Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But thats the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesnt want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever. Of course, you must remember that God isnt shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there werent, we wouldnt know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isnt any outside to him. [With a sufficiently intelligent child, I illustrate this with a Möbius strip—a ring of paper tape twisted once in such a way that it has only one side and one edge.] The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as he and not she, God isnt a man or a woman. I didnt say it because we usually say it for things that arent alive. God is the Self of the world, but you cant see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you cant see your own eyes, and you certainly cant bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding. You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isnt really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find outhow the good people will get the better of the bad. Its the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world. Alan Walts the book
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 21:29:00 +0000