Adam Blatner

 

I am a contemplateur, an affected term I made up to make my lazy thinking about stuff sound fancy. It’s a way to play. So I’ve been thinking about the Big Whats-it-all-about, beyond space, time, matter, and energy. I view these categories as fabulous in their infinitude, but still I have a hunch that mind realms also are realities that must be contemplated. I engage in trans-dimensional metaphysics, which is a fancy way of saying that I suspect that reality consists of more than just stuff, and very likely more than anything and everything that we can name.

In this other universe, on one planet-domain, they think that God is Everything-Becoming, but much of it is formative, dream-like, elusive. The “skin” of this unfolding is more solid, three-dimensional, unfolding in the fourth dimension of time that we know of as ordinary reality. This “skin” is a more fixed reality, which allows God to really do experiments.

Experimentation is the activity of subjecting an idea to the test of whether it fits with the other created constraints. Often it does not, and needs to be refined. Sometimes it has seemed like a fine idea but just doesn’t fit and must be discarded—or at least put on a shelf for perhaps another time.

This metaphoric “skin” of the trans-dimensional reality—that existence we call real reality— offers God a chance to manifest more fully, to create that which will stick around a bit and play itself out along with the other creations. Dreams are too elusive. But get this: Sentient life, intelligent life, gets to co-create in a more intense fashion, and it creates a structure for God to enter. Now it’s true that God is Everything becoming, but it’s also true that sentient beings, once they’re evolved, are co-creators who are deliciously just different enough from the creative force part of God to generate the yin-yang of encounter, of surprise, of delight.

Creativity of a joke or dance, of a pleasant exchange with some edge of novelty, these are deep aesthetic experiences, sparkled through our existence like confetti. Play lightens things and enriches them. Creativity, suffused with elements of novelty, surprise, delight, needs to be woven into our theology of bliss. It’s not just the nice feeling of relaxing in a hot bath, aaaaahhhh. It’s also wow!

Creating a Structure for God to Enter

So what if this, too, is part of the grand scheme? I have begun to entertain the idea that our world, our reality, serves this function. Not that God isn’t here all the time. I think that God is us, you and I and we, the everything. And this theory seems to answer the riddle as I imagine it.

I feel my powers waning, and that many of the causes I’ve supported drifting sideways from inanition or mixed goals. I find this a little sad, a little ironic, a little informative about the ways of the world. They are like death, which approaches gradually. My life is good enough, and there are plentiful rewards. I’m not deeply threatened by the aforementioned. It doesn’t really hurt me, but it tempts me to pull back and stop trying. I need not give in to all temptations, though. I’ll do what I can in the service of what I believe in.

What I believe is that there are forms emerging, evolving, that weave together imagination, enactment, the empowerment and vitality of improvisation, the thrill of creativity, the joys of collaborative creativity, the ways we can support and encourage each other. I sense this integration of elements as the coming thing, and perceive it happening in many ways.

Against this springtime-like emergence is the heaviness of tradition, the belief that what we’ve always done and what we’ve always believed is true because we’ve always done it that way. There’s a certain sense of truth here, but it’s based on the illusion of habit. It feels familiar, so it must be so. Yet truth isn’t fixed. What might have been true for a moment in history was really simply something that worked better than what went before. The semantics of “truth” gives the word and what it’s attached to an illusory solidity that doesn’t belong there.

This is eros and thanatos, awakening and sleep, momentum and inertia, rajas and tamas, yang and yin, puer and senex, the interplay of dualities that keep it lively. We must have both in proportion to what we can handle. Either side can be foolishly overdone. They are syzygies, those kinds of opposites, like day and night, light and dark, that are only meaningful as a dynamic pair. One exists in a sense only in its opposition to the other.

Often people find themselves aligned more with one than the other, which is all right; but sometimes people forget that the other is there, or necessary, or in any way good. That limits the consciousness of the ultimate vitality of syzygy. (Or should I say, pulse, systole/diastole, vitality/death, inspiration/expiration, the need for each to operate in the presence of the other?)

So I think that God has created stuff, then life, then consciousness, then the level of consciousness that could begin to conceive of wholeness, God. Then God created-evolved types of consciousness that could contemplate God and then, now, God is inviting us to co-create! We can’t begin to begin to imagine the extent and complexity that is God, but we can and, it seems to me, we must begin to co-create our reality!