“You Lose Your Form, You Lose Your Fear”: Experience Is Divinity, Part Fourteen — The Dream Is Over, Liquid Memories, and THE TRUTH

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”

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….

Liquid Memories

No Pain, No Gain –> No Form, No Fear

Perhaps by this time 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…

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.

God moving in mysterious ways.

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.”

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 … more about this later—have the effect of reducing our awareness of Divinity and separating us from hOMe. 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…”

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.

Continue with Those Times You Absolutely Hate, The Divinity Within You Might Be Finding Interesting: Experience Is Divinity, Part Fifteen — Easily Ungrateful Humans

Return to Keep on Cosmic Giggling and HumanLand — Fun, New Amusement Park: Experience is Divinity, Part Thirteen — Fun Times Waking from Nightmares

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity

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Keep on Cosmic Giggling and HumanLand — Fun, New Amusement Park: Experience is Divinity, Part Thirteen — Fun Times Waking from Nightmares

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.

The Cosmic Game

Keep on Cosmic Giggling

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.

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 ok. 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….

Continue with “You Lose Your Form, You Lose Your Fear”: Experience Is Divinity, Part Fourteen — The Dream Is Over, Liquid Memories, and THE TRUTH

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

To purchase Experience Is Divinity, or any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.

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

Only in the Human Form of Total Forgetfulness Can God, in Waking Up, Have Fun. Experience is Divinity, Part Twelve — What Knowledge Needs

Heaven Slickers

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.

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 … 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.

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.

And it’s more than that. 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, if 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?

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.

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, 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?

And 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. Memento, Vanilla Sky, 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.

Continue with Keep on Cosmic Giggling and HumanLand — Fun, New Amusement Park: Experience is Divinity, Part Thirteen — Fun Times Waking from Nightmares

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

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity

To purchase Experience Is Divinity, or any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.

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

Experience Is Divinity, Part Eleven — Heaven Slickers:  How Forgetting Our Divine Nature Makes Us Feel More Alive, The Turbulence of Life Keeps the Life Force Moving

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.

More Icon Clasting

A blackness? No. I have to stop trying to fit words on it for the word is an an icon.

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

Experience Is God, God Is Experience

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, ok… 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 shit out 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 ok 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 into 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.

Heaven Slickers

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.

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

Return to 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

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity

To purchase Experience Is Divinity, or any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
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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

Experience Is Divinity, Part Ten – 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.

Acquired Taste?

But 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 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? 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. 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 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.

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 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 a) 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. b) I have lived through the most horrible events, including almost dying several times. And c) 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-two 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, that 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, been abused, been taken advantage of, 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 poona 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.

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

Return to When Life is Ever New, a Revelation, One Has Turned the Good into the Wonderful: Experience Is Divinity, Part Nine — God Invents Joy by Forgetting.

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity

To purchase Experience Is Divinity, or any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.

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When Life is Ever New, a Revelation, One Has Turned the Good into the Wonderful: Experience Is Divinity, Part Nine — God Invents Joy by Forgetting.

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

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.

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, but 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” 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!

It’s such a rip off, it’s like He gets to feel, He 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?

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 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 all over again 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.

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 few, 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.

Continue with 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

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

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity

To purchase Experience Is Divinity, or any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.

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

The Cloud of Boring Sameness and Why Don’t We Stop Crucifying Christ Already: Experience Is Divinity, Part Eight — Love and Universal Consciousness

The Universe Is One Vast Expanse of Experience

And what is that One Reality we apprehend in doing service? We get a sense of the experience of another human being. We sense that our experience of the World is the same. This is called empathy; it is called compassion. But what that means is really that we sense that other people are just like us, they are “other me’s,” and that what distinguishes us is not what we are inside—meaning our experience or subjectivity of the World—but is merely the set of events and circumstances that that One Experience or subjectivity is confronted with, deals with, and focuses on. We are One Experience; the Universe is One Experience. It happens to be “looking” in different directions. We are simple foci of Awareness in the vast expanse of Experience.

Why the Bodhisattva Waits

And the other word used to describe Ultimate Reality and God, outside of 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’s 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 His nature. So to have it She needs to forget who She is.

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. But does anyone stop to think what that might mean? Can anyone even imagine or picture it?

The Cloud of Unknowing

If we try, 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?

Does God Bore You? Ok, How About Truth?

Well one of the biggest secrets of all is that it is nothing like that, in fact 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.

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. 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?

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!

Why Don’t We Stop Crucifying Christ Already…

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. Do you ever see him pictured as smiling? As being anything but solemn and severe? How about playful or teasing?

He’s Actually a Nice Guy.

How could he possible 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.

Continue with When Life is Ever New, a Revelation, One Has Turned the Good into the Wonderful: Experience Is Divinity, Part Nine — God Invents Joy by Forgetting.

Return to All Roads Lead Home and the Multi-Tasking Universe: The Universe is a Vast Expanse of Experience, “Looking” in Different Directions.

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity

To purchase Experience Is Divinity, or any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.

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All Roads Lead Home and the Multi-Tasking Universe: The Universe is a Vast Expanse of Experience, “Looking” in Different Directions.

Clasting Icons, Words, and the Physical World: Your Mind Thinks It Lives in a World of Reflections of Your True Nature: Experience Is Divinity, Part Seven — Killing Buddhas on the Path

All Roads Lead Home

We are fixated on these physical things around us—the world of matter—which, in actuality, are only projections of Reality. They are not eternal and unchanging, and certainly they are not real. Even our sciences show us that what we deem to be substantial, solid, real is actually empty, arbitrary, subjective. The bottom line is material things cannot be ultimately real, for they depend on the perception of the seer for their existence!

And there it is again—perception. Another clue!

If you do not yet see this, it is not failure for not getting it. For there is no such thing as failure. That’s part of the point, too. For all roads, everything that I am saying leads to one and only one thing.

But before I spill the beans…. I just had a funny thought. Have we already forgotten that God’s essential nature and that which we humans alone share with Him is that ability to laugh? Laughter. There it is again. Another clue, if you will.

Like I said, all roads lead there…to this one thing…to this one thing that is God.

Kill the Buddha on the Path

Let us say we see what happens if rather than trying to bring to awareness through gentle tugging at things you know inside but are not ready to remember, we try instead a simple but effective way. I love iconoclasm.

Plato’s Cave

What’s an icon? It is a piece of God that is described. And now described it is no longer seen. For with that, what is being described is no longer focused on, just the icons, just the description. It is similar to the classic misdirection magicians use to make things seem to disappear, and it is similarly mesmerizing.

Words, Icons, the Physical World

Well, there are all kinds of icons that we accept as totally real. All of them block out reality … and cause you to not see the reality you are immersed in. They “describe” Reality … they point to it … but in doing so they block it from view. Because of this, your mind thinks it lives in a world of reflections of your true nature. These reflections are called words, icons, and even the physical world.

What they all have in common is their ability to block out your perception of your true nature as God. What they also have in common is their ability to reveal your truth, when, in seeking God, you consciously decide to remove them from your perception. Words, icons, and the physical world constitute the hypnotic show of human reality, which both conceals true Reality yet can be used to reveal it at the point when you are ready to accept it: As the Asian saying goes, at an advanced stage of spiritual growth, when you see a “Buddha” on the path, kill Him. 

Words = “Monkey Mind”

Some of this might be more obvious than others. We talk about words and verbal mindplay distracting one from actually experiencing Reality; we say not to get caught up in the “monkey mind.” The idea is that if you could stop doing that you would be closer to perceiving truly, closer to enlightenment.

But it is the same thing with icons and the physical world. They conceal; and can also be removed to reveal. We go beyond “Buddhas,” idols, and gurus at a certain point. We also can retreat from the physical world into old-fashioned contemplation and meditation, or using one of the “new-age” techniques of sensory deprivation we can reduce our overwhelming awareness of “things.”

Reality Is Unity, So…

There is another way of breaking through the haze of reflections that blocks out the apprehension of Reality. First, keep in mind we have all heard it said innumerable times what the nature of God and Reality is.

We have come so far as to know, somehow, that Reality is “One.” We all say Unity is what is Reality.

We Do Service Because…

Well the other ways we attempt to experience…there I go, again!…attempt to experience this Unity, and therefore Actual Reality, is through service. In serving the unfortunate we invariably feel our heart—there’s another icon that we should dispense with…well maybe another time….

We say the heart “opens up.” We say it opens to others, and we sense our Oneness, our Unity with others. We say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Ultimately we experience our Unity with all things, living and nonliving.

What I am getting to is that the sense of Unity that we are trying to achieve, what we describe as where we are headed, and the Ultimate Reality of it all, is always described aaaass –>> One.

The Universe Is One Vast Expanse of Experience

And what is that One Reality we apprehend in doing service? We get a sense of the experience of another human being. We sense that our experience of the World is the same. This is called empathy; it is called compassion. But what that means is really that we sense that other people are just like us, they are “other me’s,” and that what distinguishes us is not what we are inside—meaning our experience or subjectivity of the World—but is merely the set of events and circumstances that that One Experience or subjectivity is confronted with, deals with, and focuses on. We are One Experience; the Universe is One Experience. It happens to be “looking” in different directions. We are simple foci of Awareness in the vast expanse of Experience. 

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

Return to Our Divine Adventure in Forgetfulness Has Us Misunderstanding the Pain We Give Ourselves to Wake Up: Experience Is Divinity, Part Six — The Poignancy of It All

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity

To purchase Experience Is Divinity, or any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
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Our Divine Adventure in Forgetfulness Has Us Misunderstanding the Pain We Give Ourselves to Wake Up: Experience Is Divinity, Part Six — The Poignancy of It All

The Perfection of It All and More Tugging on Your Umbilical Cords to Yourselves as Divinity: If God Is All There Is, and She Can’t Be on Her Side, Who Can?

Recipe for Game of Humanness: Take Equal Parts Emptiness and Stupidity…

So we’ve got a game that has components of total emptiness and utter royal stupidity, which allows a belief that death is both an end to life and that it is painful. Don’t we believe that? Well, that’s not the truth. But that’s what we come to believe. That death is an end, and a painful one, to our lives is what we come to believe coming into human form. [Footnote 1].

Add a Belief in a Death…

Think of it. We have a game that has components of total emptiness and utter royal stupidity which allows a belief that death is both an end of life, and that it is painful. And that it is terrifyingly real, and terrifying because there is that darkness beyond it which…aaaaas usual!…all the yet unprojected interesting details of this temporary creation of God, this ego, can be viewed like on a movie screen. And lacking the fundamental truth that it is just a movie, well, the parameters of this game allow for the most terrifying, most extreme feelings of any kind that is possible.

Many of you are no doubt thinking, “Why would God do and make such a hideous possibility?”

Well, remember that, just like the baby, no matter what its fears, is lovingly taken care of by its mother, we are also by Divinity. We are completely in the “hands” of Divinity. As it is said, “Not a blade of grass moves in the wind unless God wills it.”

So the fears and all the darkness are only experiences…they’re just feelings. That means that they are not permanent, having no substance or foundation—like the reality of truth-awareness-bliss does. Now that reality—of truth-awareness-bliss—is not going to change, ever. It is What Is. However, experiences, feelings are fleeting, impermanent, ultimately not real.

If God Is All There Is, and She Can’t Be on Her Side, Who Can?

And why is this difference crucial? Let’s take an example. Let us say your cat was to lodge itself under a porch, which if it stayed there it would die. Would you hesitate to drag that cat out no matter how much it screeched and struggled? Because you knew you were taking care of that cat, you would do it.

Well, that is kind of the way sometimes we have to be treated by God. It is kind of the way we being God have to treat ourselves who are in forgetfulness of that fact. Because, actually to our credit, we have chosen quite an adventure—one with forgetfulness that is allowing all kinds of things to happen that animals cannot experience. But being in forgetfulness we would lose our way back unless we helped ourselves out. And God loves God (God IS Love). So we love ourselves and we are going to help ourselves out… even if it seems to us as forgetful humans that what we are giving ourselves is pain and discomfort, not help.

There Are No Wrong Adventures

But sometimes we choose such an adventure or we see others have chosen adventures that just seem so horrible and wrong that it is impossible to believe a Divine would choose them. But we must remember we are judging these lives and experiences from the view of our limited selves—our selves that are in forgetfulness of our nature as Divinity. So in such a state how could we possibly have any inkling at all of what Divinity would want and why?

There are no wrong adventures. It just seems to deluded humans there are. From the perspective of Divinity, we see that there are always reasons, profound and beautiful ones, for everything that happens and all that exists. Everything is truly perfect … even in its seeming imperfection.

I am going to attempt to give you a look at that: How things can be perfect even in their painful or horribleness. Let me continue. It will all come together, you’ll see.

The Poignancy of It All

Getting back to that metaphor of peek-a-boo: For the baby, Mommy’s face disappears … who knows where? There is concern, distress. Where did it go? Then Momma’s face is suddenly there and everything is bright, beautiful, even more wonderful and joyous than if it had never gone away. For the baby’s appreciation of Mother is heightened by being reminded of the experience of what it is like for her not to be there. You know the saying, absence makes the heart grow fonder. Indeed, sometimes people in relationships perform a sort of peek-a-boo on each other—usually unconsciously—to keep the spice, to keep that edge of feeling, that poignancy, in their love for each other. Keep these things in mind, now.

And remember that in the baby’s experience of peek-a-boo, the darkness that the baby feels—the whatever…the feeling of loss—it’s not permanent; it has no substance or foundation.

The only substance out there that is true is that of Truth-Awareness-Bliss. These other things are fleeting. And we don’t remember it now in human form, but most of Time of the timelessness of the Now, in which we exist—except for like going off on adventures like this human life in which we create time—we spend in that Truth-Awareness-Bliss.

If you are getting an inkling of the beauty of all this, you might see the perfect poignancy of such a game.

There are so many other ways to describe its exquisiteness, too.  I will use your own truth to bring you to an appreciation of this.

Ok, we’re all God…pretending not to be.

Remembering how peek-a-boo works—for a baby or for ourselves in our continuous cycles of forgetfulness and remembrance in life, there is a part of it that we humans always overlook. No doubt we fail always to see it, because it is actually God, and is the only thing that can be God….

I realize that makes no sense to you at all: Where there is God in peek-a-boo or in the things as Divinities we put ourselves through in life—the cycles of pain and then wisdom and awakening that comes from it—sounds outrageous I’m sure. But just continue listening….

This Is the Way, the Teacher, and the Path.

There is no physical world that exists. We know that. Even our sciences reveal that. And there are no words that are anything but a way to block out the vision of essence. So you cannot expect to find God hidden in either the physical world or inside the chaos of our words.

But there is one thing, one thing always that exists, is always present, that contains everything, and that is everything. And it is also the teacher, the path, the way…the way back to remembering … the way out of the darkness…the fear…or any of the more adventurous aspects of reality.

I’ll get to it, but first notice I said adventurous, not negative, painful, or hard.

Let’s go back to that thing that you are God. And you cannot help but be on your side. So therefore what you experience is always going to steer you to understanding. Everything you experience has a purpose of getting you to realizing who you are and bringing you back eventually to your true nature. Would that not make sense? And if you look at your own life’s experiences, is that not what has happened? Is it not what got you here?

So has it yet become clear from this that what I was saying just before about this thing that is overlooked in peek-a-boo, this thing which God is?

Forgetting Where You Put Yourself

The answer is that the experience of the baby is overlooked in the game. The baby goes through all kinds of states of feeling and experiencing of the various experiential flavors that this game of peek-a-boo affords; that is what is the most obvious thing in the game. The same thing happens in the game of life. Indeed, it is truly amazing that our human amnesia can leave out the essence of existence as we go about being blinded by these myriad and distracting physical things.

Continue with All Roads Lead Home and the Multi-Tasking Universe: The Universe is a Vast Expanse of Experience, “Looking” in Different Directions.

Return to Recipe for Game of Humanness — Take Equal Parts Emptiness and Stupidity … Add a Belief in a Death: Experience Is Divinity, Part Five — Life Is the Divine Playing Peek a Boo with Herself

Footnote

1. How we end up believing in death being an end and it being painful while coming into our human form is explained in detail in my writings about our prenatal and perinatal traumas. A good deal of the book, Apocalypse—No! has to to with how our early traumas in the womb and at birth imprint us for life in ways that make us inordinately fearful and untrusting. See especially Apocalypse – No! Chapter Seven: “We Ain’t Born Typical”” and from there on.

Also, a good number of the Prasads of The Great Reveal deal with this subject of humans having a birth unique among planetmates that makes us inordinately fearful of pain and insecure. See especially The Great Reveal, Chapter Eleven: The Third Prasad – Humans Only Half Ready for Life at Birth and from there on.

Continue with All Roads Lead Home and the Multi-Tasking Universe: The Universe is a Vast Expanse of Experience, “Looking” in Different Directions.

Return to Recipe for Game of Humanness — Take Equal Parts Emptiness and Stupidity … Add a Belief in a Death: Experience Is Divinity, Part Five — Life Is the Divine Playing Peek a Boo with Herself

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity

To purchase Experience Is Divinity, or any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

Recipe for Game of Humanness — Take Equal Parts Emptiness and Stupidity … Add a Belief in a Death: Experience Is Divinity, Part Five — Life Is the Divine Playing Peek a Boo with Herself

Evils Are Concoctions from the Minds of Forgetful Divinities: Since God Is All, and Is All Good, How Can Evil Exist Unless Divinity Forgets Who She Is?

How Can God Be Devilish?

So it is only humans, forgetting their nature, who can conceive the incredible horror and act out the most hideous things possible.

But that also is part of the plan or game for humanness. For how could God act devilish and murderous unless He allowed Himself? Think about it.

And I know you’re saying, why would God want to act devilish and murderous? Ok, maybe I’m ahead of myself, but just hold that thought.

How ’Bout if He Allowed Himself to Forget?

But say there was a reason. And I know you think there’s no reason—God is good, blah blah blah, lightness and light and all that; but just check this out now.

How could God act devilish and murderous if He wanted to, unless He allowed Himself, willingly, to totally forget who He is…that is, Goodness, Awareness, Bliss?

Let’s remember that there is no such thing as death. It’s another impossibility. For God is All, and always existing. And all things that seem to be actual things and therefore separate are actually only variations on the One and Only Reality… I say reality, I won’t even say one and only thing or form, for they are illusions, too; they are Illusory props of the game.

It’s simple when you know. But knowing requires seeing or apprehending accurately. And the point of this game as humans is that seeing so clearly is impossible, as we are filled with the illusory. Totally wiping the God consciousness of knowledge, of its foundation, source, whatever, allows a kind of vacuum into which anything can crawl, in which anything can respond…in which the most obvious untruths are allowed to dominate the play of the game as if they were more than just the smoke they are.

It Is the Greatest Adventure

So it is the greatest adventure, fraught with the greatest possibilities of extreme fear, terror, and so on.

In this way God, who is not darkness, creates darkness. Now why would She want to do that?

Remember, that the darkness She creates is only fake darkness. Remember peek-a-boo? The baby’s alarmed…but he was wrong.

If you think of the nature of peek-a-boo…of what is happening, what is involved…. If you’re starting to see that, you’re starting to get it.

God Playing Peek-a-Boo with Himself

So, you see, God cannot possibly be darkness, but in this way He does create it. Now, you ask, why would He do that? I’ll get to that specifically. But for now just think of it as like allowing a game of peek-a-boo in which one does not recognize one’s mother even when she’s in plain sight. So imagine the baby’s cries and traumas then! Imagine: Mommy’s not there, mommy’s there, and the baby still thinks mommy’s not there!

So, it is this total amnesia of the game of humanness that creates the possibility of not even knowing that—not knowing God is actually there … impossible to be anywhere else—even, even when not seen. This amnesia creates the possibilities of even more extreme…oh, how can I say…more intense pain. The baby becomes totally convinced that indeed momma is gone forever…and that he is totally alone, and must live without love…so surely he will die!

Indeed this does describe the state of many a human when in a state of total forgetfulness if you think about it. For, staring directly into the face of God, so to speak, he can be so overcome with fear as to only see the relatively tiny sliver of unique attributes that he, as God, has decided to adopt for this particular game of being in the world, as a human.

It Was in Front of You the Whole Time!

What I’m saying is this total amnesia unique to humans allows for the possibility, unlike any other game, where such fear can be held, that you can totally forget the face of God even when it’s right in front of you. The source of comfort is right in front of you, and all you can see is yourself.

And by that I mean you can see yourself, not you as God, but you as the unique creation that you created yourself so as to try an experiment. Because every, every living thing is an experiment in creation. And so it’s those little things—things that make us different—that might be the only thing we’d see. As humans, most of the time, we don’t see God or even Reality except the parts of them that happen to mirror the limited self we chose to manifest, especially the parts of that self that are hidden to us. So that’s another part of it.

So, the adventure of humanness is such a fascinating game. For it allows darkness and hideousness, and war … murder … torture! … all that we abhor to exist. However, keep in mind that the fact that we abhor these evils—these concoctions from the minds of forgetful divinities—is a sign that we are finding some roots in our true nature which is light and goodness.

Why We Create Hell and Satan

This game even allows the creation of a belief in the opposite of truth … truth being no thing, except goodness, light, and bliss. It allows that humans, in their forgetfulness, and in their fear, existing without a glimmer of real truth, to conjure the opposite! So, a hell is concocted, and even an opposite of God, a Satan.

Recipe for Game of Humanness: Take Equal Parts Emptiness and Stupidity…

So we’ve got a game that has components of total emptiness and utter royal stupidity, which allows a belief that death is both an end to life and that it is painful. Don’t we believe that? Well, that’s not the truth. But that’s what we come to believe. That death is an end, and a painful one, to our lives is what we come to believe coming into human form. [Footnote 1].

Add a Belief in a Death…

Think of it. We have a game that has components of total emptiness and utter royal stupidity which allows a belief that death is both an end of life, and that it is painful. And that it is terrifyingly real, and terrifying because there is that darkness beyond it which…aaaaas usual!…all the yet unprojected interesting details of this temporary creation of God, this ego, can be viewed like on a movie screen. And lacking the fundamental truth that it is just a movie, well, the parameters of this game allow for the most terrifying, most extreme feelings of any kind that is possible.

Continue with Our Divine Adventure in Forgetfulness Has Us Misunderstanding the Pain We Give Ourselves to Wake Up: Experience Is Divinity, Part Six — The Poignancy of It All

Return to Fetishing and Fearing What’s Hidden … Life Is a Dark Screen: To Be Ignorant of Identity with Divinity Is the Purpose of the Human Form.

Footnote

1. How we end up believing in death being an end and it being painful while coming into our human form is explained in detail in my writings about our prenatal and perinatal traumas. A good deal of the book, Apocalypse—No!  has to to with how our early traumas in the womb and at birth imprint us for life in ways that make us inordinately fearful and untrusting. See especially Apocalypse – No! Chapter Seven: “We Ain’t Born Typical”” and from there on.

Also, a good number of the Prasads of The Great Reveal deal with this subject of humans having a birth unique among planetmates that makes us inordinately fearful of pain and insecure. See especially The Great Reveal, Chapter Eleven: The Third Prasad – Humans Only Half Ready for Life at Birth and from there on.

Continue with Our Divine Adventure in Forgetfulness Has Us Misunderstanding the Pain We Give Ourselves to Wake Up: Experience Is Divinity, Part Six — The Poignancy of It All

Return to Fetishing and Fearing What’s Hidden … Life Is a Dark Screen: To Be Ignorant of Identity with Divinity Is the Purpose of the Human Form.

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity

To purchase Experience Is Divinity, or any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel