“Curious God, Infinite Poignancy, and the Nature of Divinity” Which is Chapters 35 thru 43…complete, illustrated, downloadable…of *Funny God* by Michael Adzema

 

“Curious God, Infinite Poignancy, and the Mind’s True Liberation” Which is Chapters 35 thru 43…complete, illustrated, downloadable…of Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation” by Michael Adzema

Click for a free downloadable copy of this excerpt from *Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation* (2015) by Michael Adzema, with my compliments.

 

 

Section Twelve

 

 

CURIOUS GOD, INFINITE POIGNANCY, AND THE NATURE OF DIVINITY

 

 

 

35

The Cloud of Boring Sameness and Why Don’t We Stop Crucifying Christ Already:  Love and Universal Consciousness

 

The Biggest Secret and Why the Bodhisattva Waits:  We Remove the Essence of Divinity from Our Ideas of the Divine

 

 

Why the Bodhisattva Waits

SillyMickel:  And the other word used to describe Ultimate Reality and God, outside of It being One, is Love.

This follows from what was said above about the experience of Unity. For in apprehending the Truth that others are simply ourselves in other “clothing,” so to speak, we move closer to them in feeling. We call that empathy, compassion, but ultimately we call it Love.

What Is Love?

Love is the feeling that another’s needs, wishes, wants, fears, pains, joys, and attainments are our own. That is, we “feel for” them; we feel also hurt when they are pained, happy when they are joyous. What they experience is additive to us, not subtractive. It is the reason the bodhisattva refuses to go into enlightenment until everyone can. For at this stage just short of enlightenment, there is the experience of Unity and Love: We go beyond estrangement from others, beyond the feeling that we “are our brother’s keeper,” beyond even the sense that we are all in this together….  We sense that we share in the experience of all others and our experience cannot be separated away from theirs … that we rise or fall together, not just in our fortunes but in how we feel about them.

Unity and Love

So the experience of Unity leads to the experience of empathy, then compassion …  leading to the experience of Love, taking us to the shores of enlightenment, the shores of the apprehension of Ultimate Reality. They are all experiences, leading to a sense of greater experience, leading to more and more encompassing experience of Reality, of the Whole.

So, Love is closer to the truth of Ultimate Reality, or God, than what is normally thought. It is closer, but not quite it.

It is Love…. It is also hate … in a strange way….

If God Is the Universe of Experience, She Is Also Hate

God is hate; but He is hate, as us, having allowed Himself to completely forget. So He is not hate really. God is not hate, not in essence. Hate is just an experience that a part of Him has wanted.

Hate and the evil that corresponds to it is God having a different experience than is Her nature. So to have it She needs to forget who She is.

I’m starting to spill the beans here, aren’t I? Oh, I hope…. Well, if that slipped out … and you get it … that’s fine.

Why God would want to have such experiences that are not part of His or Her nature is the question. And it is what we take a look at shortly.

Universal Consciousness and The Cloud of Sameness

We also use the words universal consciousness to describe Divinity. Universal Consciousness … we have One Consciousness. But does anyone stop to think what that might mean? One Consciousness! Can anyone even imagine or picture it?

We don’t think of it as conscience, right? Of course, some people do. They mistake the two for each other and they just can’t get that out of their mind. So that’s a problem there.

The Cloud of Unknowing

But for consciousness, when we understand what it means, chances are we think of something big and amorphous — something that could be both nothing and everything, like a Universal Cloud. Indeed, at least one mystic described it as the Cloud of Unknowing. And we would not attribute anything colorful to it, for how would we know which colors? So it might be a big grey cloud or a white light.

But, Consciousness? What do we think of it, how do we picture consciousness? Can you see consciousness? So how do you picture it? Like some gigantic cloud, right?

Mary Lynn:  We don’t picture it.

SillyMickel:  But, if we try, it’s like some gigantic empty thing. Right?

Mary Lynn:  No.

SillyMickel:  Well, you just said you don’t picture it.

Mary Lynn:  You don’t picture it. It’s just Total Awareness, it doesn’t have a form.

SillyMickel:  It’s Total Awareness, yes. It doesn’t have a form.

Mary Lynn:  As you say, it’s no-thing.

SillyMickel:  That’s true. But so you’re picturing it aaaaas? Light? Or something? Total Awareness?

Mary Lynn:  I can’t really picture it. I can’t….

SillyMickel:  I know. I know, but I can. And you could, so simply.

Because it is the biggest … secret … of all. But it is one that is so obvious that you wanta die when you fucking understand it.

Does God Bore You? Okay, How About Truth?

Mary Lynn: It’s Experience … that’s what God is.

SillyMickel:  Well, what would Experience be? Don’t you see you hit it, but you didn’t understand what you hit?

Well one of the biggest secrets of all is that it is nothing like that, nothing like boringness, sameness, emptiness, nothingness. In fact it is quite the opposite. How would I know? Well, we are One with It and, like I said, we are immersed in it. It is closer to us than our breath, for it is the Experience of breathing, in that case. It is Experience, as I’ve been pointing out. And Experience is hardly dull and grey!

I said I like being an iconoclast. Why? I just gave you an indication that this idea of Consciousness … which we all see as being somehow vague … is seen that way because of the words that are blocking our view, the “icons” that are in the way. It is no thing, so we think it is nothing.

Well, you can’t see it, right? Like you just said. It’s all some kind of amorphous, like a gigantic mind that’s invisible, you know, and creates colorful things. But it’s really just basically like a big, big grey sameness, maybe.

The problem with that is that it makes God, Reality, the Ultimate, and Universal Consciousness all sound pretty goddamn boring! And thinking of it that way has really hurt a lot of people when they want to become more of this Consciousness. I know I had a problem with that part. For how can you desire very very hard and strive for something that at base seems boring, unwantable, undesirable …  that’s nothing?

Is God Nothing or No Thing?

I’ll tell you.… You compare that One Consciousness, okay? With….

Put it this way: How many people have you seen — meditators and such — sitting for hours and hours and hours trying to have like nothing in their brain!?

Nothing in their brain!? That’s what they’re thinking is GOD!

Mary Lynn [chuckling]:  Yeah.

Why Don’t We Stop Crucifying Christ Already …

SillyMickel:  Or do they think God’s going to show up in a nice pixie or elf uniform or something? No, so whatever they are picturing is boring.

Look at how we have changed Christ to conform to that. He was a funny guy! I know! I met him up there! He’s still hanging out there. He likes to shoot pool and stuff. I mean, I dunno. Ah, He’s older than me, what can I say?

Anyway, do you ever see Christ pictured as smiling? As being anything but solemn and severe? How about playful or teasing?

He’s Actually a Nice Guy!

How could He possibly have been a person and not laughed, kidded, played, and so on. Yet, all of that is removed from our depictions of Him, leaving a dour lifeless shell of a person, who is then said to represent Life itself. Do you see how confused … and therefore confusing … that is?

Yet even if we take a look at Christ’s life as we know it, was He passionless? Imagine how anyone could get into it with moneychangers in a temple and actually toss them out and not get a little roused up. Yet, being emotionless is even how He is depicted doing that!

We Remove the Essence of Divinity from Our Ideas of the Divine

The point is that we keep removing the essence of Divinity — Experience — from all our depictions of Divinity, guaranteeing we will be wrong. Wrong, and even end up getting the opposite idea. We turn living Spirit into emotionless icon and end up worshiping, even emulating, the very things that our holy people exhort us to look away from.

Why We Think Less Is More

There are reasons for everything, of course. There is a good reason why we make the mistake of confusing unfeelingness and a vapid personality and life experience with a greater and more Divine one. We are so traumatized by things that have been done to us in early life … maybe we had an angry daddy, a cruel mommy … that we get comfort only in imagining a Divine with no emotional qualities. We would rather cuddle with a statue, cozy up to a piece of granite, or be enamored of an empty concept or an ambiguous image or symbol than expose ourselves to what we feel to be the only alternative. That is, that Divinity might come crashing down on us like a thunderbolt … something perhaps our parents did. Because life was threatening to us, once, we seek to create a Divinity, thus, a Reality, that will not be, cannot be.

Emotions having become soured in us, in our religious and spiritual pursuits we strive to empty ourselves of them. Our cultures, similarly, glorify the unaffected personality; and we wish to put ourselves above our feelings and to train our children out of their emotions.

 

 

We call it “growing up” to be more insensitive, less spontaneous … to be impassionate, and morosely and meekly obedient. Our educators exhort us to deny emotions; our doctors provide pills to suppress them; and our therapists counsel their clients, helping them to be less alive. Like suburbanites paving over everything with asphalt and with manicured lawns in which any weed has been assassinated out of existence, we are terrified of anything unpredictable in the Divine, anything emotional. We want to control Divinity.

Yet, this kind of going to the opposite extreme of emotion … worshiping nothingness, emotionlessness … does not give us a picture of Reality. It only gives us a picture of a defense against what happened to us. The problem is that God is more, not less of what is Real. Divinity is not Reality devoid of the Real, of real experience. But that is what, out of fear, we have come to wish for.

How many stories have you heard, how many movies have you seen, where some old curmudgeon of a man or woman … some really mean S.O.B. is depicted at the end to have a heart of gold? True Grit and Secondhand Lions come to mind immediately, but it is one of the most common plot ideas. What we are telling ourselves over and over is that the meanness we experienced didn’t really happen. We are engaging in denial. Daddy and Mommy really did love us, though they never showed it. Like the incomprehensible goodness our religions tell us to worship, it was hidden … that is the murky message these stories console us with.

We do something similar with the Divine. We’ve experienced meanness and cruelty in our early lives, so we imagine a Divine with no qualities at all. We say It is loving, but in an incomprehensible way and “from a distance.” So how loving … really … is someone who is distant? We don’t see ourselves as free and loved and forgiven … let alone, sinless and unjudged. We are terrified of  an emotionlessness monster, which we call God, which we say is loving, but who we depict as emotionless so as to be better able to apprehend than if we depicted Him as we felt Him to be … cruel. We’d rather think of God as being nothing … or devitalized … rather than heartless; like we feel Him to be, because of our experiences with authorities in childhood.

The point is that we’ve built theologies out of our fears. We’ve created religions to soothe and deny our experiences … our Experience. Well, this has nothing to do with Reality. Indeed, in denial of our experience … and Experience … it is the opposite of it.

The theologies and religions … and many spiritualities … have nothing to do with God, either. They take the most alive, profound, glorious, and exciting things imaginable (and unimaginable) and reduce them to nothing … and thus to something that is safe: A statue Jesus. A distant and unknowable God. An amorphous, boring, and bland Universal Consciousness. An impersonal detail of the physical world like light, vibration, or energy. All of which — in denial of what we truly feel about them and their coldness, abstractness, or emptiness — we call glorious, ultimate, grand … and loving. Like those heartless parental figures we wished had been there for us … but weren’t.

What God Really Is

Going outside of our pain, outside of the confines of thought created by our fears, we see that God, Life, Reality truly is glorious. And that includes being interesting. Divinity is not sensual because it is lacking in sensuality but because it is beyond sensuality, something greater than the experience of mere perception of things, which we call sensing things. Yet we try to approach It by denying our senses, not expanding them. Thus we kill the God in us, thinking we are becoming more God-full that way.

God is not angry, vengeful, or any negative emotions, but since, having experienced mostly that and not being able to imagine truly wonderful positive emotions, we think we can approach the Divine by denying emotions as well. We wish to repress passion, anger, and tears out of existence. Churches call them “sinful”; we deem them “inappropriate” in middle class homes. We create stories where Spock-like figures are said to be mystical, religious, holy, when actually it is Frodo who is. Abbie Hoffman was more mystical, in this sense, than any Pat Robertson or Billy Graham.

The actual fact is that God is approached by more experience of Reality, not less of it. Divinity is not approached by emotionless concept or cold and unmoving icon but by participation in Reality. It is approached by embracing experience of Reality, not by retreating from it. Jesus did not retreat to a cave. We find the Divine through greater participation in life, through inclusion of more of the experience of life.

Greater participation does not mean more “knowledge” about Reality, but more experience of it … in all of its qualities — sensory, thoughtful, imaginative, emotional … existential.

Greater Divinity does not mean eliminating the negative experiences of life; it means going beyond the cruder, crueler, meaner, more ghastly negatives to experiences and understandings that include, embrace, and overstand them. We grow in Divinity by going beyond the lesser and meaner modes of understanding Reality, of being pricked and prodded into greater understanding and wisdom by pain. Certainly, at every level there is a darkness, corresponding to the Reality we do not include and embrace. And it is in interaction with that, with that darkness, that “negative,” that we are spurred ever onwards to greater participation, greater Experience, greater and more encompassing joys, beingness, and inclusion/awareness of the Divinity in which we always exist.

 

 

An Existential Metaphysical

Indeed, we get closer to the Divine to the extent that we have greater participation in Reality … in this human life as well as outside of it, in any of our states of being. God is Experience. Being closer to God is having more participation in, more inclusion of the Experience of Reality.

This does not mean that God is not of the mind at all, is not “mental.” Feelings and experiences include the mental. For deep and profound understandings and overstandings of Reality are experiences also.

There is the focusing on the map of Reality that distracts one from actual experience of Reality, true. There is also the retreat into abstraction in avoidance of and in fear of feelings and emotions, with their peripheries of darkness and pain … also true. Experience that is divided and categorized this way, and with one category elevated, others repressed, is unreal, is schizoid.

 

 

However, there is thought and mental life that is part of the journey and the experience that is greater participation in Divinity. Undivided experience — in which one cannot and does not distinguish between thought, feeling, perception, and emotion, and all are embraced unthinkingly — is holy … is wholy.

Infused with the Divine we do not “transcend” Existence, we do not split off from it into something separate which we call spirit … empty and cool … associated with mentality, with abstraction. No, we are already Spirit, we become more of it, embrace more of it … expand outward from it … an expanding circle of awareness and inclusion as opposed to a ladder seeking to put oneself above and separate from what is “below.” And Spirit is what, in this existence, we call life. Or what I call Experience.

 

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36

How to Turn Being Into Becoming and Good Into Wonderful:  Forgetting Brings Delight to Getting and Becoming Human Is God’s Play

 

When Life is Ever New, a Revelation, One Has Turned the Good into the Wonderful:  God Invents Joy by Forgetting

 

 

 

SillyMickel:  Christ showed us this. He did not retreat to a cave. He engaged in life and experienced it. Was he emotionless? Impassionate?

Even the thing we know most about Christ’s life is His suffering, yet is that nothing? In meditation folks try to empty their minds and become blank and emotionless. Yet Christ suffered, and that is hardly nothing … let alone emotionless. We sure don’t like suffering, but it is hardly boring. This man suffered, healed, taught, hung out with folks, threw money-changers out of a temple. He may not have been “political” or activist but He was hardly passive. He didn’t sit at home, trying to “empty his mind,” did He?

What a Rip-Off!

And then we say He suffered for us … so that we don’t have to.

Well, what a bunch of hooey, because, that would be like saying God became God so that He could prevent us from becoming God. It’s like saying we get to have a boring life and can be dumb and unenlightened and not learn from our experiences or grow, because, well, Jesus did all that for us!

Mary Lynn:  What a rip-off! Haha.

SillyMickel:  It’s such a rip off. It’s like he gets to feel, Jesus gets to really live life, but we don’t….

How to Turn Good Into Wonderful

The point is … when you are God … and you’ve had so many lifetimes … tripping out as an animal and such and knowing your sense of Reality and all else … and knowing that it is like a movie…. Don’t you think … at some point….

I mean, after all you’re God, and you know there’s nothing, nothing, nothing that could ever harm you … or harm anyone. Nothing … nobody ever gets harmed. And everybody always gets loved, and it can’t help but happen always that way. It can’t help but happen always that way because there’s nothing outside of that Truth-Awareness-Bliss-Love.

So, don’t you think that God might….

I’m going to have to edge my way into this….

What Is More Alive for Someone Who’s Nothing But Good?

Alright first of all, when I went up there, One Consciousness was hardly just The Big Grey Cloud … or something. Nooo. It was very real! I’m talkin’ about a guy singin’ Joan Osborne, y’know? Dancin’ and laughin’ and giving hash! I mean could it be more, well not physical, ‘cause it wasn’t physical. But, man, did we…. We didn’t sit there on our thumbs and be shy!

Mary Lynn:  It was quite an experience.

SillyMickel:  It was quite an experience! And that’s the whole friggin’ point. Which is, that … well, what would anybody crave? And you don’t have to say, oh, a lonely person, sitting in his room, would be praying … for love … or whatever. No! Deeper than that … the essence of love and everything else!

Would anybody crave sameness? Why would anybody crave a death-like pall of an existence? No!

We all crave what? TO BE ALIVE! MORE ALIVE!! There is a reason that the worst thing that we imagine in life, death, is depicted as something rotting, boring, uneventful…. Is it not possible that in abhorring what we think is non-existence we are sensing the real and true values of Divinity? Life, aliveness, vitality, change, exuberance, freedom, magnificence, euphoria, expansiveness …  are these not values that would have to be associated with Divinity?

And what is more alive for someone who’s nothing but good?

Hopeful Sadness? Seriously?

Wouldn’t Divinity be more alive by putting a “frame” around that goodness to give it a kind of a contrast so it can be more beautiful? Think of all of the things that happen in life out of pain, and the things that we all pull ourselves to, consciously or not.

Remember the poignancy I spoke of. Would there be such a feeling, would there ever be poignancy if there wasn’t like hopeless sadness? If we had hopeful sadness, we’d never even have the experience of poignancy.

Do you see that only by forgetting who we are … forgetting we are Divinity … can we really live life, be really in it, grow in it, change in it. True, it is scary as hell. But the thing is, we all … live through it!

 

 

What Do You Call God When He’s Bungee Jumping? Answer: Human

It’s kind of like when you’re bungee jumping. Say, you’re bungee jumping off a bridge. You’re sure you’re gonna die. But you’ve been convinced that all the materials, all the equipment, are safe and sound … that you’ll be secure, that nothing bad whatsoever will happen to you.

So what do you do? Having complete faith in the people doing it and the materials and the strength of them, you do it even though you’re thinking it’s certain you’re gonna die! You have all the fears in the world. It’s you doing peek-a-boo again, only this time with yourself. You’re trying to prove to yourself that God will be always there to catch you.

And you do prove it to yourself.

But the only thing is, we as God do it one better when we come into this world as a human….

We forget … that the “rope” is good.

Forgetting Brings Delight to Getting

We just throw ourselves off and let ourselves forget that it is certain we will be just fine and that instead of dying it will be fun, that it will in fact be a blast …  even if only in retrospect. Or, more accurately, in overspect.

We throw ourselves off, we come into this world, hoping … knowing!… Knowing that at some point we will remember, before we die, that there is never anything to fear and who we really are. We know we will remember because we know we’re never really gonna die … you’re never gonna die…. You will go from one lifetime to another and will think you die, but it is impossible to end consciousness.

So we know we’re going to succeed, at some point or other. We know we’re going to remember who we are as Divinity and the incredible magnificence of this game that we have chosen to do for an adventure and as an experiment in consciousness.

And we also know, when we throw ourselves into diminished consciousness, that is, into physical form, that we are going to experience things that we have never, ever experienced before … and that we may never want to experience again.

How to Turn Being Into Becoming

You might say that if God is eternal and unchanging and Real that there are no experiences that are not already. You might say that beingness is not becomingness. Yes, we can look at it that way. Then we can understand it better by thinking of it this way: Have you ever seen a movie or a TV show or play a second time, after a very long time, and have forgotten so much of it that in experiencing it is as much fun and as en-joy-able as the first time? The joy of experience is amplified by forgetting. That is, when life is approached as a revelation, from the stance that it is ever new, it is more delightful. That is how one makes the good into the wonderful.

 

 

That is how being and becoming are transcended. Reality is both … and neither by itself.

God Invents Joy by Forgetting

So, you see that forgetting has its uses in terms of magnifying enjoyment, pleasure, fun. Again, it is a form of peek-a-boo. By keeping something hidden from view, forgotten, it is more pleasurable, even joyous, when once again it is seen to exist!

So, you might say that becoming human is the way we, as God, play. It is the way we magnify delight and bring joy into existence. And to do that God needs to forget, to forget who She is.

God needs to create darkness to glorify the light. She needs to invent pain to put the edge of delight in pleasure. She has to create separation and division … she has to become multiple … to bring out the beauty of Love and Unity and to create the drama of re-union.

God makes Love brighter and more exquisite by making it poignant … by mixing it with loss. She makes having so much better by losing and so setting up the magnificent experience of getting … all over again.

 

 

 

37

The Truth One Dare Not Speak:  How Evil Is Reality? How Much Fear Is Real? …  Even in the Seemingly “Darkest” of Places, There Is Light

 

What I Can Tell You About the Seed of Light in the Deepest Darkness:  The Witness Self, The Beneficence of Experience, and the Secret About Oneself One Dares Never Reveal

 

 

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Divinity Not “Creepy”

SillyMickel:  And again, what many of you are thinking is, what about the horror? About that part — where we as Divinity experiment with things that are very painful or horrid, which we would never want to do again…. I don’t know enough about this to know if it becomes an acquired taste for Divinity. I don’t even think that would be very “healthy,” if you know what I mean … in a Universal sense. This is where being human and less than Divinely aware, I have to stop. I cannot cross this line.

So, no, I do not believe the Divine desires horror. An enjoyment of extreme experience, perhaps. But an acquired taste for like evil or for darkness? No, I do not see how the “friendliness” and compassion that characterizes existence coincides with a “creepy” Divinity. But, I don’t know, I really don’t. Here I have to go with a more traditional explanation that horror is allowed, not sought for. And that since it is ephemeral and passing and ultimately insubstantial it qualifies as more “spice” of existence and for Divine inconsequential status.

The Truth One Dares Not Speak

The other part of this, though, the part of it that I am reluctant to speak, is that we do not know how much horror really exists, for we magnify the darkness of existence in our imagination. As I said earlier, that is how we create the ideas of hell and Satan. It is part of the game we play.

I do not want to say this part “out loud” because it goes up against one of the most enforced of social sanctions. We have people who cause suffering and are insensitive, and we have those who wish to relieve the suffering of others. Of course, every one of us thinks we are the second type. Even the most horrible acts are rationalized by their perpetrators as somehow being good … and helpful to others. I’ll save getting into that for another time, though.

But we also have those in the second camp — the “caring” and “sensitive “ —  secretly aware that they have some of themselves that is like the other and so are ever vigilant to scan for and “rouse the masses” upon any sign of the first type. That is how they are able to deflect attention away from themselves as possible perpetrators. It is why we have had stonings, lynchings, and witch burnings. It is the way those with insufficient self-knowledge defend against the darkness they have inside themselves — that is, by raising a ruckus around any perceived darkness around them. Hence what I am going to say will by those fearful people put me in the first group, the insensitive, and anything I say afterward will not be read or heard. But I persevere.

To start, I wish to say that we exaggerate the pain of ourselves and others for many good reasons that have to do with trying to sway the actions of others and thus future events; exaggeration is one of the defenses we use against possible pain. If we tell others our pain is unbearable, we know it is less likely it will actually become unbearable. We know there is a lag time between when we express something and the social environment around us responds. Exaggeration is one of the defenses we use against the horror we imagine actually happening. And if you take note of the amount of words of complaint that are expressed — complaint being one of the forms of this exaggeration defense — you will see how often we do that…. And how much fear is in us….

It is similar with the pain of others. We know there is plenty of insensitivity in humans, so we overcompensate by dramatizing the suffering of others. It is a way of fighting back at that insensitivity: Hopefully the world will be swayed, and the suffering we imagine in others will be lessened or not occur.

And at this point is where most people, and most of my readers, are found shouting out, “No! My pain is horrible! You have no idea.” Or, “You have no idea how much these people suffer,” etc., etc., etc. And from the first group, the insensitive ones, we have cries of, “Yes! They are all just cry-babies!” … “sitting on the pity pot” …  and so on…. Both of these are ways of not understanding what I am saying.

Let me tell you how I know that the exaggerated pronouncements are not exact statements of reality — something that I am taking the risk to attempt here — but are intended to have an effect and to influence the quality and nature of the upcoming course of events whenever they are asserted. I can tell you that 1) I have gone through the most intense psychotherapy involving feeling the deepest and most traumatic pains that we experience in life  … especially that coming into the world. 2) I have lived through the most horrible events, including almost dying several times. And 3) I have lived in the most squalid of conditions, including years of homelessness, and endured extreme deprivation of many kinds. Indeed, in trying to make a life based on Truth work, I have been able to manage to be in poverty in almost the entire of my sixty-four years. You have to really despise money — or actually what you have to become in order to get it — to be able, with the intelligence and skills I have been blessed with, to succeed in pulling that off.

At any rate, I can tell you that the most amazing thing of all of these is they were never as bad as I imagined. Indeed, the fact that they were not was a cause of a little joy of its own.

1) I found that in my deepest re-livings of primal pain, there was an undisturbed self, an observing self, which was completely untouched by it all.

Some people call this the Witness Self. And, indeed, its serenity, calm, and quiet joy were made the most evident in contrast to the turmoil and agony I was experiencing for the most part. This is the seed of light in the deepest darkness: There is a drop of joy even in agony, even if it is only that in feeling agony one feels at least alive!

And this is without even touching on the delight that comes with learning the real truth of one’s existence or the pleasure one feels in throwing off one’s chains.

2) In coming close to death — for example, being in a car accident where the car rolled three times and I found myself face down on the road, banged up and with some stripped skin — I never felt any pain!! There was discomfort afterwards, certainly, but ever since then I have not feared death, for I feel that death is not the painful thing I, and I think most of us, think it is! I have come to believe that the body only registers pain within the acceptable or manageable spectrum and beyond that it shuts down or fails to relay it to consciousness.

I was napping in the car before the accident, while my wife drove. I woke up feeling my face against the asphalt and not having a clue who I was, where I was, or what this reality was. I had slept through the entire horrible event! And to this day, I cannot tell you what my body went through. It was as if my consciousness was transported from a time before the accident to a time right afterwards and was not there during the event. Both then and now, considering what my body must have gone through, I consider that an incredible blessing.

I can make a similar case for the beneficence of Experience using examples of the pain and suffering I went through, and the near-death, in my experiences of and with alcohol/drug addiction. That is an even longer story that will have to wait for another time.

About that, I can tell you about one time, though, which is illustrative for the exposition here. Once in particular, for an entire day, I experienced such pain that I had all I could do to keep from jumping in front of a car or in some way ending it immediately, for good. I remember the minutes ticking by so excruciatingly slow. I would look up, thinking and hoping that fifteen minutes had gone by, only to find that it had not even been two. This made the pain seem interminable, so that I thought I would lose my mind.

In fact, I felt then and afterwards and to this day, that the pain was so severe that if I could know ahead of time that I would ever again in my life have to go through that again … even just once again … life, no matter its joys or the amount of time I would have in it, would not be worth living, weighed against the suffering of such a day again. And though I still feel that way, still I have come to the conclusions and hold the beliefs about pain and suffering and the Divine that I am here expressing. And that was hardly my one experience with overwhelming pain and agony, but enough said for now.

3) I have lived on the streets, been poor, had my house burn down, been abused, been taken advantage of, lost everything financially and been foreclosed on, been robbed … you name it. I can tell you that the most amazing thing of all that, too, was that there was a part of me that I was aware of that I can honestly say appreciated at least the novelty of the experiences I went through. A big part of that was realizing that life, even in its seemingly “shadier” of places, still contained the light, that is, love, compassion, wisdom, and all the rest was found there, too … indeed was almost more evident there, and beautifully poignant, than in the more “defended” and sanctioned of society’s places. That is to say, for example, that I often found more love, compassion, and tolerance among the “least” of us than was to be found among the “churchly.” Jesus well understood this in his day.

So, part of my quest to understand pain and fear has been to go into darkness and to see how much fear and pain there really is in existence …  to see just how “bad”  … or “good” … Existence, God, or Reality is, to see how much fear is warranted. It has been an ongoing and increasing joy to find that, while darkness, pain, and fear exist, there is less than what one imagines and that even in the seemingly “darkest” of places, there is light. Or, what one might say is I went to find out if really God was everywhere and found out that, indeed, She was!!

And there is also a certain pride in succeeding at being happy in circumstances that one knows that others would be terrified to be in. And sometimes what was enjoyable was unveiling the novelty of experience that a life lived as mosaic revealed.

I will have lots more to say about this at a later time when I can think of a way to express it that will get past the “guards” of moral outrage that virtually all people have erected against this notion that pain and suffering are not as bad as we say they are.

I’m only bringing it up now because we are looking at this idea of the horror of existence, and I have to put out, for those with ears to hear, a reminder that it is our “human nature” to magnify and exaggerate all our experiences when we are expressing them to others, for many reasons. But that in order to look at the ideas of suffering and pain vis-à-vis God and a compassionate universe, the truly enlightening revelations come when one is the absolutely most honest about one’s experience and with absolutely no ulterior motive to defend against or sway the effects of one’s expression or future events from it. So the upshot of my saying the above is to raise the point that in talking about the suffering and horror that God allows (or causes) in life, virtually no one, not even philosophers, evaluates it free from the constraints of bowing to social appropriateness in magnifying the pain and horror that God supposedly is causing or allowing.

There is a societal taboo, coupled with strong individual disinclination along the lines that one dare not “tempt fate.” I don’t know anyone who does not feel that if one were say “out loud” that one’s fate is easy (or enjoyable), that one’s pain is manageable (let alone secretly pleasurable at times), or that one is really happy and has it good in life, that one would like a wack-a-mole be slapped down by the Universe or the people around into the common required understanding that life is overall a struggle, painful, and miserable … and often overwhelming and unbearable at times … except for the occasional “vacations” we can win by complaining how bad it is for us. By “praying” and complaining to the Universe and others around us, we seek to better our lots in life; and we invariably pick out the worst parts to better make our case.

On the other hand, we cannot help but feel that if we actually acknowledge the goodness of life, we will be setting in motion the forces to bring about the opposite of that. No doubt this is why the purna avatar, Sathya Sai Baba, would say that gratitude is the highest prayer, actually, the only worthwhile (honest?) one.

 

 

There are reasons, rooted in our experience of coming into the world, that have us thinking that we tempt fate by acknowledging goodness, which I deal with elsewhere.

But you don’t have to go quite this far to get my main point.

The Darkness Getting Blacker Means the Lightness Becoming Brighter

Backing up, it follows that by experiencing in life even the “horrible” things, so to speak … and really being rooted in them and experiencing them, kind of knowing them … that then one would experience the opposite of it, the love and bliss, as being all the more wonderful … beautiful … exquisite. It is all the more of a deep experience of beauty because you have the deep experience of the other which contrasts.

That is the meaning of the metaphor of having a darkness or blackness which the light is made brighter by.

 

 

 

38

Heaven Slickers:  How Forgetting Our Divine Nature Makes Us Feel More Alive, The Turbulence of Life Keeps the Life Force Moving

 

Every Path Is Magnificent and Maximizing Your Poignancy:  Time and Uncertainty Are the Screens We Erect to Block Out Knowing Everything

 

 

 

 

Experience Is God, God Is Experience

More Icon Clasting

SillyMickel:  A “blackness” which the light is made brighter by? No. I have to stop trying to fit words on it for the word is an icon.

… because after all, it’s not light and darkness that we’re wanting to contrast….

It is experiences, feelings that we want to contrast to reveal the magnificence of it all. And they are harder to fit words on or to picture. So we use analogies like light, dark. But they are icons and therefore obscure the truth, not reveal it. They need to be removed for us to think clearly again.

So, yes, it is experience, individual experience, that we as God want to contrast so as to manifest it all more wonderfully, more poignantly, in its happy and sad “flavors,” its good and bad experiences of existence.

We Don’t Know Good Till We Know Bad

For we don’t know how good we are as God! …  Until we know how bad we are as God, but not knowing it.

All in all, it makes for the most PERFECT, PEEK-A-BOO, EXPERIENCE … OF ALL!

Life – Like One Long Peek (a-Boo)

And that’s what I’m getting at: That it is all about peek-a-boo. It’s like, life is like one long peek….

And God teaches the peek-a-boo game to everyone. Why? Because no matter how many lifetimes it takes, no matter how much time passes in which that shield is up, blocking out true reality, and we do not see Momma, or God’s face, so to speak, it doesn’t make any difference. It simply does not matter.

The point is, is there such a thing as a short or a long time for returning to God, for remembering our true nature as God? No! If it is longer we are able to magnify the magnificence of the drama, expanding its flavors of experience and poignancy. If it is shorter, we’ll have happiness and bliss; and we’ll have the experience: “Wow, okay …  Now I remember! Wow! That was incredible! I would not have believed it!” We’ll have that sooner, but either way is magnificent.

That Was a Trip!

And when we remember…. Well, put it this way, how many people come back from harrowing experiences and say, “Wow, that was a trip … I’m just glad I survived it!” But they’re glad they went through it! They’re glad to have had the experience of it. They say it was like, “Wow! I really woke up to life, during that!” You know? It’s like, “I may have almost died, but I never felt so much alive!”

Heaven Slickers

In fact, some people pick up on this. There was a movie. It was called, of all things, City Slickers! And it was pointing out the dead lives that people live in the city. These friends decided to have an experience away from their wives where they would experience living on a dude ranch and being real cowboys for a spell. They expected some physical manly work out in the fresh air and some hearty cowboy chow.

In Spite of Ourselves

What they got, though, was all kinds of complications and troubles where they ended up being left totally on their own to bring the cattle to market. This was supposed to have been taken care of, and they were supposed to have been just along for the ride, just for the experience. But people died, bad folks were run into, there were complications and they ended up being responsible and having to face the dangers and challenges head on.

And guess what? Against all odds, to their utter surprise, and in spite of themselves, they did it.

Life Is a Board Game of Time and Uncertainty

Keep in mind that, when they started out, they did not know they were in for such an adventure. They were under the illusion they were going to be taken care of on the whole trip. They did not know that they were going to experience pain and all that. So when it happened, all those harrowing developments were a big and terrifying surprise.

So, you see, for the sake of having the experience fully — if they had been all-knowing as God is, or even if a part of them knew — they couldn’t allow themselves to know.

So, as Divinity, we create time and uncertainty as part of the game, as parameters in the game. These are the screens we put up to block out knowing everything — time and uncertainty. They are also the covers beneath which we hide and the foils to heighten the drama.

Maximizing Your Poignancy

These city slickers were speculating at the end … “Hey! We almost got killed, we almost got shot, we got robbed, we almost got left in the desert, and then there was a storm, and then this, then that, and oh, how horrible!”

They say it was horrible and awful, but they’re actually so much happier about the whole thing than if it had gone as planned. For they left the city and went out into greater feelingness, and they felt more alive than they ever felt in their life because they had finally experienced something that scared the pants off of them. In truth, it is the turbulence of life that moves out of us the otherwise stagnation and boringness of existence.

A Very Long Peek-a-Boo

But they also, you see, didn’t know it was going to turn out okay when they were going through all that bad stuff they didn’t expect. They believed it all. They believed they were in real danger and would not survive. They never expected to come out alive, let alone successful.

The wonderfulness of it would not have been so great, and it would not have worked if it had not been that they did not know how it would end. If they had known, they would not have been so scared or so absorbed in the experience.

The fact that in the end it was going to be seen as being great, wonderful, and worth it had to be hidden from them the whole time or it wouldn’t have had such an incredible ending. It wouldn’t have been, ultimately, so wonderful, so beautifully poignant with pleasure.

But it did end, and wonderfully at that. So when it did there was huge relief and glee. It had ended up being one very long peek-a-boo.

 

 

Gods … Just Want to Have Fun

Well, City Slickers brings us forgetful divinities a metaphor for our lives as humans. And in the same way as those city slickers, we as “heaven slickers,” when we take this adventure of human existence, we have to do it honestly. We have to forget that we are all knowing. We have to come down from being God and allow ourselves to be a limited self in order to have all the experiences fully, which in the end are known to be fun.

 

 

Had to Have Faith

But what the city slickers did need was faith. They just had to have faith and persevere. And so, therefore, they won, at the end. So, also, we as forgetful divinities simply have to have faith and to persevere.

 

 

 

39

Only in the Human Form of Total Forgetfulness Can God, in Waking Up, Have Fun:  What Knowledge Needs

 

Mind and Motion ~ Being and Forgetting; We Are Stardust … Sorta; and Where the Poignancy Comes In:  Reality Is a Funny God

 

 

What Knowledge Needs

Now, if we are somehow the thing that we create as an experiment in truth, or, as an experiment, in returning to truth … there’s no, like, good or bad; there’s no A’s, B’s, C’s for doing it….

It’s like …  we’re all God, and all experiences are all … well that’s all there is, is the accumulation of experience. That’s all there is, is experience, because knowledge is already knowledge. The only thing that knowledge needs, that could ever be better, is the addition of experience.

One might think that we have experience in order to share and to experience Love. But that is starting from the premise that we are trying to get to Love from a starting place of, essentially then, non-Love. And that is a human perspective.

But we are Love in essence. We are already the experience of Love … and Truth, and Awareness, and Bliss. So what we need to add to that is the experience of non-Love … that is, separation, then duality … both of them brought about by forgetting our Divine nature again.

We also have to add untruth, dimness of consciousness, and suffering to better appreciate our basic nature as Truth-Awareness-Bliss.

Where the Poignancy Comes In

So experience of human life is not where the love comes in, it is where the poignancy comes in, by which the love is made more magnificent, by which the love is glorified. So human experience (becomingness), added to Divine “knowledge” (beingness) is where the poignancy comes in, is where the drama comes in, is where the fun of the game comes in.

It is the same for Truth. Truth is God (not God is Truth). Hence to forget our Divinity we need to immerse ourselves in untruth, which is what the physical world is. Same for Awareness. For Bliss, we need to descend into suffering. It is not just Jesus who comes into the world in order to suffer. We all do.

Jesus is the Son of God, but he is also each of us. He died for our sins means that we all are crucified on Earth because of our falls from Grace in coming into this world

The cross we suffer on is the cross of Ego, with its dualities of left and right, up and down … or in the case of experience … of truth and untruth, awareness and dullness, bliss and suffering.

The fact that even our suffering, dullness, and untruth — that is to say, our “sins” — are also part of the Divine plan is brought forth at the end. When Jesus finally realizes, “I and the Father are One.” He is realizing that it is the “Father” (the “Mother”) who has come to Earth, who has decided it. It was His will — the will of the Father — to do the “sinning.” It was all part of the grand play of Divine Existence.

So Christ is so admired, identified with, focused on, and worshiped because Jesus represents us all in our Earthly existence. We are all “sons” of God (identical with the Father, see what I mean? Identical but pretending to be separate and then forgetting that. It is a paradox). We are all “sons” of God coming to Earth and becoming less in order to have the experience of realization again. We all learn, are misunderstood, are treated unjustly, are tortured unfairly … the crown of thorns represents the tortured thoughts that come with our Earthly existence as a result of our unusual and painful births (the baby is “crowned” in coming out of the womb). And we all “carry our own cross” throughout life and through all this and our struggle between the opposites of good and evil, pleasure and pain, truth and falsity, and awareness and forgetting have our Ego crucified again, at the end, after building it all up during life.

But like Christ we must accept our task and our fate if we are to go beyond it in this life. We must allow ourselves to be crucified … meaning we must accept that this discomfort involved in doing our dharma in life is part of it; it is not a sign that one is doing it wrong any more than Christ’s crucifixion was a pronouncement of failure upon His mission.

So it’s more than that … more than just that we come to Earth to learn Love again. Human life is where we learn and realize all the attributes of the Divine, but … importantly … in multiple ways which enhance the magnificence of our true nature.

Because, in an infinite Universe, with an Infinite God, can you not imagine that there would be an infinite number of experiences, too? And so that there would always be something that hadn’t been tried?

 

 

What I’m saying is that … I don’t like to say God is still learning … it’s not like God is still learning. It’s … God is all-knowing … God is all creation. God knows everything, God Is Isness Itself, Beingness — total and aware of itself … as I was saying above — Knowledge. But what kind of life would it be, what kind of beingness would it be, where there wasn’t some kind of newness or growth? If there wasn’t some kind of becomingness?

We Are Stardust … Sorta

What kind of Reality would that be? Sure there could be a Universe that was just knowledge existing, but would that be Ultimate or Infinite? Would that not be less than something that included change and magnificence? One that added adventure, surprise, and fun?

One that added participation?

And you say, well how would we know what is a better Ultimate Reality than not? But you see your question implies we would be so separate from Ultimate Reality that we would not have an inkling. And do you not see that is a delusion? How can you be Real and not be part of Reality? So don’t you think the Nature of the Universe might have some overlap, at least, with your nature? Is this not the real meaning of that idea that we are stardust? We are physically stardust, yes, but big deal!

The big deal about that idea of our being stardust is that our nature is essentially the same as the Nature of the Universe, for we are part of it and cannot be otherwise. Or as Christ put it, “I and the Father are One.”

Mind and Motion ~ Being and Forgetting

So, what Knowledge needs, or what makes Knowledge better, is the addition of Experience.

Or, to put it more exactly, one consciousness researcher I know phrased it that, “Ultimately what the new physics is going to determine is that all that exists is Mind and Motion.” Well, I’ve been talking about the Mind part — that is All That Exists, All That Is. And what I’m adding now is that this human experience part is the Motion part. That this All That Is is perfect also in it’s being changing and interesting. It is total without human experience (or any experience), but it is complete and perfect with it.

 

 

And how can It be changing and interesting, and still be Everything and Omniscient, unless It allows Itself to forget Itself at times … unless there is the Motion, as well? How can light know itself as light unless it allows part of itself to be dark? How can Perfection know itself to be perfect without allowing part of itself to seem to be imperfect? How can Beauty be known as beautiful without there being some ugly manifested as well with which to contrast it? Pleasure without pain? Poignancy without dullness? Kindness without meanness?

What Is Realization?

But what is realization, then? What can re-membering mean, ultimately? One way to think of it is to use the analogy of a tree. One can think of the entire existence and experience of an individual leaf of that tree. Let us say that the leaf, in becoming a leaf, is led to focus only on itself. In the case of becoming human, this is caused by the traumas and pain of our early life, which cause us to narrow our focus onto the part of us that is dealing only with the reaction to those events … or is caught up in them. At any rate, for lesser reasons and so not as severely (the leaf does not develop an Ego, for instance), the leaf begins to think of itself as only leaf. Yet is it separate from tree?

No. So the leaf adds the experience of all that it goes through in the course of the experience of its life … its emerging in spring, its weathering the beating of oppressive sunniness and heat in summer, the pounding of rain, the crisp cool winds of autumn, the friendships with birds and lady bugs. But it changes color; something new is happening.

As humans, we despair at the thought of what will come and the ending of it all. For we have Ego and total forgetfulness of our Divinity. Meanwhile, the leaf dries, gets brittle, it falls. Is that the end of the leaf?

No. the awareness that was in the leaf is now in the tree. The tree is aware of itself and remembers it was leaf. It remembers it forgot, lost focus, in becoming leaf. It also did not forget and experienced itself as tree the entire time, though this was something Leaf did not know too well. But it, as Leaf, added to the magnificence of the experience of being Tree. So also did all the other “adventures” of each of the leaves. They each happened individually and collectively at the same time: “I and the Father are One.”

 

 

Take another example. A simple everyday one. You have a cut on your hand. You focus on the pain and the cut itself. You are drawn only to the experience of that portion of your hand that is experiencing the “drama” of those moments. You forget the chair you are in and the feeling of your buttocks upon the cushion. You forget the whistle of the wind outside your window. Do you remember the smell of onions frying in the pan in the kitchen? In preparation for your meal? No.

But eventually you remember yourself as all these other things and you forget your “life” as caught up in the experience of the wound. Indeed, the experience is additive to you, but you even, at times, pay no mind to the fact that it once happened … so caught up are you in the events of the “larger you.”

Or remember the experience of reading a novel that totally takes up your attention. There also you forget the physical world. But when you put the book down? There is the experience of realization. You haven’t forgotten the doings and adventures which took all your attention in the book. They are additive to you. But you have a much different appreciation for their value and significance within the, again, “larger” you.

Waking up in the morning is another analogy. If you remember your dreams (and you should try to, for they are part of your experience of life, too), you remember how much you thought everything that happens was really happening. You don’t forget that when you wake up. And if you in the dream knew that it was going to end, would you be afraid of death?

Awakening, Enlightenment à Freedom, Freed from Fear

Only if you forgot your life as well. Well, we as humans actually do that kind of forgetting that we have a larger reality and existence outside of this “dream” state we call life. Whereas planetmates (animals, to the uninitiated of you) are the way we would be in our dreams if we were remembering we have another identity outside of the dream and that it is more real.

But that knowledge, when we have it in the dream state — which would be analogous to Awakening or becoming enlightened while in life — gives us huge leeway in experimenting with experience in the dream: We know there are no real consequences for what we do. The same with planetmates; they also do not have to conform or be so conservative in life.

 

 

And if we can remember or get glimpses, in life, of our larger Self outside of the dream of life … and to the extent we do that … we can be so much less afraid in life and freer to truly live it.

 

 

Why There Is Forgetting

Now, how can that which is essentially Good manifest that which is not itself, Badness and Dark, unless it forgets who it is? And being perfect, how can it not be a conscious and willing forgetfulness … much like bungee jumping and forgetting we are still attached by a rope and cannot ever be hurt. Or like all those movies and TV shows of recent decades where someone shows up somewhere and does not know who he is and how he got there, and the rest of the plot involves this main character following all these clues, some of which he actually might have left for himself knowing he was going to forget, to get back to remembering who he really is. The movies, Memento, Vanilla Sky, and the TV series, John Doe, come to mind for starters.

The point is, it makes for a pretty interesting story overall and the ending and revelation is all that much more satisfying. Like in peek-a-boo, the end warrants shrieks of laughter and relief.

Reality Is a Funny God

So the addition of Experience to Knowledge makes Reality better than just Knowledge alone. And the addition of non-knowledge … that is, forgetting … to Knowledge + Experience makes Reality even better. It adds magnificence, poignancy. Bottom line, it adds fun. God is fun. Reality is a funny God.

 

 

 

 

40

Human Darkness, The Cosmic Game, and Why God Is LHAO:  Life Is Like God’s Joke, Requiring that She Forget the Punch Line in Order to Enjoy It

 

Keep on Cosmic Giggling and HumanLand — Fun, New Amusement Park:  Fun Times Waking from Nightmares

 

 

 

The Cosmic Game

Keep on Cosmic Giggling

SillyMickel:  So you might think of it as the game, the Cosmic Game … the only game that God can play in which there is such high drama and all the pizzazz that goes with that, and in which, at times, all these different viewing points are created, these different beings or foci of awareness, like different camera angles on the Thing as a Whole. And they all witness different perspectives on it all, meaning they experience different things, expanding, as it were, the magnificence of the All … or God.

Additionally, the human view has it that they are individual, separate actors going through different experiences, suffering from a very fun idea of having free will and being actual creators — little mini-gods, if you will — of what they view.

Human Darkness, God’s Nature, and Why God Is LHAO

So the one that’s human is where you have the delusion — the darkness — that will allow you to have the biggest, whooping, howling, wake-up of all when you realize it’s not real. So life is like God’s joke, requiring that He forget the punch line in order to enjoy it. Like I said, God’s nature, and ours, is laughter. And that’s what He wants.

That’s why She created us, why She created humans. Because there’s beauty, and all that, in all the rest of creation. But it’s only through becoming much less than Herself and totally forgetting who She is and becoming us, that when She remembers … when He/She remembers … that She can go, “Wow!!!! THAT was FUN!!!”

(From a Billboard in Heaven:) HumanLand — Fun, New Amusement Park

I mean, we are God. And what did we create? Amusement parks! What do amusement parks do? Lots of peek-a-boo, don’t they?

So much of it is set up to scare the hell out of you. You go on a roller coaster. It’s going up and then reaches the top. Then it drops. You feel a rush that you are going to die. You scream….

But nobody’s going to die. Nobody dies. And we say it’s fun!

Why We Insist on Haunting Houses

But, there’s more obvious ones. How about that haunted house thing? Where it’s like do-de-do-de-do-de-do-de…. And you’ve got all these scary things. You’re trapped inside and you can’t get out. Oh, and they will get you! And surely you will die, you will be haunted forever….

You’re thinking, “Oh, my god! Oooohh!! Nooo!”

And then what? Suddenly it’s all over and you walk out and it’s sunshine, it’s Disneyland, and people are eating cotton candy …  So, it’s like, “Holy fuck!”

You see? But you see you have to really believe it for it to be so much fun. Unless you forget …  If you go in there knowing it’s an amusement park…. Well, it’s not so much fun! Right?

Fun Times Waking from Nightmares

But when you do allow yourself to put your awareness on the shelf for a while and get in to it as if it is real, then it’s an in-cre-di-ble fun. It’s like the most fun. It’s like when you have a nightmare. You ever have a dream that was sooo horrible …  that you were sooo glad it was a dream when you woke up?

Tae Kwon Horror Movie — New, Fun Spiritual Practice

Well, that’s a taste of it, too. How about … and of course this is not exactly forgetting … but we have a taste of it every time we go to a horror movie. Why would we even invent them? We have horror movies because we are practicing that thing of being terrified, yet having faith that the thing that we’re seeing will not harm us and we’ll be okay. It’s actually a practice … a spiritual practice … of seeing horror, but not giving it strength, not giving it reality.

And in life we do the same thing. The horrible things we create for ourselves, for our amusement as God, are ultimately not real. And it is only when we give these things reality, or “energy,” that we actually react to them and act them out! But even then, we are, in acting them out, experiencing things. And that is part of the journey, too. As I said, all roads lead home and every path is magnificent. There is no such thing as a short or a long time for returning to Divinity.

So that’s why we can talk about there being no high or low, about there being no good or bad, ultimately.

The Dream Is Over

But, you know, at some point we want to go back.

Pretty much when we’re talking like this, we’re tired of it … we’re tired of the whole thing, all the drama, the Cosmic Dream. We’ve had enough of it, and we want to go back. We’re ready. We’re ready to understand, to remember again….

 

 

 

41

Realizing hOMelessness, The Hidden Face of Death, and Being God in Spite of You:  Uncertainty Wakes Up Zombies … “Won’t Be Nothing but Big ol’ Hearts Dancing in our Eyes”

 

“You Lose Your Form, You Lose Your Fear”:  The Dream Is Over, Liquid Memories, and THE TRUTH

 

 

 

Liquid Memories

No Pain, No Gain –> No Form, No Fear

SillyMickel:  I mean, after all, didn’t I have a peek-a-boo? I mean, come on! I was scared shitless. You guys think … because I’m so kind to you now and everything…. You guys didn’t think that when I was melting, fer God’s sake, that I wasn’t out of my fucking brain scared?!

But then, you know what? When I was water? I told you, it was like the most relaxing massage. It was almost like, you lose your form, you lose your fear.

It was like, wow! And then, you know, being taken into my cat’s mouth. It’s like, “Hey, Muff, I always love you, man! This is so awesome of you! Wow, how great is that, man? You takin me inside of you? That’s so wonderful. Thanks a lot, man!”

 

 

By the time we want to go back, perhaps we have had certain experiences — and they do come to us in a variety of ways — where we have discovered that when you lose your form, you lose your fear. When one has a near-death experience, what one says about it afterward is that all fear and worry disappeared upon release of the physical form.

In Heaven There Is No …

I mean, you could not believe it, when I was dead, there was no such thing as an unhappy experience. And you look all over and … you couldn’t find it! And then when I went up to heaven? Holy cow! There’s God, my best friend in the world! I mean…. You know?

And I mean, God was no stodgy, you know, statue, love-Jesus looking God. No icon, man! This was the most opposite of an icon. It’s the most, as we’ve been saying…. It’s the unexpected that creates real experience. If you know it, if you expect it, it is just a trance state.

So, I’ll thank you for killing me…. [chuckling]

In a near-death experience or in deep meditation or using psychedelics one might get a taste of that “heaven” — that state of bliss and no-form — and one realizes that in that state there is no such thing as an unhappy experience.

There is also no such thing as an experience in our No-Form state that is less than magnificent. There is nothing boring about Truth-Awareness-Bliss. God is the opposite of an icon. It is only in the human form that we diminish Experience, that we reduce it down to a “measly trickle of awareness,” filtering out the vastness of a Universe of All Experience.

Indeed, it is this that creates the drug addiction in humans. All of the drugs that become addictive have one thing in common: they reduce the awareness of one’s form, they reduce bodily awareness. In doing this, in some of them the awareness of Mind is amplified.

Realizing hOMelessness

It is a situation that is similar in structure to dying, and drug addiction is almost always an indirect wish for or longing for death … to return to the No-Form state, to go hOMe.

So at the point when one wants to go back, drug addiction is more likely, for it mimics the spiritual goal. Indeed it gives a taste of the goal.

But, like the Siren calling, it ultimately leads one away from spiritual awareness. All drugs are some form of expanding awareness beyond the stagnation of the physical form, but like all signposts to the Divine, they block out awareness of the Divine when they are focused on, relied on. They are then the buddhas on the path who must be killed; they are the Sirens to be resisted.

Uncertainty Wakes Up Zombies

For it is the unexpected that creates real experience.

 

 

If you know it, if you expect it, it is just a trance state. And all addictions are about trying to re-live, ever and again, a particular experience or set of experiences, which happened at the beginning of that addiction. We all try to re-create pleasurable experiences; we call it addiction when it is most obvious that it is counterproductive.

Those early experiences in the addiction may have originally been a step out of the boring life of everyperson — they almost invariably were — but in trying to have them again, one has created simply a different type of stagnation of life. It is like getting stuck in a rut, now, on the other side of the road from which one has pulled away.

Our Prodigal Return

But somehow or other, one way or another, sooner or later, we succeed. We make our way down the road. We end up hOMe. Like prodigal children we return to the embrace of the Universal Soul.

 

 

“Hey, Thanks for That Death I Wasn’t Expecting!”

Those most clinging to form and with the least experience of No-Form are the most insistent on the reality of death … that is, of death being an end of consciousness.

But eventually, as you near hOMe, sure enough you realize there is no death. Other-than-Western cultures have it easier in coming to this awareness, for the vast majority of them have institutionalized ways of going regularly into nonordinary states of consciousness where the death-rebirth experience naturally occurs. Over and over again, before they actually die, they face what is felt to be death and discover it has another side — a hidden face which is an expansion of consciousness, a rebirth. More and more the prospect of death loses its anxiety; over time one becomes less fearful and more free. This is why Plato advised, “Practice dying.”

 

 

So, you know what? Heheh, I’ll thank you for killing me. But I also thank me for being you and for … and as God … for knowing that I would learn that killing isn’t possible for God. That’s the only way I would know. So thanks for that wonderful gift and, uh…. You know, I feel like, you guys, I’m sorry that you guys didn’t have the experience of it, because I know it’s harder just coming from the head.

The Hidden Face of Death

However, Westerners, as in everything else, filter out real or deep experience from their lives; they further diminish consciousness from what it already is in just being human. They fortify, regimentize, medicalize, regulate, pharmacalize, and “insure” their lives against any possible deep experience, let alone death, and so they fear it most exceedingly, having nary a glimpse of its beatific other face … and knowing little of its nature as another peek-a-boo, another thing that will be fun to discover was not as was feared and in fact was something wonderful.

But as I have stressed throughout this work, the Universe — ourselves in essence — continually brings to us the experiences we need in order to grow and re-member again. In might take a dire illness, a neurotic or psychotic break, psychedelics, near-death experience, addiction in any of its forms, accidents, tragedies, or the death of a loved one. In various ways, and gradually over time, we recall our formlessness, we regain our liquid memories.

Death then loses its power in derailing our perception of What Is. We learn that killing is not possible for God, for there is no death.

Also, since there is no death, there is no time limit on realizing our Divinity.

Being God in Spite of You

And we learn everything about getting back by teaching ourselves the way back through the ways we interact with each other and the things we do to each other …  even the bad things.

We are always ourselves trying to get ourselves back hOMe. We do that by acting upon ourselves through the actions of ourselves in the forms of others and though all those “external” events, which are also ourselves being on our side, teaching us, guiding us, and re-membering us.

The events that we encounter coming into the world as humans — most notably at the prenatal, perinatal, primal scene (around age four or five), and identity stages — have the effect of reducing our awareness of Divinity and separating us from hOMe.¹ The events that occur at and between those times through our interaction with ourselves as others serve to increase that diminution of consciousness … when we are newbies not wanting to go hOMe yet.

And later in life, beginning sometime in adulthood and when we have had enough and feel we are ready to go back, the grand U-turn begins and our interactions with ourselves as others serves to reverse that narrowed awareness.

 

 

So, it’s all Love that we give each other because whether we are assisting ourselves in reducing awareness to set up the experiment in Experience we call the individual self or helping ourselves back from it, we are glorifying the Divine adventure and moving it along. In spite of ourselves, we can’t help but be God.

 

 

And in spite of ourselves we can’t help but act as the Divine to ourselves and to others, perfectly, in bringing about many Divine adventures in consciousness. For even the seeming imperfection of it all — our actions and others — is part of that perfection, even if the realization of that does not come till after we have left our human form.

“Won’t Be Nothin’ But Big ol’ Hearts Dancin’ in Our Eyes”

There is a verse to a song that expresses this: “In spite of ourselves, we’re gonna end up a sittin on a rainbow….  Against all odds, yeah, we’re the big door prize….”²

There’s the knowledge.

“We’re gonna spite our noses right off of our faces….”

That’s true. That’s God speaking, you see?

“Won’t be nothing but big ol’ hearts dancing in our eyes.”

Nothing but Love. And that’s THE TRUTH.

 

 

42

There is a Beneficent Face of Tragedy, a Rebirth on the Flip Side of Suffering:  The Magnificence of the All That Is … Infinity of Experience ~ Infinite God

 

Those Times You Absolutely Hate, The Divinity Within You Might Be Finding Interesting:  Easily Ungrateful Humans

 

 

 

SillyMickel:  At this point many of you are thinking about how cruel people can be and the tragedy that ensues from that.

You are thinking there is tragedy because once experience has happened it cannot be changed, either in this life or in any afterward time, in any no-form state.

Easily Ungrateful = Human

But, you see, you’re already forgetting. I understand, it’s harder when you just have it in your mind. But, think: In bemoaning the tragedy of your life you have already forgotten those times when you felt grateful for those experiences.

Initially you were not, of course. It’s nearly impossible to be grateful for tragedy when it happens or even for a while afterward.

But given time, many of us see the beneficent face of tragedy, we realize the rebirth that is the other side of suffering. And we are grateful, then. We know this is true from some of our painful experiences; let’s entertain the notion that the ones we still feel are tragedies will be seen differently some time as well … whether in this life or later.

In fact, you might look back at the sum total of all those hellacious experiences and ponder that if you had not had them you would not be who you are today, you would not have the good that you currently have in your life.

You might be doubly grateful, even, thinking that without those unwanted experiences you would not have learned as much as you did in life and would be much further away from the Liberation you ultimately want.

Long Peek-a-Boo … Increase Pain, Increase Motivation

All in all, it might occur to you that it is kind of like a very long peek-a-boo experience in which, where the face of God is the most hidden, it makes you want it more and more and more and to strive more and more and more to change that. And, well, it’s actually true, you know? We take any kind of experience of misery or discomfort. And when you increase the pain of it, you increase the motivation for dealing with it and going beyond it.

So in the end you would be really thankful for all these experiences because you would find you are super-sensitized to experiencing the opposite of them, the bliss, to the nth degree. Tragedy magnifies the comedy of life and maximizes the bliss of it as a whole.

Sorry to Hear About Your Animal-Killing Toejam

And that’s the thing that’s beautiful about it. You know you’re God when you can say you’ve got chronic fatigue, you’ve got flatulence disease, you’ve got up-the-wazoo inflammation … you’ve got all kinds of … phlegm cancer, y’know? Or you’ve got a really bad toejam that’s cancerous and, uh, killing off your animals …  You know?

You know you’re really coming from your Divinity when you can accept any of that as being good for you and, though you’re not seeing it at the time, you are calm in your knowing that you will find out at some point, maybe some day, or even after this life, that you were lucky to have those experiences….

The point is that experiences are just experiences. Since there is no death, really, and all pain is temporary, and Ultimate Reality is Bliss-Beauty-Awareness, then every experience in the Universe is at least interesting and often a whole lot more. The good stuff is delightful; the bad stuff “seasons” the good stuff, making it that much richer and more intense.

Trusting What God Gives Me …  That’s Faith

And what is really bad is something we imagine but does not exist: That the suffering that happens is meaningless or is overwhelming. I’ve just dealt with the idea of it being meaningless, and we see that is not true.

As for it being possibly overwhelming, I’m seeing that you can say, “I can’t handle it.” But actually, what we usually say is, “I won’t be able to handle it.” So right there is an indication that we are prejudging what it will be like; in fear we are magnifying ahead of time what something unpleasant will be like and minimizing our ability to handle it.

But the insubstantiality of those fears has even become common knowledge in some circles. It’s one of those truths that people are starting to pick up on a lot if they have a lot of experience with pain. Like alcoholics, for example. Of course there are many other kinds of people who suffer a lot, but just as an example we know that alcoholics and drug addicts are folks who have had a lot of negative, painful experiences. And yet they’re the ones who, after going through all that hell … and I’ve gone through it … they’re the ones who are saying, “God only gives me that which I can accept….” In their 12-step programs, their AA and so on, you will hear, “God only gives me that which I am able to handle at any particular time.” Now, that’s faith.

Now to some that might sound macho or cocky. It could be taken as “Oh, I’m cool. This program ain’t gonna get the best of me. I’m gonna be handling this, man. I can take it! Won’t see me on no pity pot!” And while that is not true in terms of what that saying means, still, accepting the pain can be done with a kind of dying strain of determination, a kind of self-flagellation to ward off the fear one has that unless one toughens oneself, future pain will be even more overwhelming. And that is hardly faith.

An Interesting Experience, Anyway

This faith I’m talking about is trust. It’s trust, but it is something else. It is an awareness, however dim, that pain is not all painful, is not one-hundred percent painful. Faith is the unthought awareness — however unexpressed — that a part of us, the part that is Divine, is at least finding tribulations interesting. The trials of life are at least making for quite a story, and in that way it is better than a lame boring life story in which all pain is somehow kept away.

Faith is an awareness that Reality does not contain irreconcilable extremes of heaven and hell, but that, as the Tao symbol indicates, even in darkness, in pain, there is a seed of enjoyment; and in light, in pleasure that allows no darkness, there is indeed a seed of misery.

For, yes, as God, the part of us that’s God, these distasteful experiences are kind of like eating an anchovy. You know? It’s like your Divine self is going, “God! This tastes like shit, man! But you know, it is that the more I chew on it … it’s a more interesting experience than I’ve had for quite a while, y’know?” And then our Divinity is going, “Hell, I might even try some godawful fish eggs or something some time…. Just to see what it is like, just to have the experience of it.” You know what I’m saying?

It’s just something different. Dark and complicated experiences move the plot of life forward by stirring the pot, adding an element that is different.

Something different … and therefore, interesting.

 

 

Infinity of Experience ~ Infinite God

And in an infinity of experience…. Why can’t there be an infinity of experience? Don’t you see? For when does God stop growing? Why does there ever have to be an end? Why does there have to be an end to the variety and possibilities of experiencing, the possibilities of existing, of Existence!

I am not saying why does there ever have to be an end to human life.

I’m saying when does God stop growing? ‘Cause I’m saying that God is all knowledge.

The Magnificence of the All That Is

But She’s infinitely experiencing, and She has for all time. So, with an infinity of experiences, there’s always going to be newness…. Newness, interest, fascination, poignancy … magnificence. The magnificence of the All That Is.

And yet, He’s been doing it for all time. So how fascinating is that? How fantastic?!

 

 

 

43

Curious God and Infinite Poignancy:  All of Reality Is a Divine Leela, a God’s Play … More Than Anything Else, Existence Is Fun

 

Four Falls from Grace … And Back Again — Becoming Human Is Love’s Supreme Act of Recklessness:  Existence Is Fun

 

 

God Would Not Want a King Midas Curse

SillyMickel:  However, let’s say you are God and you are that Infinite Experience. You are endlessly experiencing and never run out of them. Would that be interesting in itself? No. Then there would be sameness. For in an important sense they would be all alike. One day of Divinity would be like the other, and it would be like King Midas who had the golden touch.

King Midas got his wish. Everything he touched became golden, perfect. But he couldn’t enjoy any of it, because it was all just the same. Perfection makes everything perfectly boring.

So there is a problem with an infinite God, an infinity of Experience, unless an element of surprise is added … the surprise of differentness, the unexpected, of newness, of change … there must be infinite variety of Experience along with an infinite amount of Experience.

Curious God

Let’s take it back to one’s individual experience of Divinity. We say God is One and think that means He/She can be contained and explained and is one and not another thing. So we have religions that differently define God, yet they say that He is One.

Well, I don’t know if my experience of Divinity is like everyone’s. I don’t know if God makes hashish brownies for everybody, you know? I just don’t know.

But I doubt it. Because God is all about infinite Experience.

And, knowing God, why wouldn’t it be one thing for me and something completely different for someone else … for everyone else? Whatever it is, why wouldn’t She do that? Who wouldn’t?

My encounter with the Divine might, at one point, be an Indian holy man … for someone else it might be a speaking eagle, for another a dancing god or one smoking a hookah, for another Jesus in a chariot….

God being infinite Experience, why wouldn’t our experiences of Divinity be different, fascinating, exotic … interesting? Why would not God who is infinite Experience be experienced in a wondrous array of intoxicating ways?

Why might not God be the experience of a clownish, dancing Divinity offering hashish brownies to one person? Why might She not be the experience of a bedraggled street person to another? Why wouldn’t She? You and I being One with that infinite experience, wouldn’t we? Would we as Divinity limit ourselves to the boring outlines that sad humans have set up to explain us?

And for everyone else it would be something else entirely, but something just as unexpected and fantastic.

Because that’s another thing: We are God, so aren’t we all curious to know? And don’t we only get our knowing, really, through experience? And with different experiences, more knowing?

Infinite Poignancy

It is so beautiful I can barely contain it. I can hardly even imagine that there are an infinite number of poignant dramas … that there are infinite numbers of horrors and heroines and tragic figures and heroic figures and demonic and evil people and angelic and beautiful people … and there’s all of the characters beyond imagining; and they’re all God. And this is the way in which God continues not just experiencing Himself, but experiences Himself as multiple.

God Has Fun

So, it’s sort of like that example of being in a play. I was saying how life is like being on stage acting in a drama. We are all God, each acting our part, but, being human, forgetting who we are and fully identifying with our characters. Only the part of ourselves who is God, well, She knows She’s God still. She knows She’s God but She’s playing all these parts. And She has fun.

You might say He has fun, but His supreme act involving humans is the fact that He allows us totally to forget, so He can really be into the experience.

God’s Supreme Act … of Recklessness

So, becoming human is not a supreme act of Love, as some might say. Actually, it is a supreme act of just pure recklessness on His part! God is already Love. In becoming human She becomes less than Love.

And that’s a recklessness that gives the twist to love, making it piquant, manifesting it more so as poignant.

It’s reckless but not meaningless. It’s wild but profound and awesome.

By that I mean there is no faith involved for God. None needed. For faith is not necessary when there is knowledge. And God has Total Knowledge. He knows without doubt that there can be no harm. Never, in all of Experience can there be harm for nothing can stop being. There is only change, transformation.

So for God becoming human, it is kind of like bungee jumping off that bridge. You are attached by the cord and it is impossible for there to be any harm. Except that in throwing oneself into being a human, as soon as you leave the bridge, you get amnesia. Theeeeen what happens?

Four Falls From Grace … And Back Again

But God knows that is going to happen. God knows that in the process of coming to Earth, He is going to go through four falls from grace, until He will end up to be as dumb as a dipstick.

Then She’s going to have to go back again to realizing She is Divine from being so repressed and unconscious. But the process of it involves all the most wonderful things, experiences. These are experiences more wonderful than planetmates can experience, because it is all done in total forgetfulness that it is not real and that everything is just fine even when it doesn’t seem to be.

So ultimately, peek-a-boo: It has all been magnificent.

Death to Everyone — Makes It Fun

What does Will Oldham say? He sings, “Death to everyone, is gonna come….  It makes hosing … much more fun.”

It is because of the fear, ultimately that fear of death, that we are most fully alive. There is no need for that fear actually, but it is that which provides the edge, the spice … the beauty, poignancy to life. It is like the sharpness that salt provides to food to bring out its multiple flavors, which were there but were dull and not fully manifest. It is this fear that makes life fun, and so much more perfect in our forgetting for a time that it is just a game we are playing for our own, as God, amusement and the manifesting of beauty in existence.

 

 

An Edge of Pleasure. Multiple Flavors

It’s because of that fear that there is the sweetness of pleasure to life as well. It gives life it’s edge. Because through pleasure we escape even the possibility, the threat, of remembering, which multiplies even more the “flavors” (experiences) of existence.

This is regardless of the fact that pleasure extends our time in forgetfulness … it is only pain that wakes us up to our Divinity and brings us home again. For the amount of time it takes to remember our nature as Divinity is totally irrelevant. It does not matter. It is poignantly perfect and beautiful any way it goes, ultimately.

Life, Experience, That Which Is is all perfect in its seeming imperfection. It is fantastic and wonderful. Ultimately, as Sathya Sai Baba said, All of Reality is God’s divine leela, that is to say, play. So, more than anything else, Existence is fun.

 

 

— FROM *Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation* (2015) by Michael Adzema, available in print and kindle/e-book formats.

 

 

Click for a free downloadable copy of this excerpt, including illustrations, from *Funny God*, with my compliments.

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell

 

— Related: See also other published versions of these ideas….

*Dance of the Seven Veils  I: Primal/Identity Psychology, Mythology, and Your Real Self* (2017).

 

At Amazon at

 

https://www.amazon.com/Dance-Seven-Veils-Psychology-Mythology/dp/154243632X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= 

 

 

 

*Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man* (2016).

 

At Amazon at

 

https://www.amazon.com/Prodigal-Human-Descents-Return-Grace/dp/1530838134/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1485034667&sr=1-1 

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*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).

 

At Amazon —https://t.co/WMyo609jCi

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*Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events* (2016).

 

At Amazon at

 

https://www.amazon.com/Wounded-Deer-Centaurs-Necessary-Prenatal/dp/1499653999?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

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*Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation* (2015).

 

At Amazon at

 

https://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Minds-Liberation-Return/dp/1499504845/ref=sr_1_7_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485034771&sr=1-7

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*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).

 

At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2anYVzi

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*Planetmates: The Great Reveal*(2014).

 

At Amazon at

 

https://www.amazon.com/Planetmates-Great-Reveal-Return-Grace-ebook/dp/B00JZ418DA?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc#nav-subnav

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Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor  (2013).

 

At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2aeeZUA

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*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).

 

At Amazon at

 

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-NO-Return-Grace-Book-ebook/dp/B00FG09NNE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr 

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*Apocalypse Emergency: Love’s Wake-Up Call* (2013).

 

At Amazon at

 

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Emergency-Loves-Wake-Up-Return/dp/1492810355/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

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*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).

 

At Amazon at

 

https://www.amazon.com/Culture-War-Class-Generations-Obvious/dp/1492864021/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 

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*Psychology of Apocalypse: Ecopsychology, Activism, and the Prenatal Roots of Humanicide* (2018).

 

At Amazon beginning May 2018, check at Michael Adzema at Amazon at that time

 

https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Adzema/e/B00J7F0URC/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 

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See Michael Adzema at Amazon for any other of the twelve books currently in print.

 

At https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Adzema/e/B00J7F0URC/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1