Murdering the Self: Enlightenment in Everhood

In Everhood - both the game and the setting it takes place in - immortality has been the status quo for at least a few million years. The people left number perhaps in the 50s, and all of them are in some amount of emotional and spiritual pain. The only way out of this immortality is to descend into the furnace, and eliminate the self with fire, as unknown hundreds or more have done, or to be killed by the Red Mage. In this landscape, all but a few - the thirty or so you must kill to achieve the true ending and about as many more who are optional - have left mortal life, though it is unclear how many were in some way murdered before you arrive as Red. This story serves as a how-to guide on reaching enlightenment in the moments preceding and shortly after death, one that seems to propose its own system, outside of traditional and Pure Land Buddhism, while maintaining much of both’s imagery.

In this reading, the Pink Mage takes the role of the conscious mind, eliminating various elements of the self, until it is all that remains, and then, itself, being subsumed. None of the other characters, in the end, are explicitly shown as enlightened. The end is somewhat purposefully cryptic, all the characters who have died are reborn in a liminal space, in the presence of a figure who resembles the Buddha. This mirrors the Pure Land Buddhist conception of the Amida-Buddha's Pure Land. The Buddha asks the player "Would you like to end the game?", an inverse of the Pure Land doctrine that one must ask Amida-Buddha to achieve rebirth in the Pure Land. This makes sense with the vision of Everhood as a metaphor for individual enlightenment. Pink, the experienced self, is the only one who asks, the only one who is enlightened, the others simply fade away after you talk to them, perhaps being integrated into Pink, or perhaps simply falling away as the illusions they are.

The matter of who exactly does what precisely in the game is, unsurprisingly, quite unclear, as there are, for most of the game, two or three entities in one body, depending on how you count. Red Mage is a wooden shell, a body, in which Pink Mage, a being of energy and soul, resides. There is some implication that Pink is already dead, the whole game being a sort of afterlife in and of itself, and this is the reading I will adhere to. Here, Pink serves as the "soul", the experienced self, which resides, temporarily, within a shell, a body that is - in Pink's case literally - a prison, constructed to prevent their achievement of enlightenment. By destroying the body and becoming nothing but pure energy, Pink can stand on a level with the Buddha, and even ask for enlightenment.

Finally, there is the player, who controls the movements of Red and Pink. The line between player and Pink is quite blurry, but it definitely exists. Pink verbalizes distrust of the player at one point, and has to put their trust in you to move on, while at most other points, the player simply has full control of Red, and once Pink leaves the body, Pink themselves. It's unclear exactly what you represent - perhaps causality or the universe itself, most likely the difference between you and Pink is a matter of ease of communication. In the end, Pink moves on, whatever that means in this story, and you, the player, will someday follow, but whether you are Pink is irrelevant, as you will one day be one with the same thing they are one with (or perhaps none with).

Lines between Red and Pink and Player, and also between the other characters, between Blue and Red and Purple and Green and Orange and Gold and Brown, not to mention the characters who aren't named after colors, are - as, not coincidentally, the lines between colors - entirely meaningless when you take a step back. It's confusing to draw a line between the in-game entity that controls Red and the out-of-game entity that controls Red because, in ultimate reality, there is no difference. We will all come before the Buddha, and we will all achieve Nirvana, it's simply a matter of time, and of cycles through Samsara.

The ending leaves the player behind, the Buddha saying, in short, that you, the player, will not join them at this time, but will someday. After a final battle to send the game off, attempting to load the save file results in a chunk of nonsense characters scrolling by at a rapid speed. A living human cannot follow Pink into whatever comes next, likely enlightenment, oneness with reality. This state is incomprehensible to one who hasn't achieved it, so it makes sense that attempting to load into it results in a stream of nonsense. The universe as a whole cannot be processed through the puny circuitry we have made, nor can it be understood through the weak meat we live within, or the wood that makes up Red's body. Hence, they must be shed to receive true Nirvana.

Again taking that reading of Pink as dead, we can come to understand precisely what Everhood says about enlightenment. In their last moments, Pink realizes the first three of the Four Absolute Truths - a mirror to the Four Noble Truths. Though these truths are quite different from the Four Noble, one of them - the second one to be precise "You are me and I am you./Even the ones you hate and love", encompasses the non-dualistic viewpoints of many Buddhist denominations. Of the other three, the first, "Nothing is lost," asserts the existence of a perpetual self, something which is controversial in Buddhism, but can match quite well with a positive non-duality. The third and last of the Secret Truths is "There are no absolute truths./You are free to wrap your half-truths into whatever...You can make the rest up." This is a paradox, a version of the Liar Paradox to be specific, but beyond that contradiction, it has an underlying message that synthesizes very well with the Mahayana view of Buddhist text as something that is perpetually expanding. If there "are no Truths," then that which the Buddha himself said is no more inherently valuable than something a monk in a monastery down the street says, or something a game developer from Sweden says. What matters is the value the experienced self finds in that which is inevitably half-true.

To cap this off, the secret truth is far more complex, as it's only accessible in a New Game+ mode. I've not incorporated the Cat God and dev fights, or the other elements that come with New Game+, into this essay, because they do not fit in the path of enlightenment, except as an emphasis that this cycle repeats with slight differences over and over through Samsara.

Ultimately, Everhood shows us that enlightenment is achievable, if, even in our last moments, we clear our minds, separate our “selves” from our bodies, and turn to the Buddha, and Enlightenment. However, if Pink had, before their death, eliminated more aspects of themselves, there would be less to deal with in the aftermath. Clearing the mind, therefore, eases us into enlightenment, as the more traditional view contests, but is not strictly necessary to achieve enlightenment, as what progress we make carries over - those hundreds of unknown thought processes and anchors which were eliminated in the furnace.