- F&#! god!
- That's an idea.
- F&#! love!
- Ok.
- People don't know what love is.
- What is love?
- They think love is holding onto things. Love is freedom. I'm going to write a book about it. God's not about love.
- What is god about?
- Freedom.
- Love and god are both about freedom?
- Yes.
- Tell you what: I'll read your book if you read mine. You write how god and love are about freedom and I'll write about how god and love are about slavery.
- What will you write?
- A kind of science fiction. I'll start with religious experience, experience of god. Wholeness, unity. Love too, but there are no individual things for love to be attached to. And also freedom but only because in religious experience nothing is being done.
- Which is why I say f&#! god.
- That's your book. In mine, I go on: stories of gods help us put together experience we can see with experience we can't.
- What experience can't we see?
- Thoughts, emotions, ideas. We have religious experience, and then what happens?
- What?
- We lose it. It ends. We feel betrayed by friends. We tell stories of being exiled by god to help us remember what has happened in the past and expect will happen in the future.
- What's that?
- More experience of god, more betrayal.
- That's your god of love for you. You can have the f&#!.
- Have you ever wondered why our gods are given human emotions, good as well as bad?
- Because they're made in the image of the morons who believe in them.
- In some of the stories god is trapped in the world like we are trapped. What if they are true?
- They aren't. God is freedom.
- In my scifi story god has his own different world, and in it is doing the same thing we do: going in a circle from religious experience, loss of religious experience, and getting back to it. When he is in exile, in his attempts to get back home he creates our world, the world we live in, and creates us, either without his knowledge or because he can't help it.
- Accidentally? We're a by-product of his working his imagination? And we do the same, accidentally are god to a new world of people when all we are trying to do is imagine a way back to our own god?
- Oh. Has somebody already written this story?
- Why does god know about us but we don't know about the people and worlds we create?
- Sometime he remembers, sometimes he doesn't. The story reminds us that we create our own world and then have to live in it. We create people and worlds when we betray people in this world. When we understand how to organize ourselves right we will stop betraying each other and stop creating new worlds. Imagining god trying to organize us right reminds us what we have to do.
- So god blundered us into existence, trying to escape his slavery...
- Going from religious experience to betrayal to religious experience...
- And another god, doing his own blundering, blundered our god into slavery.
- Right.
- How does it all end?
- You'll like this.
- Tell me.
- When the love and freedom we misapply to religious experience are put back where they belong, in our everyday lives with each other. We arrange our practical lives in such a way we don't become attached to things and we stop betraying each other. We end the cycles.
- In one level or them all?
- Them all. When we stop creating new worlds, our world has no function in the cycle of our god, whose world has no function in the cycle of the god who created him...
- And then what?
- Love and freedom.
- And god?
- What do you think?
- F&#! god!
(Continued from Karma & Kabbalah)
