Posted by dillon on September 23, 2003, at 22:30:39
In reply to Re: Faith that Fits or How to find my place » dillon, posted by Tabitha on September 23, 2003, at 18:02:28
Thanks for your responses. I have read some of the Religious Science books (I'm a book dealer and have seen some of their REALLY Old stuff too). They have some pretty interesting ideas. I've never met any Unitarians that I know of but I'll have to check them out. Recently in my search for God I came across this great story that tries to explain God and good and bad ...
Have you ever read "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are" by Alan Watts? (You can buy it on Amazon cheaply).
I believe the following story is from Alan Watts' book and its a great one...Anyway I'd love to hear what you think about his story... and I'd LOVE to find a congregation that thought this way about God... so here it is:
"Hide and Seek:
God likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.
Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that’s the whole fun of it – just what he wanted to do. He doesn’t want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self – that God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever.
God is the Self of the world, but you can’t see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can’t see your own eyes, and you certainly can’t bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding.
You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he really isn’t doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It’s the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world.
Alan Watts, The Book"
Well, that's it for me tonight. God Bless...
poster:dillon
thread:262571
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/faith/20030908/msgs/262823.html