God likes to play hide-and-seek

Hello friends. I was deeply touched by how many people have liked my recent Facebook post. It would seem that the truth rings like a bell in so many hearts.

The truth is simple but as one person commented, with all our social conditioning, the grip of the Ego personality and 10,000 years of Dark Ages, there are a lot of onion layers to peel away to discover the truth of what we are. But, if we feel so inclined, we keep going, one layer at a time. I see the truth like a shining diamond in the centre of our being and the more layers we peel back, the more the light starts to shine through, the more luminescent the layers become... and we remember who we are.

Tonight I wanted to share with you one of my favoutite metaphors by the late great Alan Watts in his writing, 'The Book - on the taboo against knowing who you are'. You may know this or it maybe the first time you read it, but see if it chimes for you...

Love. Rob xxx

This is how Alan explains God and life to his children.

“God also 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—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever."

Watts, Alan. The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (p. 15). Souvenir Press.