Created December 10, 2021
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog post.
When you hear yourself talking to yourself in your mind and using your name, what do you think?
As in:
Bill, you know you are not going to forget an idea like that, you don’t have to write it down, stop acting crazy.
Perhaps you dialog with yourself:
Why am I addressing Bill as if I were someone else? I am Bill.
No, I Am That I Am. As I always have been and will be. I know the past and future. But I – in many forms – am changing it every day, thank Myself! Otherwise I’d be alone for eternity. I give spinoffs self-control so I can laugh at myself as they/I muck things up, and through my I’s I can feel a wide range of emotions with incredible intensity, because I think I have skin in the game.
Who is Bill, then? I asked, my vision having been suddenly altered so that I now seemed to be hovering within the back of Bill’s head.
Our car this time!
An idea that has never occurred to you? Or one that since the 60s has gripped you? That it could all be the one videogame, all that exists, and that naturally who each of us is, is a faithful microcosm of The One Self, an avatar in a videogame but with no memory of your real life. As in the movie Total Recall.
With earthly videogames, we don’t so totally lose ourselves in our character. This will become less and less of an unsound barrier as virtual reality (VR) evolves. We already have feelies and have known how to add smellies for decades. With a little plastic straw in your mouth soon you can have tasties.
So VR fans will see God sooner than most of us.
“The human body serves as a receptacle for the divine, allowing it to enter into the world,” writes Michel Quinot, quoting the Patristic tradition. The writer has deep knowledge into, and feeling for Orthodox theology and its art, and a way of writing that shifts one into that thrilling feeling about life.
He writes: “God… is said to have clothed himself in flesh in order that man might be clothed in divinity.”
Let’s say that part of it is true.
Before stipulating any other religious belief beyond that, why is that part so hard to take seriously?
“That part” being that you, reading this now, are and have always been the author of the Universe, the Universe Itself.
We recent/still apes have the concept of VR videogames in which the player can lose self into the character being played. Something unimaginably larger than yourself in terms of information processing power could easily exist.
You have an awareness of yourself, so it’s not a leap to assume this even more powerful likely-to-exist mind could also possess this gift.
At minimum, more powerful minds than ours are a near certainty somewhere in the Universe.
So stepping from imagining that supermind, to where I perceive truth lies, please step up to imagining that you are the Universe.
What is looking out your character’s eyes is the Universe, not a part of it but the whole Universe is looking out your eyes.
Same for every other character in the improv play.
Life is an improv play.
And also an improve play. The trajectory of the story is from spiritual and physical rags to riches, by our own dedicated self-improvement.
Not just a book fad since the 60s. That’s the main thing we’re here to do. We’re also allowed to have fun and free will. And pleasure and wealth of all kinds.
Since we now all know this, can we now all start having fun together instead of what our characters have cooked up for Us?
Best to all,
Bill