Hide & Seek

Alan Watts' The Book presented existence as a game of Hide and Seek. He credited the metaphor to the Hindus. I love it. I believe it. That is, I half-believe it. I'm not sure I entirely believe anything: not even my own theory of Macroinformation, not even Darwin's theory of the Origin of Species, not even Pythagoras' theorem. Watts developed the idea through an alien theology: give us a fresh palatte, a little independence from our brainwashing. Fine, but I wed it right back to standard western monotheism: orthodox Christianity under the Scholastics maintained that God was Real, that God was the only thing that was real: all else was illusion, mistake, error. Thus: there is God, and only God. Nothing but God. And God is spending eternity playing with himself: playing hide and seek with himself, trying to fool himself, and almost, sometimes, succeeding.

Back to Hindu symbology again. All is Vishnu. Vishnu is Shiva. Shiva is Vishnu thinking he's Shiva. Vishnu is Shiva thinking he's Kali.

God is Jehovah begetting Jesus, thinking he's a holy spirit.

OK, get it? Think it through yourself: for five or six decades. It's really good. It gets better and better. Though I was still only twenty-four or so when I made what may be my best joke with it: I told my army friend that when the world ended, when we were all incandescing radioactively, every cell of our bodies sundered and flying off in dimensions we've never heard of at velocities we can't calculate, I'm going to summon a last word, and say to the Void, "I am not amused!"

How's this for Hide & Seek? I'm going to lump metaphors!

Deep Cover & Mission Impossible

The movie Deep Cover (1992) shows Laurence Fishburne as a cop pretending to be a drug dealer. As the plot thickens we're not sure he's not a drug dealer deluding himself he's a cop. I love it. In Hide and Seek cosmology nothing is clear, except for the monotheistic axioms, and they're not really clear either. God and Satan change roles. Is Jesus a savior or a charlatan? Seems realistic, truthful to me: do you really think the cops are there to protect you? the soldiers? Or are they there to bully you, to make you pay taxes, go to school, not let on that you doubt any of the orthodoxies, while claiming to be free, independent, not a slave: certainly not a robot: absolutely not a contagion.

I gotta take a break, be back when I can. meantime: I love the Mission Impossible deep cover line "As always, should you or any of your I.M. Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions": and the utter Big Brother detail, "This tape will self-destruct in five seconds." Belief as atheism. Nazis with no Hitler to blame!