We Are Gods
Understand that the struggles in life are what make it beautiful
I’m a huge fan of Alan Watts. He has a famous piece called “The Dream of Life.” There’s a beautiful video on YouTube of him explaining it, but if you’d like to read it, here it is:
If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.
I am not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it, I want you to play with it. I want you to think of its possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about. So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be."
And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.
That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren't God, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not God in a politically kingly sense, but god in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending you are not.
It’s a fascinating way of looking at life that brings me a lot of calm during troubled times. To think that if I had the chance to live infinite lives, I’d eventually live the lift I am today. I would do this by choice. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard, and easy things are boring.
If we were Gods, we would all actually chose to live the lives we lead…isn’t that a thought? We would want to experience every possibility and challenge in order to understand the fundamental nature of the world.
I’ve dealt with some very challenging things in my life. Many of us do. It’s very easy to play the victim and get angry and bitter. Whenever I feel tempted, I think back to this speech. That I chose this, or at least I would. And that lets me calm down and understand that hard times pass, we learn from them, and come out stronger after.
If you think of hard times not as something being pressed upon you but as something you decided to experience, life gets immensely more rewarding and easier to deal with. After all, I may have dealt with some challenges, but I can also honestly say I have done more incredible things and experienced more at my age than I ever dreamt possible. And it was those hard times that required Herculean effort to overcome that has led me to where I am today, which is on a pretty great trajectory.
Just something that brings me deep comfort that I thought I’d share. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.