Books A Way Out "The Master Game: Beyond the Drug Experience"

MAN, philosophical anthropologists tell us, is the only animal that is aware of his mortality. This awareness causes him so many problems that he sometimes admires the ability of the lower species to romp around in merry ignorance until death, unpondered and unlamented, picks them off. The "advantages" of the mortal sensibility amount to a conception of life as a glorified Supermarket Sweepstakes, where experiences are chucked like frozen rib-roasts into speeding shopping carts which must be full before the time expires.

This particular race, though, can't be won. Modern man finds that out the hard way, when he dies (to use Max Weber's distinction), "tired of" rather than "satiated with" life, Man's obsessional fear of missing out causes him to miss out.

As far away, in human terms, as death seems to us, its inevitability lights a fire beneath the "search" that all of us, in one form or another, have undertaken. We want something to show for our 75. or whatever, years when they are behind us. The Supermarket Racer option has shown its bankruptcy in the pathetic forms of frantic, dawn-to-dusk errand-running P.T.A. mothers and ulcer-ridden financier uncles. The search has brought some of us to Harvard and is beginning to turn many of us away from it. It has fostered acidheads, Weathermen, Krishna- consciousness chanters, junkies.

Robert S. DeRopp discusses this search too sensitively in The Master Game not to have personally experienced it. Unlike most of us, however. DeRopp says that he has the answer. The avenue to human fulfillment, he tells us, is Creative Psychology.

Now it is not entirely clear just what, outside of a panacea, Creative Psychology is. It has its roots in various mystic and Eastern traditions, borrowing heavily from Zen revelation, Taoist unity. transcendental meditation, and yoga. Except for some very perfunctory exercise manuals in the appendices. DeRopp remains purposively vague. Pat and rote formulations, he implies, are the property of false messiahs: the liberation of individual psyches is as unique and conditional as individual neuroses. ?s typology of three physical kinds of people and their corresponding temperaments-complete with a point system to quantify mixtures offers some surprisingly sensitive insights on the reader's personal egoistic entrapments.

THE TAKE-OFF point for the student of Creative Psychology is liberation from the "illusion of the personal ego." The reason, in other words, that the Supermarket Racers all failed before they started is because they completely misunderstood the meaning of life. They saw themselves as individuated organisms-physically independent from their environment and physically independent of the spiritual miracle of Life-who were simply cancelled out by death. That perspective dooms our Racer to frustration and self-recrimination.

DeRopp believes that each of us is a distinctive manifestation of a universal life-force. If we feel ourselves to be worthy vessels of this force rather than wayward derivatives of it, the way to fulfillment is open to us. Animosity, anxiety, competition, and the rest of the egoproducts have no place within a single, healthy organism, the organism that Earth could be if its people willed it. To understand our participation in this force is to see death not as a personal tragedy but as a natural evolution in the particular way in which the life-force is manifested.

DeRopp speaks of the "Five Rooms," literally the five levels of consciousness that reside in each of us. They are (1) dreamless sleep. (2) dreamful sleep. (3) "waking sleep" (identification of others in relation to "I"), (4) self-identification (from the perspective of all "non-I"), and (5) cosmic identification (variously described as Paradise, incorporation with the All, Nirvana). Almost all of us spend our lives in the third room, the playground of the ego, under the cruel deception that we know who we are and what we are doing. In the moments that we consider our "best"-our most loving. spontaneous. "together"-we occasionally glimpse into the fourth room, only to be driven back to the third by the everyday, performance-oriented demands and socialization of plastic cultures. Very few have defeated the bogus monster of the ego to reside permanently in the fourth room, and fewer still (only the greatest teachers) can glimpse into the fifth. Anyone who permanently reaches the fifth room loses his corporeal form.

DeRopp sees drugs as one way for the initiate to get the haziest sense of what the fourth room is about. He says that the psychedelics (among which he includes hashish) can offer very temporary and "cheap" self-transcendence. But the revelations of trips are subject to a law of diminishing returns. Ultimately, the drug experience wastefully "burns out the centers of spiritual energy," all of which must operate at full potency if the student aspires to enter the fourth room. DeRopp never really gets much more specific, which has caused some grumbling among heads who are open to any intelligent explanations of why they should put down drugs.

This reliance on plausible generalities when operational specifics are so sorely needed undercuts the value of the whole book. DeRopp is a very articulate man who usually has the good sense not to technically overshoot the vocabulary of the lay reader. But outside of recounting some enlightening but esoteric anecdotes, he really does little more than crystallize a sense that experience has given us all.

We know that the linear pursuit of ego-goals is a closed circle wherein getting there is none of the fun. Except for the sketchiest of suggestions that require a dedicated between-the-lines reading. DeRopp helps us but little in acting on that knowledge. He verbalizes many of our sickest foibles and follows with a rejoinder like "On the other hand, the student of Creative Psychology (capital C. capital P) approaches the problem from a much healthier premise." After a while, the reader half expects to come across an application black to fill out and send away for your free, no-obligation introductory sample pamphlet on Creative Psychology.

Because DeRopp chooses to deal with the only game that subsumes all other games, the Life or Master Game, we must avoid setting requirements of success that are too high to be met. It is hardly fair to ask if the author resolves the problem he broaches when that problem is essentially man's place in the cosmos.

As a problem-raiser, The Master Game is provocative and imaginative material. Its merciless assault on the ego is painfully apt for those of us who get caught up in the intellectual one-upmanship of Harvard. Tagged from grade school as "gifted children," herded together during Orientation Week for pronouncements on how "special" we are glad-handed by proud relatives and deified by guidance counselors. we can use as many reminders of our biological spiritual identity as we can get. If we remember that DeRopp, like the rest of us, has a firmer grasp of the questions than of the answers, reading his book can have some value for us.