chaos

Ram Dass is a treasure.

I'm grateful for his presence on my path.

Be Here Now was such great advice.

I will take any subject and bend and twist it.

Now is chaos.

You can't understand the now without the past and the future.

The past paints a picture and the future shows you possibilities.

Now is energy without definition.

Chaos.

Maybe the now is the illusion?

All that exists is the past and the future which converge to make up this fleeting moment called now.

You can never put your finger on the now, instead it remains undefined.

You could say it is always now and the past and the future are memories and projections.

Time and distance create the past and future.

By the time I feel gas in my stomach that sensation is in the past.

What is that?

I live in the past.

The now is the past.

All experience is the past.

Distance gives us perspective on our past.

You're saying there is no now.

It's undefinable.

How do you explain this?

Read a book.

You have either read the words or the chapter is to come.

You're not stuck on a word.

It's known or unknown. 

There's no now only known and unknown.

As you know, there's the writer of this drama and he's from the future.

The story is what's real.

Well, it's an illusion.

A real illusion.

Now is where we are in the story.

The story is always moving.

If the story ends there's no more known and unknown. 

There's nothing.

Void.

So, what's now?

I don't know.

I think it might be something.

It's the opposite of nothing.

So, if you're in the now you're in something?

Probably.

To not be in the now is to be in nothing.

Non-duality.

No story.

If you want to find unity, then don't be in the now.

Now is separation.

Now is the story.

Now is duality.

I think I understand. 

The Goddess comes up with the ideas.

That's the known part.

The unknown is how the writer will write the story.

The story is the child.

The now is unknowable because I must transform the energy of now into something decipherable I can understand.

That process relegates my understanding of now to the past.

There is now but it's unknowable.

You can't understand it.

It's chaos.

You give it meaning and create the past.

It's best to not know.

be here now

Be Here Now. Each word in the simple sentence has a profound teaching. Be is the act of being present. Here is defining that wherever you are in the universe is here. Now is similar to here, in that it is always now. My first exposure to this phrase was reading a book by Ram Dass over a decade ago when I was getting into the whole spiritual scene, its promises, and paths. I remember thinking it was a good read, but man this guy is out there! The path unfolds in due time and everyone's road is a little different. I wasn't ready for that part of the life course at the time. It's interesting to look back upon my progression through my unique path. I was initially attracted to the intoxicating lectures of Terence McKenna. The bard wove a spell of philosophical meanderings, pointing out the trap of both culture and spiritualism, as well as being a master of bullshit. He is seriously entertaining. He was quite the fool. I did notice many tried to ride his coattails - an all too human outcome. I recall listening to his brother talk about him with contempt and with good reason. He would have been subject to his non-stop meandering dialogue and fanciful speculations. I think Dennis was incredulous and a little jealous of Terence's appeal. Terence was a good introduction to the plant medicine world and eventually you see he is like sugar. Too much sugar isn't good for you but it sure does get you to crave the experience. I moved on to explore paths with more discipline and found Alan Watts. Alan was also a great entertainer and tireless talker. Alan was well versed in the spiritual traditions of the world and could elucidate them well. He was exactly what I needed, especially when he would emphasize that you need to find out who you are. That was the big one for me and allowed me to keep my spiritual independence after discovering my true identity. I didn't need to hang on to a method which would reduce me into a follower. I could give up methods because I knew the truth and thus embark upon a journey of discovery of what I wanted to know, not what someone else wanted to teach me in order to keep me trapped in a game of seeking. Alan would explain we constantly seek a higher authority in order that we don't have to face up to the truth that we are it. It's tough because eventually you come across the question of suffering and see your role in it. No one wants that. Alan would also explain that if you let yourself be talked out of who you are, then you deserve it. He would say a spiritual teacher is someone who steals your watch and sells it back to you.

As I was transitioning from an exploration of my darkness and onto the final leg of the journey, the path of the heart, I returned to Ram Dass. He passed away at the same time, which is apropos because all my spiritual teachers seem to have left me. It is about attachment, and they are better teachers without the body and its demands. It's a funny thing where you see spiritual teachers making a living by selling their spiritual wares, leading groups, and charging for lectures. I thought they lived on sunlight and air? It's like the whole retreat thing where, "My god they charge you money to attend. I get fed and have a nice room. Wait, I must pay for this? Did Jesus charge for his sermons?" I solved the problem for myself by being attracted to dead spiritual teachers.

Ram Dass is heart centred. Its honey drips throughout his talks. I hear him talk about energy and I see he has a next level understanding of this fundamental nature of the universe and then he transitions seamlessly into the humanity of our predicament. He describes methods of instruction without denigrating them. For instance, a non-dualist is incorrigible and will one up anyone who doesn't subscribe to the philosophy. Ram Dass would describe methods such as duality with the worshipping of objects of veneration and the value in it. Eventually, you give up all methods when ready. You kill the Buddha when it's time. You can even let go of non-duality and Be Here Now.

Be Here Now. I figured out a few years ago I'm in hell. Earth is hell and I'm in it. Why did I get sent to hell? I laugh about it. Desire attracted me to the carnival. Along with this thinking is that when I'm ready to get out of prison I will leave and be free. I project into the future a better existence minus a body that traps me on earth. You can see what I'm getting at. I can leave now while in a body. I don't have to stay in my prison cell. I can unlock the door of my heart NOW. I can transform hell into heaven on earth. Another spiritual teacher of mine, don Howard, who of course is dead, would tell us, "You don't find heaven, you realize it." The secret sauce to the earth game is to wake up to the hell around you and transform your heart in order to find heaven on earth. If you can do that, you win the game and when you leave you get a prize.

I can try the heaven game and maybe get a little too righteous and then return to the heart which is in the middle of the whole construct. The earth game has it all waiting for you. I don't have to play others' hell game. Sure, I must participate in the world and its unpleasantness, but I can transform it into a heart-opening idyllic experience. Why not? Be Here Now. How do I know whether the next life is going to be any different? Free of the body will present a new challenge. The solution is the heart and love. The advice I'm being given is to practice that NOW. HERE. BE LOVE.

why not be here now

Ram Dass taught me this mantra Be Here Now. He learned it from a guru brother on his first trip to India where he would be complaining about the physical journey they were on in addition to talking about the past. Finally, his friend told him to let all that go and just "Be Here Now." It's something I've been aware of while meditating. I have a busy mind and thoughts are always running through me. It's the product of being my own best friend throughout my life. I like being alone and it is my comfort zone. I'm never bored or in need to do anything because my mind keeps me company. I've never suffered from depression or anxiety even though because of my predilection for being in my head I am predisposed to those conditions. I am grateful for this part of me as it has allowed me to surf the wave of life with relative ease in that I don't get too low or too high.

I had been going through some personal turmoil and of course this put my mind into overdrive because I was searching for answers and anything which would allow me to understand the experience. When communing with tobacco snuff, I was having trouble quieting my mind. It wanted to chatter, and it wasn't until finally I remembered Ram Dass' teachings about Be Here Now that I was able to centre and just let everything go. Just be in the moment. Of course, when out of the medicine I had to examine the profundity of the teaching. Like a lot of things I come across on the spiritual path, I get an understanding of the concept, but it always seems to go deeper and when you are ready the teaching flowers. Just Be with yourself Here where you are Now at this very moment. I realized the journey to get here to now is unique in that it's the sum of all my choices and actions. Being at this place at this time is the true result. It must be. It reminds me of a saying about the Stock Market in that it is never wrong. You may disagree with it and complain that the company you have invested in is undervalued but the market has set the price, and it is what it is. This is my life. Where I am now is what I have sown. My suffering is a direct result of the path I have taken.

A good friend of mine who passed away a year ago often comes to me when I enter this state of just being in the moment. I asked about my suffering and in his glib way he said it's in the cards. It sure is! It's what I wanted and why I made the choices I made. They had good odds of causing this outcome. Maybe this is what you want. Have you ever thought of that?

I had thought of it and realized there was a good chance it is what I desired. It's good to have confirmation of what you intuit.

I also know suffering is the catalyst for transformation. I got to re-examine my overarching mission statement and it's to walk the path of the heart fully to the end in honour of the Great Goddess. I'm a perfectionist and with a lot of things if I can't excel at them, I just won't do it. Walking this path has brought failure into my life. It's harder than I thought because my ego wants me to be perfect, especially at this stage of the journey. I should be someone people look up to and a holder of wisdom, not a fallible human being. Imagine being my age and still being a screw up?

It put into perspective something Alan Watts taught me early on in this ridiculous spiritual journey. He said when you embark on some ideal to better yourself and embrace what we call the higher self, the ego just moves up a level. It's so true. There's always this dynamic with appearances in relation to others who you must put on a show for. Oh, you are going to be enlightened now, are you? I guess you will become perfected and infallible. I will have to double down on my efforts to conceal what isn't perfect. Ha ha. There's always going to be the interplay between the superego as the judge, which is reflected in your peers or culture, and the ego - no matter how you define yourself in this human body. There's no escape. The best thing to do is just recognize it and have a laugh. We all know the ultra-spiritual are hiding something or if not, they are miserable.

What I get out of the whole dynamic between the ego and the superego is that they are the ones which keep this drama going. Your base desires as defined by the id, animate your existence and is the reason you incarnated into a body. The whole game to conceal what you want then creates the cast of characters which makes earth a good show. As I write the chapters of my life while living in the now I see everything unfold as a result of my choices.

This is my story.

big picture thoughts

Plato declared: "Time is the moving image of eternity." I heard this a while ago and sort of understood. I thought it meant that eternity marches on endlessly and the waypoints are marked by time as it unfolds.

My recent trip to Peru involved seeing into the future. I peered into events that were going to take place in my life and six months later I can report that these events happened. The divinatory experience didn't give me a play by play of what was to take place, but I got the outline. It calls into question free will as I could have altered the future I witnessed. This gives the illusion of free will. I mean if the future is a known quantity, then everything is just to unfold, and you swim along in the current. How do I reconcile this? It seems quite easy. The unfolding of eternity would eventually reveal to me I could see into the future and alter it. My decisions are known and will play out so I do retain free will because I don't know what I'm going to do. The universe knows.

Because of what has happened, I got a complete understanding of what Plato revealed. I have been taught repeatedly that all that exists is the "Now" and any conceptions of past and future are peculiar human inventions based on an ability to remember what you have been witness to and subsequently being able to project into the future with reasonable confidence. Also, being able to objectify our surroundings allows us to sense the passage of time, especially when we connect it to motion. The rising and setting of the sun and its return to various waypoints over the course of 365 days gives us valuable markers which we in turn use to mark passages of what we call time. Where Plato comes in is because everything exists all now and is revealed to our senses in an orderly fashion.

The way I explained it to myself is that eternity is one big painting. For some reason we are all drawn to look at the same spot on the painting. Originally, we just saw the base layers of the composition before we started noticing more subtle details. As we move along more is revealed of this giant work of art. We start to see more of the picture, and it all starts to come into focus. As a species, we lock to the same vibration which prevents us from seeing the big picture or being able to go deeper into the shadows and contours of the art. If we can discover a way to escape from the frequency that imprisons us, then we are free to explore the off-limit portions of the painting and see the big picture.

That is what the magical plant medicine cactus Huachuma did for me. The heavy use of it every other day over a two-week span changed my vibration. I uncoupled from consensus reality and went off into some uncharted territory. I was witnessing my psyche split out into others where I could see parts of myself in them. Different hierarchies of being were revealed to me. There were planes of consciousness which mirrored each other but were telling a different story. I was King at one level and my actions were interpreted in novel ways at other levels. I was God and I was waking up. At this level it manifested as the destruction of our world. And I saw into the future. I saw myself as God finding my Goddess. King with Queen. Bull with Heifer and at this level I found who I had been searching for. As I cycled through different frequencies a new story would emerge. I was shown what was going to happen and at another level I warned myself to change course and leave it be. I made my choice which coincided with what I was shown.

It's all now and we are all one, cut from the same cloth. At the top level are the all; a step down and we become Goddess and God. As we cycle down into different frequencies of being, we become the many. At our core, we are fantastic storytellers and eternity is our greatest play yet.

enlightenment travel agent

There's a life balance towards which we all have to pay heed. By this assertion I'm describing our incarnation which involves fulfilling our dreams. Dreams are code for desires. There is a reason we are all in the beautiful freakshow and if you look within you will certainly find it. The balance I am mentioning is due to a concept called reciprocity. We make deposits in this cosmic bank which gives us the capital to pursue our desires. This is a process I've discovered that is never ending and as you progress through life, it just becomes a little more highbrow.

Let me explain further: I went on a spiritual trip at middle age and fell for it hard. I sidestepped the tentacles of culture that are set up to ensnare - you know the church, the eastern disciplines run by westerners, the new age scene, the guy on YouTube with the pretty eyes and all the answers - you know, the whole lot of them. I'm not a joiner and prefer the lone wolf gambit, I'll figure out my own path. It's uniquely for me and I'm not in your shoes so don't take my words or actions as gospel. I became a repository of knowledge and have all the receipts for the accumulation of gobs of knowing. Like a good stew, I then let it marinate while continuing to explore. My path took me from books to getting out in the world and then going into my inner world. I highly recommend the adventure and can help you with a similar itinerary if you wish. I can be your enlightenment travel agent.

There's no certificate for enlightenment. Oh, maybe there is. Perhaps some establishment will give you a piece of paper extolling your spiritual accomplishments after you give them a chunk of change. The point I'm making is if you have an independent streak, no one is going to bestow the title of enlightened upon you and furthermore because it is so nebulous and undefined, you'll always be twisting in the wind wondering if you can now mingle with the holy set. Allowing others to anoint themselves is bad for the spiritual business. As with all human endeavours, we need to appeal to an authority with the power to bestow honourifics.

What I'm getting at, tongue in cheek, but with a lot of truth based on my journey is that intuitively you will know when you know. What is it that you know? You know who you are. You know why you are here. You know the path forward. You want to help others see it and allow them to progress at their own pace.

A cold plunge isn't going to bring you to enlightenment. You know what will? Sinking into your many faults and making the mirror so present you will see it. Overload yourself with what makes you repeatedly fall down to the point you finally acknowledge it. Then the real work can begin where you transform those faults into strength. You walk through the fire and before perishing you turn yourself into a woman or man of steel.

I'm writing about this because the time is at hand. I have wanted to be of service and give back. I didn't know how to do this. I'm not an extrovert and struggle playing the game of wanting to help groups of people. Frankly, I suck at it. I couldn't start a men's club or a spiritual group. I'd hate it and look for a way out.

I wrote this a few months before my recent trip to Peru. I re-read it recently and it sums up my path of service:

I live a good life. Giving back involves service. I have gifts I can share with those who are looking for answers. I can give them knowledge and understanding and steer them in directions which will help them find what it is they are looking for. I've been through the fire and came out the other side. Fulfillment of the spiritual path is the most difficult undertaking of your lifetime, propelling you through challenges and encounters with the darkest of the dark. Making good choices always works out. Once you see the answer to the multitude of tests, you can let go of the fear and find your way.

I have life capital I can use to invest in others. I can hoard what I have as security against whatever is coming my way, or I can start spreading it around now. I can die with millions in the bank or Be Here Now in service. I've discovered the secret for my happiness. It's to be free. You need some coins to be free, but not a lot. The road ahead is well illumined. That's the startling point of this whole trip. I expected a trip into the fog of not knowing and mystery. The clarity is razor sharp.

My path forward is one of service for those who want to know. Service to the Great Goddess and to show the way towards healing and fulfillment of desires. You are free to call those desires your life mission. I will be a guide and point the way towards wholeness of self.

jewels of relativity

So, you want to live forever as who you are? The inner knowing that you are something tangible has you wondering if that essence sticks around post-expiration of the body. If you take the eastern path, you lose the attachment to self. You are to return to the all, God, the void, nothingness or whatever you wish to call it. You are everything and so playing a minute character in a vast sea isn't what's in store for you. You return to the all and are everything. But what if I want to retain the outcome of this project?

I'll take Einstein's path of relativity and Ram Dass' Be Here Now. Einstein teaches perspective and that it all depends on the situation when describing if something is true. In that sense I can envision we are the one and the many. We are God having an adventure among many avatars of the oneself. We are also that solitary avatar, playing the game without a clue of who we really are. I think that the unveiling of who I am, and this great game of self-discovery is reserved for the future when I drop the biological body. Ram Dass teaches it's all here and now. I don't have to wait.

Everything just is. Time is a function of our senses and because we can detect motion, we keep track of cycles which we call time. We convince ourselves that a reward or punishment awaits us in the future. Your reward or punishment is happening Now. Fancy that, I can go to heaven or hell in this lifetime.

The polished jewel in the universe, Indra's net, reflects the brilliance of all the infinite jewels. That jewel is you. Your container of feminine love infinitely reflects the light of the masculine. You are the One and hold within you all. Every jewel I examine is God and cannot be separate from all other jewels. Without you, the universe doesn't exist. Through this biological life you are self-reflecting. You are examining your own reflective qualities. You can polish your diamond and shine even more, or you can muddy it up to a faint glow. It's all part of the menagerie of existence and the participation in the creation of the universe. The individual jewel is relatively you, not separated, because what makes you you are the others. The same can be said about every jewel.

We take incarnation into a demanding situation such as the earth to increase our brilliance. Earth is the metaphorical cleansing of the waters of incarnation. The ancients would create stories of brilliant stars and constellations descending into our material world to be cleansed, and then reappear seventy days later to be reborn. We chase desires and learn to love in the most difficult of situations. We are given the chance to polish our gemstone. The shine is here and now.

So, back to the question. Is your essence tangible? Yes! At this very moment you are the central jewel of creation. You are a jewel which reflects all. You are the light of the universe. Without you, there is nothing. You hold within your shine, all. You are touched by all and you touch all. You will live forever as your jewel. From the perspective of being able to see differences, you see a jewel that is part of the many. From a different position of relativity, you are everything.

rise up embrace release

My brain is a fascinating machine. I feed it knowledge; it digests it over the course of a relatively short time into understanding and from this understanding grows wisdom. This process is repeatable and it has happened enough that I can internally quantify it, though to quantify it externally would be difficult other than recording my understanding of information I have fed into it.

The knowledge we generally feed into the brain comes from our everyday experiences. We live within a tightly held frequency that spills out in all dimensions so that we get hints of obfuscated forms of consciousness but we can’t grasp them for long. It leaves us with the nagging question of whether these other dimensions are ‘real’ or not. All is energy and the energy is in motion. What is energy? It is a vibration. The vibration is motion that we perceive. When we measure the motion we discern frequencies.

Everything is here and now. We are limited by perception. The frequency I lock to creates my world. We can go to heaven or hell now; there’s no need to wait until death. The energy of dead ancestors is here and now. That plane of consciousness is available if you seek for it.

I chose a seed body to incarnate my pattern of energy, in order to come forth in a plane of existence that would allow me to attain self knowledge over buried aspects of self I ignore. Within my current life I then develop further strategies to keep these traits hidden however they are more accessible than ever. We all get lost in the incarnation and forget not only our origin but also our impetus. The journey is always there waiting for us to re-engage, get back on the ship, and sail onwards towards understanding. I don’t think there is a destination or an end to it. I realized this the other day while walking my dog through the woods. There’s no destination or goal on this walk; instead it is the journey that’s the thing. That seemed so obvious. Experience is the teacher. I know I only conquered fear through experiencing full on fear and then taking it on in a struggle for survival. The walk is about exploring, becoming aware of your surroundings, and living in the moment. Aha! The destination is to be here now. Thanks Ram Dass! Eventually we turn around and head back. The natural cycle of the day turns to night. We rest and then rise up again.

I look back now on my ceremonies in the the Amazon jungle and the Andes mountains with Huachuma, that first and foremost acknowledge and celebrate Pachamama, with awe and reverence. The final ceremony this last trip moved me to tears as I understood how she created our universe out of love in order that we could play and understand. The wisdom of the opening of the Tao Te Ching expresses this sentiment,  "Heaven and earth begin in the unnamed: name’s the mother of the ten thousand things.” (Ursula K. LeGuin translation)

It’s always been the Goddess behind creation and it is our destiny to eventually destroy it. Along the way maybe we can show some respect while we head to the inevitable decline and destruction. We can embrace love while we fall from the grace of the great mother.

My pattern of energy animates the body and I take care of it allowing for this experience. Everything is like the breath; it rises and it falls. The body grows and then it decays. The growing is a time to explore the wondrous feats that can be accomplished and the power inherent in our condition. The decay is a time of introspection and insight where if you let go of the clinging to life on this plane of existence then you can step back and start to understand it. Stop being so uptight and blow it out.

The answer seems to be motion. We are deathly afraid of death however we love and are addicted to nouns. If we persist in objectifying then will come death and suffering. We love institutions that have staying power. The rock is what we ultimately look towards to express this ideal. We want to capture and live in a frozen moment and defeat the ravages of time however time is undefeated and claims all. What a predicament! If we change the way we think then we can win this game. Isn’t that cheating though? No and here’s why: If you look around it is easy to see nothing lasts. Everything is in a constant state of growth and decay; life and death. We can deny it all we want but it is self-evident. We can create languages that accentuate nouns as part of the sentence structure but it is still a way to fool ourselves into thinking there is a way to maintain this facade of the character and institutions we have created. Changing the way we think will extricate us from the trap that causes suffering, with the bonus of being able to joyously play the game of life and build the best damn character you can imagine.

By dying we defeat death. That’s a weird statement to make as we understand death as annihilation. If you embrace motion and understand that you rise and fall endlessly then you will get it. Motion is the impetus behind our transformation and this transformation goes on without end. Clinging to non-change will lead to a painful death. Letting go and trusting what is undeniable leads to grace and to living a life that sails on over both smooth and rough waters, marvelling at what comes next.

Surf the waves of time through being in motion with it.

So what is energy? It’s motion that is in motion. Try wrapping your head around that one. Try objectifying a verb. At slower speeds it looks like solid particles and at higher speeds it is a waveform pattern. Energy rises and falls. It’s string theory without the string. Ultimately I intuit that energy is unbridled love and all that has come forth for us in this universe is derivative of that love. Yes even the pain and the suffering. It’s all love because only through love can we face up to the truth of who we are and stop denying it. We are forced to acknowledge the hate and thus we can transform it. Love embraces all regardless of prejudice or behaviour.

Love is the beating of your heart. It rises and falls. The creation of the vibration leads you back to source. The heart is your umbilical cord that connects to the Goddess. It beats out your unique pattern, your signature called your soul, that binds you to the all. She creates. I destroy. We are harmonious. We are the constituents of motion. We are everything. We are nothing. She is the rising and I am the falling. 

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.