I heard this intriguing prayer: \u201cLord, if you can forgive the many little jokes I\u2019ve played on you, I\u2019ll try to forgive the one gigantic joke you\u2019re playing on me!\u201d I vaguely recognized that God\u2019s big joke is that we die.<\/p>\n
I pondered this: How is it a joke? Well, our life story at this level of reality is over. Poof. Perhaps the joke is that we awaken to a realization that this life story was only a part of the story, a minuscule part, indeed. We are so taken by the vast sweep of the greater story that we are inclined to forget the details of the limited story of one lifetime. It\u2019s almost funny, the ha-ha awareness that \u201cSilly me! I thought \u201cI\u201d was<\/em> \u201cit\u201d mixed with, \u201cBoy, that sure fooled me.\u201d It\u2019s not a mean joke, really, just a kind of awakening where you realize that what you thought was so was only a dream. Or that the peek-a-boo game you played when you were one year old: Bet you can\u2019t see me behind my hands (where I can\u2019t see you)\u2014flips and then, surprise! Here I am! Giggle-laugh! <\/p>\n The Vast Sweep of the Greater Story<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s even better than God creating the universe, if you can imagine this! God delegates! Truly, God is not \u201cin control,\u201d nor does God even desire full control. It wouldn\u2019t have the aesthetic pleasures of adventure and discovery if it were all fully intended, would it? So everything is empowered at its own level of creativity to co-create! God explains: First, I can\u2019t do it all, because \u201cdoing\u201d is a peculiarly human construct, a residue of the illusion of intentional or caused action, an illusion of\u2014what\u2014two year olds? We think we do things. <\/p>\n Of course, we do! But not as much as we think we do. Some. But there\u2019s the illusion of \u201cI\u201d who does things, personal intentionality, will: It\u2019s partly true, but the other part that isn\u2019t so true tends to be obscured. That many acts and their source and power or skill arise beyond our will is obscure to us. We think we did it all, when in fact we were the trigger, releaser, and to a variable degree, guide.<\/p>\n What gets obscured are elements of innate talent\u2014which is the degree of permeability we are to higher intelligence\u2014; habit\u2014the degree we\u2019ve done it before, an unconscious part of our nervous system for which we take credit; and other variables. The point is that self-as-vanity takes credit for the whole action. Oh, don\u2019t forget luck.<\/p>\n All this is woven into a worldview that believes that we deserve what we\u2019ve done, achieved; although we don\u2019t deserve whatever degrees of being ignored or condemned for what we haven\u2019t done or done less than excellently. After all, we couldn\u2019t help it. It wasn\u2019t our fault. But it was very much to our credit that we succeeded. We believe we need credit, praise, and rewards. (What if this belief is to a varying degree not so?) <\/p>\n Indeed, what if a goodly part of the human condition is a many-thousand-year story of humanity awakening, and we\u2019re only partly through that story? What if much of what we consider mental illness, spiritual blindness, lower consciousness, folly, and changing world-views are all involved in this awakening? (Such is the contemplation for today.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I heard this intriguing prayer: \u201cLord, if you can forgive the many little jokes I\u2019ve played on you, I\u2019ll try to forgive the one gigantic joke you\u2019re playing on me!\u201d I vaguely recognized that God\u2019s big joke is that we die. I pondered this: How is it a joke? Well, our life story at this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,13,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mind-spectrums","category-spirituality-and-philosophy","category-wisdom-ing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1815"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1816,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions\/1816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}