the game

A menu from which one chooses one’s life focus has been famously derived from consideration of the types of population that are present at the games of ancient Greece: those seeking glory and honor, those seeking gain and profit, and those detached few seeking to understand the entire process. Each of us, I perceive, contains elements of all three and goes about each day in pursuit of each. 

I add a fourth item to the the menu, the menu itself. We are not just things, objects, isolated particles worshipping this personal trinity of glory, gain, and knowledge. We are in relationship. Though we like to think of ourselves as sovereign, we exist only as an interrelating, a continuous dynamic of ebb and flow with all that is.

We are not arriving at the game. We are the game personifying.

As the game personifying, we have five deep ways of moving. We can move toward. We can move away. We can move against. We can move with. We can move as. These are the five moves of Wu Chi Ku. Advance, Withdraw. Force. Dance. Merge.

flatline and exile theology

The "theology of the death of God" (Henry Corbin's phrase) is the theology of the Man-created world, historical, linear, flatlined. Flatline theology, which recognizes Man as Theos, as God, has no working concept of Origin. Flatline theology advocates death by consumption as the holiest communion. 

The "theology of the exiled" (Corbin) is the theology of those who exist in vertical realms while walking in a flatlined world. They know that they are in God and God is in them. God is neither dead nor sleeping. Resurrection is a continuous process.

drag queens all

For our comfort, we see familiar figures represented in the heavens. With the advent of industrial light, the heavens have disappeared from view for many. Lighting up the night has produced the slow death of constellations, the death of gods, and the death of God amongst the self-lit humanoids of the day. Self-lit, we have lost heavenly comfort.

We live in space-time. We insist upon it. We love to maneuver through space-time. It feels solid, real. We may call it a drag (and it is a place of friction) but we love its melodrama and are addicted to space-time “progress.” Drag queens all.

We no longer create constellations in the heavens. We surround ourselves with them and are, of course, the main or major star in their makeup. (Makeup as in made up and makeup as in cosmetics.) 

Our constellation decides who is IN and who is OUT. Those within our constellation are the only ones that matter. All others are mere backdrops, or at times, irritants to our constellation’s drama and worthy purpose. 

Some zoom out of the societal and personal constellations. (Some say they do but have merely created a zoom-out constellation with themselves as stars amongst the zoomers.) The particle-ular point of view is released. No new constellation is made. All is vibrancy. This was once known as being God-intoxicated. 

The athletic feat is to be God-intoxicated while living amidst one’s own and other’s constellations. Why athletic? Because this takes motivation, practice, and training. And who is one’s trainer? The Cosmos Itself, training us all the time.

If I am going to be in a constellation, I choose the one of star athletes, those who choose to amplify their skills and thereby open to ever newer realms, going beyond what was once thought impossible and going beyond the beyond.

the Gospel of God

"These are the things the blessed Savior said, and he disappeared from them. Then all the disciples were in great, ineffable joy in the spirit from that day on. And his disciples began to preach the Gospel of God, the eternal, imperishable Spirit. Amen." (The Sophia of Jesus, Nag Hammadi Library)

We know of the Gospel of Matthew, of Mark, of Luke, of John. We know of the Gospel of Thomas. We rarely hear of the Gospel of God.

Who / What is God? The "eternal, imperishable Spirit." The Life Force. Our Source Sourcing. That-Which-Breathes-Us. The Enlivener and Enlivening.

The disciples began to teach the Gospel of God, not the Gospel of Jesus. They did not form a cult of Jesus nor Jesus organizations. They loved and listened to Jesus and fastened their gaze upon the One to whom Jesus pointed.

And what is the gospel (good news) of God? We are the sons and daughters, the offspring of the Wellspring. We are embodyings of the Life Force, of Spirit. We are God godding, our Source sourcing, our Wellspring springing.

This produces "great, ineffable joy."

secular and theistic

The secular understanding is that we are emergents of the natural order and can be reduced to its elements. The theistic understanding is that we are emergents of the breath and will of God and can be reduced to those two elements, spirit and intent. When we consider that the natural order and God are the same, both and each an emerging process, the secular and the theistic are saying the same thing in different languages. The trap each can fall into is a subject-object split in which "the natural order" and "God" are seen as "out there." They both turn into religions at that point. Each defends its turf and rants and raves.