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Imagine for a minute that you’re God. The Almighty. You’re not only the Alpha, you’re also the Omega and all the other letters in between. You not only made the sun, you conceived of the idea of a sun in the first place. You created light. Time. The stars. The Universe and all the goodies that orbit around in space. All this …and you did it.
Of course, there’s more.
You made the earth and all the animals. You made water and all the “little beasties” that live therein. You made mammals, viruses and a billion other creatures with talents and traits, the ability to locate and relocate, to mutate and procreate. You made them to like some things, but not other things. In short, you made us have preferences of varying intensities. You conceived of earth-bound animals and sandwiched us between animals that can move about with far less obvious gravitational effect: the fishes below and the birds above. You made all these things, or most of them, male and female and taught them how to make little versions of themselves. You made trees, mushrooms, and soil and taught them how to talk to one another in vast and beautiful forests.
And you made humans.
Humans, the most complex and simple, triumphant and tragic of all. Humans, capable of boundless love and screaming terror so horrific it can hardly be described – sometimes within the same day.
You gave all these things choice; the ability to act within their spheres. A bird is not free to write a legal brief due to the limitations of his sphere (lucky for him). A man is not free to climb like a mountain goat or a monkey, try as he may, due to limitations within his sphere. But the spheres may intersect, and this is where so many interesting things happen that provide growth and opportunity, drama, evolution, and magic.
And I would imagine if you were God, that all these goings-on would also provide not a little entertainment as well.
All these things … if we’re playing this game, they’re all related to you, right? After all, it all comes from you. If they’re not related by DNA, they certainly are vis a vis the fact that everything that is, sprung from your mind. They all started out as a blueprint, and you are the draftsman. Of everything.
So, God, you have everything. Since that’s the case, you don’t want for anything, right? I mean, what kind of God still has wants? If you have unfulfilled needs and wants, nothing aside from your power distinguishes you from anything you created. If this were the case, you would be limited by Time. Fulfillment would be found “over there” somewhere, down the road, in the future, after something acceptable happens that fills your cavernous desire. This is so obvious to me that I can’t believe anyone thinks any different.
Instead, I choose to believe that you are, above all, content. (I use the word “belief” with some reservation because “belief” is so exclusionary of “idea” that it routinely stops learning in her tracks.) I understand, then, that nothing really rattles your cage. You’re God, for cripes sake. What could possibly make you discontent, or worse, angry?
I know that this is where I go off the tracks, as far as religion goes. That’s on purpose. After all, religion loves their angry gods. But I don’t believe – there’s that word again – that you can get angry. You’re all-powerful, and yet something can frustrate you to the extent that anger actually arises? I see anger primarily as evidence that a human hasn’t done work on himself in the area in which he’s upset. Therefore, he’s ultimately fearful and frustrated in a particular instance. Hence, anger arises. And I’m supposed to believe that YOU, the Creator of All, get angry?
I’m sorry, but I can’t handle that concept.
If you’re God, you are content and complete. If you’re not complete, you’re not God. Furthermore, a complete thing is a joyful thing. You allow all the little manifestations of you, your creation, the freedom to recognize that fact, or not. It doesn’t affect how you feel about the things you created. How could it? You love them because they’re yours. That alone, because you’re who you are, is enough to guarantee their lovability forever, independent of their actions which can be inconceivably ill-informed or as inspired as you are. After all, some of their actions come because their sphere requires a certain “forgetfulness” – particularly among the humans – so they can develop in specific ways. This is also part of your gift to us. If you were always in front of us, we could never see the divine within ourselves. The gulf between what we observed in you, contrasted with ourselves, would be so great that we would never believe we are a part of you.
I’ve observed that mankind approaches you best within the family relationship. This makes sense because we’re in your family. A child may yell, “I hate you!” to a parent. A mature adult parent doesn’t damn that kid for eternity for doing so. The parent may feel human triggers that manifest as emotion because of the child, but those are human triggers, not deific ones like you exhibit. Familial love, that of connection and acceptance, is the kind of love that feels closest to yours because it’s less conditional. You meant it that way and it was a good idea, as all your ideas are. Tragically, we don’t all get to experience true familial love because parents are fallible, unlike you. But when we do feel it… wow. We feel so close and so related to Life that everything just seems so possible – just like it must for you. Your love, like all true love, is empowering. That is, when we get of our own way long enough to feel it.
This brings me to the concept of choice. Of course, there are consequences to actions, to the power of choice which you gave us. You made the consequences, too – or at least a situation where natural ones could manifest. But what creation does, doesn’t anger the Creator. You’re joy. You’re fearless. You’re complete.
This, in a few hundred words, is you. “You” capitalized, that is. The Sacred. The Holy. The Creator of the Platypus, Plato, Pluto and popcorn (with extra butter).
My question to you is this: what do you want for your creation?
The astute reader probably saw what I did just there. I created “want” in reference to You. I took my human ideal and applied it to your infinite wisdom, timelessness, and perfection. “Want” is the property of mankind, the seedling of anger and war. You, on the other hand, don’t “want” for anything.
My bad.
Let me try again. But this time, rather than focusing on what I think with my human brain that you, God, want for your creation, let me ask myself what Creation can do to feel complete, like you do? When are we most likely to feel as you do, as connected and alive? This is a good question for humans to ask. It’s an easier question to ask from the human perspective for us, rather than acting like God has wants, and if he doesn’t get them, he’s going to guns. Again, those are human experiences and emotions. We want to ask from our own experience, because your experience is incomprehensible to us, yet we want to understand you with our hearts, if not our minds.
The question of what we as created beings in human form can do to feel like you can be described in one word. That word is joy.
Joy, which is deeper than “happy” and a different kind of “content” but which contains them both, is what you are. So, when mankind feels that, it opens a connection to you; one that’s found in no other avenue, or at least not as directly. It fills us with gratitude. This gratitude supercharges the experience of the connection of you with mankind, from his perspective. It tells him in a language he can understand that for all his imperfections he is complete in a sense, simply because he inhabits a moment; a moment created by you for him. The result is the experience that we are loved, no matter what.
It’s important to point out that happiness is not joy. Happiness can come from ice cream, pie, or all kinds of human things. But not joy. Joy comes from peace, however fleeting. It’s a sense that things are as they should be in that moment, instance or situation. It doesn’t imply situational perfection or the absence of pain as much as it implies acceptance. Love is acceptance. Peace is acceptance. All three are components of joy, without the requisite smile that joy provides.
So, my fellow humans, it’s both Passover, Easter and equinox season. For indigenous pagans like me, the Sun Dance is also right around the corner. There are all kinds of things we are going to do in the next weeks or months to signify, facilitate and celebrate our connection to Creator. But if we want to be like this Greatest of All, this Most Complete, this Giver, we will find joy. Joy, the Encompassor of Peace, Love, and Acceptance. The state of being content. The facilitator of gratitude. This is the state we can share, more than any other, with God.
So, hug your family. Make amends where you need to do so. Attend your ceremonies and do the things that you think make you and God joyful. But realize that God is already at 104% in the joy department. The only thing you can do to really show your gratitude for the incredible gift of life and to be like Creator is to find and experience your own joy. Joy in service, joy in ceremony, joy in breathing air and in listening to your beautiful, strong, miraculous heartbeat. Joy in the winning lottery ticket (easy) and joy in the stubbed toe (a bit harder).
Joy is the result of feeling God from the inside out. It’s the facilitator of genius, the key to unlocking your Godlike potential as a human in a time of incredible energy and change. Joyful man is God-like man. This is really important. We need us all to be at our most Godlike, right now, because we are evolving as a species. We are co-creating an existence that’s more beautiful than that which we have now. Or maybe one that used to exist but has been gone for thousands of years for certain human ancestries. Either way, we’re creating a world without war, without pollution, that honors all humans simply because they’re human, and all the other species simply because they are as God created them.
This is where we’re headed.
In short, “joyful man” is also “evolved man”. When he is as he is meant to be, he doesn’t have use for bombs or bullets. He doesn’t seek control over others. He doesn’t manipulate. He doesn’t lie. Rather, he allows. He sees divine humor, like, everywhere. Even his tears sparkle with an acceptance that is full of knowing.
So, as joy and evolution go hand in hand, my fellow blessed humans, please go and find yours. And once you do, come and join the evolution.
Because a joyful evolution is the only one worth having.
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Photo: Getty Images
