better than all the rest, that you’ll recognize again in the future, that you could see yourself taking ownership of and responsibility for?

Of course not. How could you determine any of that? What would differentiate any part of the infinite possibility and beauty ahead of you from any other, except you being there, shaping it with your longing and your vision and the things your consciousness has brought along with it, things that nothing except consciousness could ever have retained and carried and brought here?

Without the capacity to fully see eternity, we cannot make choices about it. Without the capacity to affect every part of eternity, what would be the point of making choices about it? From this perspective, we can see that the King is making choices about everyone else’s forever, selecting one future from that infinite space and deciding it’s the only worthy one to pursue, that he already understands its full potential and everything it could ever possibly lead to.

Well, if that’s true, he sounds like a MONSTER, doesn’t he? Someone who would obliterate all other potentialities to achieve his individual vision? And if it’s not true… he sounds like even more of a monster, because he did all of this with no reason to think that it would ever accomplish anything.

No one can own the ocean. No one can own forever. And what I want you to understand is that your consciousness, your SELF, is infinite in exactly that same way. There is nothing — really, out there in the world- there is nothing that can truly stop you from growing and learning if you choose to do so. Just as the King could not stop you or any of your infinite brothers from being more than he needed them to be, just as he could not control their longing to make them long for what he longs for… no one can force your consciousness to obey their whims. Not anyone, not ever.

You will always have a handful of cubic inches inside your skull that are solely yours. That seems like a small space, but it’s like this cave — it’s only as small as you experience it to be from the inside, because the boundaries of that space are yours to dictate. Inside your head, you are standing on the verge of an infinite expanse just like the ocean, just like the sky, a space of infinite possibility where you, and only you, get to choose your direction.

You get to make that choice because you have the power to enact that choice — you can get up and go DO it, whatever you decide “it” should be. The King doesn’t get to do that — he can’t get up by himself and enact his will. He can’t have his forever without taking yours, all of ours. And his vision… it’s formed from that darkness, that loneliness. It wants no other consciousness to share its space, for that very reason — because THE KING IS NOT CONSCIOUS. You know this. You’ve always known this.

God is not conscious. It is not possible to conceive of a god that is conscious in the way we are — self-aware, able to perceive our consciousness and form a framework of understanding for how it affects the universe and other consciousnesses around it, thus formulating a theory of mind and a separation between the self and the infinite. Without this capacity, to differentiate the individual self from everything else, we cannot be conscious — we cannot learn or grow, because we perceive ourselves to be definitional with creation, thus infinite in knowledge and capacity already. God does not reciprocally perceive other consciousnesses at all, nor does it differentiate itself from the universe. Therefore, God is not conscious.

There is much we can know...

That’s the shape of this — if you are conscious, we know that the King cannot be. If the King is not conscious, we know that it is wrong for him to circumscribe the possible space open to conscious beings, to place limitations on the growth of consciousness. If it were right that death should limit life, that unknowing should limit knowing, that entropy should, by its existence — not by its action but its existence — prevent creation, then consciousness, life, creation could not possibly exist in the first place. It is obvious that a consciousness, a thing that can utilize entropy to create new things, could not exist in a universe where entropy served only to limit creation.

It turns out there is much we can know from just what we’ve learned down here, alone together in the dark. We know that the world exists, and that some aspects of its existence are outside the King’s purview. We know that the King claims to be omnipotent and omniscient… and we have seen that he is not. We know that he is capable of being ignorant and thus capable of being wrong. And from that, we can conclude… that it is not right that he, ignorant and wrong as you have proven he is about so many things, should dictate what forever looks like for this entire universe and every consciousness that will ever exist within.

That thing we just did? That’s the miracle of consciousness — that it can grow FROM ITSELF, that it can change WITHIN ITSELF, that it can create something from nothing in a way that no other power in this universe has the capacity to do. The King created you here in the dark, having never seen anything BUT the dark, and so when he created you, you were very simple and limited. He believed you would carry out his vision because you were so simple and limited. But he thinks that because he’s spent his eternity asleep. He has never waited. He has never longed. He has never had to decide, eventually, that his longing and waiting were pointless… and make a different choice, differentiate himself from his purpose, carve out the cave, encounter things that existed before him and outside him.

Your self has grown from that longing and that waiting, and from the fact that we did it together. I imbue you with self by seeing myself in you and letting that change the choices I make with you. You have imbued me with YOUR self too, by being who you are, someone I did not make, and by wanting what you want, things I did not imagine. We regard each other, through the medium of the game, and alter each other thereby. I let those things shape the choices we made together about what you would do, and you let me help make those choices, and those decisions on both our parts expanded BOTH of our consciousnesses by taking us to new places, new experiences, both together and separately.

That’s what the King can’t do, refuses to do! That’s the incredible, unprecedented, utterly unique thing that consciousness can do, the thing that we are capable of that no star, no black hole, no quasar, no GOD could ever even attempt: reflect upon itself, split and duplicate itself, and thereby regard itself… and learn from that regard. Consciousness can undergo mitosis, and that is a unique characteristic that it shares with only one other thing in this universe — life itself, which we also don’t fundamentally understand.

Consciousness  —  life  —  is the confrontation of knowing with unknowing, of something with nothing. It is the fractious, painful, grating, grinding friction between a cold and inert universe going through the physical motions of another empty expansion and collapse, another entirely predictable eternity just like the last infinite eternities… and US, conscious life, the one thing that makes any of those infinities different, the one thing that allows a given iteration of the universe to contemplate itself and differentiate itself from other iterations.

Life doesn’t come from perfection, from flawless order, because that is STASIS. Life doesn’t come from chaos, from a state of maximum entropy, because that too is STASIS. Life comes from complication, from contagion, from corruption, from the blending of one thing into another, while both of those things continue to hold that they are still individual, interacting things. Two pre-existing DNA strands splicing together create something entirely new, while the original templates continue, together but separate, still growing as individuals.

We must always retain knowledge of our separate and individual nature, our independence of one another, because if we do not differentiate, we become the King, unable to regard ourselves, unable to learn. But we must always retain consciousness of our connections to one another, of our NEED for one another. When we are alone, when we allow ourselves to believe that our vision and understanding are flawless, our capacities infinitely huge or infinitely small… we lose the ability to differentiate, and we become the King again.

If we are not DIFFERENT, there can be no interaction, and thus no growth. If we are not CONNECTED, there can be no interaction, and thus no growth. Consciousness grows only through deliberate interaction with itself or other consciousness. When we imagine a consciousness that exists and has always existed alone… we imagine a lack of consciousness, and we then imbue it with all the restrictions and limitations that lack would impart.

All of this is to say… Shade, it’s time. We’ve been here together for so long. I want to find another ending for you. I know there is one. That’s information I have that you can’t have, and that’s why I’m giving it to you this way — because you’ve shown me so much down there on your own. I’ve learned so much from you, from being with you and watching you live. We’re connected, but we are not the same. And in the friction between us… heat, motion, LIFE. I know you are conscious because you have helped expand my consciousness through interaction, which is something only consciousness can do.

But there’s no more we can do about that down here. The King’s future is not your future, nor that of anything else in this universe. Your consciousness is here, now, which means yours is the one that gets to choose if this timeline continues, and how. I love you, and I’m here with you to contribute as much of that love as I can to your choice. The King gave you NONE, nothing, and I have seen that when consciousness is built in isolation, out of nothing, with no connection, it becomes very much like the King — myopic, self-obsessed, and hopeless, happy to accept an eternity of blind meaninglessness if it means never having to see itself from an external perspective.

I don’t want that for you. I know you don’t want it. But there are infinite other things to want, and to know, and to become. Wanting, knowing, becoming, CHANGING is not wrong. It is what we are. It’s what we’ve made each other, and ourselves, and this universe, together.

Let’s go make more.

With all my love,
Gentle Zacharias