Because my style of thinking follows on from the type of person that I am, it may be useful if I divulge a little about my personality. That may help you to decide how much credence to give me. Words don’t exist in a vacuum; they are coloured by the character of their user. Consequently, there’s a reason for me to prove myself worthy. Whether I want to or not, I’m going to have to crawl out on that limb.
Though no man is an island, I keep myself a strictly-patrolled peninsula. By that, I mean that I’m semi-permeable to other input. Through reading I’ll happily incorporate ideas from external sources. But I do so very judiciously—and I’d recommend that you apply the same strategy. Tread cautiously. Do allow ideas from foreign sources to pollinate you, but don’t let yourself be genetically modified in the head. It’s a finely-tuned balancing act.
In No Ordinary Genius, David Goodstein tells of getting together with Richard Feynman one evening to read with excitement the manuscript of Jim Watson’s (and Crick’s) The Double Helix, a year before that milestone of a book was published.
“Watson must have been either very lucky or very smart,” remarked Goodstein to Fenman, “because he never knew what anybody else was doing, and yet he still made the crucial discovery.”
Replied Fenman, “That’s what I learned from reading it. I used to know it, and then I forgot it—I have to disregard everybody else, and then I can do my own work.” And so, given that Will? I Am! originated almost exclusively from me, the time might be right to reveal a little about myself (the bare minimum, I promise us both).
I always feel awkward when I’m asked who I am. The conventional response is to name an occupation, as if the activity that brings dollars through the door defines one as a person. Well, that isn't how I see myself. My day job is incidental to who, or what, I am. I place more emphasis on making a life than on making a living.
And yet I wouldn't feel comfortable coming out with the truth either—declaring for example that I’m a seeker. I hate it when people respond, “Whaaat!?” so I tend to 'um' and 'er'. To entrust a stranger or even an acquaintance with a deeper response, and for me to divulge how I relate to the universe, and what I deem to be important in my life, isn't for casual conversation.
It should suffice that English is my mother tongue, and that I can make myself understood. I write competently (if you can ignore my irrepressible wit). I don’t require that you trust me. I don’t care whether you relate to me or not. Both are irrelevant to me. I’ve grown up largely outside the influence of any major religion, so have no vested interest in any dogma or belief system. More than that, you don’t really need to bother yourself with.
Why wonder about whether I’m male or female (or combination thereof)? Surely my physical appearance—height, weight, skin colour and shoe-size—is of no consequence. I’m above the age of consent—of an age, in fact, to have grandchildren. It shouldn’t make a jot of difference whether I’m confined to a wheelchair, or run marathons. I have most of the ‘seven smarts’ and do well in intelligence tests, though have never felt that to be an advantage—the reverse, if anything. You ought not to care a hoot whether I have a steady job or am unemployed. Why would you give a fig about whether I write from a prison cell or via the free Internet access suite at the local library? What does it matter where I hang my hat?
Let me put a few more cards on the table. I don’t claim to be a mainstream philosopher or scientist (though I have a degree). I‘m not interested in acting out the part of an academic: incrementing the tedious anthills of others with micro-spoonsful of bullshit of my own. I do what I do with leaps of intuition. Just like Ed de Bono, I ain’t going to riddle my thinking with no stinking references. Also, rest assured that I’m not into any religion—I’m no theologist or ideologue. I don’t claim to be spiritual or a mystic. I don’t easily or willingly slip into the role of teacher, lecturer or guru. I’m neither a genius nor an autistic savant.
That I feel myself to be special is nothing special. Everyone, if they live authentically and occupy themselves mainly with what feels right for them, will be the most interesting person that they know. Still, you might wish to take a gander at the state of the nation and peruse the appendix: 100 things about me. But you’re just as welcome to skip it by and flip through to the present point in time.
Now, in my middle age, I find that I’ve gained an insight into the ultimate reality. However, I’ve only just arrived there—am still in the process of arriving—so it will be a while before I get everything squared away. That may explain the state of these pages. Until everything is ship-shape, things will seem a little messy. Please bear with me (and maybe lend a hand).
Given that chimpanzees share about 99 per cent of their genetic makeup with humans, I'm someone not that different from you. Choose two people at random, and they’ll be closer—much closer—than they imagine. Did you ever ask yourself exactly who you are? Well, there you go then! That's another thing that we have in common.
Try this on for size: Think of me as if I’m you. Imagine that you'd been beamed into my body or been poured into my pair of shoes (a bit tricky, since I don’t wear ’em). What would you do if you were me? No really, do that right now—our first thought experiment together.
Suppose that you were me. Crawl inside my head. Imagine that you’ve somehow inherited my cerebral estate, the only catch being that you can’t bring any baggage with you—no knowledge of the former you, no memories et cetera. You can only bring your own ‘essence’, whatever that might be. What would you do as me, and how would you act?
If that were really the situation, then to all intents and purposes I suggest that since you are me (or I am you), you wouldn’t—couldn’t—act any differently than I had been, have been, are or will be acting in the future. You’d be ‘locked in’. You would have to make—have made—the same decisions as me. You would have fallen—will fall—into exactly the same traps. This is so because you would possess (or be possessed by) my background, environment, genetic makeup and everything else that pertains. It would be impossible for you to relate to the world in any other way but mine.
You might wish to argue that point, but I’m not going to let you. For now, I’m going to leave that point simmering (and maybe you too). That notion is too heavy for me to run with on my own. I’ll need to seek the aid of a certain French mathematician a bit further down the road. But right now I’ll distract you with an invitation. Would you care to rummage through the attic of your new digs? Be my guest. Go right ahead and browse.
As you start to explore the Max Headroom upstairs, you’ll come across a group disparate items—things that don’t exactly worry as much as preoccupy me. I’ve stuffed them into boxes labelled:
- The way the world is heading
- The difficulty of trying to absorb everyone’s ideas
- Wanting to disengage from the predominant culture
- The burden of possessions
- Clutter in my living environment
- Training injuries as I get older
- The compulsion to do something with my life
- Having to deal with stuff I don’t want to waste time on
- Planning for the future
- Earning a living
- Dealing with people
- Maintaining a home and household
- Gadgets that I depend on but that keep breaking down
- Not spending enough time on meditation
- Dealing with a sexual drive
You rock back on your heels and sigh. How deflating. This is not a whole heap of fun.
My apologies. Were you hoping to take your new personality for a test drive? Were you excited to see what it could do? Sorry. I have no extra horses hidden under the bonnet. This model is much like your own—riddled with all sorts of failings. You’re wondering if it’s really a bargain.
But hey, ‘failings’ is a loaded word, like ‘deficiencies’ or ‘imperfections’. Let’s not think in those terms. From personal experience (experiences gained inside the vehicle of which you’re now the driver), what it does when you look down your nose back at yourself—apart from giving yourself eyestrain—is limit what you do. And that won’t do. If you judge yourself lacking, then the effect of that judgement on this make, model and vintage, is to make you abandon the journey before you’ve even set off. And in that case, you might as well toss away the key.
So forget about those boxes. The baggage that I carry isn’t me.
Just like having a good sneeze, it's an enjoyable act to entertain a conspiracy. Actually, it’s a form of thought experimentation. Here's a good one to try. Apparently it came from the French mathematician, Poincare. He wondered: what if one night while everyone was asleep the universe became a thousand times greater in size?
No one would be able to tell the difference, he surmised. People would wake up and blindly go about their business as usual. No one would know, because how could they? Their instruments and scales would have increased in size too. Well, that idea disturbed me when I read about it, because got me to conjure up a notion of my own.
What if every day we wake up as different person?
We touched on this earlier in this book where I invited you to step into my shoes. Just as you wouldn’t register a change in size, you wouldn’t know if you’d become another person, not if the procedure involved the complete deletion of your previous memories and the uploading of new ones. You’d wake up with your whole new history in mind, and this would be just another day of the person you now remember being. Oh my! The reason that this idea freaked me out was how could I be sure that it wasn’t already happening?
Consider: we awake into another body. We enter into another life by forgetting the old and assuming the new. We come to consciousness inside another life with its background intact, every episode of all previous seasons. The yesterdays that we recall are its yesterdays, its events and its birthday parties. What a conspiracy that would be, to be forever leaping into new continuums.
I guess you could call it quantum jumping. To all intents and purposes, you become another person with every leap. It stands to reason. That’s more or less how we define selfhood. If a person suddenly occupied another head with exactly the same genes, upbringing, environment, circumstances, knowledge, beliefs and attitudes as that entity—absolutely everything—then they would act and make the very same decisions and choices as he or she.
I’m talking exactly the same here. If you retained any inkling of your former self, would ruin the effect, but without such an inkling—if your brain was well and truly washed—then there’d be no way to tell you had changed hosts, now would there? You wouldn’t know that you were no longer ‘you’. How could you?
Your day would seamlessly ensue from the background of all that had gone before. In every respect you would be who you’d always been. Without the memories and self-awareness of a previous self, you would not miss your earlier existence. It would be like being born again in a sense. We’d be unaware of it having happened because all links would be lost. We’ve reincarnated. Incarcerated. At most there’s just the ghost of déjà vu.
Why could this not be true? It makes such sense that it must be true. This is how things work; that’s how the world is. I’m telling you . . .
No, I shouldn’t be telling you. No-one likes to be told what to think. Okay, please, bear with me. Hear me out. Po statements, remember? These are just fleeting butterflies. Don’t rip their wings off, weasels!
To make our conspiracy even more delicious, I’ll introduce another element to the above scenario by means of a riddle. What do you get when you cross E.T. and The Truman Show? What you get is a secret task.
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to locate ‘The Other’. It’s to get back into touch with (or meet for the first time; it's a moot point) some really important individual. We share a very close tie of an unknown nature.
But I, or s/he, or even both of us have been brainwashed (as per the above). The knowledge of our relationship has been scrubbed. The grand conspiracy has worked to separate us. (By the way, I’ll use the name Theo from now on—from THE Other—and refer to Theo in the second person singular to avoid having to dither between ‘he’ and ‘she’.)
It has hidden Theo. Maybe you’ve morphed you into an unrecognizable form. I don’t know what you look like, or even if you’re human! I don’t know where you are, or when you live. But somehow through some means or another I must reach you and convince you of our plight.
How’s that for a premise? Rod Serling would have loved it!
I refer to this as a mission because Theo could be anywhere in the world. For all I know, you may be living in another time period also. I hope you don’t live in the past, because how could I you reach backwards in time? But if you occupy the future, then clearly the best way forward is to plant this book for you to find.
Another difficulty is that we wouldn’t necessarily recognize one another on sight. We’re both in mufti. How would we get around that one? I, at least, have the benefit of knowing that there is a person to be on the lookout for. I’ve got my eyes primed. But you don’t necessarily know that there’s even a game on. Your lenses—your overview of the situation—may not be so clear.
Still, I can make a stab at Theo’s characteristics, feelings, perceptions, attitudes and mental orientation. I must trust that you are fortunate enough to live in a relatively open society, one in which differences are at least tolerated, and where it is possible to harbor variant thoughts (as long as you keep them to yourself). Those around you probably follow a conventional religion, and you might also, in spite of the fact that you’re not one-hundred-percent convinced. But Theo is the type of person who goes along with the flow. I warrant that you’re not the sort of person who makes waves.
That being so, I figure my best course of action is to send Theo a message-in-a-bottle. Not only must I spell it out clearly, but I can’t waste any time. An added complication is that things are not static. As the search goes on (and as I write) Theo and I are moving around. Every day we wake up in different bodies.
What a predicament! Is our situation hopeless? Come back and find out—same time, same place, next week.
But to continue with my story—time’s a-ticking on that 24-hour dial—you have a problem when you want to be both Van Gogh and Einstein, namely that Einstein was born whilst Van Gogh was still living. Their lives overlap. Hm, bummer.
Not only that, Einstein was still alive when I was already a toddler (not really, but we’ll imagine that this is the case). Damn! Somehow there’s got to be a way. But how could a soul wangle it so as to be alive in two places simultaneously, which is the only way that I can see it working?
I see no obvious solution, but that’s no reason to give up. There has got to be a way—remember that Dog ought not to be restricted by time (or by anything). How might that mighty beast crack this particular bone?
What I’ll do is to recycle our conspiracy notion of being reborn into another body every day—that one awakes as someone new and comes to consciousness with all the memories, attributes and inclinations of an entirely different person.
As I’ve pointed out, there’d be no way to tell you’d changed hosts. You wouldn’t know that you were no longer ‘you’. Your day would seamlessly stream forth from the background of all that had gone before. To all intents and purposes, you would ‘be’ who you had always been. Without the memories and self-awareness of a previous self, you would not miss your earlier existence one little bit.
Now, that may sound depressing. It wouldn’t surprise me if it did. Most people clutch fast to individual identity—see how they cling to life at death—and they strongly resist the idea of a collective consciousness like the plague. Therefore, I can understand how the idea of giving up one’s ghost on a daily basis would be repellant.
But not so fast. Give that po statement a little time. Try to realize—you’re not losing a daughter, you’re gaining a son. Don’t worry, you’ll soon get to be ‘you’ again, and much sooner than you imagine.
Are you willing to wind things up a notch? All righty! Here’s your next assignment. We’re going to work on getting you up to speed. Strap yourself in. I’m going to get you to suppose that reincarnation is unlimited in another way. Imagine that it doesn’t wait for your life to end before it kicks in. Ooh hell, hold on now!
The idea, which we've already encountered, is that during sleep you become another person. There are a couple of things that that would require.
First, is that your hardware can miraculously reboot. Previous memories get wiped and replaced with another set so thoroughly that there’s no sign. After your new identity has uploaded, you behave exactly as he or she (or dolphin) would. Yes, it’s a mind bender, but I’m sure you’ll get over it. You’d better, because we’re about to open up the throttle.
The second thing to grasp is that improved-Persil reincarnation serves to slot us, Matrix-like, into the next life as fully-formed adults, so that our consciousness is not obliged to grow up from babyhood.
There are more steps to go. I eased you into this thought experiment by putting you to sleep, as it were. I had the change of identity occur at night. I now propose that we can fast-forward reincarnation. I’m going to have it happen more frequently than once a day.
We’ve no choice. The engine would surely stall if we had to hang about twenty-four-hour intervals. There’s no such clock, in my opinion. Such a mechanism would be far too cumbersome.
Besides, we humans don’t pass our days so regularly and clear-cut. We live in every time zone. Some of us work night-shift, or attend all-night parties. We’re up at all hours of the day and night. So prepare yourself, if you would (and if you can) for a huge jump in quantum mechanics: one small step for man; a giant leap for mankind.
Consider that reincarnation may occur, not after an entire lifetime, not at the end of each day, but after a fraction of a second. Is that beyond you? Here, let me help.
Think of any two people. Oh, I don’t know . . . Van Gogh and Einstein? Envisage the self-knowledge, awareness of self, or consciousness of one darting into the other. Shift their identities. And then an instant later, switch them back.
Did you manage to? Do it again and again. Make them go back and forth like a see-saw on steroids. Speed it up until it’s like they’re vibrating. Half a second, a quarter, an eighth . . . Can you imagine it?
Don’t worry about the mechanics, the whys and wherefores, the logistics and the dizziness. (I’ll get you a pill for the nausea.) They are not your concern. Just try to envisage the process of flitting into someone else’s shoes intact with all that person’s memories, history, genetic makeup, and everything else.
Here’s another way to picture it. Compare this process to the principle behind moving pictures. You know how film is put together frame by frame. Flash twenty-five images per second upon the screen (less in some cartoons, where you can perceive the jerkiness) and there you have it: the illusion of movement come to life. The movie seems to run continuously, but that is only an illusion. What if the same rule applied to how we sensed our being-ness? What if life was a series of rapid-fire stills?
Quantum physics, quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics—who could possibly keep abreast of that field? Would anyone want to? What do photons, electrons, positrons, quarks, quirks and sparks matter?
One thing, though—they say that matter and energy are fundamentally the same. That’s very interesting. Might there be a third aspect of stuff’? Maybe consciousness is an integral part of the equation. I’m curious about whatever sub-particle it is that carries consciousness on its back.
So let’s invent another science. We’ll add Quantum Consciousness to the curriculum, the science that studies consciousness by examining its quantum-sized units. If you start with a single centre of consciousness (no, I’m not volunteering to step into the cyclotron) you could smash it up into a helter-skelter of apparently discrete centres. They’d be particle-wavelet whatevers that can be assigned attributes of mass, energy and now consciousness.
Who knows?—their study might lead to an explanation of the whole shebang, and maybe rip the veil off Old Mother Maya herself. It might explain how life as we know it has resulted from the explosion of a single, original, concentrated centre of consciousness-essence. For the sake of convenience, let’s refer to that whole before-and-after conglomeration—that it/them/us assembly—as God.
So how do we get a grip on all of that? What are we then as individuals? How are we to regard ourselves? What does each of our lives consist of, and how do we fit into the overall picture? I ask, because most of us feel that we’re helplessly adrift. We’re passengers in a ship in the midst of an absolutely perfect storm. We really need a lifeboat here. Save Our Souls.
Fear not. Help is at hand. As Douglas Adams wrote (in large friendly letters), DON’T PANIC. (Arthur C. Clarke thought that this was perhaps the best advice that could be given to humanity, so it can’t hurt for me to repeat it.) I’ll follow that up with Be Here Now, a phrase that Baba Ram Das used for his book. EckhartTolle advised, “All you really need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at peace with yourself.” To achieve that, he imagined himself sitting at his shoulder watching himself with detached objectivity.
Now that we’ve calmed a little, we’ll sink further into Czerner’s concepts of ‘eternity’ and ‘total unity’. He claims they lie outside our direct awareness, but let’s examine them anyway.
Tolle, Richard Alpert and others state that the present is all that there is. It is the only time that we have, they say. I would like you to notice something else about it.
Don’t you sense that the present is at one and the same time nothing? It has no substance or duration. The present is gone as soon as it arrives. It lasts not an instant. It lies between the future and the past, thinner than the thinnest skin.
We might easily overlook the meniscus of the present and split time into only the past and the future, if it weren't for the fact that we skate or glide eternally across its surface. Let’s give the present moment a measure of credibility. Let us think of it as having a certain substance. We’ll give it the thickness of one quantum of consciousness.
You see where I’m headed, don’t you? I’m about to string together these nothing moments into an unbroken, unbreaking wave. Our perception of the present, our most intimate experience of being, is itself the greatest testament of, argument for and proof of quantum-mechanical-reincarnation. Ism is hidden clockwork that jerks life along by the bootstraps.
We insist on regarding ourselves as individuals with separate souls living independent lives. We act as though we are discrete—fenced off from one another by date and location. We see our lifespans as a linear progression of personally relevant events.
But I put it to you that we’re finger puppets, and that together we make up one enormous hand. Can your self-awareness stretch that ultimate octave? We’re alone, and yet we’re totally together, like tube feet on a starfish, or the cilia on a single-celled organism. We’ve got to get it all together if we want to work in concert. The question is how.
So . . . let me get this straight. What you’re saying, I think, is that there’s just us—WE—plus God, right? Us and Him—a kind of duality. But that doesn't help me understand what God wants. What is it that he wants us—ME—to do? What is my—OUR—purpose?
Ah, you still imagine yourself separate.
Whoa now! You’re not going to . . . I mean, you can’t mean . . . Are you telling me . . .?
Just what the hell is this—some unholy text? Is the writer the devil in disguise? Is that what’s going on here? Is he (or I) fooling with your mind? Or am I the Antichrist come for your soul? Danger, Will Robertson!
Who knows? It could be—I mean I could be. It depends what the people who thought up that term had in mind. Could they have seen any of this coming? Certainly the ideas contained herein could change a person’s thinking. They could make you see the world very differently. You might decide that everything you thought you knew is way off the mark. And if what I say causes you to discard your religious convictions, then I suppose that I lay myself open to the charge.
But would that be such a bad thing? Aren’t you halfway there already? Western society has already largely weaned itself away from the idea of a vengeful and jealous Dog. Come on now, really. Is there anyone who still seriously believes in hell, damnation and original sin, and a red-skinned devil with horns on his head pointing a pitchfork? The sooner we escape the clutches of such crackpot witchery the better, it seems to me.
See our little spark. Unhindered by geography, it leaps lightly around the world. It skips blithely across time, allowing us to experience ourselves in a multitude of bodies, both simultaneously and overlapping. Behold now that spark flare several orders of magnitude. I’m going to up its power (this spark is going supernova). Fasten your seat-belts. Warp infinity here we come. It’s time to tackle time travel.
To do that, we’ve got to circle around and sneak up on it. Shh . . .
I am here.
You are here.
Every single instant, we are neatly self-contained. The illusion is of a wondrous separateness—individuality, independence, autonomy, free will and choice. Life feels filled to the brim with potential. Well, it should. This is a carnival, you know.
We realize its boundaries: birth and death. We observe them when others pass across them. This knowledge serves to snip us off from one another even more sharply. Everyone occupies his or her (gender is yet a further distinction) quarter-acre patch of reality. We’re fenced off from everyone else, including God.
But dammit, we are God. We’re wrapped up in that containing consciousness. We are one another. We are one. ONE. US. I. Ism.
I wake up from a dream in which I was a butterfly. Or am I really a butterfly dreaming of being a man? I wonder, is the dream state more ‘real’ than wakeful consciousness?
After all, we only dip into wakeful waters for a matter of hours before needing to recharge our batteries. By contrast, you never become exhausted in the sleep state and just have to wake up. It's not as if you run out of oxygen.
Nevertheless, we don’t question that the waking state is higher than mere sleep. Of course it must be. Isn’t our level of consciousness greater when we’re up and about? It seems so, but maybe that’s another ‘obvious’ assertion to test.
Leave consciousness out of it for the moment. Instead, let’s do an assessment of quality of being. Specifically, let’s consider our depth of connectedness to each other, the planet, the universe and our roots. We’ll compare how we do when we’re asleep, as opposed to when we’re awake. In which of the two states are we more ‘at one’?
When you open your eyes, you take on an aura of individuality and otherness. The illusion is of being a separate entity. You’re here behind the rays that shine into your eyes. Things exist ‘out there’. Time feels real, space feels real, and the cinematography of our lives feels as if it's occurring. The reels roll, we’re mesmerized, and we enjoy the drama from the comfort of our seat.
But we slough all of that off when we sleep. At that time we’re centred. We return to our origins where it is natural to be, and we draw nourishment from being there. Don’t we feel freshest in the early part of the day just after we’ve arisen? And conversely, don’t we feel dullest at day’s end?
Since this is so, then I conclude that wakefulness is not our default state. We’re not naturally wakeful beings who sometimes need to sleep. We are the one source that dips regularly into wakefulness to enjoy the experience of those dreams, which makes us not so much a butterfly as a cocoon.
Another thing is that we assume that the adult form is more advanced than the immature version. The pupa grows not only in size but in wisdom, supposedly, as our memories accumulate. But I wonder about that. Just as I’m coming around to think that the wakeful state is inferior to the sleep state, I’m starting to hypothesize that the child is the father to the man.
In one of my dreams I go into a mall with people walking about everywhere. There’re all types, all races, and I’m struck with their variety and beauty. I look into everyone’s eyes (especially if the people are women and if their eyes are brown) and then I suddenly stagger and have to reach out for support.
I’ve just had an epiphany. Now I know what it means to be God! In every pair of eyes I see consciousness swim. This pulsing matrix of humanity is omnipresence all ready to blow. It’s like a fire that just needs a match. Am I the only one who understands? We’re only a spark away from the realization that all is one. We’re just a membrane away from grokking ourselves for what we are, will be and always were: the timeless entirety. Imagine the simultaneous smile when that light dawns!
I believe that it’s time for some light entertainment. My treat—let’s go to the movies.
When I was young, I strongly identified with the hero—Charlton Heston, Marvin Lee or Kirk Douglas. As the story wore on, I became convinced that I resembled them, and that everyone would stare at me when I exited the theatre. I fancied that I even walked the same way, so I became too self-conscious to cross the foyer. I expected people to gasp at the uncanny resemblance.
A psychologist might say that suggests either a poor sense of self or a strong sense of empathy, but I disagree. I think that movies (and novels, songs, works of art) have the potential to disengage us from the illusion of our separateness or boundedness. That is why we pay such homage to the stars when they do their job well. They perform a form of magic on us by altering our consciousness and taking us out of ourselves. They remind us of the greater reality of unity.
God gets to enjoy himself when he shares our lives. At that time we’re the actors. We’re the ones receiving homage. Think of watching a video (in the genre of The Matrix it would seem). God, always in the starring role, takes his seat to immerse herself in the best virtual reality of all: a tri-D sensaround, panasound, supersensual bio-pic.
Each movie runs for seventy or eighty years from the insider’s point of view (when the featured wildlife is human). And of course, God sees it from that point of view too. While he watches, he’s compressed within a skull.
But the overview, the bigger superpicture’s, is that there is no time. Any 'time' is as good as another; it all exists at once. Life as we know it in the present tense is but a cross section of the jabberwocky Beast. God actually watches every monitor at once, and is intimately involved with every bit of the videotape in the vault.
Whether your current life story is war, medical drama, horror or romance doesn't matter. That’s not you. It’s just the current book you’re reading. You shouldn’t worry how it’s going to end. There's nothing that can go 'wrong' with it, and there's nothing that will harm you in a permanent sense.
Really, from an overarching perspective, it is ludicrous to think along the lines of: "What kind of god could allow such things happen?" The twin towers collapsing, online beheadings, Fukushima—they seem truly horrific, callous and evil to we spectators, and a thousand times more so for the people involved, but that’s only because of the quality of the special effects. For Dog it is only a show, a game to enjoy, or an experience to relish.
I didn’t used to, but now have a soft spot (spots?) for the like of T Lobang Rampa, Paramahansa Yogananda, Swami Prabhupada, Ramtha, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Madame Blavatsky, Don Juan and their ilk. It bothered me whenever so-called yogis, mystics and holy rollers would state, vacant grins painted across their faces, that everything in the world was is perfect the way it was.
What utter rubbish! Didn’t they watch the news and read the papers? By a very long chalk, everything obviously was not all right. How could they say so? Now, however, I’ve changed my mind. I see that they are right. You see, the universe is set up like a fair. It has rides, amusements, stalls and shows. Good or bad, they all feel incredibly real. They are designed to make us feel involved.
One approach to life is to give it the works. Inside whatever giant alien you discover yourself housed, you floor its pedal. ‘The devil take the hindmost’ is your motto. You give it heaps and go all-out. You barrel hell-for-leather down life’s highway. Finally, you burst across the finish line not necessarily with your vehicle in the best nick, or with the most possessions—he who dies with the most toys wins—but as if you'd tumbled down a roller-coaster of a mountain. You broadside to a stop in a cloud of dust, bruised, bleeding, exhausted and out of breath but with a smile on your face. "What a hell of a ride that was!" you grin.
And look at all the models and styles of vehicle that we get to enjoy! We have before us a fantastic and limitless variety of DVDs or computer game modules that we get to live through, not vicariously, but for real (as real as anything can be said to be).
We come in different sizes, shapes, ages, colours and sexes. There are different cultures, customs, languages, time periods and geographical locations. There are different states of health to experience, and different physical bags of attributes to master or waste at our pleasure. We live at both ends of the spectrum and every conceivable position in between. And that’s just as humans! Truly, the mind boggles.
All of us, every human, animal and plant, are God to the extent that Dog’s consciousness can shine, squeeze or express itself through our being. In most cases, that being's opening is very small. You don’t see much evidence of divine inspiration in most of us.
But it needs to be that way. Unless the openings are small, it would be impossible to maintain the necessary illusion of separateness. God wants to be having these relationships, you see. However, it’s only possible to have a relationship with someone other than yourself. If the two parties suspected that they were actually one, then that would take away some of the fun.
Generally speaking, of course.
Present company excepted.
The sense of self is relative. It relies on the fact that the external environment is not you. You can't be you unless there is something that you aren’t. There has to be that boundary.
The essence of the Rickmansworth meme is that there is only one being who experiences him-, her-, or itself (us-self) through every form of life. It’s all-inclusive. It includes all of those who are, as well as all of those who were or will be. If there are parallel universes then they are also in the mix.
And so, when the god boys say that it’s okay, it really is. Everything’s just fine and dandy with the universe. Whatever happens to you in life—whether you win the lottery, or whether you become confined to to a wheelchair, it doesn’t matter. Not ultimately.
Oh, it may hurt all right. The tooth may pain as it is pulled—I’m sure I’d fume and fuss along with the best of them. But that doesn’t change the fact that, although each of our stories seem so real, and our programming makes us cry, laugh or scream, it’s all but a technicolor dream.
The whole circus has been set up with just one purpose in mind: to provide everyone with entertainment. That’s why we’ve been compartmentalized. At heart we’re all essentially the same; we’re one. But that won’t do—you can’t put on a great performance with just a bunch of clones (witness synchronized swimming).
Some magic wand has conjured up the illusion that we’re all different and separate. We’re portals opening out into one another. We’re here for each other’s entertainment—hey, it's good to meet you! The circle game is how God passes away the time. That’s the grand conspiracy that we’re an unwitting part of. Think of it as a grand twiddling of thumbs.
