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February 13, 2005

The God Game, Part 3

*****

Jewish student: "There's a God."
Gentile student: "No way!"
Jewish student: "Yahweh!"

I don't mean to offend you, dear Reader, but I have to admit that the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh or Jehovah, always struck me as being more in the Satanic camp than the Divine. Exhibiting a kind of pathological disorder.

All that anger and wrath and guilt-tripping and manipulation and sexual objectification and vain need to be worshipped and outright torture and murder. I just didn't buy it.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Jehovah doesn't exist. He may well exist. But somehow, I never quite bought into him being the Big Guy, the #1 Creative Honcho, El Supremo Bueno.

Jesus, on the other hand, seemed more in tune with the Divine. That love stuff made more sense. But all that blood and suffering and crucifying and...

I used to ask my mother why all the real God miracles happened thousands of years ago and not today. She didn't know how to answer. Then I asked who Cain and Abel married. That got me into trouble.

Let's just say that I was sceptical of the Bible as the literal Word of God. However, there are passages that appear to be divinely inspired at some level.

(For a fascinating mathematician's examination of the first line of Genesis in Hebrew by someone not given to mystical, new age nonsense, I recommend Stan Tenan and his first video Geometric Metaphors of Life. Stan is a peer-review kind of guy. Unfortunately, the Hebrew scholars aren't that literate in mathematics and the mathematicians aren't that literate in Hebrew studies. So Stan is a brilliant but singular bridge. Do not confuse him with popular Bible Code types. He's a scholar more in the tradition of Ernest McClain. Do not dismiss him by perceived associations.)

I remember reading the sacred literature of many religions. All seem to have a piece of the truth. But I didn't want to go to India to find a guru. I didn't think I had to go anywhere to get the truth. Not to a text, not to a priest, not to some outer authority. I did believe in masters in the sense of master craftsmen who teach the apprentice and put them on the road to mastery. But I didn't want to ponder the sound of one hand clapping. So I coasted.

Anyway, back to The God Game.

Suppose I were an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being. Suppose I had the impulse to create. The question that begins The God Game is simple.

What would I create?

In a word, everything.

I would create every kind of life and every kind of non-life and every kind of place and every kind of experience and every kind of doing and every kind of being. I would create omni-life

Every universe would exist, every story would be true, every science-fiction and fantasy scenario would play out, every fiction would be fact, every narrative and book and movie and tale (fairy or otherwise) would get the green light.

I would create worlds in two dimensions and three dimensions and four dimensions and more. Worlds of Newtonion physics and Einsteinian physics and hypercubian physics and transmogrification physics and Lord of the Ringsian physics.

And I would populate my universe with immortal beings who would have the opportunity to play in those universes as long as they wanted, playing every role, and experiencing every experience.

Of course, part of the fun is getting lost in the role, so I would make sure that they would temporarily forget. Forget what they had done before. Forget who they were before. Play out the new role as if it were the only role.

Because nothing makes a life worth living more than thinking that it is the only one.

Every immortal being (Soul) would get to play every mineral, every plant, every animal, every human, the rich man, the poor woman, the master, the slave, the famous, the obscure, the healthly, the sickly, the warrior, the leader, the follower, the wielder of power, the victim of power. The angel, the devil, the magician, the (fill in the blank...only your imagination can limit the possibilities.)

Every kind of existence, long and short, from small consciousness to intergalactic and universal consciousness.

There would be one fundamental rule to make it all fair, to get the ball rolling, and to bring some structure to the overall, overarching story of each immortal being:

You reap what you sow. Every thought, word, action, emotion, intent, and non-intent generates little boomerangs that come back to you, in this life, the next, or hundreds of lifetimes away in other worlds. And given the fact that you don't remember sending out those boomerangs, life will surprise you with the appearance of unfairness and victimhood and being the effect of some other cause.

The whole point of it all? Learning how to give and receive unconditional divine love. Not romantic love, not emotional love, not intellectual love, not intuitive love. Divine love. Whatever that may be.

This creation obviously implies karma and reincarnation, although not the caricaturish versions. And why not? Why not everything combined with the ability to play out every scenario and role in personally carved out cycles?

The seasons cycle from birth and flourishing to decay and apparant death only to return to start the cycle again, in a new way. The tides go out, but they come back. The earth revolves on its axis to return. The moon circles the earth, the earth the sun, the sun the galactic center and so on.

Everything natural returns, not to its exact place, but like a spiral, to a new place similar to its origin but apart from its origin.

All in nature is a curve. Why should life be any different? It appears linear: You're born, you live, you go on a few diets, you die. But that is the appearance. Why not more?

And what about all those horrible things that happen to children? What about the so-called problem of evil?

It's a problem only if you take a short-term linear perspective. Only if you believe that just because you don't remember existing before you birth, that you in fact didn't exist. (Heck, you don't remember existing during your sleep last night; did you still exist? Just because you have memory of a thread before, how do you know you existed? How much of your existence is really taken on faith? Groundhog's Day. Remember?)

I know. I can hear all the qualifications and rationalizations and argumentations buzzing in your brain. There' so much more that would need to be answered and explained and structured.

But why not? Why not some truth in every religion, including non-religion? Why not a universe whose fabric basically allows each immortal being to partition reality in such a way that each can have his own reality, and those who are in some kind of agreement can participate in similar realities or worlds so that they can share anchor points for greater experience and growth together?

(Look for my upcoming posts on How the Mind Works, to see how we may already possess those partitioning mechanisms. And that without them, we would re-experience Soul or God or whatever you couldn't call it because you would lose the language.)

Ask yourself, if you were truly omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, would you limit your creation to that of Jehovah or Allah or Krishna or Brahma or Descartes or Sartre or Sagan or...?

Now for the The God Game, Part 4.

*** Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it. Niels Bohr

*** When I discover truth, I will tell you, if telling you still seems important. Ashleigh Brilliant

*** Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul. Ashleigh Brilliant

*** How can I believe in God when last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter? Woody Allen

***Death is the greatest hoax every perpetuated on humanity. Mark Alexander

Posted by witnit at February 13, 2005 5:32 AM

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