Adam Blatner

That has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Anyway, 99.999 percent or more of everything doesn’t get utilized for the precise purpose for which it was designed. For example, sperm, embryo squids, oak tree acorns, various other kinds of seeds, stars, planets, etc.—most stuff doesn’t directly contribute to its own entelechy. The entelechy of a baby squid is to grow into a full-sized squid, sexually mature, enough to generate other baby squids. Maybe one in a million grow up to do that—the others get eaten along the way. Ditto the other things. All this is to say, poetically, God is profoundly prolific. One could say grossly inefficient, but the thing is that this is the way stuff happens in a cosmos that is billions of years old. Millions of tries to one success, but that success then builds on itself, survives in the evolutionary process.

I was reminded of the way that 99.999% of dream events and images get lost. No sweat. God is inconceivably patient, (The fact that we have a name for large numbers does not mean we can begin to really conceive of them. It’s difficult to conceive of durations in our own lifetime!)

I playfully foresee a time in the future where we remember twice as much of our dreams as now, maybe even ten times as much. It doesn’t matter, though, because the myth being spun out in this micro-essay is that God is patient, prolific, and we get to be part of that process! We get to help God be “born”—that word in quotes, because in uncountable ways, God has been born; the point is that we should not deny to God the idea that Divinity can re-emerge in new, fresh ways, amounting to a Renaissance, a great cultural trend, a new species, new possibilities. Indeed, I grant God the recognition that in uncountable ways, God is born again and again, perhaps in your being.

I say “being” instead of “soul” because all of you is God, your fingernails, your microbiome. But you are not just what you think you are: You are all the levels of depth that you hardly know about, psychically as well as physiologically. And from the depths of your archetypal source to the way you wiggle and think, it’s all God being born. It’s not necessary to hypothesize a soul as something apart from your body-mind, when it’s perhaps easier to recognize that you operate at all the levels of depth, even though your conscious mind hasn’t known this, or thought it explicitly.

As a kid, you didn’t make these distinctions of mind versus body. You were all of you. Our schooling distorted this, separating your mind from your body. Example: Sit still! What kind of craziness is that to tell a kid?

You learned with your whole body-mind, with your intuition and imagination as well as your senses and reason. This was one of the “falls” of humanity splitting off from its natural source.

But it’s all okay. God is (in this myth I’m making up) only about, oh, say, eleven years old, if the whole course of what humanity is, was, and will be is taken into consideration. So our job is to mature a bit. Certainly we should refrain from the temptation to think or act like we “know-it-all,” because we’ve learned enough to compare ourselves with younger kids, people who lived in the olden days. This is a tiny bit true—we do know more—but it is largely illusory—we don’t know all that much more.

The point of this mini-essay is to enjoy in the privilege of being a tiny part of the universe that has actually achieved enough consciousness to know that it’s a tiny part of the universe. Along with that enjoyment is the duty to advance consciousness by a tiny fraction. That’s all we need to do, help God be born a tiny bit. Even that is progress. But think! What could be more glorious? Being a general leading a triumphant march through Rome? Come on! You get to help the God of a trillion trillion life forms on a trillion planets be more born! Wowsie Woozy!

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