belief

Alan Watts says the spiritual is transient. Conversely, the seekers among us look towards an ideal of eternal life thinking we can lock ourselves into one manifestation and find solace in living forever as an unchanging monolith. Look around you: nothing lasts! That is what is revealing about the nature of existence. Derived from that observation is the sacredness of music and of dance, which are activities that are play and have within them no real objective, competition, or a restraint of time. They are performed for the sake of performance. To play is to behold the divine.

We in the west look towards the future, to a time when we will be rewarded with eternal life for our righteous achievements within this lifetime. Even the eastern traditions push us towards union with the godhead after getting off the wheel of reincarnation. Curiously, they also contradict with sayings like “Be Here Now.” No wonder those starting off on a spiritual path are confused after sampling the spiritual smorgasbord. If time is an illusion and all there is, is the now, why do we look towards some future goal of samsara or a kingdom of heaven? Existence is now. This is it. This is heaven at this very moment. Don’t you get it? The spiritual is the performance, the dance. We are all notes of the eternal song. We aren’t going anywhere but we are here now! To grasp the all is to live freely in the now and realize truth is now and truth is always changing. I’m the all come forth and then I will be the all returned; a wave of energy that can't be defined by time and space because all you can do to define me is metaphorically take a picture and claim that picture is me. The illusion of time and space are such because they are measurements; nothing but attempts to capture the moment and the object. To wit, creating a static noun by delineating an event in time and space. I am an event come forth recognized as an individual, an ego, playing a part in this divine body I have been blessed with. When released from this body, I will live in a truth of recognizing the all and that I am everything all connected. It is all relative.

However, nothing is stopping you from playing along with whatever you want to believe or manifest. Notice I used by convention the word "play." Your higher feminine and masculine selves will play whatever part you want them to play. They don't have a role. We assign them the role and they play it. They just are and we assign them a role to which they artistically perform with aplomb. The domineering god the masculine higher self plays to the best of his ability because that is the role we asked him to play. We sent our feminine higher self away, locked her up, and on my hero's journey which I choose to play, I get to rescue her from the dragon I created because that story is timeless.

Along the same line of thought, we are in the age of reason because that’s what we choose to believe and as a culture that’s what we teach. Magic is gone because we don’t believe in it anymore.

God exists if you believe he exists. If you don’t believe, then he doesn’t exist. You see it is you, you are god, and you are the world’s foremost stage actor and this is the grandest stage of them all. You have hid this from yourself so the show can go on. If you ask the actor within, the "higher self", to play god then by all means god he will perform and he will rock it out. What a magnificent performance making us believe. He will sweep all the academy awards. Glory to god!

Exist and then we don’t exist. It is truth now but maybe not later. I am a self now but probably not later. So, there is this transience of perceptual unity and of non-unity that may provoke a longing for unity or perhaps a struggle to hold onto selfhood for as long as possible. Perhaps, collectively, the togetherness is bliss; please no more adventure, but eventually I yearn to ride the roller coaster of many selves. The actor comes out of retirement and enlivens the grand stage of what we call life once more and makes us all believe.