Chapter 2: The Player Behind the Player

Something unexpected happened while I was reading the story of how I might have become Scott.

I had been following the idea almost playfully: imagining a consciousness somewhere beyond this world choosing a human life, entering an avatar, and agreeing to forget that it had done so.

Then I reached the part about the player behind Scott.

Suddenly, the idea was no longer merely interesting.

It felt personal.

A lump formed in my throat. My chest swelled, and I felt an intense mixture of tenderness, recognition, sadness, joy, and wonder. The emotions were not separate. They arrived together, blended into something I cannot easily name.

It felt like déjà vu—not the ordinary sensation that I had previously visited a place, but the deeper feeling that I had once known something important and was now beginning to remember it.

For a moment, I did not simply imagine that there might be something beyond Scott.

I felt connected to it.

Something Out There—and In Here

The presence I sensed seemed to be outside me, somewhere beyond the boundaries of this life. Yet it also seemed to be within me, reaching through whatever separates these different levels of consciousness.

It felt like the player behind the avatar called Scott.

That player was still me—but a version of me existing from a much broader perspective. It seemed more evolved, more aware, and less frightened than the human being moving through this world.

It resembled what I have often called my soul.

But this was more intimate than a philosophical definition of the soul. I did not feel watched by a distant spiritual observer. I felt cared for.

The player knew what Scott was experiencing.

It understood the mistakes, fears, loneliness, love, grief, confusion, and occasional moments of clarity. It knew how seriously Scott took a life that might appear very different from outside the game.

And it had my back.

That was the part that touched me most deeply.

If there really is a player behind Scott, perhaps it did not send me into this life and then abandon me. Perhaps it remains connected to me through intuition, inspiration, love, conscience, dreams, and those strange moments when something seems to rise from within while also coming from somewhere beyond me.

Perhaps I have never been as alone as I sometimes believed.

Why Play This Game?

I began wondering why a more highly evolved consciousness would choose to experience this particular world.

Why enter a reality containing pain, fear, separation, uncertainty, aging, and death?

Why leave a place of greater awareness to become a human being who cannot even remember agreeing to come here?

The answer I felt was not expressed in words. It was closer to an impression.

The player came here to feel what it is like to be alive under these conditions.

This world is intensely polarized. Love exists beside loss. Courage appears because fear exists. Forgiveness becomes meaningful because people can hurt one another. Discovery is possible because we begin without knowing. Relief requires tension. Reunion means something because separation hurts.

The challenges do not merely interfere with the rewards. In some mysterious way, they help create them.

A game with no uncertainty would contain no suspense. A game with no possibility of failure would make achievement nearly meaningless. A life without vulnerability might be safe—but could it produce the same depth of tenderness, courage, compassion, and love?

Perhaps the resistance is not an unfortunate defect in the game.

Perhaps resistance is what allows the experience to matter.

From within the avatar, pain still hurts. Loss still feels like loss. Nothing about this perspective requires me to pretend that suffering is pleasant or that every tragedy was deliberately selected in advance.

But perhaps the player sees relationships that Scott cannot see.

Perhaps it understands how fear can create courage, how grief can reveal love, and how an apparently broken life can generate experiences unavailable in a world where nothing important can be lost.

Maybe the darkness and the light are not evenly matched enemies.

Maybe they are contrasting colors inside the same picture.

The Kaleidoscope

The player’s motivation did not feel like happiness in the ordinary sense.

It felt more like a desire to experience the entire kaleidoscope.

Happiness and sadness. Pleasure and pain. Confidence and anxiety. Belonging and loneliness. Victory and disappointment. Love and grief.

From Scott’s perspective, these emotions often contradict one another. I naturally want some and resist others.

But from the player’s perspective, they may be different expressions of one larger experience: aliveness.

The player may not enter the game merely to be happy. It may enter to encounter the full range of what a human life can become.

That does not mean the player is indifferent to my suffering. The overwhelming feeling I experienced suggested precisely the opposite. Its interest in Scott did not feel cold or experimental.

It felt compassionate.

Tender.

Almost parental, although even that word does not completely capture it.

The player seemed to love the avatar through whom it was experiencing this life. It did not condemn Scott for becoming confused inside the game. Forgetting may have been necessary for the experience to feel real.

The player knew why I forgot.

It also knew that, occasionally, I might begin to remember.

Between Games

As I sat with this feeling, I remembered an experience from 2019.

I had been taken to the hospital during a serious medical crisis. My blood pressure had climbed above 180, and for several days I was mentally and physically out of it. My family feared that I might die.

My memories from that period are fragmented. I experienced episodes of amnesia and memory loss, and I cannot establish a clear boundary between what happened around me and what happened inside my mind.

But I remember an experience that felt extraordinarily real.

I seemed to be floating in space, looking toward Earth.

I was no longer standing on the planet as Scott. I was somewhere beyond it, able to see it from a distance. I was accompanied by a guide—some form of intelligence or presence that appeared to understand where I was and what was happening.

I asked where I was.

The guide explained that I was between sessions, or between games. My body remained on Earth in a coma-like condition, but I was temporarily outside the experience.

I understood that Earth was not the only available world.

There were other planets, other environments, and other games I could choose. Earth was merely one possibility within a much larger range of experiences.

I was free to go somewhere else.

I do not remember being frightened by that possibility. It felt surprisingly natural, as though some part of me already understood the arrangement.

But when I looked toward Earth, my heart swelled.

I thought about my boys.

I thought about my life—the relationships, unfinished experiences, and people to whom I remained connected. Whatever difficulties existed there, I did not feel finished with them.

I wanted to return.

I wanted to play more of this game.

Eventually, I regained ordinary awareness inside my body. I learned that several days had passed and that my family had been deeply worried. I remained in the hospital for four or five days, trying to understand what had happened.

Was it a near-death experience?

Was it a vivid dream produced by a brain under extreme physical stress?

Was it delirium, a neurological event, or the mind’s attempt to create a coherent story during a period of disrupted consciousness?

Or had I briefly experienced something beyond the reality I normally inhabit?

I do not know.

I cannot honestly turn the experience into evidence that other worlds exist or that human life is a game selected by a consciousness outside the body. Emotional intensity does not prove a metaphysical explanation.

But uncertainty does not make the experience meaningless.

Whatever caused it, it changed me.

Years before I began writing The Avatar Experience, I had already experienced myself as something temporarily separated from Scott—something looking back at Earth and deciding whether to return.

Recognition Across Time

When I became emotional while reading about the player behind Scott, perhaps I was recognizing the same pattern.

The story I was reading gave language to something I had encountered in the hospital years earlier.

That may explain the déjà vu.

The moment felt like waking from a dream and realizing that I had been dreaming—while still loving the dream enough to want to return.

Perhaps some part of me remembered standing outside this life and choosing it again.

Perhaps that is why the emotions were so difficult to separate. I was not feeling simple happiness. I was feeling love for the entire experience, including the parts that hurt.

I felt compassion for Scott.

I saw him as a human being trying to navigate a difficult and beautiful world without remembering how he arrived here. I saw his mistakes differently—not as proof that he was defective, but as part of what happens when consciousness becomes immersed in limitation.

For a moment, I felt toward Scott what the player might feel toward him.

Patience.

Tenderness.

Understanding.

The desire to embrace him and say:

I know this feels real.

I know this is difficult.

I know you have forgotten.

But I have not forgotten you.

Who Is the Player?

It would be comforting to stop here.

Scott is the avatar. The soul is the player. The mystery is solved.

But perhaps awakening does not solve the mystery. Perhaps it merely moves the mystery up one level.

If there is a player behind Scott, what is behind that player?

Is the soul the ultimate self—or is it another avatar within a larger reality?

Could the being who chose this human experience also be participating in a game it does not fully understand? Could there be layers of consciousness, each believing itself to be the player until it becomes aware of another level beyond it?

A dreamer may awaken from one dream only to discover that it is still dreaming.

The player might be playing Scott while simultaneously being played by something greater. That greater consciousness may exist inside another system, which itself belongs to something larger still.

There may be no final player that the human mind can locate.

Only players behind players.

Dreamers within dreams.

Consciousness awakening to itself one level at a time.

Still Inside the Game

I remain Scott.

I still wake inside this body. I still experience uncertainty, desire, irritation, love, fear, grief, and hope. Bills do not disappear because I imagine myself as an avatar. Relationships still require care. Loss still hurts.

The game continues to feel real.

Perhaps that is the point.

If I could remain constantly aware of everything beyond Scott, I might no longer experience this life as Scott experiences it. The distance between the avatar and the player may be necessary for immersion.

But occasionally, something seems to pass through the separation.

A dream.

An intuition.

A moment of wonder.

A hospital experience I cannot explain.

A sudden lump in my throat while reading words that feel less like a new idea and more like an old memory.

These moments do not tell me exactly what reality is.

They remind me that reality may be larger than what Scott can see.

And they leave me with the feeling that somewhere—beyond me, within me, or somehow both—the player is still here.

Watching through my eyes.

Feeling through my heart.

Experiencing this strange and beautiful world through the avatar called Scott.

And perhaps, when I become very still, reminding me:

You are not playing alone.