From 201400d58ee98c13ba1661aa3871c3b56d5c9f52 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: grr <grr@lo2.org>
Date: Thu, 2 May 2024 21:32:35 -0400
Subject: breakout 'new modality' essays

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+\chapter{Mock Risk Games}
+
+
+Suppose you stand in front of a swinging door with a nail sticking out of it 
+pointing at your face; and suppose you are prepared to jump back if the 
+door suddenly opens in your face. You are deliberately taking a risk on the 
+assumption that you can protect yourself. Let us call such a situation a "risk 
+game." Then a mock risk game is a risk game such that the misfortune which 
+you risk is contrary to the course of nature, a freak misfortune; and thus 
+your preparation to evade it is correspondingly superficial. 
+
+If the direction of gravity reverses and you fall on the ceiling, that is a 
+freak misfortune. If you don't want to risk this misfortune, then you will 
+anchor yourself to the floor in some way. But if you stand free so that you 
+can fall, and yet try to prepare so that if you do fall, you will fall in such a 
+way that you won't be hurt, then that is a mock risk game. if technicians 
+could actually effect or simulate gravity reversal in the room, then the risk 
+game would be a real one. But I am not concerned with real risk games. I am 
+interested in dealing with gravity reversal in an everyday environment, where 
+everything tells you it can't possibly happen. Your 'preparation' for the fall 
+is thus superficial, because you still have the involuntary conviction that it 
+can't possibly happen. 
+
+Mock risk games constitute a new area of human behavior, because they 
+aren't something people have done before, you don't know what they will be 
+like until you try them, and it took a very special effort to devise them. 
+They have a tremendous advantage over other activities of comparable 
+significance, because they can be produced in the privacy of your own room 
+without special equipment. Let us explore this new psychological effect; and 
+let us not ask what use it has until we are more familiar with it. 
+
+Instructions for a variety of mock risk games follow. (I have played 
+each game many times in developing it, to ensure that the experience of 
+playing it will be compelling.) For each game, there is a physical action to be 
+performed in a physical setting. Then there is a list of freak misfortunes 
+which you risk by performing the action, and which you must be prepared 
+to evade. The point is not to hallucinate the misfortunes, or even to fear 
+them, but rather to be prepared to evade them. First you work with each 
+misfortune separately. For example, you walk across a room, prepared to 
+react self-protectingly if you are suddenly upside down, resting on the top of 
+your head on the floor. In preparing for this risk, you should clear the path 
+of objects that might hurt you if you fell on them; you should wear clothes 
+suitable for falling; and you should try standing on your head, taking your 
+hands off the floor and falling, to get a feeling for how to fail without 
+getting hurt. After you have mastered the preparation for each misfortune 
+separately, you perform the action prepared to evade the first misfortune 
+and the second (but not both at once). You must prepare to determine 
+instantly which of the two misfortunes befalls you, and to react 
+appropriately. After you have mastered pairs of misfortunes, you go on to 
+triples of misfortunes, and so forth. 
+
+The principal games are for a large room with no animals or distracting 
+sounds present. 
+
+\textbf{A.}Walk across the lighted room from one corner to the diagonally 
+opposite one, breathing normally, with your eyes open. 
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item You are suddenly upside down, resting on the top of your head on the 
+floor. You must get down without breaking your neck. 
+
+\item Although the floor looks unbroken and solid, beyond a certain point 
+nothing is there. If you step onto that area, you will take a fatal fall. Thus, as 
+you walk, you must not shift your weight to your forward foot until you are 
+sure it will hold. Put the ball of the forward foot down before the heel. 
+
+\item Something happens to the cohesive forces in your neck so that if your 
+head tips in any direction, it will come right off your body, killing you 
+immediately. Otherwise everything remains normal. Thus, as you walk, you 
+must "balance" your head on your neck. When you reach the other side of 
+the room, your neck will be restored to normal. (Prepare beforehand by 
+walking with a book balanced on your head.) 
+
+\item Invisible conical weights fall around you with their points down, each 
+whistling as it falls. You must evade them by ear in order not to be stabbed. 
+Walk softly and fast. 
+
+\item The room is suddenly filled with water. You have to control your lungs 
+and swim to the top. Wear clothes suitable for swimming. 
+\end{enumerate}
+
+\textbf{A'.} Play game A while on a long walk on an uncrowded street. The floor 
+is replaced by the sidewalk. The fifth misfortune becomes for space suddenly 
+to be filled with water to a height of fifteen feet above the street. 
+
+\textbf{B.} Lie on your back on a pallet in the dimly lit room, hands at your 
+sides, with a pillow on your face so that it is slightly difficult to breathe, for 
+thirty seconds at a time. 
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item The pillow suddenly hardens and becomes hundreds of pounds heavier. It 
+remains suspended on your face for a split second and then "falls," bears 
+down with full weight. You must jerk your head out from under it in that 
+split second. 
+
+\item The pillow adheres to your skin with a force greater than your skin's 
+cohesion, and begins to rise. You must rise with it in such a way that your 
+skin is not torn. 
+\end{enumerate}
+
+\textbf{C.} Lie on your back on the pallet in the dimly lit room. 
+
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item Gravity suddenly disappears completely, so that nothing is held down by 
+it; and the ceiling becomes red-hot. You must avoid drifting up against the 
+ceiling. 
+
+\item The surface you are lying on becomes a vast lighted open plane. From the 
+distance, giant steel spheres come rolling in your direction. You must evade 
+them. 
+
+\item Your body is split in half just above the waist by an indefinitely long, 
+rather high, foot-thick wall. Your legs and lower torso are on one side, and 
+your upper torso, arms, and head are on the other side. Matter normally 
+exchanged between the two halves of your body continues to be exchanged 
+through the. wall by telekinesis. It is as if you are a foot longer above the 
+waist. In order to reunite your body, you must first roll over and get up, 
+bent way forward. There are depressions in the wall on the same side as your 
+feet. You have to climb the wall, putting your feet in the depressions and 
+balancing yourself. You will be reunited when you reach the top and your 
+waist passes above the wall. 
+\end{enumerate}
+
+\textbf{D.} Sit in a plain, small, straight chair, on the edge of the seat, hands 
+hanging at the sides of the seat, feet together in front of the chair, in the 
+lighted room, for about thirty seconds at a time. 
+
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item The chair is suddenly out from under you and sitting on you with Its legs 
+straddling your lap and legs. You have to get your weight over your feet so 
+you won't take a hard fall. 
+
+\item The direction of gravity reverses and the chair remains anchored to the 
+floor. You have to grab the seat and hold on in order not to fall on the 
+ceiling. 
+
+\item You are suddenly in a contra-terrene universe, in which the atmosphere is 
+unbreathable and prolonged contact with either the atmosphere or the 
+ground will disintegrate you. The seat and back of the chair become a 
+penetrable hyperspatial sheet between the alien universe and your own. As 
+soon as you feel the alien atmosphere, you must jerk your feet off the 
+ground and deliberately sink or plunge through the seat and back of the chair 
+in the best way that you can. You will end up on the floor under the chair in 
+your universe. 
+
+\item You are suddenly in dark empty space in a three-dimensional lattice of 
+gleaming wires. Segments of the lattice alternately burst into flame and cool 
+off. You adhere to the chair as if it were part of you. With your hands 
+holding onto the seat, you can move yourself and the chair forward by 
+
+\end{enumerate}
+
+\plainbreak{2}
+
+\textbf{[NOTE: TWO PAGES MISSING HERE IN SCAN]}
+
+\plainbreak{2}
+
+from blundering into a radiation beam, you have to communicate 
+pre-verbally to the other mind by every means from vocal cries to 
+pantomine, and get your-body/his-mind out of range of the radiation. When 
+the body is out, you will both be restored to normal. (The first thing to 
+anticipate is the basic shift in viewpoint by which you will be looking at 
+your own body from the other's position. There is no point in tensing your 
+muscles in preparatiton for the misfortune, because if it occurs, you will be 
+working with a strange set of muscles anyway. The next thing to prepare to 
+do is to spot the radiation beams; and then to yell, gesture, or 
+whatever--anything to get the "other" to avoid the radiation. Note finally 
+that neither player prepares for the possibility that he will be surrounded by 
+radiation. Each player prepares for the same role in an asymmetrical pas de 
+deux.) 
+
+\emph{Asymmetry:} The two of you play a given duo game, but each prepares 
+to evade a different misfortune. 
+
+\textbf{AB.} Stay awake with eyes closed for an agreed upon time between one 
+and fifteen minutes. Use a timer with an alarm. 
+
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item Each suddenly has the other's entire present consciousness in addition to 
+his own, from perceptions to memories, ideologies, ambitions, and 
+everything else---threatening both with psychological shock. 
+
+The couple must take up positions such that their sensory perceptions 
+are as nearly identical as possible. Beforehand, each must discuss with the 
+other the aspects of the other's attitude to the world which each must fears 
+having impused on his consciousness. During the game, each must think 
+about these aspects and try to prepare for them. 
+
+\item Each suddenly relives the other's most intense past feelings of depression 
+and suicidal impulses. In other words, if five years ago the other attempted 
+suicide because he failed out of college, you suddenly have the consciousness 
+that "you" have just failed out of college, are totally worthless, and should 
+destroy yourself. Presumably the other has since learned to live with his past 
+disasters, but you do not have the defenses he has built up. You are 
+overwhelmed with a despair which the other felt in the past, and which is 
+incongruous with the rest of your consciousness. In summary, both of you 
+risk shock and suicidal impulses. Beforehand, of course, each must tell the 
+other of his worst past suicidal or depressed episode; and discuss anything 
+else that may minimize the risk of shock. 
+\end{enumerate}
+
+\section*{Intrusions in Duo Games}
+
+As before, distractions and modulations can be openly studied by 
+consent of the players. As for bogies, it is possible in duo games for one 
+player to create a bogy without warning, in effect acting as a saboteur. As 
+soon as a game is sabotaged, though, confidence is lost, and each player just 
+watches out for the other's bogies. Here are some sample intrusions. 
+
+\begin{tabular}{ r c c c }
+	\textsc{Game} & \textsc{Distraction} & \textsc{Bogy} & \textsc{Modulation} \\
+	AA 1. & cough & shout in other's face & each take a different drug \\
+	2. & talk and laugh \linebreak get out of step & $\rightarrow$ \linebreak (stomp hard) & \\
+	3. & spin around & $\rightarrow$ & \\
+	AB 1. & cough \linebreak talk and laugh & gasp \linebreak silently pass palm back \& forth in front of other's face & \\
+	2. & & & \\
+\end{tabular}
+
+
-- 
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