Life is starting to seem like a game to me. I had two random strangers chime into my world yesterday to unexpectedly yank me out of my melancholy, the Smoker and the Bag Lady I’m calling them. And last week I had my Drunk Angel tell me to cool it on the drinking and the junk food. These were the Universe’s preferred vessels, or God’s Chosen People, if you will. I’ve also been getting conflicting messages from events, rockstar parking in my crowded non-permit free-for-all of a neighborhood every day lately, and then parking tickets for the dumbest of infractions. The growing business on one hand and overdue bills on the other. Everything is contradictions: obstacles followed by blessings, then more obstacles. On one hand I am feeling more aware and more tranquil than ever, but on the other hand, with my growing business and my growing family, I am facing more challenges than I am used to. The sun-gazing makes things plain to me. It makes me more aware of cause and effect which I think is a mild version of being able to see the future; so I see the various ways anything can go wrong more clearly now too. I realize something: life seems like a game sometimes because it truly is a game. From the darkest tragedies to the most potent joys, from garlic breath to garlic toast, we set this life experience up, right down to the last detail. And then we rigged it to play itself out in response to our states of being, but we don’t get to remember how responsive and pliable reality is until we get here and go through some of it. Some of us never remember. That’s the game. And that’s why sometimes we feel provoked. Or victimized. Or cursed! Life is playing with us.
That’s the way we set it up. By we, I mean all of us combined as one being, the Great One, or the Grand Self, or the Universe or dare I even say-God. If the universe is all one thing experiencing itself and that one thing happens to be a vastly intelligent consciousness evolving; then it makes sense that as we fragment ourselves into trillions, nay, infinite pieces (in the form of all the humans, creatures, insects, plants, flowers, clouds, rocks…you name it) that we would have set it up in a way that ensures that we would, in fact, evolve. Clearly we elected not to keep the memory of this grand plan of ours, so knowing we would have the Great Amnesia, we put in a back up plan. We planted methods for how to remember the truth. Those are the paradoxes, the mysteries. Pondering them and contemplating them has the power to bring back our memory. The Great Amnesia is really just the state we are in normally, it’s the state we are born into, by agreement. It is the state from which we seek enlightenment. Enlightenment is simply our original state of peace in which we understand we are all one, all things are one thing, and there is nothing to fear because this is just a game; it’s the state of our higher self, our self pre-birth.
Consciousness is experiencing Ourself from the perspective of each thing, however that thing perceives; that is what it means to be omnipresent. We say God is omnipresent; because we are all God, all things are God, God is manifest in all life. It would stand to reason that mechanisms would be put into place to make sure our consciousness has a rich environment of opportunities in which to evolve, improve, create. So we tell ourselves to visualize something we want in such vivid detail, but then to hold no expectation of how it will turn out. Another contradiction. But we do this because if you have too rigid an expectation you will strangle the manifestation. Well doesn’t that sound like a needless paradox, like a wasteful mischief put in place by God or the Universe if God or the Universe was a teenage punk? I mean what the hell is that? Want it, but don’t expect it, because then you won’t get it. But let it go, or “die to it”, whatever the hell that means and it will be yours. That sounds exhausting. But that’s just the point isn’t it? We set up a beautiful world for ourselves to play in, water, abundance, sunshine, each other, endless variety and difference to amuse and explore…but we set up little paradoxes to bump up against our little utopia and make us question ourselves, examine our emotions, and come hell or high water, to improve, because that is the object of the game in the first place.
The abundance is still here on earth, it always has been. Our filters made of our beliefs create our experience. What kind of joke is that? Unconscious beliefs create filters that control my perceptions? Well then how the fuck am I supposed to know what’s real? How do I figure out what the hell is really going on? That’s what the challenges are for. They are the mystery and the paradox of life that make us take a longer look at ourselves, all molecules and cells and DNA and muscle and personality and realize, whoa, I’m kind of a miracle, aren’t I? Who in the hell made me? And then we ponder existence, then God. This attitude of pondering is the precursor to humility and has the effect of loosening the filters of false belief we hold that cloud our perceptions. So the false beliefs cause a distortion in our perceptions that cause us to bump into obstacles, which cause us to ponder our existence, which can cause us to examine and over come our false beliefs. What is the point of a crazy intricate cycle like that? The point is to evolve.
We have to become impatient to learn compassion when people are impatient with us, a paradox, but it leads to joy when the lesson is learned. All the lessons do. See, the “peace that passes understanding” as the Bible describes it is sitting right here, we just have to recognize the opportunities to access it. The opportunities are always the challenges. The challenges set this journey of seeking into motion. They are catalysts for growth, every single time. But because they are sucky (the paradox) we tend to overlook these opportunities and sink into misery. Abundance is still right there. But as we add on more unconscious beliefs we can see even less. I think this abundance is what Jesus was talking about when he said “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”, and these perception-altering false beliefs are what he was referring to when he said “Don’t be concerned with the speck in your brother’s eye, rather take the plank out of your own eye first.” So life is actually a game. We designed it that way. So we might as well learn the rules, then master it, then win every time. It’s a game of hot potato where we juggle around tragedies and randomness and war and confusion just so we can all see how we handle it. It’s nothing serious, so let’s all just relax.
But another paradox is hidden here because there is only tragedy and randomness and war and confusion because of the Great Amnesia, which makes us think we are all separate. It’s not a bad thing, in fact it is normal. It is the first rule of the game after all. Consciousness, meaning you and me, fragment, we forget the point, and trying to remember the point is the point. Because the game is about evolving consciousness in the first place. It’s a game about perception and awareness and mastery, so the paradoxes necessarily will mess with those things. Perhaps the greatest revelation we can have is that we are all in this together so maybe we can learn to cook the potato instead of hurling it at each other. The idea of separateness is our greatest illusion. When enough of us remember that we are truly, literally, spiritually and molecularly all one fucking thing, we will reach a critical mass and cooperation will replace competition. A new truth will be revealed to us finally, one we couldn’t see before but we can now see was obvious all the time: when we start working together those things we threw off like a hot potato before, the disease and the helplessness and the desolation evaporate like the mirages they really are.
If we are a fragment of the whole experiencing itself then we agreed to this, we signed on long ago before the big bang, before we split off and radiated from the stars through the eras into this moment on the outer edge of reality with the Great Amnesia. That’s also why there is such power in the present moment and why the new agers go ‘cray cray’ over the idea of “now” because in the literal sense now is the edge. This very moment is the latest and greatest and newest thing the universe is experiencing because it is experiencing it now. We are a living fragment of the cutting edge of creation and existence. Cooperation is the next evolutionary leap. We are just a group of molecules banded together to create a conscious form….well, it turns out that so is everything else. We are greater than we think we are, and more connected than we have been lead to believe. So let’s work out the kinks in our shared reality together, because it just so happens to be our destiny.
I gazed for five full minutes today. Something about this feels sacred to me, like a pinnacle has been reached. In the game of life I feel like I just got a “get out of jail free card” or passed go and I’m collecting my $200. Everything that happens is an opportunity for me to improve, I know that now. I can’t ever not know that again, so it makes it much easier to be okay with whatever life throws at me, because whatever it is, it’s the next opportunity to evolve.
SIDE EFFECTS: You can start to get overly philosophical after five minutes of gazing.
BENEFITS: You become more aware, more alert, more conscious of the nearness of prosperity to you. You can begin to taste it. And it tastes like garlic toast.
